ICv2 White Paper, an annual review of trends in the comic book industry

COMICS ARE DEAD!

…What? Too soon?

…Well maybe not dead but things are changing quickly, read on…

Dropping Sales

The comic book industry is having another tough year, the volume of comics being sold through comic stores continues to drop, the latest numbers indicate a 7% drop in sales while comic sales in books stores went up 8% (even with the meltdown of Borders). In terms of genre, Manga continued to drop, down 11% over the year while the largest gains were in the kids and tweens market, up 67% from last year. The drop in sales has been blamed on the decreasing number of stores to sell product, heavy piracy of scanned copies of comics and a resistance on the part of most publishers to move into the digital marketplace.

Bricks and Mortar

It seems that as bricks and mortar distribution continues to drop in sales that Amazon is taking up a larger share of the sales of physical copies of comics. This isn’t digital sales, I’ll talk about those in a minute. Amazon seems to be doing this by offering deep discounts for comics/ trades/ graphic novels (without any say from the creators) and providing cheap or even free shipping for the product.

The Digital Market

Now onto the digital market. There seems to be a few main distribution/ consumption channels that were considered relevant to the comics industry. Apple’s iTunes and the iPhone/ iPad hardware that goes with it are currently the most popular destinations. The other channels are Android, PSP, Kindle and the web. The current trends on those channels is growth in Apple’s offering, an increase in Android but the PSP comic market is collapsing. Kindle, Nook and the web are seen as emerging channels that will continue to grab more marketshare.

The sales through these channels have started out small but the general belief is that they will continue to grow considerably. In 2009 they amounted to about $500K-1M. As Dave Steinberger, the CEO of comiXology, described it, “If print comic sales were a sheet of paper, digital sales would be a piece of dental floss”. Despite the small numbers the consensus is that the sales will continue to grow even though they are lagging behind digital book sales. Currently e-books on Amazon are outselling printed books. That happened only four years after Amazon started selling digital books. Milton Griepp from ICv2 believes that comics are poised to follow and that growth in the digital market will be exponential over the next few years. The problem with growth in the industry has a lot to do with the comic publishing industry lagging in their transition towards the digital market. The industry is being heavily disrupted and the opportunities that are appearing also come with considerable risk. Like most traditional publishing industries, risk isn’t something that makes them comfortable. Here are some of the big questions that they would like answered before they engage in a digital publishing strategy. Are digital comic buyers going to be collection buyers? In other words, will they want to follow a continuing storyline over several months or are they looking for short, discrete story lines within an existing IP franchise? Is the current pricing going to work? And if not what kind of pricing experimentation are we going to see? Are digital comics going to cannibalize the existing customer base? This is based on a concern that if current buyers go digital they aren’t going to be interested in going to their local comic store and picking up a printed copy. These are all good questions based on some honest concerns. The thing is, you can’t be paralyzed by the uncertainty, the comics industry can look to the tech sector for the kind of entrepreneurial attitude required in a constantly disrupted space. Tech needs to re-invent itself constantly as new technology makes old models of doing business obsolete. The comics industry is already starting to see the effects of the disruption in dropping sales and it has started to react with a lot of new ideas. It can be certain that some of them are going to succeed and those companies are going to be the real winners in the evolving industry.

The Future

There was a lot of speculation about what else is going to happen in the comics industry over the next couple of years. The general belief is that the proliferation of tablets was going to present the largest opportunity for growth but that it will tend to be organic and evolve from small initial successes. Brick and mortar retail locations are going to become increasingly involved in deciding future directions of the marketplace. They are now very much aware that they need to be extremely active in re-inventing the shopping experience if they are going to survive the rise of the digital comic book. There was also a belief that Transmedia exploitation of comics and comic properties was going to become increasingly common as narratives continue to slip between media and platforms. One of the most interesting speculations, and the one that I’ll end with, was the interest in a creator-to-consumer channel developing. Digital books are already doing this and there was a lot of interest on technology providing the opportunity for comic creators to bypass publishers and build a direct relationship with their audience. I’m working with The Fabler on making that kind of channel become a reality so it was interesting to see it brought up as a future trend.

