Comic-Con 2012 brings out technology
July 2012 – The 42nd annual Comic-Con event in San Diego continues to be the anchor point for geekdom’s ruling of the entertainment world was bigger than ever. The show has shifted the past few years from traditional graphic novels & art to film and now is dominated by the small screen & smaller mobile screens for the content target.
The rise of availability of channels on both standard and premium cable, have driven the content creation groups (production companies) to focus on long format shows that bring very devoted fans, at a much lower price than a major feature film. The multi-play aspects and the on-demand viewing habits of television watchers, allows for higher revenue return options for a show with multiple playback options. This is opposed to the screen time constraints of the still in progress digital theater conversion, and the even lower number of showing days of the 3D digital screens.
Major studios working with the big pay stations like Starz, HBO, and Showtime have long doen their worn series and development projects. Now they are facing competition from AMC, Syfy, BBC America and others – all to the joy and strong embrace of the comic, science fiction, and graphic novel community. The big long runners were shows like the Walking Dead, that appeared at the event as the AMC TV show, the graphic novel series and two video games – one by Telltale games launched several months back, and a second game soon to be released that is more of an arcade style zombie shooter rather than a story game.
ComicCon2012- Total Recall banners
The extent of the TV overshadowing film is obvious from the sigange – banners adorn the local restaurant corner across from the convention center promoting the remake of Total Recall, while the near by hotels, get a an almost full building wrap to promote the new network series Revolution. Other series with extensive transmedia licensing include the Starz series Spartacus which was showing their new Xbox and PS3 game designed by Ubisoft. The game featured integrated content from the series itself.
ComicCn2012- Revolution Hotel Wrap
The digital push continued with a big rise in availability of digital comics. Both in custom reader form with interactive capabilities and as a standard format comic in electronic form, their popularity is rising. Marvell, DC, Dark Horse and a large number of independents are now providing multi-platform products (iPad, Android, PC & Mac), most of the independents are still on only one or two platforms as the time and cost for multiple transcoding is still high. A big addition this year was the large amount of Anime that was now available in digital form. It is about 4x the number of titles and properties as 2011.
Another big change was the artist community itself. Traditionally this is a very ink and paper specialty. However, as the number of artists gain “outside” work in advertising and graphics design, VFX and publishing. These include direct to digital artists like Echo Chernik of www.echo-gallery.com & www.echo-x.com, and Jim Hillin of Cypress Pictures, who does feature film VFX as well as being the author/illustrator for zombie bunnies. This effort is being greatly simplfied by products like the Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch screen interactive pen display. The product was shown with Adobe and Corel graphics tools, as well as animation products from Smith Micro and Pixelogic (Zbrush). The large screen display that used a direct 1:1 drawing surface allows for tull creative design without the need to scan to recapture for reproduction in new form factors.
The nature of Comic-Con remains the same – enthusiasts, cos-play, collectibles, and the ability to mass market under a transmedia format increased early adoption for new shows and themes which should grow the full supply chain of the market segment.
