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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: A Second Wave Old Fart Caves In

Published: December 20, 2012 1 minute 6 comments

Comixology and Andrews McMeel have announced a deal to publish Dilbert, Doonesbury and Big Nate books on a virtual platform, with more to come.

Comixology

Comixology also sells DC and Marvel comics and graphic novels like "My Friend Dahmer" and all sorts of similar stuff that comics fans want.

In digital format.

I'm trying not to be an old fart about this, because (A) nobody likes being an Old Fart unless they're making a living at it and Andy Rooney is dead, and (B) I remember the Old Farts of bygone days, which I think makes me a Second Wave Old Fart.

I got my first personal computer in early 1984, a Texas Instruments Pro that didn't do much, but what it did, it did very well, and I immediately lost patience with the Old Farts who prattled on about the glories of writing on typewriters.

Their chief argument was that, with a typewriter, it slows you down and makes you really think about word choice. Which I'm sure is what people said about typewriters vs. pens. And a dip pen would slow you down even more than a fountain pen, and so now we know why the Epic of Gilgamesh remains the best-written book of all time.

When you have to scratch each letter into clay, it really forces you to choose your words wisely.

Only I have a feeling that Ur-Author was about two-thirds of the way through when he made the mistake of asking his wife to have a look and she said, "You named his buddy 'Enkidu'? 'Enkidu'? Some day, that's going to sound like a Jimmy Durante song!"

But he already had a stack of dried tablets sitting there upon which the guy was named "Enkidu" and so to hell with it.

Think about it: If clay tablets had a search-and-replace function, we might have been reading "The Epic of Gilgamesh and Buckshot" all these millennia.

Anyway, my objections to digital books have largely been based on similar resistance to change, and I'm working on it, in part because I think I need to get on board as an author/publisher and in part because I need to get on board as a reader.

It's not all Old Fartism. Some of it is conflating books and newspapers.

I object to the idea that you can buy a paperback for $12.99 or a digital copy of the book for $9.99 because I have this sense that printing and shipping add a lot more than three bucks to the cost of a book. 

But that matters less in the case of books than in the case of newspapers, because a book still offers everything a book has ever offered, while newspapers are losing their competitive edge in that regard, ironically because they are shaving costs at the wrong end of production.

Newspapers no longer want to pay the people who create the content. As local newsrooms lay off reporters and editors, they start to lose their ability to offer quality, expert content you can't get anywhere else. 

Plus they look to the Wall Street Journal as a model for making a paywall profitable without considering that nobody pays for a WSJ subscription out of pocket — that's all vouchered back to the Company. Heck, if I could voucher food, I'd be eating surf-and-turf every night.

But, while I'm not paying $150 a year to read articles about local bond issues written by some starter-salary newsroom newbie who has no idea how bonds work, or stories about global issues that I read 36 hours ago online, a ten dollar book is still a pretty good deal.

And I used to object to digital books on the basis of permanence, until I found out that, in most cases, you're not buying a "real" copy. The book you bought is still up there, so that, if your computer fries itself, you can recover your library.

Assuming the people you bought it from still exist. And assuming they don't start letting their authors go all George Lucas on us and retcon everything.

And you can read digital comics on the toilet. God knows, if you can text on the toilet and hold phone conversations on the toilet, you can certainly sit there reading. You can even put your Kindle-Nook-Kobo-iPad in a Zip-Lock bag and read in the bathtub if that is your wont.

Which leaves one quibble: Those stupid phones, and the overall "gotta get smaller" direction of technology.

A few years ago, I went to a convention in Chicago, and, after it broke up, we found ourselves with a few hours to kill before our train back to the coast. And there was the Chicago Art Institute, so in we went, and found ourselves wishing we were stuck in Chi-town a little longer, because you can't begin to see that place in a few hours.

It was one "Oh, I know that one!" after another, but, in particular, I was struck by Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris Street: Rainy Day."

Rue de Paris
Yeah, "I know that one." What I didn't know is that the damn thing is 7 x 9.

Feet.

And it's not just enormous for the sake of enormous. It's so that each of those cobblestones can be a painting of a wet cobblestone.

I was blown away.

Now, with all due respect, I don't think I've ever seen a Dilbert, Doonesbury or Big Nate strip that needed that sort of scope so that we could pick out the exquisite detail.