So, things are still very much in flux, I think they will be for several years, I hopeful that at the end of it all there are going to be a lot more comics out there and a lot more readers.

 

Super 8 and Portal 2: A train wreck and a media collision

I just had to throw up a quick post on the inclusion of the “Super 8″ film trailer as a playable level in the new game “Portal 2″. You can check out the game player trailer here.  You can then compare that to the actual film trailer here. Having the trailer as an interactive, playable level is an interesting twist on moving a story between mediums. I can only think that J.J. Abrams and crew thought that getting the trailer is a heavily marketed game is going to increase the profile of their brand. It seems to be a typical approach of transplanting the strengths of film into a game engine, but I’m not seeing something different that is playing to the actual strengths of the game media itself. I’ll have to see how this plays out, perhaps there is more coming that is going to make this an interesting approach to interactivity and storytelling.

How-to play the comic book option game

Recently a buddy of mine, Riley Rossmo, the artist for Cowboy Ninja Viking, had the option rights for the comic purchased by Disney First of all, congrats, Riley works really hard at his craft. I met him at a regular meet-up of local artists at the Kensington Pub here in Calgary when his main project was Proof. He always had a number of creative properties on the go and had a keen sense that Hollywood was always looking around for something new. He was in talks with a number of studios that were all trying to find the next big hit for the film industry. Proof was the first experience but Cowboy Ninja Viking eventually made the deal. This isn’t anything new, in the past few years, comics have increasingly become a place for the film industry to look for creative properties. Next to the stack of scripts on the desks of the entertainment industry is another, shinier pile of graphic novels and trades.

There are some good reasons that comics and graphic novels are there on that pile. They all have a fully formed stories, lots of characters to fill up the story landscape and, more importantly, they’ve already been seen by thousands of people. One of the biggest challenges to the film industry is trying to figure out if the movie they are making is going to be a hit or a miss. If a story already has a fan base and a ton of positive reviews, chances are they’re onto something good. Most of the people making decisions about funding really don’t know anything about their prospective audience. With a large fan base they’ve got a lot of feedback that the audience loved the comic and they are hungry for more. The funders don’t have to rely on a single opinion that may or may not be informed. So basically, if you’ve got a story that works in a visual format you’re lowering their risk that they’re going to fund a bomb at the box office.

There are some other elements you should consider as well. Comics, as a medium, give you a lot of room. You can vary a lot of things in the narrative such as story structure, art style and characters. You can do it in a lot of unconventional ways and play around with narrative because the cost of your comic bombing at the store aren’t that high. If things don’t work out you just start up another concept. The cost of failure in movies is much higher and as a result they tend to play it safe. This means you follow a standard three-act structure that can follow the conventions of a film script. This can be a bit challenging with a long running series as they don’t really have a structured start and ending. In Riley’s case, they brought in the script writers from Zombieland to put it into a standard format that can actually be filmed. It is something that you need to think about if you are looking at your story moving into a different media. Have you built it so that it can move into film? Or is is something that is going to take a lot of work to fit into a standard format that runs for 80 minutes? The easier it is for a producer to see the transition, the easier it will be to get their interest.

Now comes the next steps, someone finally offers you an option on that comic title you’ve poured your soul into for the past year. An option isn’t an outright purchase, they are basically buying the exclusive right to buy the rights to your creative property in the future. It is a producer’s way of buying some time while they try to get writers involved to polish up a script, line up some name actors and get the financing in place to actually film the movie. It is usually 12-18 months, if they haven’t been able to pull all of that together in that time period, they probably never will. At this point you’re not going to get the big Hollywood windfall, options will only pay out a few thousand dollars. The option agreement will usually define how much you’re going to actually make if the film moves forward. If all of that comes together and the producer moves the film into production you can look forward to the big pay-off. This might be in the form of a cash settlement or it might be a piece of the profits from the film, each option agreement can be different.

One last piece of advice, get someone you trust to review the option agreement. I’ve known a few naive writers who agreed to take back-end points on a film, thinking they were getting a share of the profits. What they didn’t realize is that they only get paid after all of the debts for the film are paid off. Just so you know, it is in the best interest of the owner of that film (often the film distributor) to make sure that film never makes any money on paper. The end result is that you will never make any money even though your film ran for 6 months at the theatres and sells out every Christmas at BestBuy. There are a lot of pitfalls and you need to be well educated to make sure you avoid them all. If you don’t have someone who knows all this stuff it is worth it to hire a lawyer who does. You’ll be happier with the results.

