Adventure Time comic gets lost in translation

I'm a huge Adventure Time fan. It's a fantastic mashup between Where the Wild Things Are, Ren & Stimpy, Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Spongebob Squarepants with a little bit of adult suggestiveness thrown in. How they're getting away with saying things like "nobody's going to sack my nut palace" on what's supposedly a kid's show is beyond me. Which makes it three times as awesome at least.

I saw the comic at the Kaboom! Studios booth at WonderCon and knew I had to review it. My whole family loves the show, including my husband and 15-year old son. The comic, however, didn't work for me.

The faces people make, the body movements, the random things that happen, the little looks people give each other... the comedic timing is a lot of what makes the Adventure Time show work so well, and unfortunately there isn't much of it present in the comic simply because of the format. Comics are a static art form where a story is told in sequential panels without movement, or with implied movement only.

The comic does maintain much of the show's humor, including sight gags and the level of weirdness as far as things like people drinking other peoples' sweat unknowingly and undead snails. There are tiny little text gags in the margins that you have to hunt for and might miss the first time or two, which are awesome. The fact remains, however, that a huge amount of what I love about Adventure Time can only be found in a moving animated version with sound effects and vocal inflections. A static paper comic can't ever do all that.

Wendy and Lisa TOUCH a new wave of viewers

Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, the dynamic duo of television scoring, were recently part of the "Famous TV Theme Music" panel at WonderCon. Prior to the event, White Bear PR admitted a limited number of press to some roundtable interviews with the panelists, and UFN was part of that opportunity.

Here's a partial transcript from the roundtable (we didn't include the section about their work with Prince, which they get asked about every single time). Unfortunately we didn't catch the name of the gentleman who asked about Heroes -- sorry about that, whoever you are, it was a good question!

Urban Fantasy News: Trio of questions for you, all kind of inter-related. What is your process when you get a new show, when you get a new assignment?

Wendy: Process? The script first, then call the producer, set up a meeting, talk about what they have in mind and then the two of us go in with a whole bunch of ideas after that initial meeting.

Lisa: Usually in reading the script you might get an idea in your mind about what might be a good sound, or instruments to use in that particular script or story, depending on what it is. Then you bring that with you to the meeting and compare that to what maybe they were thinking because they usually have their ideas. And if they line up somewhat, or if they’re convinced that your idea’s really cool, they either say “great,” or “can you demo it for us.”

Wendy: I think the magic in that dynamic between us grabbing a script, coming up with an idea, and going and having that meeting is figuring out before we go ahead and blurt out what our idea is, is to just gently test the water to find out what ideas of theirs will work with the ideas we have, and then play off the things we know will work. The reason why we do that is because if it’s a project we want, that’s the important thing to try and hook in. If it’s a project we’re not crazy about, I don’t think we’re as invested in finding out what the exact overarching idea for them is. So that’s how the process begins, and then we have to take it away and hopefully we have more than a few days to come up with an idea.

UFN: Getting a little more specific, you’ve done music for Heroes, phenomenal job on that, by the way...

Wendy: Thank you.

UFN: I hear that you’ve just joined up with Touch, Tim Kring’s new show. How did you get involved with Touch?

Lisa: (laughter)

Wendy: We’ve done every Tim Kring show, so we’re sort of hooked up with him. So we’re kind of his musical mouthpiece, I guess you could say. For “go-to.”

Lisa: Luckily, and thankfully. When he first wrote the script he actually called us and said, “I have something that I want to send you, would you be interested?” Which was really funny...

Wendy: Ha ha.

Lisa: ...Of him to ask, because we’re like, “Of course!” So he sent us the script, and it was the pilot script, and it was so beautiful and amazing. The script itself, if you ever get a chance to just read it, besides seeing the actual show. The show was executed really well too, but...

Wendy: ...But the page was really great to read, and that’s why Kiefer Sutherland actually took the gig, was based on that script and how beautiful the read was.

Lisa: It’s a beautiful story and so amazing. And of course we really get along with Tim, and see things the same way as far as being experimental and trying to break molds and trying different things and still wanting it to be successful. So he’s a good guy to...

(Other interviewer): Speaking of Tim, I wanted to touch on Heroes. I wanted to go back in time here a little bit. How did you approach Heroes, because it’s more or less a superhero series. What was your approach and what was the musical statement you were trying to make with the show, if any?

