technology
Tron: Legacy webcomic plunges you into a virtual world
When it first came out, Tron was a groundbreaking movie because of its use of computer animation, which up till then had only been seen in limited doses. Thirty years later, an online graphic novel based on the movie, Tron: Legacy, is breaking new ground again by using HTML5 to create a webcomic that is much more dynamic than your standard still-pictures-in-a-browser format.
This is not some cheesy “motion comic” where Hulk’s arm moves up and down while the rest of the picture stays static. Check out the demo video: The motion is not figures on a background but the backgrounds themselves, which rotate to give the reader the feeling of moving through deep space. (If you’re the type of person who gets seasick at iMAX movies, this may not be the comic for you.) Oddly, the fight scenes are more static than the setup, because those scenes don’t have the same three-dimensional motion effect. The plot itself seems to be rather elemental, and you don’t have to have seen the movie to follow the comic—everything is laid out for the reader.
The demo video is a bit of an ad for Internet Explorer 9, which is the browser this graphic novel was developed for. I was able to view it fine in Safari on my Mac, although it was a bit jerky. You scroll through the comic by dragging, so it’s not quite as smooth an experience as in the demo, and it’s a bit disorienting because there are no indicators to tell you how long the comic is or how far along you are. Still, it’s nicely done and worth looking at for the novelty value, if nothing else. Sort of like Tron itself was, back in the day.
- June 13, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Spider-Man musical producers ‘stepped in dog poo’
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Broadway | Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris, producers of the troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, talk candidly about the $70-million musical — or “$65 plus plus,” as Cohl says — as it shuts down for more than three weeks for a sweeping overhaul. Will the production, plagued by delays, technical mishaps, injuries and negative reviews, hurt their reputation? “It might,” Cohl concedes. “It’s a matter of the respect of those whose opinions I care about. Most will recognize that Jere and I stepped in dog poo and are trying to clean it up and pull off a miracle. We might not.”
In related news, Christopher Tierney, the actor who was seriously injured on Dec. 20 after plummeting 30 feet during a performance, will rejoin rehearsals on Monday. [Bloomberg, The Hollywood Reporter]
- April 22, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Two plead guilty to selling fake Comic-Con badges
Comic-Con International
Legal | Two Los Angeles men accused of selling counterfeit passes to this year’s Comic-Con International have pleaded guilty to theft and were placed on probation for three years. Farhad Lame and Navid Vatankhahan, both 24, were each ordered to pay a $750 fine, complete 10 days of community service and pay restitution to the victims.
Prosecutors say the two photocopied Comic-Con badges and sold them on Craigslist to people looking for last-minute memberships. They were arrested in July after two of their victims attempted to enter the convention using the counterfeit badges, which the women bought for $120 each. [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
Technology | Tech blog Chip Chick names DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson as one of its “Top 13 Women Who Impacted Technology in 2010.” [Chip Chick]
- December 28, 2010 @ 06:42 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Nook Color
Digital publishing | As expected, Barnes & Noble on Tuesday unveiled its Nook Color e-book reader, priced at $249. The 7-inch LCD touch tablet runs on the Android 2.1 operating system, and offers web browsing, audio and video playback, and basic games (CNET notes that Barnes & Noble is pushing the device as a “reader’s tablet”). The device ships on Nov. 19. [CNET, Salon, paidContent]
Internet | PayPal has announced its much-anticipated micropayments system, with Facebook and a number of other websites lining up behind it. PayPal describes the new product, available later this year, as an “in-context, frictionless payment solution that lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher’s game, news, music, video or media site.” Scott McCloud is quick out of the gate with reaction: “This is so close, in almost every respect, to what we were asking for over a decade ago, it’s almost eerie. They’re even using the same language to describe it.” [TechCrunch]
- October 27, 2010 @ 07:54 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes [Updated]
TouchSmart 310
Digital comics | Hewlett Packard’s newly announced TouchSmart 310 — it’s an all-in-one touchscreen desktop PC with a starting price of $699.99 — will give users access to more than 8,000 Marvel comics, thanks to a deal between HP and Disney: “TouchSmart users will now be able to buy and download special versions of classic comics, and then literally thumb through them with on-screen controls. More than 8,000 Marvel titles are available, which HP says is the most extensive digital collection ever offered from any content partner.” [PCMag.com, TG Daily]
UPDATE: Marvel has issued a clarification, as well as an official press release: “HP TouchSmart Apps Center will offer streaming access to over 8,000 digital comics from Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. None of these digital comics will be downloadable.”