The Fabler: Next Steps

I haven’t written a lot about The Fabler, but it is a new business that I’ve been rather proud to be involved in over the past year. It started with a discussion between myself and Bruno Steppuhn about the publishing industry, we both realized that it was changing rapidly. We had talked to a few publishers and printers down in the U.S. and they understood the shift as well, they just didn’t know which direction it was going. None of us thought it was going to die but we believed that the business was going to fundamentally change. We started to look at how social media technologies and new hardware were going to turn publishing into a very different kind of industry. We decided to figure out what that new industry was going to look like, raised some money and created our first shot at a social site that focused on digital viewing and print-on-demand for the comic book/ graphic novel community.

It gave us a chance to experiment with a very creative and demanding community. They were very vocal about the kinds of things they want to see for the future of comics. The creators wanted more creative control, more profit for the creators, engagement with their fans, distribution options, more profit…basically, they felt they were doing all the work, they should get more for it. The readers just wanted one thing, great art and great stories and a lot of choice. We put that all together into  The Fabler and won “Best Use of Social Media” at the 2010 MediaFresh awards, beating out a number of much better funded crowdsourcing and social media projects. We worked closely with ZenSoft Studios (check out their demo reel, great stuff!) to develop the site. The feedback we got gave us a lot of encouragement so we’ve continued our discussions with publishers and printers about what was going to be in the next version of The Fabler. We don’t think we’ve got everything right yet but there are a huge number of publishers that are looking for new solutions for their industry so we’re motivated to keep trying. Keep an eye out for updates in the New Year, I’m hoping to show you some pretty amazing stuff and explore some new business models that are going to let creative industries explode and reach every single audience member they can, anywhere in the world.

Interactive fiction: Trends in how we read it

The website One Book, Many Readings is an analysis of trends in interactive, hypertextual fiction. These were the Choose Your Own Adventure books that began to flourish in the 80s. The design models for quests, side-quests and narrative are used in the game design of a number of adventure based and role-playing video games currently available. The demise of the books seems to coincide with the rise of many of these kinds of video games.

Visual map of a branching story

The analysis pointed out some interesting aspects of the evolution of the books over time. As the books were published, certain approaches seemed to work better than o

thers. These books become more popular, had more sales and helped to direct the next round of publications. It would seem that anyone who enjoyed a narrative that gave them choices would prefer a large range of choices and endings. Although that make sense intuitively, it seems that the opposite happened.

Rather than becoming more complex they began to decrease in branching and increase in linearity. The reason for the change isn’t really clear, perhaps an increased demand for simpler stories or may the genre starting to settle into an equilibrium. A place where it the ability to branch a story doesn’t affect the quality of the story itself. It still remains a solid narrative that resonates with the reader rather than giving them a complex, muddled experience.

The other interesting aspect of the research is the idea that some of the books rewarded the “creative interpretation of the rules”. In one story in particular, Inside UFO 54-40, you could actually get to a special ending by not following the constraints of the system but thinking outside of them. What makes this interesting is that the Choose Your Own Adventure books started to evolve to a place where creative thinking would allow the reader to experience them in a much different way. It is something I don’t see evolving in video game design, an affordance built into the game play that can take you to a completely different outcome if you decide to think outside the constraints of the system. Cheats and exploits aren’t really the same, the help a player gain an unfair advantage. Although they are creative, they aren’t built in as part of the narrative around the game itself.

Pixar, Up! and New Media

Up!

I’ve just finished a workshop at the Banff Centre with Rich McKain from Pixar.  He did a great presentation on his work and the very interesting life he’s had in the world of computer animation so far. All that hard work paid off by finally getting a position as an animator with Pixar and working on the film Up!.