But I retain the right to feel that they deserve more than a phone screen.

The Old Fart may just be being an old fart, but the Comics Fan is right.

And, by the way, if you're determined be an Old Fart, find a classy way to pull it off:

 

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Comments 6

  1. Indeed.
    Me too.
    And similar such stuff. Especially the part about not getting the small price differential between a paperback vs. an e-book. Somehow all that paper and ink ought to cost more. Me thinks they subtracted the cost, but not the marginal profit they earn based on that cost.
    I love my wife’s Kindle and have read several books on it. Unfortunately, it is one of the paper-white versions, so I doubt that reading comics would be very enjoyable.
    As an aspiring writer, I do find the self publishing opportunities created by electronic readers to be quite intriguing. Where else can you act as writer, editor, and publisher all in one?

  2. I wrestle with it. I love what I grew up loving, print, and have never once fallen into a timeless reverie staring at an electronic screen. Not to say I won’t or can’t–I have plenty of hide-bound book-loving friends who swore they’d never go electronic until they got their Kindles, after which they proselytized with the fervor of the newly converted–and maybe that’ll be me someday. But not yet.
    Aside from books and comics, I don’t get why watching a movie on a 5-inch screen is considered a good thing. Just because you can? I really love the poke-modern-life-in-the-eye impulse that led Peter Maresca to reprint old “Little Nemo” comics at full size (huge!) or Chris Ware to do “Building Stories” as an assortment of ephemera including a board game. Impossible to digitize! I did a bit of that in my “World of Tomorrow” book with different paper textures. I value contrarians.
    Your Caillebotte story reminds me of seeing a triptych of Monet’s “Water Lilies” at the MOMA in New York. Everybody’s seen pictures and posters of the lilies, but I was stunned to discover how enormous these were. Room-sized! (Just looked it up: three panels, each about 6.5 x 14 feet, making a single painting nearly 42 feet long). It’s an entirely different, and very moving, experience. I think the same more or less applies to other arts. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to experience them as the artist intended.

  3. I feel that away about Rodin’s “Gates of Hell.” I’d *really* like to install it as the front entrance of house. 🙂

  4. I saw “Rainy” in Chicago back in the mid 1980s. I was at a history conference as a grad student and the Art Institute had a shown of Monet’s work, many of which had not been shown in the US before. I blew off an afternoon of sessions to go see the show. My adviser was furious (which should have been an early clue to switch advisers) but I’ve never regretted going to see the paintings….. I’ll remember seeing several of Monet’s haystack together for the rest of my life, but I would probably had forgotten any panels I attended at the conference a long time ago..

  5. Sure, you don’t have to print and ship an E-book, but you have to maintain the library on multiple servers, maintain constant uptime, while never letting any server get too bogged down. Those servers and the hard drives attached to them are fairly power hungry.
    There’s also something to be said about maintaining enough profit to feed Amazon, the Book publisher/distributor and the author. So, yes, serving a ton of E-books can be an expensive endeavor.
    Nevertheless, it also seems that most people like to throw out the whole “Supply-and-demand” think when slight differences exist between products. Whether it’s Mac vs. Windows, Columbia vs. North Face or Paperbacks vs. E-book, people start nitpicking the differences in cost rather than just accepting that at a specific price point, people will still buy a product and it has nothing with being oblivious to the actual costs.

  6. As I said, I think the quality of what is offered is more important than the overhead of producing it, though I also think (in the case of newspapers) that, if it was profitable back when you were paying the carrier a 30 percent delivery kick, you could drop the cost of a subscription and still come out on top because of savings in other areas.
    But it comes down, as Mat says, as I said, to whether it feels like a good deal. I think in the case of the comic strip reprint books, ten bucks is a great price. And if you then turn around and view them on a phone, you’re missing a lot, but it’s your money. *shrug*
    However, I’d add that I’d want to see what “My Friend Dahmer” looked like in digital format, because part of the impact of that book is in how Derf lays out the panels. It’s the total page, not panel one-panel two-panel three. As with Maus, as with Whatever Happened To The World of Tomorrow, the page itself has its own impact, and if you aren’t displaying the entire page, you’re not seeing it as it ought to be seen.
    An iPad is likely the same size as a page in one of those books, if they are formatted to simply pop onto the page. (Anybody know?)

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