chad writes, Marvel Entertainment will begin selling digital “In-Motion” comic books through iTunes, it was announced yesterday at the Digital Media panel at New York Comic Con.
The company is working with Neal Adams and Continuity Studios to create a new form of digital comics for iTunes dubbed motion comics, which feature panels that animate scenes and add spoken dialog from voice actors. No exact price point was discussed, however, it was mentioned that multiple prices could happen depending on the content.
Read on for the rest of the article. Early titles released this way will be the new Spider-Woman ongoing and the existing Astonishing X-Men run by Joss Whedon and John Cassidy.
Neat, or gimmicky?
It could be pretty neat, if they respect the projects and the medium. It could also be simply a gimmicky way of trying to sell digital versions of comics to people who’ve already bought the paper versions. Here’s hoping the (partial?) animation is decent and they put some effort into the voice acting.
Here’s also hoping for some thought into both! These comics were (usually) carefully designed for the medium of paper comics. Injecting animation and voice will be inherently jarring; they’ll have to really think about how and why to do this so that it doesn’t come across as "because we can" or "because it will sell".
It sounds like a really strange idea to me to begin with. I can see where it came from — people thinking about what can be done with online/digital media that can’t be done with comics or cartoons. So that’s cool.
Anybody planning to review any of this stuff when/if it comes out?
Re: Neat, or gimmicky?
The Spider-Woman series will hit the digital motion comics format before it hits the paper format. If iTunes sells it to Canadians, I’ll get it and check it out. I may even get both formats for comparisons. I’m concerned about adapting the Astonishing X-Men run, but Spider-Woman was designed for both media from the outset. The issues will be largely the same, but the motion version will have some content not in the paper version and vice versa.
Re: Neat, or gimmicky?
Marvel had something like that on their site a while back, a flash-based gimmick that was quite obnoxious, and they discontinued that abomination rather rapidly.
Of course, they were using it as some form of contrivance to force viewers to subject themselves to advertising for a given amount of time in order to get to the next page, no wonder people didn’t flock to it.
Sounds like Broken Saints
I don’t know about you, but this sounds alot like what Broken Saints did. The DVD even had the voice acting in it. I really liked the medium, so it should be interesting to see what this turn out like.
.
Comics tend to have some really cheesy lines and inner monologue though. I don’t know how that will translate to voice acting. The cartoons tended to avoid inner monologue as much as possible.