Marvel to Offer Digital Backissues

Marvel Comics has announced they will be doing aggressive online launch of current and classic comic book titles. Marvel has had limited "dot comics" availability in the past, but the December 14th announcment makes it clear that Marvel views digital presentations in Flash format are a part of Marvel's marketing future.

As Cinerati has discussed before, comic books are in many ways "loss-leaders" for the companies that produce them. When an excellent print run of a comic book is 100,000 the profit margin on a monthly basis is fairly low. In order to make reasonable profit comic book companies rely on either licensing of their intellectual property or, in the case of Marvel, the release of IP in other formats. Both DC and Marvel, as well as other comic companies, release their intellectual property in the form of movies, action figures, and games. In the past, Warner Bros., who own DC Comics, have had one up on many competitors in that they were able to reap all the profits from their theatrical releases. Marvel on the other hand has had to deal with unpaid licensing fees. The recent struggles over the Spiderman franchise have led Marvel to create their own production studio. Warner is still reliant on other companies, among them ToyBiz the owner of Marvel Comics, to produce their game and action figure merchandice. Marvel has had an advantage in the toy market since they were acquired by ToyBiz when the action figure manufacturer realized it would be cheaper to buy, the then bankrupt, company than to pay licensing fees.

Marvel's press release (below) focuses on how the digital comics will introduce the comics medium to a new audience, an audience who consumes Marvel media in other formats. Marvel gets a double benefit out of the deal. First, some who read the digital comics will want to read the real thing and thus increase the profit of the loss leader. Second, the digital comics work as a permanent advertising campaign for Marvel intellectual property. Fans of the Fantastic Four movie who eagerly await the next film (to be released in 2007), will be able without charge to read the past and continuing adventures of the Fabulous Foursome.

For those who think current fans will be disgusted and end their comic purchasing ways, remember how few you really are and that new comics like Nextwave will not be offered in the digital format. If the only comics "hits" Marvel gets are digital, they will make sufficient profit on the other media to compensate and new fans will want physical copies. In other words, the disgruntled will be replaced and the market may even expand.

Wouldn't you, the comic fan, like to share your hobby with a new generation? Think of the Dot Comics as Afternoon Cartoons that require kids to be able to read. That's the right mindset.

Marvel is embracing the digital medium as a second loss leader and shouting out to the competition, "It's Clobberin' Time!"

MARVEL GOES DIGITAL! HOUSE OF IDEAS LAUNCH CLASSIC & CURRENT COMIC TALES ONLINE!

Industry giant Marvel Comics has launched their popular characters and their adventures into the digital realm. Marvel.com is to be host to online versions of classic and current tales of Spider-Man, the Hulk, X-Men, and more. Stories from throughout the company’s long history will be translated into a form that can be viewed right off the fan-favorite website.

“There are two audiences that we're trying to reach,” observes Peter Olson, Creative Director, Online for Marvel Entertainment. “For people who have only been exposed to our products through movies and TV, we want to use this as a vehicle for introducing them to comics as a medium. For our long-time fans we feel it'll be a good way to check out titles they aren't familiar with and also to catch up with our archives.

“I'm working on a classic X-MEN run right now, actually,” he says, with the gleam of a true fanboy in his eye.

Although a black and white version of a Nextwave digital comic was shown to a select group of the press, there are no plans to make the digital version of this comic available to the general public. Nextwave #1 (Diamond code: NOV051973) will be available in local comic shops on 1/25/06.

Marvel is truly excited about the launching, especially concerning the technology being utilized. Every effort is being made to make online comics viewing a joy for the fan. “The reader is extremely flexible,” says Olson. “It allows the user multiple ways of
going through an issue, including a very innovative ‘smart panel’ mode that allows the reader to focus on the book one panel at a time. It provides convenience for the user as they can read their favorite comics from any computer with an Internet connection.”

