"Event Television" is the Death Knell of Network TV

Certain shows have been good for television as a medium in the last few years. Complex storytelling, compelling antiheroes, and gray morality have turned water cooler talk away from Desperate Housewives to "I can't believe Walt fucking [SPOILERED] [CHARACTER]." (Alright, that's essentially the same conversation when you remove the verbs, but suffice it to say that a high-maintenance cosmetic surgery addict is fairly distinct from a meth-cooking recovering cancer patient with a Napoleon complex.)

"Event Television" is being touted a lot right now. It's not a new idea, but it's the first time an old format has spurred so many producers to attempt to make money by creating grand, intricate shows that–frankly–cost a hell of a lot of money to produce.

Let us be clear: it is wonderful that networks are shilling out crazy amounts of cash to put together smart scripts, talented actors, and vision-filled producers and directors, and effectively giving them creative license to do what they think works best for the show. All of those things foster creativity and a generally better story. This is good.

 Let us also be clear: this is a complete fad.

Networks are always looking for their keystone programming, they're just more willing to take risks with their investments now that other networks have proven the format. That format? Early film reel serials. Self-contained stories with a designed beginning, middle, and end, fluffed up in the middle of each installment with some odd complication that extends the plot out and requires a steady viewing of the complete material for total understanding, but could otherwise be shown to a complete stranger at any point and give a reasonable account of the series' tone at large, preferably drawing them in to start from the beginning. Really, there's two target demographics working together who would normally compete here: Networks are now considering Netflix when they make a show.

Admittedly, that's something a a gross generalization. A more nuanced explanation might be that Networks have discovered a way to draw readers into live-airing programming (more developed storytelling) while simultaneously drawing back former viewers who have "cut the chord" with cable in favor of online streaming services for only a select few shows (format your show in easy-to-binge plot chunks for the Netflix addicts). Ideally, they seek to draw the latter group back into the former, and return a few precious commercial ad dollars.

The plan is a good one. Certainly serial dramas have not done well on television previously, at least on the whole. Sit-Coms and episodic dramas do better in syndication, as a single episode will be unlikely to contain much character or plot development for the overall series. Even fans of cult classic shows like Twin Peaks or The X-Files which skewed early towards long-form plots are hard-pressed to argue that the one-off episodes didn't tend toward being far better than later "wrap-it-all-up" episodes.

Much of this can be blamed on a lack of funding, or Network meddling ruining a great, masterfully arranged concept (Firefly being the quintessence to many viewers). And, to be honest, a serial format wasn't really a proven concept. Miniseries traditionally wouldn't do well. For every Roots their were Doctor Who made-for-TV movies that had been downgraded from series orders. And for every Who there were about 17 single-cam "I Love Lucy" and Honeymooners knock-offs which could be made for far less money.


Maybe we can call this period the Age of the Serials. Franchises are more powerful than ever in the entertainment world. I've long enjoyed photographing the movie posters at my local theater and commenting with "Sequel … sequel … remake … sequel of a remake … based off a TV show …" etc., etc. But these isn't the mere "Halloween: Part 5" franchises anymore. Now we're dealing with two-to-three movies a year coming out of Marvel studios, each its own franchise or potential franchise, crossing over every three years with a massive billion dollar event film, new Spider-Man and associated spin-offs from SONY, DC Comics and Warner Bros. trying to replicate that success with a new Superman, Batman, and Justice League shared universe, FOX adopting comic book time travel to link rebooted universes into a massive conglomerate for X-Men, and freaking STAR WARS getting produced into an even bigger Death Star of a warship. All of these movies I will pay upwards of $18 to see in theaters, possibly with popcorn, by the end of next year.

Now, nerds have always been more amiable to serialized stories. It's where we come from, generally speaking. The trick Networks have played is to convince average, well-rounded people to become as fanatical about one particular show as rabid nerds can be about Star Wars. I've seen people reading Game of Thrones who had previously seriously doubted had the capacity to read. Those are 700 pages tomes, filled to bursting with obscure, Old English spellings and fanciful, fictitious languages. Characters fight with swords and dragons, but spend 90% of their time engaging in courtly intrigue and sharp wit. People are buying these kinds of books because they "Really liked the first three seasons."

So what was the trick, if not simply making a better product? It's this: these Networks are still dying.


