For a few years now, Marvel Comics has been offering a digital subscription service called Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, but today, they launched a much-higher-profile app for iOS devices and trimmed the name to Marvel Unlimited. (They promise an Android app will come "soon.") This is a big deal, because most people don't read on their desktops, or even their laptops. They read on their phones and tablets, and they're much more likely to read the comics on their mobile devices if they're readily available through an app.

The Next Web explains how it all works, but basically: For ten bucks a month or $60 a year, you get access to 13,000 digitized comics. You can only save six of those comics at a time to your device for offline reading. And Marvel makes a squishy promise that comics published this week might be added to the app in six months or so.

TNW says—and I agree—that Marvel Unlimited isn't really worth it yet. The reason I believe it's not worth it is that Marvel has a terrible track record producing trade paperback collections of their monthly comics. Their paperbacks come out too late to capitalize on a monthly book's buzz, and then they pop out of and back into print at weird times. With all the nerd internet buzz about Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, most of the relevent trade paperbacks aren't available right now. I simply don't trust Marvel to provide their new comics on a timely basis. Maybe one day, if comics stores go away, Marvel will operate on a digital-subscription-only model. I think they'd be able to get enough people to sign up for a $5-a-month subscription to fund the creation of new comics. But I think that day, if it does happen, is still a long way off.

Yesterday, I told you that Chris Sprouse, the artist who was scheduled to draw a Superman story written by hateful homophobe Orson Scott Card, backed out of the comic. DC Comics promised that as soon as they found another artist, the story would be released. Now Rich Johnston comics rumor site Bleeding Cool reports that the comic might never be released:

I understand that this may never happen. That, basically, there is no “hurry” to find a replacement artist… and that the people involved with putting the comic together simply weren’t aware of Orson Scott Card’s activist membership. I mean, I was. I’m sure you were. But, it seems not everyone was.

As Johnston points out, the movie version of Card's best and most popular novel Ender's Game comes out this fall. There's no way fan backlash is going to stop a movie from coming out, but it sure will kick off some interesting discussions.

First, DC Comics announced that hateful homophobe Orson Scott Card was writing a story for a Superman comics anthology. After weeks of controversy, in which stores refused to carry the book and comics fans vowed to buy multiple copies of the issue to make up for what they (wrongly) perceived as a violation of Card's freedom of speech, the issue has been temporarily resolved. USA Today says:

Due to the media attention surrounding the science-fiction writer and his story in the forthcoming Adventures of Superman, artist Chris Sprouse — who was to illustrate a tale by Card and Aaron Johnston — has departed from the book, according to DC Comics... "It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I've decided to step back as the artist on this story," Sprouse said in a statement released Tuesday. "The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that's something I wasn't comfortable with. My relationship with DC Comics remains as strong as ever and I look forward to my next project with them."

DC says it's looking for another artist to draw Orson Scott Card's story, and they promise to publish it once it's done. They probably won't be asking Alison Bechdel to draw this one, I'm thinking.

As Mary Traverse told you yesterday, Emerald City Comicon starts tonight. But if you're not in town—or if you haven't already bought tickets for Saturday, which is sold out—you should visit Flipon.TV's Emerald City Comicon page, which is livestreaming certain ECCC panels for free. If you'd like access to all the feeds and the ability to watch panels after they've finished, $14.95 will get you full access to all the convention programming, forever. It's the perfect gift for the agoraphobic comics fan in your life!

(Via Comics Alliance.)

Remember when I told you that hateful homophobe Orson Scott Card's story in an upcoming Superman anthology set off some controversy?

Slog tipper Shawna points out that a total of four comic book stores are refusing to carry the comic with Card's story. According to Robot 6, the stores are Zeus Comics in Dallas, Whatever Store in San Francisco, I Like Comics in Vancouver, Washington, and Ralph’s Comic Corner in Ventura, California. Comic book fans are being totally reasonable about these small business owners' decision to not carry a book by a creator they consider to be an active agent of hatred.

Just kidding! They went crazy, right on schedule. Although to be fair, I have to admit that the amount of right-wing bullshit that I see in the comments on comics blogs seems to be decreasing. Unless there's a popular new right-leaning comics blog I don't know about, there's a lot less hatred than there used to be. But there are still a few freaks hanging around:

It’s disturbing to see how a small number of people of a particular sexual orientation can inluence the culture so much. Seems to me that the actions of the homosexual community in regards to those who oppose their lifestyle is rather oppressive. Although they are always screaming about tolerance, I don’t see too much f of it from them.