John Dokes, Marvel Director of Marketing and Business Development, is understandably proud of this new venture, as well as eager to receive feedback on its operation. “Offering Marvel’s characters and stories in a new way such as this is something we’re very passionate about. We believe that there’s a large percentage of comics fans that will simply love to view our comics online and we hope we can all work together to make this as pleasurable and successful an operation as humanly possible.”

“The thought that classic Marvel tales and their current counterparts are being translated into the digital realm is as exciting as it is comforting. They’ll be preserved and strengthened for future generations.”

As this new feature of Marvel.com ramps up, the posting of stories will increase. “We'll be adding several new issues every week. Eventually it'll be up to one new issue every week day.” Dokes points out.

To view the newly launched Digital Comics, visit http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/catalog/catalog.htm

To find a comic shop near you, call 1-888-comicbook

Great News for Game Fan Programmers!

One of the common arguments made against strong intellectual property rights is that it limits creativity and the growth of a given media area. This argument is frequently made my DJs and was the cornerstone argument for why "Disney is evil" in Bob Levin's The Pirates and the Mouse. Levin argues that some characters have become a part of the cultural tapestry and that artists should be allowed to manipulate these characters in the creation of a kind of patchwork art. This would be similar to sampling that DJs do, but visual rather than aural. Levin doesn't point out that the case law created by Disney's agressive protection policies has created a legal history which is very helpful to the small fry, but he does make some compelling arguments against IP in perpetuity. The intellectual property protection in the Constitution is supposed to foster the public good by providing financial incentive for the creator while also allowing others to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and advance the arts.

From Article 1 Section 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

We can debate what "useful Arts" means or what "limited Times" means, but that is unnecessary as Congress passed copyright laws very early and they are a well established part of American law.

What is amazing is that Vivendi Universal has shown that the marketplace can allow for the protection of IP while also allowing for fans of a given intellectual property to create new versions of existing IP. Vivendi Universal has decided to allow the fan created King's Quest IX to be created by the current fan only public creation team. According to the agreement, "Vivendi Universal Games (hereafter VUG) granted a fan license to Phoenix Online Studios to continue work on the KQIX project. As part of the negotiations between the two companies, VUG required a change of name of the project. As a result, "King's Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining" will now adopt a new name: "The Silver Lining"."

Mods, minor program modifications, have become somewhat the norm in the game fan community, but this marks a new high point for the industry and leaves open the possibility that companies may make available more IP which is financially not viable but has a loyal and talented fan base.

Holiday Fun For The Family

In the spirit of Americans being so addicted to violence that it permeates fully their lives. I offer you a Savage Worlds edition of the Holidays.

The War on Terror has opened on a new front -- Toyland is at War!

An early Christmas present from GWG/PEG!

Back by popular demand is the highly entertaining Battle of Christmas Eve. This free Savage Worlds adventure, by the ever-so-slightly twisted Wiggy should put you in a festive mood.

Christmas is coming, and across the land, children are fast asleep, waiting for Santa to deliver their presents. But for one little girl, Christmas is about to ruined by the Mujafuzzeen, diabolical toys intent on causing havoc in the real world.

Only the heroes of TIC-TOC can defeat the Mujafuzzeen and save Christmas. But is there time?

Find out in The Battle of Christmas Eve.

Pinnacle Entertainment is once again offering their Holiday Season themed scenario packet for the Savage Worlds game. I played this last year and had a great time. Maybe I'll do it again this year.

To play the scenarios you will need a copy of the FREE Test Drive Rules for Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds is an easy to learn and fun to play role playing game that bridges the gaps between playability/complexity, speed/realism, and wargame/rpg. Do yourself a favor...Save Christmas!

Awaiting The Prestige

In October 2005, Cinerati reported that Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins) would be returning to his mystery roots with The Prestige. The upcoming movie about competing magicians in London at the end of the 19th century will star Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as the rivals. The Prestige is based on the World Fantasy Award winning novel written by Christopher Priest published in 1995.

