One of my many distractions over the years has been photography.   And not just in a professional manner, but before that.  I liked to take pictures.  Didn’t matter what the camera was, or how the image actually turned out, I liked to take pictures.  A few years ago I purchased my first Digital SLR camera.  The most exciting thing to me about this was the idea of being able to use different lenses.  For the first year I owned it, I had the two lenses that came with it.  Then I bought a used 50mm.  Meaningless to many of you I am sure.  But anyway….

Last Winter, while at a photography convention for work, I discovered the coolest toy on earth for my camera.  The LENSBABY.  No, seriously, this little contraption it great!  There was previously a fad in photography of Tilt-Shift Lenses.  That is not what a Lensbaby is.  And thank goodness, because that sounds complicated and hard to use.  The Lensbaby is more of just a tilt lens.  What the best part was, not only could I make images have an entirely different look, it had swappable optics and accessories to transform a standard lens into a macro, a wide angle, a zoom, a holga (plastic lens), or a pinhole.  The pinhole was one of the most fascinating to me since I had loved making my own pinhole cameras out of oatmeal containers and making prints in my photography class in college.  I had looked up how to make a pinhole cover for my camera at one point but chickened out.  The Lensbaby was truly my all in one solution for my new photography toy.  It was able to give me everything I wanted…..for the time being.

Over the past 9 months, the company introduced new toys to go along with my Lensbaby.  I had known a few of them were a possibility, so I was excited on each launch day, but waited patiently.  Today, a Lensbaby package came in the mail.  My awesome husband purchased all of the new toys for me as a birthday gift.  There are 4 new accessories for my Lensbaby and we have 4 days until we leave for San Diego.  So we will experiment with one new toy a day.

Tonight, the first, and the biggest…..the fisheye lens.  This is an optic for the Lensbaby that is really the entire lens itself and then clicks into the shell that attaches to the camera.  I have wanted a fisheye for a long time, and what better way to have one than to pair it with my Lensbaby.  Not only is it WAY more affordable, it is smaller, and I can do a bit more with it.  The only downside is that everything with the Lensbaby is manual focus, and since I can’t focus anything….my whole life is a blur 🙂  But alas, I love it!  And now, when we get the focus right, we can take arms-length shots of us with the Lensbaby!  Cannot wait to explore San Diego with my new toy.

Tomorrow night…Super wide angle adapter.

A few months back, Kevin got us in to see a 15 minute preview of the new James Cameron film Avatar.  The event was similar to the Dark Knight preview we saw a few months before that premiere, but I have to say this was disappointing by comparison.

The problem I had with the preview was that none of the five scenes we were shown were in any way complete.  We saw enough to get the idea: the human military has some interest in a strange alien world, they send in operatives who have uploaded their consciousnesses into the bodies of the indigenous people, mayhem ensues.  The main protagonist appears to be a disabled marine who is made able to walk again in this new body and serves as the viewers’ guide to the alien world.  However, without any real context for the scenes, it was hard for me to get into.  The preview for The Dark Knight gave us the full bank heist scene, and I think anyone who saw it was completely on board for what to expect.

The real showcase for this event was the 3D IMAX technology used to produce the film.  It looks gorgeous when things aren’t really moving around, but the action scenes fell apart.  I struggled a bit having prescription glasses under the 3D goggles, but eventually found a configuration that worked.  Although it was amazing to see the way the scratches and imperfections of my lenses were intensified.

It was kind of interesting to see Sigourney Weaver (Aliens) and Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation) working with James Cameron given his success directing properties that made them sci-fi stars.  This movie may be great, but I wasn’t convinced enough to buy advance tickets for the December 18th opening as we walked out.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about digital comics lately. It all started with a paper I had to write for a Marketing class that finished up last week and was largely responisble for me not posting much lately. I was writing about Marvel’s failure to turn their success in cinemas into comics sales. It was admittedly a hatchet job. I had three pages to make my point and there was very little room for balance. Maybe I’ll post it here later this evening… But as I was finishing my paper and writing about the company’s distribution channels, the whole paper took a completely unexpected left turn into a discussion of digital comics.

