Last weekend Marvel made another uncharacteristic appearance at South by Southwest (SxSW), the independent movie and music festival held annually in Austin, Tx. In the previous year Marvel announced their ReEvolution campaign that included the first fully digital comic line called Infinite, and its debut story featuring Nova set off the events of last year’s enormous event AvX.
This year Marvel introduced something new to the digital reading experience with a 3 day offer of over 700 free digital comics featuring historic 1st’s in the company’s long run. Also announced was the new and innovative “Project Gamma”, a perfect blend of audio and visual storytelling, and the coming of new weekly Infinite books debuting in July with Marvel’s biggest bad boy, Wolverine. Keeping in step with last year’s SxSW, Marvel continues their goal of recreating how readers experience digital comics.
Marvel #1
Marvel is giving away over 700 full digital copies of some of the most influential and desired comics of all time. Beginning March 10th at 11th and ending March 12th, these books will be available through Marvel’s digital store and in the Comixology digital store.
Among these titles are stories by legendary writers like Stan Lee and Chris Claremont, also current acclaimed writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Kevin Smith, Jonathan Hickman, Ed Brubaker, and Jason Aaron just to name a few.
This is an incredible deal for any fan of comics. Just the shear amount of comics available makes Marvel’s first announcement at SxSW impressive. Coupled with their second app, Marvel Unlimited, Marvel is poised to expose their rich history to an entire new generation.
“This is the perfect way to show everyone how much we believe in our material by letting them try the first issues for free, because we’re sure once they start, they won’t stop.”
-Sales, Digital & Print David Gabriel
Marvel Unlimited
Marvel Unlimited carries over 13,000 of the company’s back issues in .PDF-like formats. For a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 a month or $59.88 a year, readers can go back in time and see the stories from the Golden Age up to the Modern Age of comics. The app also allows for up to 6 downloads to be kept on portable devices for times when internet services aren’t available.
The app subscription will come along with a newsletter informing readers of themed books and specifically coordinated issues put together for those interested in particular characters or famous storylines. The downside however is that these files aren’t arranged in the panel to panel format seen in Comixology purchases. Instead, think of a single image that the user guides themselves through by zooming in and out of pages and moving panel to panel manually. It’s a small price to pay for accessing a huge catalog for an easy monthly fee.
This brings readers to Marvel’s front door with old and familiar stories and characters, but once readers cross the digital threshold, the publishing legend is re-innovating how readers absorb their stories by adding the new element of audio for a more enriching experience.
Project: Gamma
Very little was known about the very Hulk-esque ad campaign last week, but on Sunday the details were spilled out and digital comics gasped for air. Not since DC’s announcement of day to date publishing in the New 52 has such a bold move been made in the digital market.
Conceptually the idea to include a score and sound effects to digital storytelling is both insane and obvious. After all, where else could the medium go? By implementing music and well placed sounds in the panel to panel reading, Marvel is attempting to tell a richer and more involved story by using these audio cues to aid in influencing the reading as the story would ask it to. Film has been doing the same thing since its birth, so the method is clearly one that proves effective. The question today though is will it work while reading a comic?
Marvel has anticipated many of the potential obstacles that could derail the project. With the aid of Momentum Worldwide and composers for film CORD (Harry Potter, Drive, Looper), Marvel is building an experience that adapts itself to the reader’s specific style. By creating fluid musical loops and well composed pieces of music, the score to each book will move fluidly with no breaks or buffering between panels, thus making a story that is paced by the reader and still remains as effective as a score by John Williams or Hans Zimmer.
Included in the technology will be the ability to go backwards in the story and keep the music consistent while still reusing the instrumental cues put into the score to amplify the mood for a scene. The music will also include new original scores tied to both books and characters. Similar to the musical themes each character had in Batman: The Animated Series, subtle reoccurring themes will work themselves into the musical background throughout each story.
The release date for the first Project: Gamma digital comic has not been released yet, but it’s said to be coming later this year with the announcement of another big event. The only questions that remain are if this additional experience will have an additional cost to the already debatable high price of digital comics and if there will be an option to turn off the music and sound effects.
Finishing Mavel’s digital tidal wave of new ideas comes the return of their first big step into the “ReEvolution” of comics, the growth of the Infinite line. The fully realized digital comic will be continuing in a weekly series consisting of four of Marvel’s biggest characters in new original stories that will extend continuity along with its printable counterpart.
Marvel Infintie
Timed with the release of the new Wolverine movie on July 9,2013, Wolverine will lead off the Infinite line with Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted. Written by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, and art by Paco Diaz, the Infinite book will be released every Tuesday for 13 straight weeks where another character will begin their own story. There’s no news about who the other three characters will be yet.
Marvel is proving themselves to be at the forefront of digital comic storytelling. No other mainstream company is attempting something so big an endeavor, but with a backing by Disney, the chances are good that the company that has claimed bankruptcy several times won’t be crippled by any possible failures. The comic book giants are taking a big leap into uncertainty with confidence that they will emerge the undisputed king of comics.
“We’re at the forefront of developing a new language for comics. If we go back to the way comics were told, it started with a horizontal strip of panels and evolved into a comic book page. [Then] you could go vertical or horizontal and page design was a part of the process. Now we’ve taken it to the tablet and the handheld media and you’re seeing how, even in a short year or so that we’ve been doing [Infinite Comics], how we’re evolving this and getting better.”
-Marvel Editor in Chief, Axel Alonso