HBO GO was crashed by the sheer number of people attempting to stream the Game of Thrones premier through the network's app. The majority of these people do not pay any money to HBO, but rather know someone who was willing or foolish enough to fork over their password. These people, actual HBO subscribers, could watch the premier live on their TVs. This means that nearly all of the people watching through the app one hour after broadcast were not actually paying HBO anything. They were stealing. So many of them that it outstripped the service's ability to function.

Or perhaps we pick a different delivery method. FX Network bills American Horror Story as an "anthology series," each season being a self-contained story akin to a long-format Twilight Zone. Each season is 12-13 episodes, amassing equal airtime, about 75% of that actual story. These shows are watched once, and then nothing. Perhaps some DVD sales. But they are talked about seemingly forever, but mostly only in anticipation of the next episode or iteration.

There are always a few viewers who will subscribe to a Network or service just to watch their one new favorite series, but these are not life-time consumers. They are month-to-month and you can't maintain a vast corporation around that when 99% of your other programming is turned on in the background of a Kraft Dinner. Networks are going to hemorrhage money from their cheap shows while 1% of their lineup makes a majority of the profits, but those shows continue to cost drastically more to produce in the first place. The logical solution seems to be to produce fewer shows with higher quality, and allow for more reruns and syndication in their 24-hour broadcast cycles.

But there's the kick: not one viewer cares. They want to see their show, and they want to be able to gorge on it. So for the time being, Networks make their best shows drawn-out and riddled with suspense, so much so that  we end up watching flawed characters make flawed decisions on ever more increasingly grand scales, becoming cartoonish villains and caricatures of their initial selves. Jack Bauer has had the worst 192 hours a human being can endure. Walter White became Lex Luthor, and then Bryan Cranston narrowly lost that exact role to the kid from "The Social Network." Don Draper is in desperate need of a psychologist and a liver transplant, Rick Grimes and his son Carl have pretty obviously turned into mad sociopaths out of necessity, and I honestly don't know if the apparently endless Stark lineage can survive a planned seven-book run. The stakes keep getting higher, every commercial or credits run comes with bated breath, and viewers wait interminably for another episode to air, as if it were the only thing worth discussing since Tony Soprano (maybe) died.

Meanwhile, I'm done. Many, many, people, nerds and hipsters and Pre-K teachers among them, are bailing on watching live programming. A lot of people I know are using DVR to at least watch a show on their own work schedule or skip through the commercials, while many others simply stream online. Lamenting that Netflix can't upload a season until the home release is also available? Here's a neat trick: try Googling "Watch [NAME OF SHOW] online," and see what pops up. Legality issues aside, everything you've ever wanted to watch even the slightest is available to view on the Internet for free. It's not even hard, and in most cases, once the file is uploaded, there's nothing illegal about watching the thing that's already there. (Downloading and uploading, mind you, are still outlandishly punishable copyright offenses.)

Instantaneous gratification culture is killing Network Television, and I couldn't care less. I'm more excited to see what existing and new companies do when they realize it'll be more profitable to create one exceptional franchise with a reasonable pace and release it in complete installments all together (Hint hint: Arrested Development) than to cling desperately to failing media and schedules, begging Seth McFarlane to drop one more morsel on their plate. Even George Lucas and Spielberg discussed the future of the movie industry in similar terms, telling Empire magazine last year to expect fewer, bigger-budget movies and lots of small indie films, with ticket prices correlated directly to that cost, and playing in theaters for up to years at a time.

I would love to see 17 television stations and a TV that's mostly streaming apps à la carte.

Disney Buys LucasFilm, to Make More 'Star Wars'

4:16 p.m. October 30, 2012. Day after Hurricane Sandy knocks out my heat, water, power, internet, and phone service. This is the exact moment my heart broke and I lost the ability to empathize with children, or humanity on a whole.

Disney has purchased LucasFilm LTD. for a total of $4.05 billion. Part of the deal includes detailed plot treatments for another Lucas-designed Star Wars trilogy (and Indiana Jones, but let's not bury the lead here).

Granted, George has done none of the good for SW in 20 years, but still, tis is a terrifying thought. What horrible, canonical sequels and spinoffs could they wreak?

"But Dave!" you say, and loudly for some reason, "Doesn't Disney own Marvel, and aren't the Avengers movies kick ass?" Well, yes, however those movies were started before Disney bought Marvel, and they're productions of Marvel Studios a semi-autonomous division, and currently under the reign of the almighty Joss Whedon, blessed be his name. They get multiple byes that Star Wars may not.

