For those who might not know, American comic books are in a bit of a Renaissance. Along with everything else, comics are going digital.
Now, people in the comics industry have been thinking about how to make this "work." Like books, people prefer to have comics in their hands. Though Amazon's Kindle is a nifty little toy, not many people are screaming about how wonderful it is to curl up in bed with a nice e-book.
Marvel Comics currently has the Digital Comics Unlimited program, where, for a small sub fee, you can read scanned copies of old and new comics on your computer monitor. Though this is nice, and cheap, it doesn't use the advantage of a digital medium.
Less than a year ago, DC Comics began its Motion Comics line. The releases of these comics have been scattered - a few here, a few there. Mostly, these are popular and award-winning miniseries that have been tweaked here and there for motion as well as sound, making it a cross between an audio book and a bad cartoon.
DC started with Watchmen, using the Motion Comic to build hype for the film, and has since moved on to Batman: Black and White and Superman: Red Son. These aren't bad attempts at going digital, but these stories weren't written or drawn to have motion.
Scott McCloud, the ever-experimental comics guru, has fooled around with the medium as well, working on pieces that use the Internet or motion to move the comic around spatially. But his experiments never really use the concept of motion, per se.
Tomorrow, Marvel Comics will release (via iTunes) its first original Motion Comic, Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD. Since the book's artist, Alex Maleev, and writer, Brian Bendis, are working on this book with the intention of giving it motion, I can only hope that this book will really prove what a "digital comic" can do.
However, all of these attempts at moving comics into the digital realm begs one question: Do comics need to be digital? I believe that Spider-Woman may answer that question with a resounding "YES" if, and only if, Spider-Woman is capable of telling a story in a way no comic ever has before, while still retaining the essence of an American superhero comic. Otherwise, it's just a cartoon.