Lisa: It’s a thing with Tim of not doing a typical... bumbumbum baaaaa... (sings the Superman theme)

Wendy: Action!

Lisa: Which is great, and I love those kinds of action movies and everything, but... also, the way Tim writes is so emotionally-based.

Wendy: There’s a lot of more subjective text.

Lisa: Yeah, these humans who are figuring out or finding out... discovering these powers they had. So it was more like... let’s take a look at how that might be hard for some people, not necessarily a heroic adventure that they go on, but more of a strange sort of... “oh no, I don’t know that I’m okay with this.” And Claire... in a way it was teenage suicides over and over, which is really kind of strange if you think about it. She’s jumping off bridges and catching on fire and it’s like... why are you doing this to yourself? So we just approached the score completely opposite. We had that one cue – we used to do interviews about this a lot – the "Fire and Regeneration" cue that ended up being a template for the show because it went the opposite direction. Super languid and beautiful. So when you came to these action moments and put that up against it, it changed your experience.

Wendy: Your orientation of it.

Lisa: Yeah, it became more subjective as opposed to visceral and adrenaline. It was more like in your mind, a dream experience. That was the approach with that.

UFN: Since we’re still on Heroes for a bit, could you give us a comparison for what it’s like to work on Heroes versus Touch. They both have similar “we’re all connected” and international themes, but at the same time Heroes has a much larger cast and more mythical superpower stuff. Touch is a much smaller intimate cast...

Wendy: Yes!

UFN: ...And you have to stay away from that sound, you can’t just do Heroes all over again.

Wendy: No. And we’re not. Absolutely not. I’ll tell you what, we were asked the same question just the other day, and I think they’re approached completely different. Heroes was much more languid and pad-oriented and evocative and ethereal. Not a lot of time signature stuff except for the Hiro and Ando characters, that was the only thing that had a lot of time signature stuff to it. Touch, because of what the story is about, it’s about communicating through numbers and theories and...

Lisa: Connectivity through patterns.

Wendy: Right. We use time signatures, and a lot of time signatures in the score on this. So if you listen carefully enough, you’ll hear that difference. The shows are so different, and the ways they’re being done are so different, it’s not hard to kind of conform to what it needs. I don’t see it as “how do we not do that again?” I don’t see it as being a problem. It’s made itself really clear what we need to do to it. And we’re only four episodes into composing so it still has legs to find.

Lisa: The thing is that it’s being told initially through the kid who doesn’t speak, so it’s his internal voice, so we try to make the sounds really small, but not cute. In fact, there’s been a conscious effort even with some of the shots that were done in the show. There was one scene that Tim just told us about with a dog in one of the episodes and the dog just went up to the kid actor as they were shooting and sniffed at the kid, and the kid petted the dog, and they were like “That’s great! What a great shot!” But they ended up cutting that, because it was cute. Too cute. And the show can’t go there, because it’ll tip it into a place it doesn’t belong. So with the score, even though we’re using small sounds and even bells and things like that, we’re making it really small and super rhythmic, not too pretty or emotional, even though there are beautiful moments. You have to see it, because hopefully we’re finessing it just so, so that it’s interesting and personal without being cute.

Gearing up for WonderCon

Just a quick update, today we received renewing press pass information for WonderCon, the sister show to Comic-Con San Diego, which is normally held in San Francisco. Due to rennovations to the Moscone Center, however, WonderCon is being held in Anaheim this year, March 16-18.

Some special guests have been announced, including Marv Wolfman, J. Michael Straczynski, Mike Mignola and Wil Wheaton, but Programming, Exhibitors, Autographs, and other scheduling has yet to be confirmed. We expect to start receiving convention-related press releases and press opportunities now that our registration is in, so keep an eye out here for updates regarding potential interviews and events we may be doing (did somebody say League of Extraordinary Ladies?). And, as always, the popular Where's Peter? segment will be a part of our WonderCon coverage too. Keep an eye on the official WonderCon website for current information. This is a great show, don't miss it!

Is Comic-Con Too Big?

I first attended San Diego Comic-Con in 2007, and have been to three others, as well as a few other conventions of this kind, such as WonderCon and Dragon*Con. In 2007, you could still buy a four-day Comic-Con pass within a few weeks of the opening, but this year tickets sold out in January in a matter of two days, and tickets for next year were on sale at the convention, ensuring another sellout crowd. The attendance of Comic-Con is over 130,000 people, but I submit that the real capacity is actually much smaller.