The first disappointing news regarding the upcoming film was reported in today's Hollywood Reporter. It appears that Scarlett Johansson will be appearing in the role of Olive in the film. The Olive character exists a small, but important, section of the novel and the inclusion of Johansson in the role gives a hint as to how the film is being adapted from the source. The narrative of the book spans from the late 1870's to the modern day with Olive appearing during the early 1900s.

Given Nolan's talent and his displayed ability to narrate "internal" mysteries while playing with narrative structure, Cinerati had hoped that Nolan would cover more of the time spanning rivalry than is now likely. Johansson is too large a name to be given a minor role, though I am baffled at her appeal to casting directors since her best acting was in Eight Legged Freaks. It appears that starring in self-indulgent artiste fare directed by enfant terrible is what constitutes stardom today.

The narrative of The Prestige, the novel, reveals itself like a magic trick. In fact, the title itself comes from magician lingo (the word means illusion in French). To quote from the novel:

An illusion has three stages.
First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted is hinted at, or suggested, or explained. The apparatus is seen. Volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in the preparation. As the trick is being set up, the magician will make every possible use of misdirection.
The performance is where the magician's lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a performer, conjoin to produce the magical display.
The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparantly did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.

But the word prestige has numerous other meanings as well. It can refer to one person's standing in society or within a profession, it can also imply wealth. The difference being as between prestigious and prestidigitation. Christopher Priest's novel uses the word prestige to represent all the above definitions and a couple more. His use of the word is tricky and it is the root of the conflicts and mysteries contained within the novel. Both magicians (Alfred Bordon and Rupert Angier) seek prestige, and use prestidigitation to acquire it, but both also have secrets to keep and both conceal parts of their private lives. The reasons for this deception are best illustrated in a discussion early in the book about the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo.

I saw Ching perform only once, a few years ago at the Adelphi Theatre in Leicester Square. At the end of the show I went to the stage door and sent up my card, and without delay he graciously invited me to his dressing room. He would not speak of his magic, but my eye was taken by the presence there, on a stand beside him, of his most famous prop: the large glass bowl of goldfish, which, when apparently produced from thin air, gave his show its fantastic climax. He invited me to examine the bowl, and it was normal in every way. It contained at least a dozen ornamental fish, all of them alive, and was well filled with water. I tried lifting it, because I knew the secret of its manifestation, and marvelled at its weight.

Ching saw me struggling with it but said nothing. He was obviously unsure whether I knew his secret or not, and was unwilling to say anything that might expose it, even to a fellow professional. I did not know how to reveal that I did know the secret, and so I too kept my secret...He walked with his head bowed, his arms slack at his sides, and shuffling as if his legs gave him great pain.

...But logic was magically in conflict with itself! The only possible place where the heavy bowl could be concealed was beneath his gown, yet that was logically impossible. It was obvious to everyone that Ching Ling Foo was physically frail...

...The reality was completely different. Ching was a fit man of great physical strength...the size and shape of the bowl caused him to shuffle like a mandarin as he walked. This threatened the secret, because it drew attention to the way he moved, so to protect the secret he shuffled for the whole of his life. Never, at any time, at home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal gait lest his secret be exposed.

Such is the nature of a man who acts the role of sorcerer.

Of the two magicians in The Prestige one is like Ching Ling Foo, his entire life is an illusion. The other is a master performer, but unlike the above narrator needs others to reveal tricks before he can perform them. One is a natural sorcerer and the other is a natural performer. Both seek the secret of the other's most magnificent trick. Both tricks involved the transportation of a man from one location to the next, but both have different causes to similar effects. One, like much of magic, is simple when discovered (or is it?) and like most magic tricks the simplicity of the trick can ruin the effect. Once you know a trick's secret, the trick can only be judged by the performance/ingenuity and not the illusion. The magic is lost. The second trick's secret is the reason why The Prestige won a fantasy award.

