How do you exploit a finite series and wring every last licensing dollar out of it? DC Comics has come up with a plethora of nifty brand extensions from the long awaited action figures to the nice art book from Titan Books.  But, the most interesting and innovative has to be the Watchmen Complete Motion Comic which has effectively animated the dozen issues, added narration and music, and turned it into something new.  This has been available for purchase on line, chiefly through iTunes, but today the complete series is being released in a two-disc DVD set.

Those of us with long enough memories have equated it with the cheaply animated [[[Marvel Super Heroes]]], from Grantray-Lawrence Animation in 1966. Unlike that hodge podge, all the art you see is from Dave Gibbons’ illustrations. He was actively involved with the production and his attention to detail comes through.

One of the biggest advantages to this method is that each panel can now be studied on the big screen.  You can check out all the background details, all the little things that Alan Moore had Dave add to scenes to get the message subtly across.  This, in some ways, surpasses the Absolute Watchmen for that enlargement.

Characters walk, wave their arms, move their eyes, and so on.  The motion is more fluid than one would expect and the background characters and objects move nicely.  The captions and word balloons are retained to give it that “comic book comes to life” feel but director Jake S. Hughes also employs film techniques to change scenes and tosses in some CGI animation for special effects but is judicious with their use.

What you lose, though, is the tightly constructed format which was also done intentionally.  The 9-panel grid that Dave employed was as much an element in the maxiseries as was the story. In fact, the [[[Watchmen]]] may well have been one of the first comic books to have been designed from the ground up prior to work beginning on the scripts.

It’s all a tradeoff.  Much as I miss the grid, I miss more the excised dialogue which was trimmed, we’re told, in the in interest of time. As a result, this is an adaptation and not a complete retelling of the comic in animated form.  Similarly, all the backup material which rounded out each issue is gone. You’ll have to a buy Tales of the Black Freighter on DVD later this month for that pirate tale along with Under the Hood. Of course, you could wait for the mega-version when director Zack Snyder integrates everything into one master story but I digress.

One of the additions, which I found myself enjoying, was the music, scored in a James Horner style. It was moody, low key and totally appropriate to the subject matter. And in a goofy way, I loved that the word balloon tails followed the characters as they moved, always how I imagined things working after reading Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

The vocal work is entirely handled by one voice actor, rather than a complete cast. Tom Stechschulte, a television actor, does a superior job giving life to each character.  His female voices were off-putting but he nailed all of the male parts which was quite a challenge.

The extras here are trailers for related product and an extended look at the just-released Wonder Woman animated feature.  There are other, cooler, extras on the Blu-ray disc which was not reviewed.  Now, is this affordable and worth having?  Overall, this was a satisfying experience and helped me refresh myself on the story in time for the movie. You could download each chapter for $1.99 ($24 total) or buy the DVD which retails for $29.98 but obviously will be discounted just about everywhere you look. The kicker, though, is that it comes with a $7.50 coupon to use with purchasing your movie ticket so there is a cost savings to be had.

IDW Publishing has announced the upcoming release of The Complete Rocketeer by Dave Stevens, collecting the classic series in its entirety for the first time ever.
 
After more than a decade out of print, The Rocketeer makes a triumphant return to stores this October with a comprehensive hardcover edition featuring artwork digitally re-mastered from Stevens’ own lovingly maintained collection of originals, and all-new coloring by Laura Martin, the Eisner-Award-winning colorist handpicked by Stevens himself.
 
The Rocketeer, a rollicking tribute to pulp novels and Saturday morning matinee serials, follows the high-flying adventures of stunt pilot Cliff Secord and his girlfriend Betty, after Cliff finds a mysterious jet pack and takes to the sky. The graphic novel went on to become a much-loved major motion picture directed by Joe Johnston.
 
In addition to the mass-market hardcover, a very special deluxe edition is planned. Presented in a larger format, the deluxe edition will be filled with behind-the-scenes material, a treasure of additional pages featuring previously unpublished Rocketeer designs, preliminaries, and sketches by Dave Stevens, many taken from his personal sketchbooks.
 
“It is an honor to work on The Rocketeer,” said IDW Special Projects editor Scott Dunbier, “I’ve been a fan of Dave Stevens and The Rocketeer since I first read it in the early 80s. It was a dream of Dave’s to see his creation return to the shelves in a complete collection. We are dedicated to making this the definitive edition, a book Dave would have been proud of.”

Today’s list of quick items:

• Happy birthday to Theodore Geisel. And happy birthday to my dad. No, my dad is not Dr. Seuss.
   
• From an article in the Guardian: "Americans already consume va stly more paper than any other country — about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China. Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin forests." In other words, yet another pressure on comics.
   
• Drew Barrymore to Direct Third Twilight?
   
• Groening’s “Life In Hell” In Trouble? | Comic Book Junction

Anything else? Consider this an open thread.

One 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:

• Copyright Holders Challenge Sites That Scrape Content – NYTimes.com Convenient timing.
• Robot 6  » A little more on the shutdown of Scans Daily
• Mightygodking.com » And I Shall Call It Dumbassopalooza: scans_daily and Peter David and The Internet is like a stone rolling downhill sometimes.
• Colleen Doran » Archive » Scans Daily
• airings: S_D’s demise from a person who really was there at the start of it.