Radio interviews with Russell Willis and Charles Kriel about webcomic apps

Panel Borders: Digitising comics

Concluding a month of shows looking at web comics, Alex Fitch talks to two experts in web based technologies about their dissemination methods aimed at bringing comics to tablets and other devices. Russell Willis discusses his Panel Nine range of graphic novels for the iPad which include titles by Eddie Campbell and David Lloyd and are about to be joined by a new digital store front for British book publishers.
Also, in a presentation recorded at Cartoon County in Brighton, Charles Kriel talks about his Indiegogo campaign to fund a new app designed to be the equivalent of iTunes for comics allowing collectors to combine their existing digital comics collections with newly bought titles to fill in the gaps, with questions asked by Alex Fitch, David Lloyd and members of the audience.

6pm, Sunday 31st March, repeated 4.30pm, Tuesday 2nd April, Resonance 104.4 FM (London) / streamed at www.resonancefm.com / extended podcast at panelborders.wordpress.com

In Review: The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator

Writer / Director: Edgar Writer
Artist / Animator: Tommy Lee Edwards
Narrator: Julian Barratt
Music: Unloved (David Holmes, Keefus Green and Jade Vincent)
Publisher: Microsoft

4 online episodes, approx 7 mins each

The plot: Brandon Generator, a freelance writer with writer's block, overdoes on 13 cups of espresso and blacks out. He awakens in a world similar to our own, but bits of reality disappear into a white void. Threatened by a giant four eyed monster made of coffee he tries to escape back to reality, deal with mysterious pieces of writing and voice mails that have arrived from the aether and track down a mysterious girl.

The Review: An excellent piece of comic book story-telling that sits in the middle ground between animation and motion comic; Brandon Generator tells a whimsical fantasy story that mixes Hoxton creative navel gazing with crowd sourced fantasy elements. The casting of Julian Barratt as the narrator is perfect – bringing to mind both the lo-fi fantasy of The Mighty Boosh and the satirised media world of Nathan Barley. As a disembodied voice, Barratt also sounds quite similar to regular Edgar Wright collaborator Simon Pegg (who, ironically, is currently starring in A Fantastic Fear of Everything, which is also a comedic, urban fantasy about an agoraphobic, paranoid writer).
I spoke to Wright at the launch event of the fourth and final episode of  Brandon Generator and told him that it also reminded me of Jackanory, a comparison he was quite pleased with, and he suggested Barratt's soothing, laconic tones are ideal to listen to just before bed!

Commissioned by Microsoft to promote their latest internet browser IE9, the project also exists partially as a tech-demo, and while it also plays fine in other browsers, the website encourages users to upgrade to the latest Internet Explorer to use all of the interactive features. This may be less of a concern now for anyone who hasn't seen the story yet, as the interactive nature of the project has concluded – cliffhangers at the ends of the first three instalments encouraged the public to send in lines of dialogue, sketches of creatures and plot elements – and the way I experienced Brandon Generator at the launch event was projected onto a big screen, a closer experience to Wright's usual cinematic work, and one that didn't diminish the quality of Tommy Lee Edwards' art. David Holmes' ambient score is also very enjoyable, awaiting a full album release in due course.
The animation ranges from simple pans across Edwards' drawings to multi-layered moments where flashing messages sit on top of scrolling text on top of background images to reflect the lead character's disorientation, but rarely goes as far as fully animated characters. In any case, Edwards has experience in moving pictures, such as The Book of Eli, so he's better placed than many other comic creators in animating his own work. This means, while the project is more sophisticated than every motion comic that has preceded it, you can still imagine the possibility of it being printed as a regular graphic novel – something the creators refrained from promoting when asked about this at the launch, as it might detract from the novelty of it being an online experience. The possibility of an eventual graphic novel and the creators' love of print comics is evident in certain scenes where three or four panel borders are combined with the mise-en-scene.