It was Friday morning, I think, that was the final nail in the coffin for me. I had planned on attending the Torchwood panel as press, and had no aspirations of sitting in the front row, so I made my way over to Ballroom 20 at about 9:00 AM to get in line. After some time of being directed here and there and still having no idea where I was going, I asked one of the security personnel where the end of the line was. He pointed across the yacht harbor, and I saw a line of people stretching beyond that and around the corner behind the trees probably a half mile away. There was literally no end in sight.

I said something to the effect of “Are you s---ing me,” and after determining that it was, in fact, the line for Ballroom 20, I walked away.

Comic-Con has changed over the past five years. This year, as I passed by other people, I kept hearing the words “frustrated” and “disappointing” as they conversed with others. I saw the same thing on Twitter. I heard other attendees complain about how difficult it was to get into the panels they wanted. Friends that I had hoped to see there, both attendees and professionals, didn’t go this year. There seemed to be less of a feeling of joy and exhilaration in the crowd, and almost more of a sense of duty to be there.

And then there’s the problem with security. As you may or may not know, Rhys Ifans, who plays The Lizard in the upcoming Spider-Man movie, apparently pushed a female security guard out of the way after one of the people he was with was questioned about not having the proper pass. The security guard placed him under “citizen’s arrest” but he was later released without charges.

When I arrived on Thursday afternoon (hot and exhausted after an eight-hour car trip), the first thing I did was to walk to the back of the hall in order to pull out my cell phone so I could locate the friend I was supposed to meet up with. One of the red-shirted guards (if you’ve ever been there, you know the ones I mean) immediately took it upon herself to yell at me to move, despite the fact that I was standing there a total of about ten seconds next to several other people in the same area. I explained that I was merely getting out my phone, and she became hostile. I looked at her, clearly hot and tired, and said “Don’t. Just don’t.” Her reply was to raise her voice even more and yell at me “You don’t!” in her best “oh no you di’nt” voice. At that point, I thought it best to try and find somewhere else to stand to make my phone call.

Again, others experienced the same thing. Everyone I asked, which was a random sampling of friends, vendors, professionals and random people I was standing in lines with, said that security was a lot more belligerent and rude this year. I passed by one area where a dozen or so people were seated along a wall, and a man was saying to the nearby security person, “They get to sit there and I don’t? You just kicked me out of there!”

I’m not surprised in the least by what happened with Ifans’ group, since it was happening to less famous people all over the convention center the entire time.

The other question I asked my random sampling of attendees was, “Is Comic-Con too big?” Every single one of them, without exception, said yes. One man even applauded me. Literally. He said “thank you,” and clapped as we were standing in line for the Deepak Chopra booksigning which was across the street at the Hard Rock Hotel because there was no room in the convention center itself.

More and more of the convention is spilling out into the adjacent Gaslamp District, with many downtown parking lots being converted into party zones and the kind of spaces that companies used to have inside the convention center, which merely compounds the downtown parking and traffic nightmare. One entire parking lot was taken up with some kind of Playboy party – we could see the distinctive bunny logo on a flag from over the high security fences as we walked by.

What does Playboy have to do with a comic book convention? For that matter, why does Glee have a panel there? Why did I receive email press releases and onsite handouts for some kind of smokeless cigarettes?

San Diego Comic-Con has become a marketing machine that attendees have the privilege of paying through the nose for, if tickets can even be had at all. Once there, if you even want to get into the room for one of the larger panels, you have to camp outside in line for hours and hours. I later heard that the Torchwood line that I had been trying to get into was already 3000 people long at 6:00 AM.

Disappointingly, it looks as though Comic-Con may get even larger. A publicist friend of mine (one of the many who agrees that it’s too big) told me that there are plans to push the entire back wall of the convention center out into the current marina area, doubling the size of the hall, just for Comic-Con. I would guess that this is how the planners were convinced not to move the convention elsewhere – the promise of an even bigger San Diego Convention Center in the future.

Honestly? Count me out.

By contrast, WonderCon in San Francisco is a wonderful convention. Unlike San Diego, which doubles or even triples their hotel room rates, the flagship Marrott Hotel just two blocks away has a special half price WonderCon rate, making it accessible to most people who wish to attend. Additionally, since it is the flagship hotel, most of the talent stays there, and I had the pleasure of running into Sergio Aragonés in the lobby last year.