Mystery and deception fill The Prestige, as does magic, in a tale filled with adventure. And no tale of the turn of the century would be complete without Nikola Tesla, who will be played by David Bowie in the film, and The Prestige delivers.

The novel masterfully incorporated real world magic history into its narrative. In one of those great moments of serendipity one finds in life, I found a wonderful book about the time period by chance at a local Borders. This book was about the famous Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo, not to be confused with Ching Ling Foo, whose own life was filled with mystery and one deep secret. Chung Ling Soo, one of the most acclaimed Chinese magicians of London, was not Chinese at all. Not only that, he own "real" identity turned out to be filled with deceptions as well. You see, Chung Ling Soo was really William Ellsworth Robinson, a former magicians' assistant and the husband of Olive Robinson. "But even William Robinson was not who he appeared to be, for he had kept a second family with a mistress in a fashionable home near London." Chung Ling Soo was an imitator of Ching Ling Foo, who was a real magician who's actual name was Chee Ling Qua and he became a formidible enemy of the American impostor. The biography of Chung Ling Soo, The Glorious Deception by ingeniuer Jim Steinmeyer is a wonderful narrative of real world rival magicians and living deceptions. The Glorious Deception displays that no matter how good a fiction might be, sometimes reality is even more exciting.

The number of parallels between the books is remarkable. Both magicians in The Prestige battle for the affections of Olive. One of the magicians has two homes -- the first with a happy family, the other with his mistress. One of the magicians in the novel, like Chung Ling Soo, was inspired by Ching Ling Foo. The list goes on the similarities between the magicians in The Prestige to the life of William Robinson are fun to find. One could only assume that Christopher Priest had read The Glorious Deception as part of his research. But that would have been impossible! For while The Prestige was written in 1995, The Glorious Deception was just released in 2005. It is as if we have witnessed a new magic trick...write a fiction novel and have it transported into the future (months before a film release of the novel) and transformed into a real life biography. Unlike with most magic tricks though, finding the "secrets" increases the appreciation of the fiction, but in this case the real world "illusions" are in some ways more fantastic than the fictional.

Old News About Spielberg and Electronic Arts

Back in October it was reported by EA games and the Hollywood Reporter that Steven Spielberg would be partnering with EA games for 3 next generation titles. Exciting new for the game industry indeed, even if it passed under Cinerati's radar at the time. What makes this news truly exciting is that Spielberg seems to understand that the future of digital entertainment is in Home use and not in the Theater. The financial burden of changing celluloid theaters into digital screeners is significant and, while it may be the long term future for the industry, seems unlikely to be the near future direction of the industry.

As the consoles, and PCs, which run games are becoming more powerful, the videogame industry has reacted by making videogames both more realistic and more interactive. New graphic capabilities have lead to beautifully rendered "animated" sequences filling the gaps between game levels on fight games, and nearly seemless narratives on roleplaying style console games. With each generation of game the Final Fantasy series becomes more an more like an interactive movie. A feature that audiences seem to enjoy. EA has taken the model of video game as interactive movie to heart and last year donated $8 million dollars to the USC School of Cinema-Television to set up a three-year Master's program in interactive entertainment as well as endow a faculty chair. It doesn't take more than ten minutes playing Fable or X-Men Legends to see how closely related the videogame industry is to film in narrative creations. Even the acting unions have entered into negotiation battles with the video game industry understanding that it is part of the entertainment future.

Spielberg has long been a visionary in the connection between videogames and film. Shortly after he founded Dreamworks SKG, the studio announced it was creating a video game division. Dreamworks Interactive released a monster game in 1999, Medal of Honor, which combined cinematic and narrative techniques with interactive play to good effect. In 2000, EA purchased Dream Works Interactive and has annually released sequels/expansions of the Medal of Honor franchise. Medal of Honor, the game, was a video game inspired by Spielberg's successful Saving Private Ryan and has left in its wake a large World War II first person shooter legacy. While Castle Falkenstein may have been the first successful WWII shooter, the Medal of Honor series took the action out of the "fantastic" and into the visceral.

