Is Comic-Con About Comics Anymore? (And if not, does it matter?)

“So how was Comic-Con?” asked what seemed like the millionth friend of mine who knew I just got back. “From what I can see on the news, is it even about comics anymore?”

I’ll confess, I’m of two minds on the subject. On one hand, the ghosts of some eighteen previous Comic-Cons keep rattling around in my head, and I remember when the entire show floor was full of people selling actual comic books. Fifty-cent and dollar comic boxes were everywhere, and I managed to haul away several long boxes full of finds for my own collection. It was a glorious time.

But over time, actual comic sellers became a smaller and smaller part of the show. Today, purveyors of comic pamphlets occupy a mere four or five aisles in a sprawling convention hall that runs the length of eight city blocks. Even when comic publishers, artists, and small press are figured in, actual comic books are almost as much a minority in the convention hall as straight male hairstylists in the Castro. In my darker moments, this fills me with something approaching despair (about the lack of comics, not hetero hairdressers, mind you).

But really, when you look over the vast nerdapalooza that Comic-Con has become, it’s hard to stay dour for long. Just think about it: for every conceivable sub-section of geek culture, Comic-Con offers five days where you can tribe up and enjoy the company of your fellow fans. Whether you prefer to dress in a snarky gamer T-shirt, as Wolverine, or as a laser-toting Victorian dandy, you can find others who share your love for your particular brand of pop culture.

Catwoman and Joker Cosplayers (picture from the fabulous comicvine.com cosplay gallery)

You can spend your loot on action figures, video games, steampunk-inspired watches, or even software to manage those thousands of comics you’ve been piling up since you were a kid. You can meet the people who created and starred in your favorite movies, wrote your favorite books, or drew that amazing painting of the robots with donuts. This year, I even bumped into a guy who produces old-time radio dramas about zombies.

And yeah, even as the convention spills out to dominate downtown San Diego during its run, having overflowed the bounds of a million-square-foot convention center, you’d still turn it into a tiny, diminished thing if took all the comics out of Comic-Con. It’s no longer a great place to find that copy of Batman #473  you’ve been searching for–the internet has taken over much of the action on that front. But instead, Comic-Con glories in Batman video games, Captain America movies, and more comic-themed art, T-Shirts and action figures than you can shake a Batarang at.

So yes, Comic-Con is still about comics, even if it’s not so much about comic books. It’s about being a fan, loving cool things, and getting a chance to have fun with other folks who love the same things you do. And that, is a wonderful thing indeed.

It’s a Small, Interconnected World

It looks like we might be a little late getting our 1st quarter updates out for the ComicBase Blu-ray Archive Edition. For years, while 50 GB Blu-ray media has been hard to come by in the US, we’ve been sourcing ours directly from Japan. Unfortunately, the nuclear reactor troubles they’ve had after the recent earthquake have forced our supplier to leave Tokyo temporarily for their own safety.

As I read my supplier’s apologetic email this morning, I had to sort of marvel at a world that lets us so personally and smoothly deal with a supplier that’s halfway around the globe–even in the midst of a great tragedy.  We wish them–and all of Japan–well, and hope things turn around for them soon.

Rock Band: TV Suicide

For the 2010 Human Computing Christmas Party, we had a big Rock Band 3 party over at Casa Bickford. It wound up being the usual silly-good-time full of merriment, missed notes, and off-pitch singing, but the whole thing was nearly scrapped when my Sony Receiver apparently achieved sentience and tried to shut the party down.

Yes, all those years it had spent dutifully processing sound for everything from Project Runway to Fallout  had apparently given an ordinary Sony STR-DG510 stereo receiver the necessary input to achieve a sort of intelligence of its own. But, as Neil later theorized, it must have still have been bound by Asimov’s 1st Law of Robotics (“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”).

Thus, as several alcohol-energized partiers wielding plastic instruments were about to launch into Blondie’s “One Way or Another”, the receiver sprung into action and immediately abruptly cut off the sound, flashing a one-word message on its matte-black, minimalistic display: “PROTECT”.

Stunned by this act of apparent free will on the part of a faithful piece of electronic equipment, we performed that most cherished of tech rituals: turning the power off and on. Once again the receiver was apparently back to its old dependable self…until the first guitar strum of the song. Then, as before, the sound suddenly muted and the Sony glared enigmatically at us, “PROTECT” flashing insistently on its display.