“Hey, I know you!” I said, recognizing his trademark glasses, mustache and tropical shirt.

“Yes, hello! Nice to meet you!” he said enthusiastically, shaking my hand.

“Are you having a good con?”

“Yes, I love WonderCon. You can actually talk to people here, unlike Comic-Con. That one’s just too big.”

Alternative Press Expo (APE) announces special guests for 2011

Coming off its biggest year yet in 2010 with attendance topping 5,500, the Alternative Press Expo (APE), returns to San Francisco this fall at The Concourse Exhibition Center. The Expo, taking place Saturday, October 1 and Sunday, October 2, will again feature the expanded Exhibit Hall and additional programming tracks that debuted in 2010.

Five special guests have already signed on for the show: Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant!), Daniel Clowes (Wilson, Mister Wonderful; courtesy Drawn & Quarterly), Craig Thompson (Blankets, Habibi), Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve, Scenes from an Impending Marriage), and Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man, I Thought You Would Be Funnier).

“Interest in APE has never been higher as evidenced by our growing attendance and roster of exhibitors,” said David Glanzer, APE’s director of marketing and public relations. “This year’s terrific mix of special guests really helps us continue that momentum as one of the ‘must-see’ independent comics shows in the nation.”

APE showcases the best in alternative and small press comics, with an Exhibit Hall packed with cutting-edge creators featuring their comics, books, zines, original art, hand-made items, and much more. Further details on APE 2011, including a complete list of exhibitors and the full programming schedule, will be announced closer to the event.

Priest Director Scott Stewart, in his own words

Director Scott Stewart, courtesy Sony Pictures

This interview was part of a media roundtable at WonderCon with about eight other print and online reporters. "Q" is a question from one of the others, "UFN" is us. A few minutes of 3D footage, as well as the "sizzle reel" trailer, were shown the night before at the Metreon a block up from the Moscone Center where WonderCon is held.

Scott Stewart: Hello! Did you have a chance to see the footage last night? What did you think? Did you like it?

All: Yes!

Q: I went in thinking "Oh, it's vampires, seen it," but I walked out thinking, "I've never seen that before." It was amazing.

SS: Cool!

Q: Paul Bettany was telling us how easy it was for the two of you to work together. How was it?

SS: He's totally lying. It was horrible. No, it was great. It was really great. We had gotten to be friends on the last movie. We only worked together for a certain amount of time on that picture because it was an ensemble, and this was a chance to kind of put the whole movie on his shoulders. I knew it was something he could do, and everything about the movie is a big leap forward from the last movie we did. It's a more ambitious story, a much more straightforward story, and it was a chance to design a whole land and allow him to really inhabit a character he has to carry. I read the script and thought about who the archetypal heroes are, and I thought about Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen and John Wayne. Paul's somebody, when you look at him, you can put him in any time period. You can put him in the future, put him in the past, whatever, and he fits. Some faces are really contemporary. They just feel really contemporary. So I wanted somebody who looked like he would fit in this world that would be a little heightened. He also does a really great job of making his face look like a mask, and you just get the sense that there's a rage there. You know, he sits down and he's so charming and funny and nice. In movies, he's got a real ability to convey that anger. That, to me, was reminiscent of some of the characters John Wayne had played, so that's what we went for.

UFN: He mentioned that this had three times the budget of Legion.

SS: Which meant we had three dollars! Yeah, Legion was a really low-budget movie by the standards by which we work, generally. So yes, this was definitely more. By the standard of other movies... we don't have the budget of Pirates 4, probably not even a fraction of that, so what we had to do was be really clever as to how to make the movie feel visceral and exciting and textured and detailed, and make the world comprehensive. We just had to plan it really carefully and focus our planning and efforts on just the things we were going to see in the movie and try to be really efficient.

UFN: I think you can really see that on the screen, and I'm wondering if you feel that, compared to Legion, you're at another level now.

SS: Yeah, [Legion] was a little movie, a throwback to 70s horror. Yeah, I hope so! It feels like a nice step forward, because in every way I have more experience. I felt better equipped to do it. The learning curve of a director is... [makes a sharp upward angle with his hand]... and I guess in any great art it never ends, so every time you do it, you get better at it. I would have been very ill-prepared to try and embark on something as complex as this movie, given the schedule and the budget, without having embarked on it once before. So it's really helpful. It felt like it was a trial run for Priest.

Q: You said you did some of the visual effects yourself?