My main complaint was that yes Marvel has invested in digital comics with their Digital Comics Unlimited online service, but the fact that the books aren’t new or portable really handicaps it despite the reasonable price point. It’s possible that I’m just strange, but I have NO desire to be handcuffed to my computer when I want to read comics. It’s also why I don’t really take full advantage of the amazing but has-to-be-illegal HTML Comics site.

I get that digital comics could on first glance potentially cannibalize sales of their print books but think about it this way. First, a large percentage of the people buying Marvel’s books are not like me at all and they view their books on some level as an invesment. They put the comics in bags with card boards backs and squirrel them away in special boxes. These types of people are not going to abandon Marvel’s pamphlets for digital comics. These people might be willing to purchase additional Marvel books that they don’t currently collect, however, if they had a low-cost way of doing so.

Second, in the last sales figures I saw, the only Marvel book to sell over 100.000 copies was Captain America: Reborn. If the average Marvel movie makes $200 million, which is a conservative estimate since many make far more, and the average movie ticket price is $10, we’re talking about 20,000,000 people who are paying to see Marvel products on the screen. If Marvel could convince just one out of every 200 people who sees their films but doesn’t read comics to buy that Captain America title, sales would double. One out of 400 of those people picking up the title would result in a 50 percent rise in sales and that’s just their top book.  What about all of the books that sell 50,000 copies? I don’t believe that reaching this audience is an impossible challenge, but I highly doubt most of those 400 people even know where a comicbook store is, let alone would they seek one out. And I know charging $4 for a 22 page book is not going to help matters at all.

Wow, have I digressed. Digital comics. Right.

The first comics technology I was exposed to for the phone was an Iverse produced prequel to the latest Star Trek film that was originally published by IDW Comics. IDW are mostly known for publishing licensed comic based on Angel, GI Joe, Transformers, 24 and now Star Trek, though their output is definitely more diverse than that. Not only was the story of that first digital book strong (and it addressed many of my complaints about the film), but the technology was impressive and the price point of $.99 an issue was impossible to ignore. I immediately saw the potential for comics in this new medium. No longer would you need to make a concerted effort to seek out a physical store that sold only comics to purchase obscure books. Suddenly, you could click your phone a few times and be reading a book seconds later. It’s kind of amazing to be honest.

Both Iverse and Comixology have released strong iPhone apps. They both offer primarily indie comics at a price point of between $.99 and $1.99 per issue. The apps also both offer a large number of free comics to sample before committing to following the books either in print or digital form. Issues are usually broken down to be viewed panel by panel for an easy reading experience. This feature can, however, result in the reader not being able to appreciate the artist’s layout of the full page. Iverse compensates for this problem by offering the option of physically turning the iPhone from a landscape to portrait view, which shifts the image on screen from a single panel to the full page. It’s pretty slick. You move from panel-to-panel by swiping your finger across the screen.

I was less impressed with Panelfly’s app which seemed to have simply have scanned the pages of the book I tried out. I needed to expand images to read the lettering and scroll around on the page with my finger to see it all. Not my favorite experience at all.

The concept of digital comic books is relatively new to me and so far I’ve been mostly downloading free books to sample with several pleasant surprises. I’m really looking forward to exploring Elephantmen, Atomic Robo, and We Kill Monsters in more depth. Their sample issues were all very engaging and worth trying out.

Several indie publishers including IDW have been very vocal about the fact that making their comics available digitally has both increased the sales of their physical books as well as provided an additional low-cost option for their products to potentially reach an audience that never goes into comicbook stores. Many indie publishers have largely been squeezed out of the Diamond Previews catalogue in recent years making it increasingly difficult for indie comics to reach the market at all.  Some of these “books” are reportedly selling more copies online than in stores. While this is great for the publishers, I’ve long been of the opinion that digital comics won’t matter to most people who read comic books until one of these apps hooks up with Marvel and DC. Plenty of people likely disgree with that attitude.  Marvel and DC, however, have to date seemed more worried about the danger of online piracy than the potential digital comics represent to expand their market.

Until today.

Today Marvel released a handful of comics for Iverse, Comixology and Panelfly. Strangely not only did Marvel not release the same books to all of the services, the price point varies with Panelfly offering their books at $.99 and the other companies offering their books at $1.99. The books released include the first Marvel Zombies mini-series, the first few years worth of the latest volume of Captain America and Astonishing X-men books, some Amazing Spider-man issues and more. I cannot stress enough how potentially game changing this could be for this industry, though I think Marvel needs to release way more books (including newer ones) to really move things forward. Hopefully that will come with time.

