The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Service advisories: PeterDavid.net, MichaelDavisWorld.com

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

Just letting people know, since folks have been asking:

PeterDavid.net was not pointing to the right folder for a while last night as part of the update brought on by the traffic update, but the nameservers have updated and it seems to be resolved now. Some of the older entries are still migrating over, but you should be able to reach it. As part of the upgrade, you may want to check your RSS feeds.

MichaelDavisWorld.com, on the other hand, has been having server problems for a few days now, but we’re told it should be resolved soon.

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Scans_Daily: Actual, you know, data

  • Uncategorized
  • March 2, 2009

oj000-6652828One of the arguments that’s been trotted out in the wake of the scans_daily closing– sorry, scans_daily is how I see it should be written — is that having things posted there tipped people off to cool things to read. We have anecdotes of people spending $2800 because of books that they saw on s_d, pitted against sales figures for monthly comics that have been going down month after month, year after year. Most of this is difficult, because there are very few correlations that can be pointed to that make us say, "Ah! Someone posted five pages of Stupendous Man #73 and sales went up!"

However, we actually do have data that we can point to– webcomics.

At various times, people used scans_daily to promote their webcomics, books that couldn’t be gotten any other way. And at one point, so did ComicMix. I posted the first seven pages of The Original Johnson to scans_daily on January 19th, Martin Luther King Day, to see what sort of traffic we could get.

How much traffic did we get? A negligible bump. Fifty click throughs at most over a few days, and not many of them stuck around.

As a point of comparison, the New York Times ran an article on The Original Johnson a month prior on Christmas Day, 2008, the least visited day of the year for the website and the newspaper. The article was buried in the sports section. And we got well over twenty-five times the click throughs from the Times alone, and seventy times the traffic.

So– was scans_daily a good promotional platform? I’d have to say no. Why? Because it was an illicit group, and had to stay under the radar. As an illicit group, it was limited as to how much it could grow– it had less than nine thousand readers when it went down. As Warren Ellis pointed out, it couldn’t be used to promote anything. What it could do– and did very well– was reproduce a lot of comics storylines well enough, month after month, so that people didn’t need to actually buy the comics over time.

There have been a lot of successes from online promotion. And we’ll see what sort of traffic we get from a link on Ain’t It Cool News, which wrote Lone Justice up today. But scans_daily has not been seen to have a positive impact on readership from our point of view. We’ll update you in a few days when the traffic dies down. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to publish any other actual data — Kevin Church, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Woo woo woo.

In the meantime, a few more links:

 

The Point – March 2nd, 2009

In like a lion with news on the resurrection of DEAD LIKE ME and how the stars feel about coming back from the dead. Meanwhile, Kevin Smith proves he still has it and makes our 5 Cool Things In The Comic Shop this week, and BATTLESTAR plus DOCTOR WHO equals LAW AND ORDER?

PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
 

And be sure to stay on The Point via badgeitunes61x15dark-9645994,  RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean

 

 

The Un-Ethics of Watchmen, Part 1: A Bird’s-Eye View

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

drmanhattan-8414138Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?

The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?

 

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The latest on the Scans_Daily shutdown

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

Well, this has been an entertaining weekend.

To recap: on Friday, the LiveJournal community scans_daily has been suspended for posting copyrighted material without the permission of copyright holders, which is against LiveJournal’s ToS.

Many people, looking for a focus to blame, have taken out their venom on Peter David, bombarding his site with comments, some supportive, some abusive, and pretty much chewing up computer cycles. This has required moving up a planned migration and upgrade to the site, and there’s nothing like doing an upgrade while a comment storm is going on.

(Incidentally, this person is one of the more obnoxious pinheads I’ve come across in a while, whose argument seems to distill to "I was rude to someone I stole things from, so he took back what I’d rightfully stolen, I think, and this makes him a bad man". I suspect this person felt that the three bears had no right to chase Goldilocks away, let alone eat her– especially since she didn’t like two-thirds of the porridge that she ate.)

Further commentary has been brought up by Johanna Draper Carlson and Gail Simone on the "you’re shutting down a free comics site! Bad!" side, Kevin Church and Lisa Fortuner on the "About bloody time" side, and Digital Strips’ Brigid Alverson giving equal time to both.

As for the scans_daily moderators, the best summation seems to be from schmevil. Stubbleupdate has offered to answer questions in an interview; I’ve already sent a list.