Honestly, I try to placate myself. Most of the best Star Wars stuff has always been someone else's. Irvin Kirshner's death this year hit me pretty hard. I don't go in for a lot of the Old Republic EU, just the newest stuff with the primary characters and their families. This won't really affect me so much, even if they do create terrible sequesls starting as early as 2015.

But then I ask myself, what could really be worse than George Lucas making more Star Wars episodes? And I'm horrified to say the first thing–the only thing, really–that instantaneously comes to mind, is "Disney making more Star Wars."


May the Force be with us. We're gonna need it.

http://youtu.be/wzDIClx-_pY?t=53s

7 Spoiler-Free Spider-Man Easter Eggs for Nerds

Normally a *SPOILER* warning would go here. If anything here is a spoiler to you, you're a terrible nerd, and likely haven't seen any trailers of previous Spider-Man films/comics/T.V. series.

"Maaan…I hate missing the F-Train."

1. Yes Stan Lee gets a cameo. No to Bruce Campbell, though. Sadface.

2. Lizard in a coat. As promised, there is a slight nod to the comics, in which The Lizard frequently wore some tight little Hulk pants and his lab coat. It's short, as expected, but it's there.

3. Spider-Man's shoes. While they don't attempt to scientifically explain the spider-power that is sticking to pretty much any surface this time around, fans have been miffed for years about not getting even a casual explanation for Peter Parker's ability to stick to walls through his shoes. However, if you look closely in Amazing Spider-Man, he wears modified steel-reinforced boots, and I'm pretty sure I saw some little grippies on them. I'm not saying they could keep a normal man upright, but maybe it's enough to compensate for socks and shoes on a spider-being.

4. The ridiculous action pose. Also as promised, there is one shot of Spider-Man that is spot-on to the comics and some of the character's more … limber maneuvers. It's unobtrusive, yet noticeable.

5. Andrew Garfield is an awkward spider. Garfield actually studied spiders' movements to accentuate his own for the roll of Peter Parker. And not just for superheroics. Peter starts so awkward as to boarder on "I'm not going to pick on that kid because he might bring a gun to school," but after his transformation he acts nearly autistic; avoiding eye contact, greater trouble expressing his thoughts verbally, odd ticks and repetitive motions. At parts, it feels almost as if Spidey is the channel through which Peter circumvents the social aspects of Asperger's in order to engage society and individuals around him, which–incidentally–is a phenomenal take on the character. Peter is supposed to be a smart mouth, but never in his personal life, only in costume. That was one thing Tobey McGuire got right.

Oh, and this isn't really an Easter egg, but there's one scene, you'll recognize it immediately, where Emma Stone goes toe-to-toe with Awkward Peter and they awkward it up together awkwardly. Seriously, the scene was chewy with awkward. When it was over I felt full. Like I could wrap up the leftover awkwardness and bring it home in a doggy bag to save for lunch tomorrow.

6. Yes, there is a mid-credits scene. Stay for it.

7. No, there is no second post-credits scene. Joss Whedon really burned you forever with that one, didn't he?


And one more fun little tidbit?

I heard through a reliable source (read: "a nerd I know") that a Sony Pictures executive has openly stated to being open to the possibility to leasing the rights to Spider-Man to Marvel Pictures for use in an Avengers sequel. Since this movie is going to make several bajillion dollars, I see no reason this could not potentially work out if all parties are open to it. Andrew is the right age to still be the young guy on the team and, this is just my speculation, if they'd lease out Web Head, there's no reason Sony wouldn't also lease out X-Men property characters, the only one they give any care for being Wolverine. I'm sure Hugh Jackman would be more than enthused at slicing up Manhattan.

Further Nerd Poetry

"Wade"

There once was a young merc named Deadpool
Whose enemies thought him a great fool.
But while out slaying some goons
He thought, in yellow balloons,
"Not since smoking has cancer been this cool."

"Snikt"

"I'm the best there is
At what I do, and what I
Do ain't very nice."

Kindle Fire, DC Comics & Comixology: "Let's all lose money."

It was at a panel at New York Comic Con a few days ago that Comixology, the online comics reading platform, acknowledged the announcement that Amazon's Kindle Fire would receive exclusive digital publishing rights to certain DC Comics graphic novel titles, including Batman trades and Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon's masterpiece Watchmen.

Comixology, of course, is relevant to this deal in that they power the official Marvel and DC Comics comic book apps.

Yup. Both of them. Online, iDevice, Kindle, and any other proprietary app those companies want. They even do Dark Horse. Cute, right?