As things stand now, if Marvel continues to release just old issues digitally, their program will exist as just an alternative to their terrible collected edition program that seems to constantly let most of their trade paperback books fall out of print. Of couse, there’s no real reason why digital books should EVER go out of print, so this is not totally a bad idea…

I do hope Marvel pushes their price point down to $.99 as that seems to mostly be the digital standard. If I have to choose between spending $1.99 on 22 pages of a Marvel comic and an episode of Lost on iTunes. Marvel loses everytime.

In addition, there’s the rumor that this mythic Apple Tablet product that might not even exist but might be released tomorrow or next year will come loaded with a comics app called Longbox. That’s one more game changer if you ask me.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that I didn’t specifically state that DC Comics continues to have no real digital distribution in place for their comics. It’s really pretty sad how stuck in the past they are.

Look Bruce Willis has made some of my favorite movies of the past 20 years. No one can really challenge the good movies on his resume… except my brother, but he’s dumb.

Surrogates is a bad movie. It’s boring. It’s humorless. It’s heavy handed in its commentary. It’s just not fun. I want better for Bruce Willis. I’d rather see another Whole 9 Yards sequel than him make another film this uninspired.

The basic premise is that technology that was invented to help people who are confined to wheel chairs or maybe to fight wars without losing American lives has been subverted to allow people to live artificial lives through robots. Fat dudes can control hot chick bodies and have relationships with other dudes and no one can tell the difference. Old people can run around in bodies that look decades younger and they do. People are living through their surrogates nearly 24 hours a day. They NEVER leave the house anymore. It’s like life only better. And if I remember correctly this evolution of human existence is supposed to happen within fifteen years. One of the key results of the emergence of surrogates, however, is that murder no longer exists.

There are small groups of humans who hate the idea of surrogates and live in reservations throughout the country that for some reason the government has no jurisdiction over. They’re led by a dude called the Prophet. Isn’t that a cool name? Too bad he’s in the film like all of three minutes…

Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent who misses having a human relationship with his wife who lives completely through her surrogate. Turns out something bad happened to them in the pre-surrogate era. Willis of course ends up investigating the first homicide in years and then a bunch of dumb stuff happens. Guns are shot. A helicopter crashes. People are betrayed. Nothing is as it seems. It’s all so shocking in its unoriginality.

The ending of the film is inexcusably convenient and undermines the entire conflict of the film.

Credit where credit is due, there is one visually interesting scene near the end of the movie, but of course it was spoiled in the commercials. Though to be honest, I’m not sure other people thought it was as cool looking as I did. There was A LOT of laughter in the theater during the scene and yet… no jokes. At the end of the flick a few people clapped and they were laughed at by the rest of the crowd. So someone somewhere did like it. But they’re probably dumb… like my brother.

The last of Marvel’s 70th Anniversary Frame variants shipped this week.  I’ve made my feelings about these books pretty clear, but as a true Marvel Zombie I couldn’t just let them pass by.  So, consider this my digital revenge as I add them to my “virtual collection.”  Take that, Marvel!

See if you can spot some sneakiness on Marvel’s part with a few of these covers…

The following issues feature Marvel 70th Anniversary frame variant covers:

• Amazing Spider-Man #601
• Amazing Spider-Man #602
• Amazing Spider-Man #603
• Avengers: The Initiative #27
• Black Panther #7
• Cable #17
• Captain America: Reborn #2
• Daredevil #500
• Dark Avengers #8
• Dark Wolverine #77
• Deadpool #13
• Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth #2
• Exiles #5
• Fantastic Four #570
• Guardians of the Galaxy #17
• Hulk #13
• Incredible Hulk #601
• Incredible Hercules #133
• The Invincible Iron Man #16
• The Might Avengers #28
• Ms. Marvel #43
• New Avengers #56
• New Mutants #4
• Nova #28
• Punisher #8
• Secret Warriors #7
• Son of Hulk #14
• Uncanny X-Men #514
• War Machine #7
• Wolverine: First Class #18
• Wolverine: Origins #39
• Wolverine: Weapon X #4
• X-Factor #47
• X-Force #18
• X-Men: Legacy #227
• X-Men Forever #5