Legal | The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to affirm a lower court’s ruling that a California law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to minor is unconstitutional. [press release, Game Rant]
- September 20, 2010 @ 07:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Nikki Cook goes hi-tech
Nikki Cook visualizes audio technology
Comics artist Nikki Cook is going to be the guest artist this month at Gizmodo, which does for technology and cool gadgets what Gawker does for gossip and io9 does for science fiction (they’re all part of the same blog family). Cook is a member of the Act-I-Vate webcomics collective and has worked on a number of different comics; she is currently collaborating with Ben McCool on the graphic novel Memoir, and it looks like her work will be a departure from the usual photos of sleek but mostly rectangular objects on Gizmodo.
And because she’s an attractive comics artist living in Brooklyn, Seth Kushner has photographed her on a fire escape against a luminescent gray sky. Click to see:
Continue Reading »
- July 14, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Apple
Technology | Apple said it is adding new security measures to its iTunes store after a developer reportedly hacked into numerous customer accounts to boost the ranking of his comic apps, which briefly dominated the book category. The company claims the weekend incident was an isolated — about 400 of its 150 million iTunes users were affected — but customers tell The Wall Street Journal that hackers have hijacked accounts before, with Apple doing little to stop them. [The Wall Street Journal]
Conventions | Heidi MacDonald looks at the tug of war between San Diego, Los Angeles and Anaheim for Comic-Con International, and the tough decision facing event organizers. “This has been by far the most challenging thing we’ve ever done,” said David Glanzer, the convention’s director of marketing and public relations. “Nobody thought we wouldn’t have a decision by June.” The board hopes to make a decision before this year’s event kicks off in two weeks. “If we don’t [make an announcement],” Glanzer said, “a lot of the focus is going to be on that.” [Publishers Weekly]
- July 7, 2010 @ 08:37 AM by Kevin Melrose
Meet your friendly schoolyard wall-crawler
A 13-year-old boy in Cambridge, England, has transformed two vacuum cleaners into a device that enables him to climb walls like Spider-Man — okay, almost like Spider-Man — earning him the admiration of classmates and the scorn of J. Jonah Jameson.
Hibiki Kono, a Spider-Man fan, spent five months designing and assembling the gadget, made from two dirt-cheap vacuum cleaners (about $22.40 each) and square wooden pads.
“My mum thinks it’s brilliant,” he said, “but she won’t let me us it in my bedroom as she is worried I may pull down the ceiling.”
- June 30, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Slash Print | Thoughts on comics and the iPad
The Marvel Comics App on the iPad
A roundup of commentary on what Apple’s newly released iPad may mean for comics:
• PvP creator Scott Kurtz: “… Everything I read online points to an entire industry either adamatly denying that the iPad will change things for comics or actively praying it doesn’t. Then there’s the truly astounding group of idiots just sitting there waiting to see if it does anything. Retailers want it to fail because they want to keep selling physical floppy comics. Diamond wants it to fail because they want to keep being a monopoly for physical floppy comics. Fans want it to fail because for them, comics is about collecting, bagging and boarding, not reading. Creators want it to fail because they’re artists, and they don’t understand new business models or how to make money, nor do they want to worry about it.”
• Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada: “… The iPad could be the new feeder system for brick and mortar stores. Ever since the newsstand really died for comics, that element has been missing in many ways. Trades in bookstores picked up some of the slack, but the newsstand used to be huge. I think the iPad will be that and more and will improve the sales of comics in all areas, especially at comic shops. That’s why we have the comic shop locator built into the app.”