Here's where we play "Good Idea/Bad Idea," dedicated to Steven Spielberg and the executives of daytime programming at Warner Bros. studios back in 1998.


Good Idea: Securing awesome, exclusive content for your new device from a major industry player.

Bad Idea: Refusing to allow users of any other device access to the same digital content.


Amazon, great job. You gave yourself a definite boost. Even if this fails miserably, you got a couple extra nerds to buy Kindle Fires they would otherwise possibly pass over for a competitor. Savvy move.

DC, are you legitimately mentally handicapped? Who told you this would be a good idea? Did you see one too many "Call of Duty" commercials where preordering through a specific retailer or for a certain console gets you an exclusive bonus? Did you not realize that those features are generally available to all users after a set amount of time? Or that every platform gets it's own exclusive extra content, while everyone shares the basic game features? At what point, DC, did it seem like a brilliant idea to take your most profitable stories ever, and make them exclusive to one device?

I understand you're backstepping a bit by admitting that you can't promise anything yet, but the exclusivity isn't permanent, and you just wish you hadn't signed that non-disclosure form so you could tell us when you were planning on unscrewing your fans. You're even trying to taut the Kindle app as a go-between despite prior comments to the contrary. I get it. There's fallout you didn't see coming and now you're on damage control

It's still not stopping Barnes & Noble and other booksellers from removing all physical copies of the "exclusive" titles from their shelves.

Hey look! It's that time again!


Good Idea: Boycotting products for which your supplier is trying to grant your competitors certain exclusive permissions.

Bad Idea: Boycotting those products and now making them actually exclusive to that competitor's device.


And while we're at it, Bad Idea: Trying to force a weak business model where digital comic sales are designed to encourage physical comic sales, and then accidentally making your comic sales preclude physical sales. Oh, and now your digital sales are slipping. Congrats.



Comixology, I'm so sorry you got stuck dealing with these kids. I bet you feel like the guy who hired Larry, Moe, and Curly as bakers because they came so very highly recommended.

Dave Malki ! of Wondermark Talks Webcomics, Twitter, Publishing

He's probably the only man on Earth who uses an exclamation point as a post-nominal honorific, which might be a shame if there were anyone else deserving of it.

David Malki ! is a dapper gentleman.

David Malki ! started Wondermark in 2003, a webcomic made not through physical or digital drawing, but primarily through the skillful combination of 19th century woodcut prints, scanned from the pages of original tomes Malki collects. The comic has been collected in several volumes, currently published by Dark Horse Comics, and from 2006-2009 ran in the print edition of The Onion. Yes, despite some very strong opinions we got into, Malik makes it clear he doesn't have an actual loathing of syndicated comics as an idea.

Which is actually how we first got talking. Back in college I was Fun Page Editor at the campus newspaper, Pipe Dream. (Alright, there was also the Free Press but that's its own feud.) Part of my effort to beef up the page involved getting top-tier webcomic artists to let me syndicate their comics on precisely zero budget. Dave was by far the most accommodating. Not only did he consent to letting me run old Wondermark strips, he mailed me a DVD with about 30 or 40 of his personal favorite strips when I asked about high-res files. I also imagine he did this via his clockwork butler as he sat in a leather recliner, donning his top hat, monocle, and smoking jacket.

So when I started in on this project of interviewing various artists and creators of webcomics for my book's long discussion of digital comics, Dave Malki ! was kind of a hope against hope. His views supported my original college essay that layed the groundwork for this whole project. I've spent almost a year now revising and gathering new material for the piece. The original Tweets and blog entries weren't going to cut it as far as original research was concerned. (That everything we ended up talking about supported my thesis was simply a grandly beautiful bonus.)

Short version: it would not be an embellishment to say that Malki agreeing to this email interview would make or break my idealized vision of the project.

Not only was he amiable, he was curious as to the idea, incredibly open with his thoughts and experiences in comics publishing and even considerate enough to offer clarification to anything I found "too heady." Frankly, if I wasn't six-years entrenched in these precise issues, it would have been. That said, I have amended a few notes and links for the casual reader who might be intrigued by parts of the discussion.

Me: What have your experiences been like with using Twitter to converse directly with your readers? Is it something like the next step in having comic forums, or is it something else entirely?

Malki: Forums are a particular type of culture that has a lot of great qualities: friendships and in-jokes and islands of weirdness can erupt in little petri dishes. I've met some great people on forums, and I know of lots of relationships that started on forums. Forums can also be a cesspool, of course, and I think on a long enough timeline -- or with the wrong crowd -- things tend to trend that way as communities grow insular.