 

Webcomics You Should Have Read: ‘Perry Bible Fellowship’

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

It started innocently enough, folks, I swear. I was patrolling my normal series of blogs, whence I came upon a startlingly funny little comic. Instantly I thought “Hey! Another opportunity to share with the masses an ongoing, intelligent, mildly offensive online comic! And again without fail, I find yet another online comic worthy of praise… that had already been deemed dead. But, my gentle readers (and my gentile readers too), I again choose to share with you a comic to be lifted on high and praised as “A Webcomic You Should Have Read!”. I give you The Perry Bible Fellowship. (Note: at this point henceforth when I declare things like this, you should quickly load up an MP3 of “O Fortuna Carmina Burana” and pour yourself a fine glass of Burgundy. If neither are available, a reasonable alternative would be a cassette single of "Step By Step" by NKOTB, and pour yourself a slop bucket full o’ Mountain Dew.)

I admit I find many things to be funny–religious zealots, explosions, bum fights, british curtness, farting, and my fiancé’s face when she’s asleep… and truly, this little strip seems to cover all those bases well, and then some*. A brief history tells us:

The Perry Bible Fellowship (or PBF) is a newspaper comic strip and webcomic by Nicholas Gurewitch. It originated in the Syracuse University newspaper The Daily Orange. The comics are usually three or four panels long, and are generally characterized by the juxtaposition of whimsical childlike imagery or fantasy with extremely morbid, surreal humor. Common themes include irony, religion, sexuality, war, science fiction, suicide, violence, and death.

The comic received its title, taken from the name of a church in Maine, in its Daily Orange incarnation.

Let’s dive in, shall we? (more…)

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ComicMix Quick Picks – March 1, 2009

  • News
  • March 1, 2009

cosmiccomicsolivepanter-9910089Today’s list of quick items:

Anything else? Consider this an open thread.

Review: ‘Wonder Woman’ DVD

wonder-woman-dvd1-9359032The DC Universe series of animated features got off to a rocky start with the [[[Superman vs. Doomsday]]] offering but has gotten steadily better.  [[[New Frontier]]] was pretty amazing and now they offer up [[[Wonder Woman]]], which may be the closest we get to a feature about the Amazon Princess for quite some time.

And I’m pretty okay with that, given how good this direct-to-DVD offering is.  It’s not perfect, but it’s entertaining and a great introduction to the character. If you’ve been following the interviews we’ve been posting here at ComicMix, you know that it comes from the usual suspects behind the animated DCU along with a very strong voice cast.

The movie posits that Wonder Woman exists in a world of her own and there are no references to the greater DCU, allowing you to dwell on the mythological background that spawned the character.  Created by William Moulton Marston, his grasp of the Greek mythology he predicated the character on was shaky at best and frankly, it wasn’t until the George Perez-driven version of 1987 before anyone explored the Greek gods and their role in the Amazons’ world.

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Live Journal Scans_Daily shut down

  • Uncategorized
  • February 28, 2009

The message on Live Journal is very simple:

Error

This journal has been suspended.

And with that, it’s gone and the comics community has changed.

And before anyone asks, no, Peter David isn’t responsible for drawing attention to the powers that be any more than Dirk Deppey is responsible for posting a link to it almost every day for years in a news publication. If you post enough stuff on there and you don’t own the copyright, your foot shall slide in due time; sooner or later you will get noticed and the hammer will fall.

Before you ask, yes, I posted stuff to scans_daily to promote The Original Johnson, because it’s a large community of readers. But ComicMix controls the rights to the book and used it for promotion.

I hope that scans_daily can reconstitute, but remember, to stay outside the law, you gotta be honest.

If any of the group administrators would like to contact us to comment or for an interview, please feel free.

Watchmen: Now Universal joins in with new clips

  • News
  • February 28, 2009

So far, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Fox have all had ties with Watchmen. Now, we can add NBC/Universal to the list.

Next week, NBC Networks will be airing never before seen exclusive Watchmen character profiles during the programming of shows on NBC, USA and SCIFI to gear up for the release of Watchmen on March 6th.

Here’s the schedule:

  •  March 1 – Clip montage featuring Dr. Manhattan airs exclusively during "National Treasure" on USA Network.
  •  March 2 – Clip montage featuring Rorschach airs exclusively during "Heroes" on NBC.
  •  March 4 – Clip montage featuring Ozymandias airs exclusively during "Ghost Hunters International" on SCI FI.
  •  March 5 – Clip montage featuring Nite Owl airs exclusively during "Battlestar Galactica" on SCI FI.
  •  March 5 – Clip montage featuring Silk Spectre II airs exclusively during "Burn Notice" on USA Network.
  •  March 5 – Clip montage featuring The Comedian airs exclusively during "30 Rock" on NBC.

Following their network airing, the clips will be available for viewing on nbc.com/watchmen.

Meanwhile, Disney is trying to figure out a way to tie things in. Some Ozymadias/ScroogeMcDuck crossover, I suppose. Or Donald Ducktor Manhattan, he’s already not wearing pants…

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