I know I’ve been talking about New Media, film, narrative, video games and all sorts of other things on this blog so I wondered what New Media means to a company like Pixar. There have been a lot of different campaigns out there for film, some of them were less than notable while there have been a few successes, James Cameron’s New Media campaign for Avatar comes to mind. I talked a bit about it with Rich as he is working on the new Cars 2 animated feature that is still at least a year away. Their strategy for keeping up interest in the franchise and building interest in the new film? Animated shorts. Pixar knows that shorts don’t make any money and that doing a series of animated shorts is going to cost quite a bit of money. To put things into perspective, Rich kicks out a staggering 3 and a half seconds of animation per week so these shorts are a serious investment. It has to do with the fact that Pixar cares more about a meaningful story than building the kind of New Media hype that might get a couple of extra butts in seats when the film comes out. I thought that they might just be following an old model of creating content rather than strategizing through the many different social media and New Media options that are available for their films. I know that Pixar has an excellent grasp of storytelling but were they ignoring some current trends?

I started to do some digging into the film Up! to see what had happened for that film. I read this Huffington Post blog on the film, “Pixar’s new movie panned by wall street“. It turned out that Wall Street thought that Pixar was not only ignoring current trends but traditional trends in blockbuster films. They thought the film was a bad idea and de-valued Disney’s stock after hearing about the film’s plot. They didn’t believe it was commercial enough and the movie-going demographic was never going to want to see a film about a 78-year old man. The movie was just missing too many required elements to be a blockbuster. The prevailing philosophy from those who are motivated simply by profit was that the film was going to miss the mark.

The film went on to resonate deeply with moviegoers. It made $293 million at the box office in North America and $430 million in foreign box office sales. This isn’t even including the DVD, toys and other spin-offs that would have been part of the returns on this film. It has also gotten Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. It has met a number of successful standards for commercial and artistic success.

Pixar 1, Greed 0

So what does this mean for New Media? Well, I’m starting to believe that filmmakers that are driven by Wall Street are going to make films that follow the right formula. They hopefully make a return for their investors and a mindless escape for us, the viewer. New Media campaigns aimed at promoting those kinds of films aren’t likely to engage us, after all, we’re not there to have a meaningful experience, we’re there to escape. Viewers who are attracted to that kind of film don’t want to be engaged in some kind of detailed, immersive experience, the last thing they want is more mental overhead in their already busy lives. A company like Pixar might have a different kind of audience, ones that are actually attracted to stories that might help give some perspective on their own lives. I find it interesting that given that kind of audience, Pixar doesn’t try to build interactive New Media campaigns to go with their films. Instead they just create more narratives, short films in the case of Cars 2. Perhaps they’re just doing what they do best, perhaps they don’t think New Media can really handle narrative effectively. What I really believe is that they know storytelling and the needs of the audience. When New Media is able to provide those kinds of storytelling experiences, Pixar might consider it an option. When, and if, Pixar does try something, I suspect they will have thought it through rather carefully, much more carefully than anyone in Wall street apparently.

The Witch of Portobello

Paulo Coelho is an internationally successful author who has written such books as The Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello. It is this last book that inspired The Experimental Witch Project. Coelho decided to explore what his readers saw in the book’s characters and the story he had created. He partnered with HP and created a contest to encourage filmmakers, musicians and artists:

People were encouraged to choose a character in the book and create a short film based on that character. The contest resulted in 6000 submissions and Coelho chose 15 winners. The total amount of footage created by those winners was 380 minutes. That footage is being edited into something that can be presented at a film festival, around 90 minutes, but Coelho intends to create a version of the film that will have all 380 minutes. He is aware that this would be a non-commercial property but believes it is the only way to properly explore all the work created by the various participants of the project.

Film contests aren’t new but what is interesting about this is Coelho’s willingness to embrace social media and New Media as a way of exploring the meaning of his story in the space between the reader and the author. Coelho has actively engaged that world by talking about his books and his life in a diverse number of virtual spaces such as YouTube and MySpace. He believes these are places where a worldwide audience can engage in conversation with an artist that has not been possible in the past. It is not about promotions or ego for Coelho as he is eager to have an opportunity to engage in the imaginative and creative ways that his audience will take his works and make them into something else. His goal as an artist has always been to share what he’s discovered inside his own soul. Using New Media he is now able to instantly gauge his success in the goal by the content and conversations created with his audiences in those online spaces.

