Mixed Emotions Over Mixed-Motion Digital Comic Books on iTunes

Comic books have been co-opted by virtually every medium to emerge since the radio. From the Pop Art movement of the late-50s and 60s to TV and film, comics have provided the blueprint for a large amount of popular—and profitable—entertainment. Unsurprisingly, the two largest comic book publishers are owned by film studios, which have used their comic book holdings to the tune of multiple blockbusters with grosses larger than many countries’ GDP. However, despite their in-your-face-everywhere-you-look ubiquity in film, one medium has remained untapped by the major comic book publishers and their various namesakes: the Internet.

Until now, that is.

Sure, some comic strips, dailies and other periodicals have been on the internet for over a decade now, but, for the major publishers like DC and Marvel, only copyright infringing user-scanned PDFs have been available. Now, however, Marvel has announced the production of mixed-motion comic books that will feature both animation and still-frames. These mixed-motion comic books will be available on iTunes and other online outlets.



Let’s limn this development a little further. The mixed-motion comic books essentially mean that comics are coming several steps closer to the films, both animated and live-action, that co-opt and, generally-speaking, ruin them. Is turning pages, either physically or through a PDF reader, and using that thing, you know, “imagination” or whatever it’s called these days, too hard for the general public? Have comic books, which were constantly demonized as the end of literature and literacy in general, now joining the bread lines along the medium it was supposedly replacing? In other words, will movies, both live-action and animated, prove too difficult for viewers to view 20 years from now? Are intravenously-consumed movies not far behind?

On the plus side, comic book illustrators and writers might actually make end’s meet. But then again, the struggling-comic-book-artist-as-a-young-man graphic novel genre would surely suffer, and what would be left with then?

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