“Oh, if only we had some engineers around who might be able to solve this…” I wailed in mock anguish. Knowing, of course, that this pretty much described half the attendees in our geekified little gathering. After a flurry of rewiring and patching, we soon managed to route around the troublesome receiver and kick into probably the most tragic rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody ever heard in our–or any other–reality.

But what the heck: WE had fun, and our poor, suddenly sentient receiver’s efforts to save the Multiverse had come to naught. As it was replaced the next day, my newish Mitsubishi TV also decided that it had had enough and began blinking out a pathetic, “Just kill me already” signal which the repairman interpreted as a sign that its brain had melted. It must have been that version of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” we attempted…

The Million Dollar Club: Action Comics #1 and Detective #27

A few years ago, I had a discussion with then Managing-editor (now Editor in Chief) Brent Frankenhoff of Comics Buyer’s Guide. It went something like this.

Me: [Diamond Comics head] Steve Geppi says he’ll pay $1,000,000 to anyone who sells him a near mint copy of Action #1. I say we get on top of this now and set that as the going price in the guide.

Brent: But what’s Bob [Overstreet] got it at? Like 200,000? Can we really go with that big a jump?

Me: I think the question is this: If I walked into Steve’s office with a near mint Action Comics #1, do I walk out with a deal for a million? I, for one, take Steve at his word*. If so, that’s the market rate. Our job is to match the market, not just make our prices fit into some nice progression from our own last-best-guess. Let’s leave that to the other guides.

* Having once had a meeting with Steve during which he had to casually brush a mint-looking Superman #8 onto a box next to his desk in order to make way for me to put down my laptop, I had little doubt he could make the Action #1 deal happen.

…

So it was that in the next edition of ComicBase, Action Comics #1 (the first appearance of Superman)  went from $220,000 to a cool million. It was crazy. It was controversial. It…was the only comic in the database that required the use of scientific notation in order to label the y-axis.

And in the past week, it’s proved to be prescient. Indeed, it seems to have understated the value of the book somewhat, as an VF 8.0 copy just sold for a cool million, followed by a similar copy of Detective #27 (The first appearance of Batman) selling for even more: 1.075 million, making it officially the most expensive comic of all time.

Human Computing Gets a Phone System Upgrade

Please share in our joy at putting a stake through the heart of our old telephone system at the office–or at least the telephone answering/routing portion of it. (Note to AT&T: Your 974 is a fine office phone, but the 984 answering system at the heart of it—to quote Jean-Louis Gassée– “…could be even better.” I’ll spare you the translation of what that implies it is currently).

In any case, the direct phone numbers to reach us all on are:

• ComicBase: 408/266-6883 (same as before)
• Atomic Avenue: 213/471-2423
• Human Computing’s human interface/user experience consulting services: 408/705-1256

Wish us luck as we settle into the new phone system, and please let us know if you have any difficulty with any part of it.

Mac Mini: The World’s Most Power-Efficient Windows Server (?!)

We all knew Apple made pretty computers with great interfaces, but have they also managed to create the most power-efficient Windows server machine on the market?

We just wrapped up a huge round of server upgrades at comicbase.com and AtomicAvenue.com. Last to go were our three oldest servers which we use to run a bunch of essential but boring jobs like our DNS, email, Microsoft Exchange, and Active Directory Domains.

The old servers were “1U” jobs–your basic short, wide, and very long boxes packed to the gills with heat-generating electronics. These were cooled–barely–by a suite of fans at the back of each box blowing at hurricane speeds.

Having these servers around the office was like having a cleaning woman permanently parked in the back room vacuuming up a storm. In fact, the noise of these servers was enough of a factor that finding a “server room” to put them in where they (a) wouldn’t overheat and (b) wouldn’t drive us all bonkers with their unceasing roar–was a major part of the search for our last two office locations.

So what replaced these power-sucking, heat-generating, noise-blasting behemoths? A trio of tiny Mac Minis running Windows Server 2008, thanks to Apple’s Boot Camp utility which lets you dual-boot them as either Windows or Mac OS X machines.

