Miraculous Resurrection

Last week we had a reader comment how disappointed he was that nobody in the comic had died like we promised. I pointed out that we had closed and killed Dan’s Comic Shop and for a true comic fan, the lose of their favorite comic shop is a tragedy of untold proportions. He said he’d accept that answer only if we were going to bring the comic shop back. That it’s not a true comic book death until that character is resurrected later. It’s like he’d hacked our system and read our script outline.

When we first mentioned ComiXology’s Digital Storefront Initiative I’d commented that I was interested in reaction from brick & mortar comic shop owners. Disappointed that I hadn’t found any online, I decided to fix this by asking the guys at Bedrock City Comics about it when I went on Wednesday. They didn’t know what I was talking about and hadn’t heard of the program. That would explain why there wasn’t a lot of reaction to the announcement. After explaining what I knew of it, they didn’t seem that interested. If other shops were going to try it, they’d be interested to hear how it went, but they weren’t worried about digital comics at the moment. They said that digital comics weren’t affecting their business, so they weren’t concerned, but that they might change their tune in a year.

After they declared that digital comics weren’t affecting their business, I felt kind of bad putting Batman Beyond #2 back on the shelf so I could go buy it digitally at home. I did a side-by-side comparison of Kris’s physical copy of Batman Beyond and the digital copy on my iPad and I found the reading experience to be equivalent, except you don’t have the ads in the digital copy. I think I’m going to keep pulling Batman Beyond digitally to see if there’s something in the long-term digital experience that degrades the overall comics experience. Honestly, though, I’m much more interested in digital comics for the back catalog of issues than getting current stuff. There are all sorts of things that ComiXology’s digital collection has that I’ve been looking for for a long time either as back issues or trades. That potential is very good for my comic reading habits, but it’s a big pain on my wallet.