According to the Hollywood Reporter (article linked above) Spieberg is an avid gamer who is quoted as saying, "I hve been playing EA games for years and have watched them master the interactive format...I am looking forward to working closely with the team in Los Angeles."

With an ever expanding DVD market, a changing theatrical market, and a burgeoning On Demand market, the video game industry is establishing itself in a strong place in the entertainment field. Those worried about the future of aspiring filmakers need only consider Neil Young (the VP of EA Los Angeles) comments, "The goal here is to have the first true collaboration between filmmakers and game makers. I'm personally excited by the opportunity to work with Steven to build games that don't just engage players with their interactivity but also try to move them emotionally."

Those who think that the future of the video game market will be dominated by programmers and math geniuses need look no further than the creative forces behind World of Warcraft and City of Villains to find games designed by "writers" and not "coders." Like film, video games are produced by multiple departments: Sound, Writing, Directing, Acting, Cinematography and Special Effects. The coders control the last two (and contribute to the technology available to the others), but it is the visionary creators who will rule the day.

Marvel Battle Dice Images Available

Matt Forbeck, game designer extra-ordinaire, has posted images of his forth-coming Marvel Battle Dice game. There seems to be a trend of mainstreaming superhero miniatures games. On December 7th Cinerati mentioned the upcoming non-collectible Teen Titans game by Bandai and according to Forbeck the Marvel game should be releasing in January.

This news bodes both positive and negative for the "gamer" industry. The gamer industry is a small cross-section of the overall gaming industry. The broader gaming industry includes all kinds of board games and toys, everything from family games like Monopoly to specialty games like Warhammer. The gamer industry, on the other hand, is a niche market made up primarily of specialty games devoted to the comitted "gamer" rather than the casual player.

The expansion of what would typically be constituted as a specialty game, in this case a superhero miniatures game, into the mainstream market is a positive trend for gaming as a whole. Gamers are continually looking for new players to enjoy games with and the entry into the niche marketplace by mainstream gaming companies is a positive trend in this regard. It also provides a glimpse of a possible stable gaming future where games designed by talented specialty game designers are widely available. Fans of specialty games remember fondly the days when the full line of Dungeons and Dragons products were available at Toys R Us and this may signal a return to such popularity.

On the other hand, if the current specialty gaming companies who produce a wide array of excellent games are unable to gain access to mainstream retailers this may be a sign of a crisis in the industry. While many Number One has talked to are excited about the Matt Forbeck designed game, there are others who wonder what this will mean for the popular Heroclix game by Wizkids Games. Wizkids games is a current "gamer" company which has made a great deal of headway into the mainstream marketplace, especially with its Heroclix property. If the Battle Dice game fortells the loss of the "miniatures" license with Marvel for Wizkids, this could spell financial troubles ahead for the company. This could mean trouble for the industry as well, as Wizkids is one of the larger niche game companies. Wizkids is the perfect example of a corporation attempting to adapt and expand its role in the marketplace.

The primary concern of consumers isn't usually the health of any particular company, but the industry as a whole and thus the most important concern is product availabilty and quality design. As long as talented freelance designers like Matt Forbeck, who also works with Wizkids, are designing games the gaming industry has bright days ahead.

Kung Fu Assassins Attack UCLA

This Sunday, December 11th (scroll down to the bottom of page), students from the Deadly Venoms school of kung fu will descend upon the UCLA campus to battle over who will inherit the school's treasure and legacy. Will it be Toad? Snake? Centipede? Lizard? Or the mysterious Scorpion? Who knows? (Well actually I do, but I'm not telling).

If you've seen Five Deadly Venoms you know it as a poorly dubbed Chop Socky classic. In fact, it is one of the all time great Shaw Brothers films. But you haven't really seen the film until you've seen it on the big screen (35 mm) in Mandarin (with subtitles) and remastered. Awesome.