These are computers so diminutive that we can fit all three of them side by side on a single level of our server cabinet. They’re so quiet and power-efficient that they don’t even have (or need) fans to cool them. And the total power draw? About 57 watts total when they’re running full-out at their assigned jobs!

Now, I can’t recommend the Mac Mini for every server job. For one thing, their small, slow, laptop-style drives make them unsuitable for anything involving the storage of any great amount of data, or where disk speed enters the equation in any real way. For instance, they’d make pretty mediocre file servers or web servers, and fairly horrific database servers. They also lack a lot of server niceties like hot-swappable drives, redundant network adapters…or any of the other things which IT folks tend to gush over but rarely turn out to be useful in the real world.

But for jobs like DNS service, where the computer can load all the data it’ll ever need to serve in a small amount of its RAM, they seem (so far) to be working out as well as the buffest, most costly machine we could have thrown at the problem. Better yet, they’re doing it at a fairly trivial hardware cost, in near-perfect silence, and with a power draw hundreds of watts less than the servers they replaced.

I don’t know how Apple managed it, but I’m blown away that Apple–known everywhere for pretty interfaces and beautiful design–may have also created the world’s most energy-efficient server in the bargain. Well done, guys!

The Apple Tablet and The Future of Comic Books

Noted comics writer James Hudnall writes in his blog that the rumored Apple Tablet (concept art shown below) could wind up saving the comic book industry. I agree that the Apple Tablet is going to be hugely disruptive to the print media world, for many of the reasons listed in another blog.

Here’s how I see the whole thing playing out: Sometime in January or February, Steve Jobs will get up on stage and announce the Apple Tablet. Essentially, it’ll looks like a big iPhone, complete with touch screen, glossy plastics, and impeccable industrial design. Wi-Fi is also a given, along with some sort of interface (Bluetooth?) which lets you set it in an equally impeccable cradle for charging, keyboard, and mouse access.

But the real win is going to be as a portable media “slate”–think HD movies, full-screen video conferencing, and the like…and then imagine reading a book on it.

This is where Jobs turns the demo over to little Johnny from Public School 323 somewhere. Johnny’s class will have been road-testing the Apple Tablet for their science textbooks, and he’ll hold up the tablet to the camera where it shows an elegant textbook cover which “opens” through the use of a gesture. Pages will be “riffled” similarly until Johnny arrives at some science diagram, perhaps showing the way an LED emits photons. Johnny will then tap the diagram with his finger, and it  will come to life showing an animation depicting the whole process. Next will come history books showing famous speeches next to the picture of the speakers involved, recipe books showing video instruction for the dishes being cooked, etc.

And then–if I were Steve Jobs–I’d have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos come out on stage and announce that all those jillions of Kindle books which can already be read on your iPhone will also work on the Apple Tablet. Ditto for the Barnes and Noble book inventory.

So what about comics? Well, for a start it’s easy to imagine Marvel…err.. I mean Disney (of which Jobs is a board member and single largest stockholder) doing comics either specifically for the platform (a la Spider-Woman: Agent of S.W.O.R.D.) or simply making sure that the already-strong Marvel digital offerings include making it possible to buy any current (and possibly older) Marvel comic directly through the device at a fraction of the cost of buying it in paper form.

Although motion comics are expensive to produce, and still in their infancy in terms of technique, all modern comics are likely to pass through a digital “final” form (e.g. PDF) on the way to the printer anyway. Running it through a batch process to whip out the digital reader version is simplicity itself for the publishers.And if they sold the digital copy in a way which clears them a single dollar per copy, they’d already be more profitable to publish than the paper versions.

In this digital future, you’d lose the feel of paper and some of the other qualities (not least of all resalability) of the physical comic, but readers would also have them in pristine, archival format for an eternity without needing filing, comic boxes, or bags. And they’d cost a lot less–probably no more than $1 to $1.50 per issue.

Not everyone will go for it–at least not at first–but expect a larger and larger percentage of the comic buying audience to switch to digital in the same way that newspaper readers have. (And the month that an Australian reader can get their Marvels in this format for $0.99 instead of the $7.50 or more they currently pay, it’s all over on the newsstand).