IFC Short Film Challenge and UbiSoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed… If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that one does not fear revenge”

-Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)

And that sets the tone for the world of Assassin’s Creed 2, based in late 15th century Italy. It was an amazing time when things were changing very quickly and new ideas were shaking up Europe.

The IFC and UbiSoft put together a filmmaking challenge to see what kind of short film their film-making community could create based on the game world and characters from the first-person shooter.

The winner, A Father Avenged, was a pretty impressive piece of short film that explored the theme of revenge and the toll it takes when you decide to embark down that road. It also gets at some of the truths of that time period, the Renaissance was as much about brutal measures to achieve security and unity in Italy as it was about enlightenment. The kinds of ruthless tactics needed to achieve that security are pretty well documented in Machiavelli’s how-to guide The Prince. This short film by Frank Thomas was an interpretation of a time period that would have had a heavy toll on many of the people who lived through it. It is still focused on those revenge fantasies that are typical in the first-person shooter genre but it tries to explore some of the humanity in actually being a character in that type of game. For that, I’d have to say it was a great step forward in adding depth to what is generally a pretty shallow game-play experience. I’m not sure it would have worked as a cut scene in the game, or even if anyone would have watched it between levels, but it was an appreciated piece of work from someone looking for games to be more than the usual twitchfest. I’m looking forward to more of these kind of ideas from Ubisoft, they definitely seem to be more creative about how their games live in the media world than many other game designers.

Break the Fourth Wall

and this is what you get:

“a clichéd, kitsch and largely nonsensical story with more plot holes than a field in Cambodia”

Dan Cheer’s Review, Game Planet

Call of Duty Screenshot

In a recent review of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dan Cheer finds a well-modeled, visually stunning game…with a plot that seems to have been cut and pasted from whatever action genre b-movie that happened to be in the blu-ray player of the game designer when he sat down to build the narrative. The story revolves around several challenges involving shooting evil Russians and blowing stuff up. As I write critiques on the use of narrative in various gaming contexts I wonder why they are making it so easy? These multi-million dollar creative properties aren’t converging as much as co-opting the worst of the film genre in an attempt to engage their audience in an immersive experience. They aren’t drawing their audience through the fourth wall and allowing them to engage in the narrative. They are providing such bad storytelling that the players are just trying to avoid paying attention to it so it doesn’t disrupt their game play.

Ubisoft’s Convergence of Film and Video Game

UbiSoft has released a new short film, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage,  in preparation for the release of their game Assassin’s Creed 2 on November 17. It is the first part of a three part trilogy.

The short film is part of an ongoing effort on the part of UbiSoft to bring creative properties to multiple platforms. The goal is to engage gamers in as many entertainment mediums as possible. They have been strategic in their approach, acquiring Canadian special effects firm Hybride in order to produce quality films. Hybride was the company responsible for green screen epics such as 300.

After watching the film I would have to say it is the first Italian Renaissance ninja film I’ve ever seen. I think Italian ninjas are better dressed than their Japanese counterparts but their acting range seems to be about the same. The film itself has beautiful cinematography but I think they missed an opportunity to really create a different kind of narrative for the game.

Ubisoft has stated that they are doing these films as part of a campaign to create a more immersive experience for the gamers who are playing Assassin’s Creed. Games, especially first person shooters, or in this case, first person stabbers, aren’t very good at narrative. The cut scenes are limited in the depth and scope and most are quickly skipped by the players so they can move onto the next challenge in the game. Here was a chance to build on the strengths of film and work on mood, atmosphere, exposition and character. Perhaps they were just creating an action genre film for the demographic they had identified for the game. I’m not really sure how much interest those kinds of hardcore gamers have in film, even this one.  I had just hoped that when game and film started to converge, they would have let each approach the story from a completely different direction. Instead of playing to the strengths of each medium, Lineage becomes a great looking film that looks like gameplay. Everything I’ve seen in this first film could have been achieved by cut-scenes and voice-overs within the game itself. I’ll withhold final judgment until I see the final two installments of the trilogy, perhaps this is all going someplace even I don’t expect.