Why Marvel and DC are Losing the Webcomics Fight

In case you couldn't figure it out, I tend to be a bit progressive when it comes to technology. My school reports were typed and printed with digitally drawn covers back in 1985; I was logging in to BBSes by 1987; a friend and I started a virtual design studio in 1993; I was fully invested in and using my PDA for daily tasks by 1997; I got a robot to vacuum my floors in 2004... I'm not bleeding-edge, by any means, but when I see a technology that works and improves my life in some fashion, I try to take advantage of it. I see the potential it was designed to achieve and maximize it as much as I can.

That's one of the reasons I love the exploration of web comics -- how the medium is being taken advantage of during a digital revolution. My biggest surprise so far was just that it's taken me so long to get on board. (I didn't really start reading any regularly until 2004.) And now, seeing how great the possibilities are, am almost as surprised that more isn't being done in this arena. That the big guns in comicdom are being extremely cautious about this whole online comics notion. I know Marvel and DC at least both have people specifically hired to put their content online. Their job is, in part, to give their respective companies the best presence possible online. I know I would have been arguing for developing more comic content online for a couple decades now if that was expressly my business.

Now, to be fair to those tech guys, they're only allowed to do what their superiors let them. If Marie Javins and C. B. Cebulski (the current EICs at DC and Marvel) say, "Don't put our comics online" there's not a whole lot they can do. But if I were in that position, I'd have gone back again and again with different methods to get something out there and new business models and get the bean counters to run numbers and whatever I could to drag those companies into the 21st century.

Now, this is Marvel and DC we're talking about and, like the Titanic, they don't exactly turn on a dime! Admittedly, they have made some attempts in the past couple decades but they haven't made much progress since. In a lot of respects, Marvel in particular has back-tracked considerably. DC's current efforts -- their handful of Webtoons titles -- seem to finally be successful at least from the point of view of the fans, though it's unclear if those actually within DC see it that way.

Now I don't expect Javins and Cebulski to be lead champions of online development. They're not tech kinds of folks. Which is fine; they're not supposed to be. But you're supposed to hire talented tech kind of people to tell you how to improve your company in the tech area and, more importantly, listen to them! They have expertise for a reason!

Several years ago, I read The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. His basic premise was that technology has gotten advanced enough that it levels the playing field for everybody. The fact that you've been around longer or have more cash to spend on marketing matters less and less with each day. The old ways of doing business are being superseded. The global village is virtually upon us (pun intended). And it's why a company like Naver -- originally just a tech company that built their own search engine -- seemed to come out of nowhere to a lot of people as a major force in webcomics. They were leading on the technology front and overlaid comics on top of that, giving deference to their IT folks for developing a user interface and experience that didn't just try to replicate printed comics on-screen.

Jack Kirby was once asked in the 1980s what he thought the next big thing in comics was going to be. He said that he didn't know, but it was almost assuredly going to come from some guy sitting at home by himself, and not from some corporate office. Jack was mainly talking about style and genre, but I think it applies just as well to business models. You want to know what the next big thing is in online comic development, Marvel and DC are the last places you want to look!

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