Broken Frontier

Publishers have kept an increasingly curious and uncertain eye on the rise of web comics, and legal, and illegal downloading. What has been seen in other forms of entertainment over the last few years has inevitably reached the world of comics. Will comics on paper eventually become a thing of the past? Highly doubtful, but the rise of comics on monitors can no longer be ignored. Broken Frontier chats with Tom Barker, the founder of a brand new comics on the web experience, aptly titled Digital Comics For All.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Do you and your team come from both a technical and comics background?

TOM BARKER: We come from outside the comics industry, but have been fans almost our whole lives. My team -  really right now there are two of us, myself and my creative director Nick. Nick comes from an advertising background and my background is in software engineering. I've been an adjunct professor of computer science the last six years, and at various roles within a software engineering function the past ten years. Currently I'm one of the lead developers at Comcast.

BF: Obviously you believe that digital distribution is the future for comics. Is that the main reason that you opted for DCFA over starting an actual comic shop?

TB: Well, I opted to create DCFA for a number of reasons. As you said I absolutely believe that free digital distribution is the future of traditional print media. We've been seeing it for years now in other mediums - the readership of print magazines and newspapers have been dwindling for a long, long time. As recently as last week EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) was shuttered. At the same time, in the comics industry, we've seen this online pirate scene crop up, which you can interpret a lot of different ways. First it's wrong and illegal and compromises many people's livelihoods. But if you shift your perspective a little, it shows that a great amount of people are interested in reading this content. The numbers are drastically different between free online views and actual hard copies purchased.

I'm sure I'm going to misquote Larry a little, and Larry I'm sorry if Ido: Larry Young (Founder of publisher AIT/Planetlar) conducted an unscientific study a while back with one of his books - he released a book free online at the same time as its hard copy release. What he saw was that the hard copy numbers he sold were in line with what he expected, but the online free views were exponentially higher. Orders of magnitude higher.

What that says to me is that - OK you've got this existing user base that purchases hard copies, and has been purchasing hard copies, but is shrinking as time goes on and is stretching its potential purchase pool across an ever widening group of choices.  But you've also got this other group of users that is orders of magnitude larger that is going completely untapped.

So you can spend a decade battling this like the music industry and alienate your untapped new user base, or you can adapt. You can monetize all of those eyes looking at your free content.

Now you've opened up a completely new stream of revenue that isn't eating in on your existing income stream. And readers get to read everything they could be interested in, for free and completely legal. And creators get exposure to a much much larger audience than they would have. Everyone is happy.

This isn't that radical either. Other mediums are starting to do this. Look at www.fancast.com, look at www.hulu.com - television shows and movies are being distributed free online, monetized through ad views. It's really where everything is going.

BF: What have been the major challenges in setting the operation up?

TB: Getting publishers and content owners to sign on. I think they realize this is where everything is going, but it's such a new field they might be a little worried about who will be the market leader when the dust settles, they might be a little squeamish about putting their content out there, and they might not be prepared to monetize online ad views yet.

BF: Will you eventually have non-comics content on the site?

TB: Absolutely! While comics are our focus, and I don't see us hosting say a gaming magazine in the near future, I do see us hosting other content around the medium - magazines, portfolios, etc.

BF: If a publisher is interested in seeing their book on DCFA, how do they go about it, and what are the technical requirements?

TB: Shoot me an email - tbarker@digitalcomicsforall.com  All we need are jpegs or pngs for each page and short description for each issue. It's as simple as that. We can work individually with each publisher, within their comfort level to get their content out there at their own pace and to work with their advertising rules.

BF: Are you actively seeking certain genres or products?

TB: Not at all, we welcome all comics and comic related content.

BF: With Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited and Wowio and similar sites, how will you set yourself apart?

TB: Well Marvel's site is a pay site and the core part of our business model is allowing free views. I'm not convinced that there are an interesting number of users that will pay to view the content digitally. If you are going to pay for content, I think you're going to want a hard copy to put in your book shelf or to carry with you and feel the heft of it in your hand.

And Wowio is fairly scattered, while they offer some comics, comics don't seem to be their focus. DCFA is focused squarely on the comics industry.

BF: You appear to be quite open and welcome to suggestions on your blog. Has that been a great help to the development process?

TB: It has actually. At some point I'd like to see the blog be a collaborative thing where users can discuss features, even vote on them. The feedback we've gotten so far has been focused, someone reads a feature on the list and emails me directly about, which is great too. It gives us an insight directly into the point of view of our users. Just this past week feedback has caused us to change our focus to refining some features in our viewer, before we jump right into our new redesign. That direct line to our users allows us to be agile like that.

BF: You state that your long term goal is to be the "single on-line source for any and every comic that you might want to read." How exactly do you go about achieving that ambitious target?

TB: Well it's all about the users. If the reading public enjoys what we do and supports the mission statement, then it will happen. The more readers we have the more incentive a publisher has to sign up with us. We'll keep plugging away trying to sign on more and more publishers, adding features and updates to the site, giving people more reason to frequent the site.

You can see more at www.digitalcomicsforall.net.