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Comics, Micropayments and Scott McCloud

Yesterday, Scott McCloud (the man behind seminal works like Understanding Comics and the vastly underrated Zot! books) launched The Right Number, a new web (or more specifically Flash) based comic. While there have been some excellent web comics in the past, this one is notable not so much for its content (although it is quite good -- more on this in a moment), but because it uses a new micro-payment system, where each installment costs $0.25.

This new system is not without its problems. Micropayments simply can't work as long as credit card companies charge transaction fees, so in order to make this a profitable venture for everyone involved, you have to pre-pay a certain amount up front, which will seed your account. The minimum is $3, which isn't a big deal, but I wish it were possible to literally do just $0.25 transactions. But the real problem I ran into when signing up was with BitPass' credit card system, which for some reason wouldn't accept my card at all, telling me that the address on my card didn't match the one I was entering. I suspect this is due to the fact that my address has two lines (with an apartment number, of course) and their form only has one. I was able to bypass this by using PayPal, which they offer as an alternative payment system, but it seemed like a silly oversight on their part.

The actual comic itself is quite good, but McCloud is really hurting himself by offering only a teaser up front. This is the Internet. People have proven that they're willing to pay for something if they see a real value there, but in order to do so you need to convince people they why they should pay for this when so much is available for free. I bought it because I like to support things like this, and because the initial $3.00 payment is about the same as a normal comic book. A better idea would have been to release the entire first chapter, or at least half of it for free, and then start charging later. With only a teaser available, it's going to be a tough sell, even if it is only $0.25 per chapter.

Using Flash is another problem. As a general rule I don't care for Flash, but that's only because it tends to be misused. Stuff like Homestar Runner has shown that Flash doesn't have to suck, even if it usually does. McCloud uses it well, with the panel transitions being used as a perpetual zoom from "page" to "page." He wisely avoids animation (with only one, subtle example), which is good and keeps it in line with his own definition of a web comic. But I think his "zoom" method takes away from the impact of each panel. Every panel is a composition, just like it would be on paper. But here, in the center of every screen is a thumbnailed preview of the next panel. This hurts the overall visual impact of the panel, since it means every composition has to be broken by this "frame within a frame" concept. Still, as Flash-based comic experiments go, it's a good one, and better than Marvel's dotComics, which I think do a decent job of adapting paper comics to the web (this has a nice advantage since it's being designed exclusively for the web).

The story is interesting, and I'm looking forward to reading the next two chapters. It's not as gripping as some comics you're likely to read, but it's nice to see McCloud doing fiction again, and at $0.75 (or $3.00, depending on how you look at it) for the whole thing, it's a decent bargain.

Posted by jason at July 2, 2003 01:44 PM | TrackBack | Read more: