With all the insane rumors flying about surrounding Apple’s new Unicorn product, the tablet, conversations are buzzing again about what this could mean for a host of industries, including the comic book industry. New technology has been a catalyst for change for as long as I can remember. We’ve watched the rise of MP3 players, cell phones and streaming video enter our lives. But we quickly forget about the casualties caused by such innovation. People with CD players are silently mocked, while AT&T fights for approval to take the land line telephone system off life support. Streaming video is poised to deliver a killing blow to the video industry, already reeling from the wounds inflicted by the switch to DVDs and the emergence of Netflix. So as the body count stacks up in this Digital Revolution, I can’t help but ask myself “Who will be the next to fall?”

The comic book industry, more specifically the comic book retailer, seems like a likely candidate to be carted off the battlefield. The attack isn’t malicious in nature, but boils down to consumer motivations.  With the ushering of a new digital medium, the biggest advantage to consumers is that devil known as “convenience”. Convenience is a funny thing, because its value typically outweighs the other positives of a traditional medium. I prefer the layout of a standard newspaper. To me it’s a superior product than my digitally delivered Kindle edition of the newspaper. But the convenience afforded to me with the digital version, has ultimately pushed me to the new medium, despite the pain of the price point and the inferior product. That is what comic book shops will have a hard time competing with when the tablet from Apple, or any other manufacturer who does it right, arrives.

That convenience could mark the demise of the culture of Wednesday comic book day. There is something to be said about the feeling you get when you walk into a comic book shop and talk with the owner. When other fans of the medium have made their purchases and are just hanging around discussing the latest story lines or making bold predictions on the future and fates of our spandex idols. It’s more than a retail location. It’s a meeting place for people of a similar passion to meet and enjoy the company of one another. It’s a place for newcomers with questions to come and ask those questions without fear of a belittling response from an anonymous narcissist. It’s a haven for our community and for our culture.

With such a vested interest in its survival the simple question is “Why not just buy them at the comic book shop then?” It’s the same question asked by record store owners and video store proprietors.  Convenience is addictive and gratification is delayed. How often have you lamented the idea of lacing up the boots and braving the elements to go to a party? Comic book shop? The gym? Only to be relieved once you got there, happy that you made the journey. It’s how we deal with delayed gratification, the same reason we might spend an extra $20 dollars at Best Buy when we could have ordered the same product from Amazon and waited two days for its arrival. Those same mechanisms will be at work when we can make a few gestures and have Iron Man #31 in our lap in seconds. As we become more accustomed to our new found life style, the details of our shop visits become blurred. The memories of talking with the gang about their pulls for the week, get replaced with memories of the hassles of the weekly trip, double checking your order and making sure your pull list was properly updated. The ease of purchasing that back issue you missed will replace the memory of the joy you had when you found the issue at Wizard World after looking for 3 months. Searching through long boxes will be something left to an even smaller number of collectors. The life of today’s comic book fan will forever be prefaced with “Remember when….”, the hallmark term for nostalgia.

I won’t make any speculations as to what technology may or may not do for the publishing and consumption of comics. Many others have done that. My post is more a plea of hope that technology can breathe life into an industry without it losing a part of itself. The Digital Revolution has improved our way of life. We embrace the victor, but it doesn’t mean we can’t mourn the cost.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Comic Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.