- April 8, 2010 @ 08:33 AM by Kevin Melrose
One custom-made JARVIS, Stark family fortune not required
Tony Stark and JARVIS, from "Iron Man"
It may not be able to help him construct an armor suit — not yet, anyway — but Chad Barraford’s Project Jarvis greets him and his dog by name, controls his apartment lights and temperature, and can even cook a hot dog.
Inspired by, and named after, JARVIS, Tony Stark’s personal artificial intelligence computer system from 2008′s Iron Man, Barraford’s “digital life assistant” (DLA) runs on a four-year-old Mac Mini with built-in speech recognition.
The 27-year-old tech-support worker, who communicates with Jarvis via RFID tags, microphones, webcams, tweets and instant messages, has spent a grand total of $691.98 on his DLA. The Boston Globe has the full story (with video).
(via TUAW.com)
- April 7, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Slash Print | The OMG it’s the iPad edition
From the Apple.com video of the Marvel Comics App
• Apple reports that it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, when the media slate was released nationwide. That same day, iPad owners downloaded more than 1 million applications from the App Store, and more than 250,000 digital books.
• The Marvel Comics App is one of only 11 for the iPad showcased on Apple.com — that’s out of more than 1,000 available on the App Store. The spotlight comes complete with a video of someone browsing The Invincible Iron Man #1, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca.
• At CNET, Seth Rosenblatt reviews the Marvel app.
• Jeffery Simpson considers the differences in the digital paths taken by the music and comic-book industries: “The major applicable lesson from the music industry is not to wait too long before moving toward digital. Record labels grossly misjudged where music sales were going to be going, and spent more time fighting illegal downloads from Napster than they did in finding a way to sell music on-line. It took Apple and iTunes to finally drag the major labels into the digital age, and the record labels continue to manage to cripple new music services and potential revenue streams by forcing draconian digital-rights management software into services that don’t have the clout of an Apple or Amazon.com behind them. Eventually though, the comic industry needs to decide whether or not it’s in the business of selling paper, or selling illustrated sequential stories.”
• And on Twitter, writer Andy Diggle cuts to the chase: “The elephant in the room: will creators get royalties on iPad comic purchases?”
- April 6, 2010 @ 08:18 AM by Kevin Melrose
Marvel Comics App announcement sends tongues, and fingers, wagging
"Marvel Comics Arrive" Twitter trending topic
Spurred by Marvel’s official announcement of its iPad app, and early reviews of its performance on Apple’s new media slate, “Marvel Comics Arrive” briefly rocketed to the top of Twitter’s trending-topics list this morning.
But as some comics fans read the raves from the likes of the Chicago Sun-Times’ Andy Ihnatko, The New York Times’ David Pogue and BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, or grumbled over the $1.99-per-title price tag, author-blogger Cory Doctorow was busy taking a stand against the iPad — and the Marvel Comics App.
“I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them,” Doctorow wrote this morning at BoingBoing. “If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. [...] So what does Marvel do to ‘enhance’ its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.”
In response, author and comics annotator Jess Nevins tweeted: “That whooshing sound you just heard was Cory Doctorow missing the point on digital comics.”
Meanwhile, on The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog, David Itzkoff asks, “Can the iPad Do Whatever a Comics Store Can?” He doesn’t offer an answer, but Marvel’s Ira Rubenstein does. Unsurprisingly, given the number of egg shells scattered throughout any discussion of digital distribution and the direct market, the response is a firm no.
“I don’t think anything can replace the comic-book store experience,” Rubenstein, executive vice president of Marvel’s global digital media group, tells Itzkoff. “That Wednesday, when people go to the stores, I call it a mini Comic-Con. It’s where fans gather and talk about the books and they argue about the books and speculate about the books. That experience isn’t going to change.”
In other comics-related Twitter news, Dark Horse’s series of “April Fool’s Comics” tweets also broke onto the U.S. trending-topics list on Thursday.
- April 2, 2010 @ 09:24 AM by Kevin Melrose
More details emerge about Marvel’s iPad app
Marvel Comics App for iPad
Marvel Entertainment has confirmed details of its app for the Apple iPad, saying it will give fans “unrivaled access to Marvel’s rich library of comics.”