Twitter's a different thing entirely. The remarkable thing about Twitter, and I think the thing that was kind of new about it, was and is its asymmetrical nature. I can follow you on Twitter without you having to follow me back. But I can still talk to you if I want, and you can still reply to me if you want. So it's more like broadcasting than conversing in an everyone-gets-a-turn forum sense, but still with this ability for conversation in a truncated way. Anyway you know how Twitter works.

I think Twitter is great for cartoonists, or people who do similar things. Twitter allows those who're interested to be involved, but without having to remember to go to a forum, or there being an embarrassment of desolation when there's nothing going on for a while. And people can be as involved as they want without feeling like they have to be a part of something official. Being accessible in return creates a bond between artist and reader that's really rewarding as well. I don't know that I have a lot that's groundbreaking to say here. I like Twitter? Twitter is good.

What are your thoughts on "premium content" webcomics that offer free updates but either rely on or at least supplementary content exclusive to paying subscribers?

"People sometimes mock artists for
selling merchandise, like there's
something bad about being a
T-shirt salesman."

I think it creates a huge burden on the artist to provide that premium content to satisfy the paying customer. I don't think it's a fundamentally flawed business model by any means, but I think it's a hard row to hoe and I don't think I'm up for that kind of pressure.

People sometimes mock artists for selling merchandise, like there's something bad about being a T-shirt salesman. But I'd rather sell T-shirts and give the art away for free, than the reverse. When I give the art away for free, I can make a bargain with myself that it's good enough, because you didn't pay for it. If you were paying for it, it'd never be good enough to satisfy me, and I'd be a wreck. Let me take your money and give you a T-shirt in return, because I know that'll at least cover your body. It's not going to seem like a good idea at midnight, and then reveal itself to be a threadbare misery in the morning when you open your closet.

Do you personally buy single-issue or trade comics from DC or Marvel, or any of the 'Big Time Fancy' publishing houses?

I don't anymore. I used to buy issues in, like, high school and college, then I bought trades for a few years as a grown-up. But I guess I just sort of stopped caring? I would buy a TON of comics, and I think the bar was so low that I just got frustrated. People would RAVE about any comic that was merely "not actively bad." I also got tired of waiting months between trades for the stories I actually did like. That plus the soap opera culture around superheroes is just silly to me -- I started to feel like a poseur in the comic shop because I don't care about any of that stuff.

I still like comics, and I read them on occasion, but I don't buy them regularly. I just don't have room in my house for more books! I don't buy any books if I can help it. Which I can't always.

Do you have any thoughts regarding DC' and Marvel's sale of digital copies of their monthly titles? Price-points on-par with single issues, proprietary file formats, subscription fees, that sort of thing?

Dustin Harbin just wrote a great piece about this on his blog, from the perspective of someone who's worked in retail for a long time. I don't have the same kind of perspective, but what I do have is no particular interest in either the success or failure of mainstream superhero comics as an institution.

So my dispassionate opinion, I guess, is that it makes sense. If you want to reach more readers, you have to take your material to where they are. I was home sick the other day with nothing to do, so I downloaded the Comixology app for the first time and browsed some free comics. I like their interface and I read some comics I otherwise wouldn't have. I don't think it's a bad app or a bad idea, and if people want their fix of comics without having to store the paper issues -- or if they don't have any particular sentimental attachment to paper issues -- then I'm glad that they have a way to read those comics in a way that's convenient for them. If they're willing to pay a few bucks for that convenience, I guess that's between them and the marketplace.

What I might do, if I loved comics and there was a sufficient backlog to make it worthwhile, is pay a Netflix-like subscription fee to read whatever comics I wanted on my iPad, whenever I wanted. I could finally read some famous old Kirby story on a whim, or look up an old Batman story that was mentioned in an article. Or sit and read decades of Peanuts without having to pull out my Fantagraphics books (I have them AND the old paperbacks from the '60s, but neither are coming with me on a plane).

I think -- and Dustin made this distinction too -- if you don't own the content, you're renting it and should pay a rental or subscription fee. If you download permanently and own the content, you should pay a purchase fee. Those are the models that make sense to the consumer. And maybe there are in-betweens -- if I read an issue of Batman on my subscription account that I really like, and I want to keep it in my local archive, I can pay a quarter and keep that one indefinitely. Get me DC on the phone, I got a scheme for them!