At first, expect the readers–especially Apple’s–to be expensive enough that they appeal mostly to early adopters and those with fair amounts of spending money. But that’s not such a dissimilar demographic from the comic buying audience as a whole right now (comprised mostly of post-college males with higher than average family incomes). I think the digital future will be one us far faster than most would dream now.

To steal a surfing metaphor, a big wave is coming for the world of comics. You either gotta get on your board and ride it, or get prepared to go under.

“Creative Destruction”, or “Server Crashes (The Good Kind)”

In memoriam…

Economist Joseph Schumpeter is famous for popularizing the term, “Creative Destruction” to talk about the way economic progress relentlessly grinds down the old to make way for the new in a never-ending cycle of “reinvent yourself or die”. For instance, buggy whip companies were driven out of business by Henry Ford’s horseless carriages which, being horseless, did not not need to be whipped quite as often. (They also pooped less). Similarly Polaroid had a monopoly on self-developing film but lost its business when digital cameras made film irrelevant, and suddenly you had other ways of taking pictures you didn’t want the photo developing guy to see.

For a little software company that’s been doing this ComicBase thing for seventeen years, we live and breathe this whole “creative destruction” thing ourselves–whether we like it or not. We started out shipping ComicBase on six compressed Mac OS 1.4 MB floppy disks, went on to become early adopters of CD, DVD, and digital video, and were the first PC program in the world to ship on Blu-ray Disc format. (We just made history again by being the first commercial PC program to ship on Dual-layer Blu-ray format!).

We’ve had to make the transition from Mac OS 7 to PowerPC processors, then wrote an entirely new version–in another language, no less–to let us run on PCs with Windows 95. Naturally, this led to later versions which in turn offered support for Windows 98, , Me*, 2000, NT, XP, and Vista, as well as new technologies like 64 bit operating systems and the growing use of mobile and handheld devices of all stripes.

*Which is to say that the constant glitches you experienced while using Windows Me were just the operating system blowing up, not ComicBase.

Ironically, we had to discontinue our original Macintosh version when Apple decided to mothball HyperCard, the development environment it was written in. Thankfully, Apple later introduced Intel-based machines which once again let the Mac folks use ComicBase under Windows, thanks to Apple’s Boot Camp software (and numerous other programs like VMWare, Parallels desktop and the like). It actually works so well that we even use a Mac Mini as one of our demo machines at San Diego Comic-Con–Not that I don’t still get regular hate mail from fans of the long-dead HyperCard version…

And of course, we’ve embraced the internet in a big way as well, starting with a basic HTML web site way back in 1996, and steadily revving it, rewriting it, and expanding it in the years that followed until it now does everything from real-time comic price quotes, to weekly price and title updates of the world’s largest comic book database. Then, since we clearly lacked anything else to do, we created Atomic Avenue–the vast online marketplace of comics which now boasts more comics for sale than all of eBay (1.2 million and counting!).

So what’s the point of this running travelogue through ComicBase history? In a roundabout way, it’s to explain why I treated five of our most loyal and longest-serving server machines to ignominious and painful deaths in the past week.

One by one they fell: “Spectrum” (our office file server) was repeatedly bashed and thrown onto the hard floor of our office until bits of plastic and metal came flying off from its horribly twisted case. “Judy” (backup and utility server), “Elroy” (our old production web server), and “Astro” (the production database server) had their disk drives ripped out, cards scavenged, then were mutilated and chucked into a dumpster parked behind our building.

And then there’s Goddard (our old test database server)…It’s probably best not to even talk about the things we did to him before the twisted bits that remained joined the bodies of Judy, Elroy, and Astro in the dumpster.

I feel really weird about all of this because in a big way, there was nothing wrong with those servers. They were all working absolutely fine when we sent them to that big shiny server rack in the sky. It’s just that their technology was getting too old, and it became possible to economically build new servers to replace them which offered twice the performance, were far quieter, and consumed less energy. We tried to find a nice retirement home to shove them off to via Craigslist and Facebook, but to no avail–they were heavy and cumbersome to ship, their technology was too specialized and dated to be worth selling, and nobody volunteered to adopt them before the time came for them to be put down.

So, after months of planning, machine construction, and staggered software installs to reconfigure all our interrelated sites and services to use the new machines, it became time for the old servers to be, well,  creatively destroyed (at least, as creatively as we could be without the use of explosives!)

