Steinblogger

I’m checking in with Daredevil this week for nostalgia’s sake. Some of my favorite comics are DD, especially the Daredevil graphic novel with art by Bill Sienkiewicz, one of the great comic artists of our time. I’m also checking out the Trade Paperback of Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman, because of the rave reviews it got. Yes, I know I have two of the same Daredevil comic below. That variant cover looks awesome, but the wrap-around cover would be cool, too.

Late addition: Batman Confidential. I love Heroes and didn’t realize Michael Green was writing a story.

I’m one of the “early adopters” stung by Apple’s price drop on the iPhone, which adds up to $400 in my family. Apple’s $100 store credit gesture is nice, but necessary only because the early adopters of the iPhone are mostly Mac owners.

Apple is competing in a new category and needs to compete in a new way, while its core early customers for the iPhone are Mac users that expect Apple to act like Apple Computer, Inc. rather than as a cell phone producer. If Apple behaved like Apple Computer, Inc., it would keep the prices fairly static, shipping new models with new capabilities to keep the prices in place. At the least, it wouldn’t drop prices by a third within the first year or so.

The Motorola RAZR is a great example of how the cell phone marketplace works differently than the computer marketplace. According to the NY Times, the RAZR was released at $499 (yes the same price as the original 4GB iPhone) and was $199 six months later (about 60% less). Within 12 months it was $99. That’s a perfect illustration of how pricing works in the cell phone world. Don’t expect to see iPhones for $99 anytime soon, but don’t expect Apple to give a gift certificate every time they drop the price, either. That’s a one-time gift to us early adopters.

Personally, I’ve gotten at least $100 of value from my iPhone in the last two months. So, I’m good.

Books are out today, due to the holiday. The Fables trade paperback is not new, just an addition to my library. As always, these descriptions and cover shots are courtesy comixology.com.

I discovered a great iPhone shortcut by accident. While in the email list view, slide your finger left-to-right over the message title and description. The delete button will appear. That drops a click from the deletion process (no need to click edit).It’s fun to discover little touches like this after 7 weeks with the iPhone.

Apple’s new Numbers software doesn’t support custom number formats. That means you can’t use a real value of 10,000,000 but display it as 10M. This is a deal-breaker for me. Hopefully, 1.1 will fix this missing feature. (I’d also like to see full AppleScript support. Heck, any AppleScript support!)

At Heidi MacDonald’s insistence (no, she didn’t personally insist that I go, but rather posted it to The Beat) , I went to see Paul Gravett’s talk on comics and art at MoCCA tonight. His presentation was subtitled Comics as Art, Art as Comics.

Mr. Gravett has written several books about graphic novels and manga, and I found his talk to be thought provoking. I also left looking to buy some work I wasn’t familiar with (Mattotti’s Fire and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan), always a good thing.

For me, the Big Thought of the Night was on the perceived difference between comic book art and fine art. Images in comic books, according to Gravett, are “expendable.” The reader is “driven by the pulse of the eye-stream that takes you across the page.” Fine art, as in a gallery or museum, on the other hand, is slowly taken in, contemplated. You take your time with it. Taking a slow, contemplative manner with comics gets in the way of the narrative “eye-stream.”

(An aside: I love that combination of words: eye-stream. It encompasses what web comic books need to achieve to be a great way to read comics. By the way, a really interesting “infinite canvas” — a la Scott McCloud — was created for an exhibition Mr. Gravett talked about. Check it out.)

I can think of more than a few examples in my collection where the comic book art needed to be contemplated. Bill Sienkewicz’s Moby Dick, which he told me is being republished by Image this Fall, comes to mind. I spent many languorous hours contemplating the last page of that book. Dave McKean and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum. Matt Wagner’s hand painted foregrounds, airbrushed backgrounds, and Sam Keith’s inks in (the original) Mage: The Hero Discovered. Ted McKeever’s Metropol. These examples have compelling eye-streams. There is worth in being able to consume a comic book, yet come back and meditate on an image or page to be enveloped in a particular feeling, or line, or color. I don’t think Mr. Gravett would disagree with me.

I think both expendable comics and comics that demand contemplation can have compelling eye-streams and great narrative power. It’s just that some you come back to just to look at, and some you don’t.

I received my first AT&T bill yesterday. It was a whopping 61 pages long! On top of that, because of all my trials getting the phone activated, AT&T had me down for three accounts with my number and one account for my wife. My heart stopped when I saw the total: $456.99!

I also received my last bill with Sprint. We were very careful about our Sprint accounts, making sure to not renew them so we could switch, pain-free to AT&T. In fact, I called Sprint in May to complain that they surreptitiously renewed both of our accounts. They agreed it was a mistake and confirmed they had removed the renewal. Yet they still charged us a $350 penalty for leaving them! It took over a half hour on the phone to get it rectified.

AT&T only took about 20 minutes. We’ll see next month if we’ve resolved all of it. Part of the shock is that they pre-bill, so I received both July and August. To their credit, they finally heeded my request to give us back our activation fees.

Sprint vs. AT&T, who comes out ahead? I don’t think I’m any worse off than before. So, AT&T comes out ahead simply for being smart enough to get iPhone.