SS: Some stuff I did. I took much more of a hands-off approach on this one. I used my ability to do the visual effects more as a pre-visualization, doing storyboard animatics and those kinds of things, helping to design the vampires, helping the studio see what the world was going to look like and feel like. Because we really did want to try and push it, and that can be challenging. They have to take a leap of faith with you, so my goal is to try and make it not that much of a leap by showing them as much as I can, and hopefully delivering it, and they were all really excited about it. We designed the movie for 3D, we had talked about shooting for 3D. I wanted to shoot on film, and Don Burgess, my cameraman, a legendary guy who's shot Spider-Man and Cast Away and Forrest Gump and a lot of great movies, he's a great cinematographer... It's a landscape movie, it's part of being a movie that has real scope, and we wanted to shoot wide-screen and shoot on film and use old lenses. So we kind of got the best of both worlds, because when the studio started seeing the movie being put together, they went, "Oh, okay then... let's talk about converting this film to 3D." We did initial tests and they just looked so good! And they gave us the time. They pushed the release date to May for that. It was a nice big vote of confidence because it's expensive to move a release date.

Q: How closely did you work with [Priest graphic novel author] Min-Woo Hyung?

SS: He came out while we were in pre-production and spent a few days with us. The TokyoPop people brought him out. And we were nervous, because I had come into the movie with Cory Goodman's script, and there were 16 books and this sprawling thing mostly set in the old west, and some in the crusades, and there's a little bit of stuff in the future, but he never finished it. It's a cliffhanger, and you have no idea where the story's going, and Cory realized it would be really tough to make into a movie, like how to structure it for the time period. Westerns are hard, so he put it in a kind of apocalyptic future and imagined that that storyline had gone into the future. When Min-Woo came and read the script and looked at all the design stuff we had, and we sat down and talked about what our intentions were, it was really pleasing to us, because he said "I was thinking where the story would go if I thought I would ever write more, and I imagined going here, and here, and here, and that really feels like what you guys did." He was inspired enough by that to actually, much to the pleasure of TokyoPop, go back to Korea and write this big long bridge story between where the books left off and the movie began, which TokyoPop released as a new series of Priest comic books, which is really cool.

Q: Has there been talk at all about making a sequel?

SS: Not quite ready to talk about that. There are some things that we're working on that are ways to take the most successful aspects of that story and put it in a new context in a way that's exciting, and lets us really get into the story and the characters, that I think you'll enjoy.

Courtesy Sony Pictures

Exclusive: Brea and Zane Grant on their upcoming projects

Zane and Brea Grant

You may remember Brea Grant as Daphne the speedster, Hiro Nakamura's frenemy from Heroes. Our Heroes-related section of the interview is on our sister site, House Petrelli, but UFN asked some more general questions about Brea and Zane's upcoming comic book projects, which are both entertaining and very diverse.

UFN: We Will Bury You... I was going to say that launched at Comic-Con '09? Am I right on that?

BG: We started promoting it in '09, but it actually didn't come out until a year ago, and then the trade came out this past fall.

UFN: And who's the publisher on that?

BG: It's IDW.

UFN: Ah, okay. And what's the premise?

ZG: It's the story of a zombie apocalypse that begins in New York in 1927 and follows a sex worker and her girlfriend as they try to survive, the people they meet and so on.

UFN: Okay, interesting angle on it. So we see the underside, and they see these things happen in the corners where most people don't?

ZG: Yeah, it's basically a survival story set in the 20s.

BG: There's a lot of comic books and zombie comic books specifically that look at people with power, with money, who are cops, who have skills... and we wanted to look at people whose survival skills are more street skills. Street smart rather than having money to buy your way out, or get on a boat, or do whatever you would do to survive.

UFN: Are there other projects you guys are moving into? Other titles, other...

ZG: Yeah, we're still working on comics together, we're pitching out a few things right now. We're pitching out a slasher book with Eric J who does some really amazing art. He was the co-creator of Rex Mundi and he's doing a book called Fly right now. So that's a really fun one, and we're working on a comic about a graffiti crew that learns to do magic. It's really an urban fantasy thing. The tentative title is Dead City Kids.

BG: And we have a Suicide Girls comic book coming out in April with IDW as well.

UFN: I think of them as pictures... what are they going to be doing?

BG: Well, we wrote a story for them. It's sort of a Charlie's Angels-esque group of elite fighters fighting against a giant religious corporation in a sort of dystopian future.