So long, fellas. I’ll sort of miss you when I browse my Network Neighborhood and don’t see your names there. At times like that, I’m sure I’ll think of the fun times and the pain we had together, and get all nostalgic for a second or two (except Judy–we never really bonded for some reason).

But rest assured:  if we’re doing our job right, the day will come before too long, when your replacements will be blinking their little LEDs nervously as we assemble the machine that will replace them.

ComicBase 14.0.3 and the Awesomely Large Database Bug Fix

I just posted two beta (translation: we‘re pretty sure they work perfectly, but we don‘t want to get cocky until some other folks beat on them) builds of ComicBase 14.0.3 and ComicBase Express 14.0.3. If you‘ve got ComicBase 14 already, you can download the updaters here:

Of the three issues these builds address, the one I never saw coming was an “Overflow” error which we traced to an ancient routine in ComicBase which counts the number of titles in your database (prior to things like showing progress bars and statistics). What was the overflow in question? As it turns out, a few folks have actually managed to add more than 32,767 titles in their databases (A title is a comic series (e.g. Action Comics–not to be confused with the 437,000+ individual issues currently in ComicBase).

As it turns out, 32,767 is one of those magic numbers in computer science–2 to the 15th power (if you start counting at zero) — and the limit to a data type known as the “signed integer”. Go beyond that, and you get an overflow error.

Once I located it, it took but a moment to fix the problem (the new limit is 2 ^63rd power: a bit more than a 9 quintillion). But I had to stop for a moment and just marvel at how far this little comic project has come in the 16 years since we started with the then-huge database of 20,000 issues from 297 titles. (And back then, I figured it was just a “mopping up” operation to add in everything those 297 titles didn’t cover, thus my dimensioning of the title count as a simple integer). Man, I couldn’t have been more wrong about the scope that ComicBase would one day become.

So anyway, please try out 14.0.3 and send us notes to let us know how they work out for you. And let’s all pray that I never have occasion to revisit that particular limit again!

Barcode Scanners – Sales, Success, and Sudden Shortages

When we added the barcode scanning feature to ComicBase years ago, we sort of had the idea that a few folks might be interested, but they they might not know where to grab a barcode scanner of their own. Thinking ahead, we made a deal with the supplier of the Manhattan barcode scanners we’d chosen for our own use in the office to get a couple of extras to sell to interested customers.

We ordered two scanners, thinking we might be stuck with them if they didn’t sell. Instead, they both sold instantly, so we ordered five more.

Those sold quickly as well, so we upped our next order to ten… then twenty five… then case lots… and before long, our little software company had actually become the #1 seller of that particular barcode scanner in the country.

Fast forward to this year, and we caught a break on the pricing of the scanner. Rather than just pocket the extra profit margin, we decided to take a chance and heavily discount them down to a previously unheard of $89 each. As a result, we sold so many in just a few days that we cleared our entire inventory in under a week.

“Wow!” I thought, “we’re really onto something here! Let’s do some bundles so that folks upgrading to ComicBase 14 can grab a barcode scanner at the same time and I’ll bet we’ll sell a ton of them!”. We did…and we did.

We moved so many, as it turns out, that we actually sold out the entire remaining supply of that scanner in the U.S. The distributor literally ran out and had to order more from the Pacific Rim where they’re manufactured.

Since then, it’s been a somewhat awkward few weeks over in the shipping part of the company as we had to arrange to ship the software ahead of time as we deal with the back-order of the scanners. We even made a couple of customers a deal and sold them the scanners we pack along to trade shows to demo ComicBase. But now even those are gone and all we can do is desperately wait until September 11th when the Florida-based distributor gets the big shipment in.

A few days from then, we should get ours, and start making life difficult for both our mailman and our art staff (apparently the replacement batch of scanners are now black, but otherwise identical. Unfortunately this will mean a bunch of work to shoot new product photos and lay out all the various ads we use to show them in the proper color). I personally think the new black color looks cool, but for all I know, there’s a home office there where someone’s not only had their heart set on beige, but has also picked out a matching desk and drapes to go with it. Far be it from us to want to cause an unwelcome surprise where office decor is concerned!