How to you feel about "Comics Piracy" as a concept and practice? I'm mostly just referring to scans and torrent/P2P sharing, but certainly you would have some experience with aggregator pages bleeding your page views, as well.

[Note: You can steal single issues, trades, full series, long out-of-print stories and pretty much anything that's ever been copyrighted on the internet, including comic books. Though webcomics tend to be immune to this, having all their content online for free already. "Aggregators," however, pull the most recent strips from various sites and display them on one page without extraneous content or advertisements, effectively stealing page views from the website and therefor ad revenue as well.]

A lot of webcomics people get super up in arms about aggregator sites. Frankly, I don't care about them one way or the other. As Cory Doctorow says, "the danger is not piracy, but obscurity." I'm in a rarefied spot because I make my money mainly from merchandise, not ad revenue or floppy sales (both of which could be hurt by the practices you mention) but on the whole, any "piracy" that results in more sales (down the road) than it removes puts me ahead. Being a crank about aggregator sites is just causing a tempest in a teapot, in my opinion.

I don't have enough experience in the floppy biz to know how much the torrents and scans affect their business. Are these people that would have gone to their LCBS [Local Comic Book Store] and paid $3.99 for XYZ #431 if they hadn't torrented it? I doubt it, in most cases. Are they people who might buy the trade as a gift now that they've read the whole thing? If the trade's available, maybe. The problem is that the trades aren't always available. With print-on-demand technology now, I have no idea why every comic storyline EVER isn't available as a trade.

You've expressed, shall we say, a relatively calm but seething hatred for most syndicated comics. From what I gather, your qualm seems to be commercialism making the work artistically "bland." Would that be a fair statement?

I think "hatred" is a strong word. It's a bit of a persona, this crank who hates the newspaper comics. I actually have a great affection for newspaper comics -- I grew up reading them religiously -- but there came a day when I realized that most of these people, especially the legacy artists, were squandering an opportunity that others would KILL for. That's mainly the thing that gets me riled a bit. Imagine someone says, "We're giving you a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl. Say whatever you want, do whatever you want." And you use that time to say...nothing. You sit there and stare at the camera and finally say, "Men like golf, women like to nag!" You'd be the biggest idiot in the history of television.

Now, I've been doing this for long enough that I know: (a) It's incredibly hard to be incisive every single day of your life. (b) It's incredibly hard to produce good work when you feel you are beholden to a huge cross-section of readers. (c) It's incredibly hard to take risks when you're extremely comfortable. I don't think the comics page is necessarily the appropriate place to be risky, so I don't, like, make this a crusade...but the REASON the comics page isn't the appropriate place to be risky is that it's been systematically dumbed down for decades. So at this point it's just fun to make fun of the fogies, I guess.

 
Jim Davis has retired from drawing new "Garfield" strips. (Let us ignore "Life According to Garfield.") Jim calls you up and says, "Dave !, save newspaper comics. Take my cat, please!" He tells you you can script and draw anything you want, save for gore, nudity, and profanity. Would you take the job?

No. I have things of my own to say that don't involve Garfield. I get what you're saying, and it's an interesting pickle, although complicated by the fact that the Garfield brand image in particular has to maintain a BILLION-dollar industry.

But let's say the Browne estate wanted to hand me Hägar the Horrible. THAT, I might take. Why not? I could turn that into something Achewood-esque.

You have your own merchandise, collected editions, and all your work with TopatoCo. [NOTE: TopatoCo is a sort of webcomics collective merchandising site owned and operated by Jeffrey Rowland of Wigu and other artists including Malki, designed to provide a resource for artists to design, sell, and ship their own merchandise without necessarily having to regulate every part in the process themselves.] Webcomics for many years had a stigma of being less 'legitimate' because the artists also sell merchandise, despite the likes of a myriad of Garfield and Peanuts licensing arrangements, and pretty much everything by DC and Marvel ever. Do you think this double standard was because webcomics are independently run? Is monetizing the same as "selling out" or more noticeable at that scale?