UFN: I did not see that coming.

ZG: It's sort of a science fiction spy story kind of thing with espionage. It's fun. I think we did a good job! And we have Cameron Stewart who does some amazing art, and David Hahn who also does some amazing art, and Steve Niles is writing a back-of-issue story. I think it'll be a fun project. It's coming out in a few weeks.

UFN: And is that with IDW?

ZG: That one's with IDW, the other ones we're still pitching out and we're talking to some people about them. I'm doing a web comic with a friend called Detective Warlock, Warlock Detective. It's kind of a horror-comedy about a small town warlock detective. He does things like he fights a graveyard hag at a skating rink, things like that.

UFN: Is that set in the present-day?

ZG: Yeah, it's set in the present-day. It's pretty cool. I think that'll be up next month.

UFN: Do you have a website?

ZG: I do, it's ZaneGrant.org.

UFN: Dot org?

ZG: Yes, I'm an organization.

UFN: Or you're very organized. Or both. Do you have any parting thoughts or other work you're doing?

BG: I co-wrote a screenplay that's going to shoot in September that's one of the big projects I'm working on on my own besides other acting ventures. It's independent and still in the early stages, it's called Best Friends Forever and it's an apocalyptic road trip movie.

UFN: The horror genre, pardon the pun, just will not die. Zombies and vampires and the apocalypse... do you think there's still a lot of audience? Do you think it's played out at all?

BG: I don't think horror will ever play out. I think people are drawn to it for whatever reason they have. I never wake up and think, "No, I don't really want to watch a horror movie or read a sci-fi book. I consistently want to be in those genres, whereas I do sometimes feel like I don't want to watch a depressing drama or something like that. I think it's here to stay. I think certain things will probably go out of style. I have this theory that werewolves are the next big thing. So I think zombies will go out of style, other things will go out of style, vampires will go out style, but I think at some point it's still gonna cycle through.

UFN: Horror as a genre, obviously, has been around forever, since Mary Shelley, since before that, scaring people, things that go bump in the night... it's kind of blown up recently, but you don't think it's going to shrink any time in the near future?

ZG: I don't think so. I think as a genre there's a lot of room to find new stories, especially now that so much money is going into remakes, or even just rehashing the same stories from the same authors. And those monsters do have specific meaning to our society. In international horror, over the last ten years people there have been some really interesting new kinds of stories that people are telling, or telling in a different style. Even vampire stories, like Let the Right One In, that movie's amazing. It's so different than anything.

UFN: Well, like Priest is coming out, and the interesting thing about the vampires on that is that they're actually some kind of non-human alien infection kind of thing, and the people are light-sensitive instead of... it's a twist on it that's really interesting.

ZG: Yeah, I think there's a lot of room for tweaking things and playing with what's there, but definitely the genre is getting maybe a little bit stale involving the mainstream-ization of it, but hopefully some money will go into some great projects.

BG: I think the true fans will keep it alive.

WonderCon 2011 Panel: Evolution of Comics in the Transmedia Space

Print comic book sales are the worst they've been since, perhaps, they were created. For example, Spider-Man has gone from topping 200K in sales per month to the current level of about 50K. The median age of a comic book reader is 33, which is the oldest ever. In looking at the faces at an event like WonderCon on both sides of the tables, these statistics thrown out at the "Evolution of Comics in the Transmedia Space" panel appear spot-on accurate.

So what happened to the industry once driven by the pocket change of idealistic little boys?

"It's too exclusive," said panelist FJ Desanto.

"There should be enough there that you want to come back every month," added Marc Andreyko. "Each issue should have a beginning, a middle and an end. We've lost that."

"When 'okay' storytelling costs $2.99, it's just not worth it," said Dennis Calero. The point was further made by another panelist that there's sticker shock when you arrive at the register and the clerk says, "That'll be $75."

Left to Right: Diana Williams, Dennis Calero, FJ Desanto

I know that for myself, as a 44-year-old woman whose grandfather collected comics, I stopped buying them in the 1980s when crossover madness made it impossible to keep up with what was going on. Add in the rapid rise in prices at the time, and a poor college student such as myself couldn't keep lining the comic book companies' pockets. And I did see the ploy for what it was -- forcing fans to buy four comics instead of one. I had to drop them all. Recently, I've tried to get back into some of my favorite titles, but there are so many versions and alternate universes for each one, I have absolutely no clue what's happening and there is no jumping-in point any longer, as if they're all perpetually accelerating mag-lev trains.

