'Comic Book Comics' #6 Recalls the Rise of Digital Comics and Piracy [Exclusive Preview]

I started downloading comics as a way to get back into them and find out what was good. This was about half a year ago. I now have over 500 Gigs of mostly ill-begotten funnies. I went a little crazy over the availability, I think, because the vast majority I will probably never get around to reading nor would ever have considered paying for.

I try to also buy as many comics as I can. Though, like music (which I also buy and steal), I'm often buying second hand, so it doesn't make any difference to the creators either way. Also like music, I find it more gratifying to buy directly from the artist wherever possible.

Today is Wednesday. I'll be heading to the comic shop on my lunch break, my earliest opportunity, and most of the new releases I'm interested in will be gone. I intend to start a pull list with them as soon as I know which of the New 52 are worth following past issue three.

That, or start buying legit digital copies. But I will have to wait for them to be cheaper because I'm simply unwilling to pay the same for digital I would for a hard copy. I haven't quite worked out if or how I intend to go down that road. I agree with another comment about a Netflix for comics idea. More and more I think consumers are moving toward preferring access over ownership of media. I mean, I (almost) never download movies now that I have Netflix streaming, or to a lesser extent music now that I have Grooveshark mobile.

So anyway, I suppose I've downloaded books I'd have otherwise paid for. And I've paid for things I'd never have heard of without downloading them. I'm not looking to walk the line here, I am going to continue to download, but I also want to pledge my support of the medium where I can. With that, I'm off to my local comic shop to pick over the tattered remains of the release wall.

Hmm... It might be a little harder to enjoy some of The Oatmeal's gripes now.

I thought I was pretty informed on the webcomic world, but I've never even heard of "The Oatmeal"

Even if we can't agree on piracy's effect on the industry, can we at least agree that claiming that a smaller sales base leads to a producer pricing yet more consumers out of the business is ridiculous? The number of people interested in buying at all doesn't matter. Hell, cost of production matters very little outside of the question of whether the item is sold at all. The only thing that matters is the price at which price*(number of people willing to buy at that price)=more than any other price. That's the equilibrium price, and it is the foundation of the study of economics.

The assertion that people are less likely to pirate material created by one person is not correct. I have artist friends who try creating comics, cd collections of images, etc all on their own and it still doesn't matter to pirates. The material still makes their way to reposting and torrent sites. I've come across people with the mentality that its their god given right to spread material, in some circumstances without care of who created them.

Hey, this comic looks neat! I'm gonna download it!

@Scafin

You claim torrents "can drum up business." I would be thrilled if that was true. But we've been in the Torrent Era for some time now, and comics sales continue to decline or, at best, remain stagnant. Unfortunately, torrents are not driving consumers into the legal marketplace in significant numbers. This much is provable: That torrents are just not very helpful to the industry.

Of course, not being helpful doesn't, in itself, mean that a thing is harmful. Torrents could just be neutral -- not affecting sales one way or another. Plenty of people claim this.

To believe that, you would have to believe that an industry whose entire business model is built on charging for access -- the cover price for a comic or book, the ticket price for a movie, etc. -- isn't affected at all by an unauthorized third party offering the exact same access -- not a free sample like what's on this page, but the whole and complete thing -- for free.

Does that really sound plausible to you?

As I suggested in the piece, trying to stop torrenting is an exercise in futility. I think what ultimately needs to change is the business model: How and why and when we charge for access to creative material.

You know what I'd like to see? A Netflix for comics. You pay a certain amount per month to have full access to a shared universe. I'd pay $20 or $30 a month for access to most of the Marvel comics, for example- even if there was a delay of some kind. Has anyone even looked into this?

The point about manga sales dropping after scanlation sites took off ignores that manga became a crowded market in the mid-2000s, and ignoring shrinking book sales (manga being sold more through regular book stores than comic book stores), 2007 would be when the (then) current generation of manga readers would have been growing out of it at the same time as the - potential - next generation of manga readers were supposed to be getting into it but did not do so because manga was then defined by cheap reproduction and impenetrable long-running series whose earliest volumes were out of print, or shorter series that were more readily available - usually as a complete collection - via the second-hand market that obviously doesn't service the publishers. The only way to improve sales was licencing new properties, better translations, higher quality materials and improved editorial oversight, which a lot of manga publishers couldn't afford, hence they started to go under even before scanlation took off.

Scanlation sites also generally push obscure or untranslated manga that has no physical western counterpart, the scans of manga released in the west usually originating via anime fansub communities who cater to fans of properties like Naruto and Bleach and keep up with the comic versions alongside the tv episodes, a practice which also occurs with Toku, J-drama and even Korean shows/manhwa. Which is not to say that scanlation sites DON'T host manga based on those properties, obviously - although most who run such sites know that since they're violating copyright law they're currently hanging on by a thread and don't want the attention. I'd be surprised if most such sites are still going in five years' time.

The industry (Marvel, DC mostly) needs a MAJOR overhaul for its business model. Blaming piracy is a total cop out in a world where there are 500 different Iron Man, Avengers, X-Men, Batman, and Spider-man franchises running at the same time and the only time I see anything about a comic in the regular, non-comic world is when Superman makes headlines for not being an American citizen and Spider-man is a black and latino kid.

I also have issue with how I have to spend 3.00-5.00 on a floppy that has maybe the equivalent to 10 minutes of action and plot if translated into TV time. I only really buy TPBs of whole stories I like anymore. I'll buy a floppy if the art just completely jumps out at me. Otherwise I'll just wait.

I'm pretty lucky to live in Portland and have places like Things from Another World and Floating World Comics who grasp what's going on a little better than your average comic store and cater to a wider variety of customer than just the Simpson's Comic Book Guy types. If anything, catering specifically to those types and not looking to see who actually has money and potential interest is what's hindering comics more than piracy ever could.

Comics can't really be compared to music and standard books because the delivery is half of the product. You can just read the text of a book and get everything it has to offer. You can play a song on just about any device these days and get the product in its entirety. However you have to have the book format and high resolution imagery to get the full effect of a comic. Reading one on a computer or to a lesser extent on an iPad is very limiting. If the art and story are good enough, someone's going to go and buy it so they can have a physical copy to keep on their shelf. Everyone I know that's into comics, young and old, are like that. That's fundamentally integrated into comics and won't go away unless the very definition of a comic book is changed.