For one thing, I think if there is a stigma, it's a manufactured one. I don't think there's enough of a general webcomic audience to have a consensus on the issue, although there are always loudmouths of every stripe. The only time anyone gets riled up about anyone "selling out" in any medium, ever, is when they feel someone is enjoying undeserved success. In webcomics, where success comes in many flavors, someone who's spent a ton of time refining a wonderful drawing style might look at xkcd and think, "I deserve more success than him." Someone who's an editorial cartoonist performing A Valuable Service To Our Political Dialogue might look at a flighty gag cartoonist and think, "I deserve the kind of success that she's enjoying." There's always somebody feeling like they're getting a raw deal, especially because there's no proscenium arch that webcomics pass under that anoints them with Legitimacy -- in other words everybody feels they're every bit as deserving or legitimate as someone else. That's usually good, because it really is a meritocracy, and you can really just start from scratch and do something amazing and get somewhere with it. That's awesome and cool and valuable to the artform and the culture.

"There's nothing ethically wrong with designing T-shirts

I personally think "selling out" involves compromising the integrity of your message to
make it commercially palatable. I think Peanuts sold out when Charlie Brown started smiling on greeting cards. That's not the Charlie Brown that the comics portrayed; that's a different character, a more marketable character. But is there an ethical component to that? Ultimately the only person to whom the integrity of Peanuts has to answer is Charles Schulz, and he was okay with it. We comic fans can be disappointed by the decision, but millions of greeting card fans may have been delighted by it. T-shirt design is a good gig too. Plenty of people try to design funny T-shirts without even going through the formality of making an unrelated comic first. There's nothing ethically wrong with designing T-shirts.

I'll even go a step further and say there's nothing ethically wrong with pandering to an audience. There are greeting cards -- like that Maxine character -- that are ALL ABOUT pandering to an audience. There's literally nothing more to it; it's a narrative constructed for the express purpose of pandering to a card-buying public. Again, the question comes back to the author. A work attracts the kind of audience that is appropriate for it. If the work is shallow and pandering and cheap, the audience that comes to it will be the kind of people for whom that kind of work is the cat's meow. Is that the audience you want to surround yourself with and build a career atop? If so, fine, but know that's the bargain you're going into.

Speaking of TopatoCo, I read an interview you did with Shane Peterman for CNN in which you said, "The shirt shows the exclusivity and uniquenes of the wearer.…It makes them super cool." I've been thinking about that a lot in regards to my Questionable Content "IRONY" shirt I picked up a few years back. Am I cool because I wear a shirt that says "irony" blatantly when I am expected to wear an ironic t-shirt, which is not ironic, but is then ironic for not being ironic? Or am I cool because I have a shirt from something more obscure than Metallica? (Side note: Is it cool that I once dated a girl because she recognized the reference, or does it just sound like nerd bragging?)

The "irony" of the IRONY shirt is that it's not actually ironic. Shirts like that are designed to be read acontextually, and if it's recognized by someone else then it's just a bonus, like if you see someone driving your same model Saab. You wave. It's cool. It's not designed to be a tribal marker per se, but what it can be is an exclusive thing, a joke that your social circle hasn't seen yet. It's the same as being first to post a meme to your circle of friends. You're the cool guy. So to speak. (Did the relationship work out? No? SHOCKING)

[Note: It absolutely did not work out, but the immediate cause was distance. Being asocial nerds without social skills or outward displays of emotion was more of a subtle undercurrent.]


Finally, do you see major comic houses like DC, Marvel and Dark Horse surviving the next 20 years, and if so how? Could they change their business models, or will they just cling to the old ones in desperation until the last paper mill is demolished by iPad-driven bulldozers powered by flash-cloned whale oil?

DC is owned by Warner Brothers. Marvel is owned by Disney. They'll survive. The Muppets and Winnie the Pooh are still around, shadows of whatever they once were, decades after being bought by Disney. They're brands, and brands survive because brands make money for media companies.

Will the comics still be around? I dunno, maybe. I have a very foggy view into the future of the mainstream comics biz because I just don't operate on the same wavelength as they do. I don't know to what lengths they'll go to stay relevant, or what their priorities are. Telling good stories? Reaching new audiences? Or solidifying their hold on their existing market share?

The people I see doing better are publishers like Top Shelf, First Second, and Oni. These are people making honest-to-goodness books, rather than comic books. Graphic novels that appeal to people like me, who just can't be arsed to care about superheroes. There are still people doing good work for DC and Marvel, but I think the number of people with sentimental attachments to the tropes of that industry will surely dwindle in time.

As for Dark Horse...they're a different case. They, too, have dreams of being a media company. Right now the Hellboy properties and the licensed comics (Star Wars, Buffy) are their cash cows. They certainly make more money from their movies and toys than from the actual sale of their comics. So I'll go out on a limb and say that within 10 years they'll have been bought by an actual big-money media company as well. Hell with it...I'll guess Universal.