The Marvel Comics App, developed with ComiXology, will launch on Saturday with more than 500 classic and modern stories priced at $1.99 each. New content will arrive each week.
According to the Marvel press release, launch titles will include such “modern classics” as Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham’s Fantastic Four, and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men. At launch, a handful of newer titles will be available for free — among them, the first issues of Captain America, The Invincible Iron Man, New Avengers, Super Hero Squad and Thor.
It’s unclear from the press release just how recent the titles offered via the Marvel Comics App will be. The Hickman-Eaglesham run on Fantastic Four is obviously fairly recent; their tenure began in October 2009. Likewise, Super Hero Squad #1 was released in September 2009. But there’s no word yet on how much of a lag we should expect between the release of a print comic and its availability on the iPad, or how the publisher will decide what titles will be sold through the app.
The Marvel Comics App is available for free from the iPad and iTunes app stores. It comes equipped with a comic-store locator.
BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin posts a video walk-through of The Invincible Iron Man #1, by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov, and provides a “hands-on review.”
- April 2, 2010 @ 05:52 AM by Kevin Melrose
Marvel app for iPad confirmed, called ‘brilliant’ and ‘game-changing’
ComiXology's Marvel app for iPad
Just days before the Saturday release of Apple’s iPad, there’s confirmation that the much-anticipated media slate will feature a Marvel Comics app developed by ComiXology.
While noting that the Marvel application doesn’t yet appear in the iPad’s App Store, Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times says he’s “very impressed and excited” by what he sees: “This underscores a sentiment that everybody in comics has felt ever since rumors of an Apple tablet became tangible: that the device would finally make the experience of reading comics digitally into something that’s practical, enjoyable, and most importantly deliver the story in a way that feels like a comic book.”
David Pogue of The New York Times describes the Marvel app as “brilliant in its vividness and panel-by-panel navigation,” while BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin starts with “spectacular” and “game-changing” before getting a little more specific: “crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete.”
But back to Ihnatko, who devotes the most amount of space to the app, and provides the most details.
“If you’re a purist who needs to see the whole page at once, you can hold the iPad in portrait mode and flip through the story as you would with a paper comic,” he writes. “You can zoom in and out as you wish, but though the iPad screen is smaller than a standard comic page (I measure it as 7.5”, compared to a comic’s 10”) it’s still crisp and readable when scaled down. Turn the iPad on its side, and a new viewing mode becomes available. In iBooks, tapping the left and right sides of the screen turns pages. In the Marvel app, it ‘moves the camera position’ forward and backwards through the story, snappily zooming in and out through the ‘units’ of the page, highlighting moments of dialogue or action.”
Developing …
- April 1, 2010 @ 06:29 AM by Kevin Melrose
Apple’s iBookstore designates ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ as top-tier category
iPad's iBookstore
When Apple’s much-anticipated iPad launches in the United States on April 3, the media slate’s highly organized e-book application will feature “Comics & Graphic Novels” among its top-tier categories, Forbes.com reports.
Citing findings by the Busted Loop mobile media research firm, the website states that Apple’s iBookstore will designate about 20 main categories, including “Fiction & Literature,” “Reference” and “Cookbooks.” Below those will be more than 150 sub-categories; “Manga” will fall under the comics section.
The iBookstore content sales and delivery system is viewed as a major selling point of the iPad, but until today it had been unclear how much an emphasis might be placed on comic books.
When the iPad was unveiled in January, Apple announced it had partnered with five publishers to produce content for the iBookstore: HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. All of those houses have imprints that publish graphic novels or manga (for instance, Hachette’s Yen Press imprint publishes Twilight: The Graphic Novel and Yotsuba&!, while Penguin’s Puffin division produces a line of literary adaptations). Macmillan and Simon & Schuster are also major book-market distributors of graphic novels by other publishers but there’s been no mention of whether those agreements could extend to the iBookstore.
More publishing partners are expected to be added after next month’s launch.
(via AppleInsider)
- March 11, 2010 @ 01:59 PM by Kevin Melrose