I will buy multiple copies, out of spite. It’s staggering how the homosexual community, when shown any opposition, of any degree, throws around the words hatred, bigot, homophobic, hatemonger, etc.
This is the real world. People don’t have to be tolerant. People don’t have to be accepting. People don’t have to be accommodating of anothers opinion. Being offended over every thing must be a miserable way to live.
Get over yourselves.

All this a bunch of horse hockey. Don’t like the author, don’t buy his stuff. You want to buy it, but it !

Continue reading »

DC Comics is publishing a new anthology of Superman stories titled Adventures of Superman. One of those stories is written by Orson Scott Card, who is a hateful homophobe. This move has proven to be quite controversial. Michael Hartney published an open letter about it that's making the rounds:

I can’t and won’t support the hiring of Orson Scott Card on Adventures of Superman. There’s a difference between having conservative political beliefs and being an active force of bigotry and hatred. Card is the latter. So draw away, Ethan Van Sciver, you fabulous Republican! Fine with me! Orson Scott Card, however, is in an entirely different, unjust league....Ugh. And of all the characters Card could have been hired to write, you give him Superman? The character that taught me to lead by example? To do the right thing, even when it was hard? To keep going, even when it seemed hopeless? What an insult. Kids are killing themselves. They are killing themselves in a climate of intolerance and homophobia publicly fostered by people like Orson Scott Card. You don’t have to contribute to this. You shouldn’t. You mustn’t.

Robot Six reports that DC Comics released a statement that reads:

As content creators we steadfastly support freedom of expression, however the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that — personal views — and not those of the company itself.

This does not resolve Hartney's point—the issue is not that Card holds hateful, homophobic personal views. The issue is that Card works at spreading his hateful, homophobic agenda. He's a board member of NOM. He's a figurehead for hateful homophobes, and he proselytizes against gay people. He has tied his name to the anti-gay agenda, and made himself an important figure in the battle against gay rights. He's the kind of guy that Superman would lecture, but instead DC made the choice to let him put words in Superman's mouth. There's a petition for DC drop Orson Scott Card from the anthology. I don't think it will work. But as the petition nears 10,000 signatures, it's important to note that some of DC's lower-selling titles only sell 40,000 copies a month, so this is not an insignificant number for them. It might make DC reconsider hiring Card in the future.

Any comic book nerd will tell you that Dr. Frederic Wertham's book The Seduction of the Innocent pushed the American comic book industry into its dark ages in the 1950s. Wertham's research conclusively tied comic books to juvenile delinquency, and his data was used to shut down some of the more daring comic book companies at the time. For the next twenty years or so, comics were exclusively for children. The industry governed itself with a strict organization called the Comics Code Authority. But now we're learning that Wertham manipulated his data to suit his agenda:

Behavioral problems among teenagers and preteens can be blamed on the violence, sex and gore portrayed in the media marketed to them – that was the topic of televised public hearings held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954 to address the scourge of comic books. The hearings, which resulted in the decimation of what was an enormous comic book industry, had been inspired in large part by the book “Seduction of the Innocent,” by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, based on his own case studies.

Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History.

It's sad to think that a whole generation of comics artists didn't have the chance to really test the fullest potential of their talent because this one shithead set out to prove an incorrect thesis in the name of family values. (Important side note: This News Bureau Illinois story loses all its internet posts by titling this story "BAM! WAP! KA-POW! Library prof bops doc who K.O.'d comic book industry." That's like every shitty journalistic comic book cliche ever, piled into one lousy headline.)

Comics Alliance explains what happened when Doonesbury tried to make a case for newspaper comics. Turns out, webcomics fans and creators turned Trudeau's jokey little statement into a great illustration of why online comic strips are superior in just about every way. (Now if only more than four cartoonists could make a living at doing comics on the web, everything would be just grand.)

We got an e-mail from Emerald City Comicon PR Director Joe Parrington a few minutes ago that begins:

Unfortunately we discovered today that Emerald City Comicon's website was hacked into, including our backup files, and everything is now gone and unable to be retrieved.

We now begin the long process of building our site from scratch, which will take several days at least.

It's true: When you visit Emerald City Comicon's site right now, you get a page that reads like so:

I asked Parrington whether all the information ECCC has collected from this year's batch of ticket-buyers (credit cards, addresses, etc.) are safe, and the answer is, fortunately, yes "Event Brite hosts all of the ticket portion of things for us," Parrington says, "So none of that was stored with us." Your identities and tickets are protected, nerds! But you won't be able to get any new information about the con for a few days at the least. Best wishes to ECCC as they put their site back together in what must be the busiest time of the year for them.