Grade 8 in 1980? You're younger than I figured.
First grade in 1980. Born in 1973. I only
sound like a crotchety old man. I'm actually a crotchety middle-aged man in disguise! I'm told I've loosened up since I was a kid, too.
When you watch a blu-ray, they often have links to other content. Couldn't Warner Bros. include some free digital comics with the superhero Blu-Rays so that people get them in front of their faces? Hook 'em for free and all that.
Could be. My concern is linking the free sample with the vendor. Could be done with Blu-Ray, maybe, but I'm not familiar with the things. I'm still in the dark ages of a DVD player that doesn't need to call home to ask if I'm allowed to watch my movie...
There's a similar problem with Jim's product-placement idea. In a cartoon, there are so many fake products floating around on the background that you need to overcome your audience's suspension of disbelief to convince them that everything else is fake except this thing over here.
One angle...in the background when I cook dinner, I've been watching '80s cartoons on Netflix. (He-Man is surprisingly not-bad, and the music is pretty good for such a low-budget/Filmation production.) At the end, they have the parent-appeasing "button," where someone tells you the moral of the story, because you're too dang stupid to realize that blowing up buildings is uncool. A surprising amount of quasi-fascist "always obey authority" morals, when the episode was clearly about the authorities being wrong, too, but never mind that.
Anyway, I wonder if it might be a thought to revisit the "button," but make it a comic history lesson. Give a minute or two to focus on the week's guest star or villain, and have the main characters talk about how long he's been in comics, where he's appeared...and where you might be able to find him RIGHT NOW.
On the other hand, the United States does have laws about advertising to minors, so that might not fly. Might be why there's no product placement, too.
Back to the topic: I agree with the idea that digital comics may be the next, and maybe only next step, but I'm wondering how we convince a generation of kids who have come to accept illegal downloads as the norm, that they should pay......anything?
That's probably not too hard. You do it by making the comics easy to buy and add more value than the pirates can. For example, you can't ask the writer questions when you download a torrent, nor can you check the book out before you buy it. Imagine a low-resolution, low-color version of the existing Flash viewers, but free--you can read any book to get a sense of the action, but to get the details (or maybe the last couple of pages...?), you need to pay. And since it's only a click away, it's easier to spend the dollar than go find a free download.
Keep in mind that kids are going to download because it fits their demographic. They have plenty of time, but little money and no credit card. When the option is download for free or convince the parents to give them a dollar for music they think is atrocious garbage, guess who wins? I think you could do good business by having the parents subscribe to a monthly budget for the kids. Let them buy what they want within that budget, and if they want more in one month, either save money leading in, or send a request (through the system) to the parent, showing them the book and explaining why you (the kid) want it.
But people also grow. When I was a kid, we had the earlier home computers, like the Commodore 64. Nobody bought software for that thing. We had literally thousands of disks with pirated software, copied from one machine to the next across the country at full-day meetings, where parents duplicated the disks endlessly. Today, I don't know many people who are downloading software illegally except to try it before paying. Some went completely legitimate, some stop buying new versions, and some bail for free software. I think most of that is just because buying software is much easier than it used to be, and we ex-kids now have an income. (Software piracy is rampant in Asia and Africa, but that's because we claim that we want them to use it to become part of the economy, but it costs a year's salary.)