Wondermark continues to update every Tuesday and Friday. Malki ! is also currently involved with the compiling of solicited material for the upcoming second volume of the short story collection "Machine of Death," which you might remember from last year when it briefly ousted Glen Beck's new release as the most popular book on Amazon.

Stay classy, internet.

Captain America: The Final Odyssey

Captain America always has his origin story in World War II. This is actually kind of a problem.

Unlike Batman, who's parents could have always been murdered "twenty years ago," Steve Rogers was always born in Brooklyn within a few years of 1924. He doesn't age like his Golden Age counterparts, thanks to accelerated healing and a few decades frozen in ice (or time, occasionally).

But here's a quirk: Captain America was presumed dead at the end of WWII, until his frozen form was found and thawed out by The Avengers. The first time the comics did this 1964. Cap had been frozen for 19 years.

Flash forward to 2011 and Samuel L. Jackson explaining to Chris Evans that he's been frozen, "almost 70 years," and we begin to see the issue. The first time Cap was revived, his girlfriend was still alive. I think in some versions she even married Bucky. Steve could go see his war buddies. Currently, Peggy Carter would be about 96. Not exactly fit to go dancing with Steve next Saturday.

Batman's parents were billionaires. It doesn't matter what year it was, they could always have put on their formal wear and dragged a 9 year old out to the theater one night. But Captain America has to start in the mid '40s and then he has to disappear until the 'modern' day, whenever that is. Every time Marvel does a reboot, Captain America looses another decade to time.

In 2045, Rogers will have been frozen for 100 years. At what point does his brain just melt from the culture shock? Will it be like Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, where the one astronaut left floating in 2001 gets found by asteroid ice skimmers a thousand years later and is revived to a world of technology so complex not a single living person can understand every integrated system in even the simplest devices?

Screw that. In the Marvel world, Spider-Man 2099 has cloaking technology and nano-whatevers. After a thousand years, Cap's going to be woken up by Cable popping through his dystopian future while raising Hope Summers.

"My name is Miguel O'Haha. I am a geneticist trying to recreate Spider-Man's powers in others.
In an unrelated story, I gained those exact powers trying to break my forced-addiction to drugs. Really."

After all the world's oceans run dry and toxic, will Cap still be floating in a block of ice somewhere in the North Atlantic?

9 and a Half Reasons To Go See Captain America

Marvel's last Avengers prequel is out, today, and it's the prequel to all Avengers prequels. [If you want to watch them in chronological order, it would be Cap, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, then Iron Man 2, with it's final act overlapping with the very beginning of Thor.] Chris Evans redeems himself for ever becoming the Human Torch by becoming the (other) Big Blue Boyscout.

In case you needed a reason to see The First Avenger other than "I saw the last four," and, "I'm seeing Avengers," here's a few you can thaw out.


1. I'm pretty sure the Red Skull took a potshot at Indiana Jones. "The Fuhrer digs for trinkets in the desert." Clearly Hydra chose not to employ Major Toht in Egypt.

So that's what happened to the Red Skull!

 2. For all you literary nerds out there: it's a frame tale. For that matter, it's something of a Frankenstein Vs. Good Frankenstein kind of movie.

3. Pretty much every scene with Cap as a U.S.O. propaganda machine.

• The costumes.
   
• During a montage, a bunch of kids in Brooklyn are shown reading the first issue of "Captain America" the comic book, and it's the classic 'punching Hitler' cover.
  
  

4. Howard Stark. Dominic Cooper's not exactly Robert Downy Jr., but he's definitely the man's dad.

"Say whaaaaaaat?"

4a. "Fondue." (Trust me.)

5. Bucky.

6. BUCKY!!

7. Aeronautics nerds: Two words. "Fyling. Wing."  

8. *Mini-Spoiler* One scene takes place in Times Square, and if you look closely you will see billboards for 'Bank of America,' 'American Eagle,' and 'Planet Hollywood.' Edgy.

9. The Post-Credits. If it wasn't patently obvious after four other films, Cap has a post-credits scene.


*Complete spoiler you really need to read anyway*

This scene isn't so much a scene as a fully-fledged, extra-long teaser for The Avengers. You can even catch glimpses of Loki, Cap's 'modern' costume and pretty much every hero in full get-up (except Dr. Bruce Banner, but I'd guess he'll be the wildcard). If you see anyone walking out of the theater during the credits, feel free to yell and throw popcorn at them until they retake their seats.