In a nutshell, the panelists are absolutely right. So what about the next generation of readers?

"I picked up a book where Superman was married, and that turned me off to comics for twenty years," said panel moderator Jeff Krelitz. "Aquaman was getting a divorce, and I had to wonder, "How much of that is what the writers are going through?'"

Clearly, overly complex storylines, crossovers, cover prices and "socially relevant real-life" scenarios are not working, and are not bringing in new readers. What will? Jeff Newelt has some ideas.

"When things are shared a zillion times a day on Twitter, Facebook and so on, it's an easy click over to Amazon for the print version. Digital will feed print," he said.

"Saving print is the point," said Calero. "In the future they'll say, 'You used to kill trees to make books? How weird.' But it's an association that's generational." Andreyko goes as far as to call it "nostalgia porn." In the Archaia panel the next day, however, an attendee made the point that their higher-quality papers and products don't shy away from print, but instead they embrace the medium. 

Left to Right: Jeff Newelt, Marc Andreyko

It's not a battle between print versus digital. Instead, they can compliment and help each other.

"The connection with the end user and delivery to them is so fragmented," said Adrian Askarieh. "Transmedia helps solve that."

"Anyone under fifteen... digital is all they've known," pointed out Diana Williams. Unfortunately, most companies miss the mark in capturing these new fans. "Disney and Lucas are the kings of telling a story in different media."

"Make the early stuff accessible and cheap," said Andreyko.

"There needs to be education to the general public about digital comics," said Newelt. "It's mostly only core comics fans. It's also too partitioned -- 'comics are this, video games are this, movies are this,' and so on. It's about taking something and having it work organically across the board."

"I've never seen an industry so big market themselves so poorly," added Desanto.

But it's far more than marketing and accessibility. "Storytelling is just as important for getting new readers," said Krelitz. "What about putting Spider-Man and Batman out in all these new media?"

"It's great if the content doesn't suck," replied Desanto.

"When it backfires, you lose them FOREVER," Andreyko said dramatically into the microphone. Or for at least twenty years, in the case of Krelitz.

At the close of the panel, we saw two examples of motion comics, the first being Fall Out Toy Works with professional voice talent done by Anna Faris. The second, aimed at ages eight and younger, was much more comic book-like and was a simplified retelling of the current Tron film, using the same actor audio tracks and additional narration. In both, I found myself questioning where the "comic book" ended and where small-scale animation began.

Being one of the aging generation of comic book fans that grew up on paper books only, I'm not convinced that "the kids" will look at a motion comic and desire the traditional paper editions -- I see them simply asking for more motion comics.

Is Calero right? Will images printed on dead trees be looked on as a curiosity of the primitive past? Or will the human need for the tactile experience always create a demand for the easily created and portable humble comic book on paper? Time will tell, and the question bears ongoing examination, especially at excellent and thought-provoking panels like this one.

L to R: Diana Williams, Adrian Askarieh (back), Dennis Calero (front), Jeff Krelitz, Marc Andreyko, FJ Desanto, Jeff Newelt

Inaugural Post - What is Urban Fantasy News?

Welcome to Urban Fantasy News, the sisterchild of House Petrelli, of Heroes fame. Even though Heroes has (probably) ended (stay tuned for news on that), our interest in modern fantasy and speculative fiction hasn't, and never will.

Speculative fiction is the great "What If?" What if ordinary people suddenly discovered they had superpowers? What if you could take a pill and never have to sleep again? What if the world was actually one big computer simulation? What if you were immortal?

Urban Fantasy News covers the fantastic in the present. As much as we enjoy things like Sherlock Holmes or Halo, the focus of UFN is solely the comics, films, television shows, books, video games and more that take place in the present day, such as Iron Man, The Matrix, Tron, Being Human, Dead Rising and so on.

So what's in store for UFN?

Our next event is WonderCon in San Francisco, April 1 & 2. We've gotten some great press-only invitations, so look for our first exclusive UFN content next weekend (and keep your fingers crossed for some killer interviews we've requested). We'll also be posting links to hot articles, and continue our perennial photo op favorite, Where's Peter?

Want to be part of UFN? We're looking for regional reporters, so if you're interested in submitting content, please contact us here or via Twitter and we'll talk!

That's all for now. Stay tuned to this channel for news of the fantastic!