The crowd sourced elements incorporated into later episodes work well, from the design of the coffee monster and its name “Caffiendo” to the random lines of text the lead character is assaulted with as he tries to escape the monster, one of which was contributed by Erotic Comics author Tim Pilcher, who receives a credit at the end of episode 3. Hopefully this means other online projects by A list comic creators might also be willing to incorporate suggestions by their readers, without the usual fear of being sued by anyone on the unsolicited 'slush pile'.
Overall, Brandon Generator is worth checking out for fans of any of the creators' work and anyone curious about the possible future of online comics.

You can find the animated comic plus a plethora of behind the scenes information at http://www.brandongenerator.com

Space Age Exhibition on Tour

You know how these things happen when you're surfing the 'net. While researching some imagery for a comic strip I'm working on with Ross Dearsley, completely by fortuitous accident I came across information about a touring exhibition organised by the V&A Museum of Childhood named Space Age: Exploration, Design and Popular Culture.

Currently at Truro's Royal Cornwall Museum until 19th April (this museum being what I was actually looking for at the time), this major exhibition explores people’s fascination with space, and how that fascination has influenced popular culture, from literature and comics to film, design and merchandising, including toys.

To help exhibition visitors explore the relationship between reality and fantasy a range of real space objects are displayed together with classic space-inspired designs and childhood objects,hoping to show the reality of how space exploration has developed and how space fantasy and science fiction worlds have been created in people’s imaginations.

The development of the exhibition was assisted by a "Scientist-in-Residence" originally funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (now the Science and Technology Facilities Council). The exhibition also features online learning resources and some venues offer space-related teaching sessions, along with a series of family events (e.g. planetarium shows, popular science talks, rocket making workshops, etc) supported by the Institute of Physics.

Tour Dates

• Royal Cornwall Museu, Truro
Until 19 April 2009
• City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth
9 May - 26 July 2009
• Bradford One Gallery, Bradford
15 August - 1 November 2009
• Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton
21 November 2009 - 7 February 2010
• South Shields Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne
27 February - 16 May 2010
• New Walk Museum, Leicester
6 June - 29 August 2010

• Read more about the Space Age on the V&A web site

It's a Science Fiction World...

-- or at least, that's the view of a leading American professor, talking about a new article he's written for Indiana's Martinsville Reporter-Times.

"Science fiction is no longer kids' stuff, but serious literature," acclaimed Jules Verne expert Arthur B. Evans, Laurel H. Turk, who is also Professor of Modern Languages at DePauw University, tells the paper. "It's partly because we are living science fiction on a regular basis."

Dr. Evans is featured in an article headlined "No longer considered pulp fiction" with reporter Ronald Hawkins describing Evans as a good example of the increased respectability that science fiction has gained over the years.

"Evans is a French professor at DePauw, but he also teaches a science fiction course at the university, one of many institutions of higher learning that offer such courses. Evans also is the managing editor of Science Fiction Studies, a scholarly journal that began at Indiana State in the 1970s and moved to DePauw in 1991 after time in Canada." The respected journal which publishes critical articles and book reviews only, recently reached its 100th issue.

Evans discusses how science fiction has changed since the days when stories focused on the possibilities of space travel. "Today, there are all kinds of interesting themes," he says. "There's a lot about nano-technology, biological futures, viruses."

The professor also discusses the difference between science fiction and fantasy. "It's fantasy if it's got magic and no perceivable laws of science in operation," the professor tells the paper. "If it's about the supernatural, it's not science fiction. An example of the differences in literature would be that the Harry Potter books are fantasy, whereas Jules Verne's ' 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would be science fiction."

• Read the complete text at the newspaper's Web site.

Technology News: Prince victim of Identity Theft

Morocco's state run news agency is reporting that authorities in Casablanca have rounded up the usual suspects and arrested an engineer accused of stealing the identity of Prince Moulay Rachid on Facebook.

The prince, shown here perhaps at the moment he realized his reputation as "The King of Hearts" had earned him the friendship of thousands on the online social network, is the younger brother of King Mohammed VI and second in line to the throne.

Among many other duties he is president of President of Marrakech International Film Festival Foundations, and has been focusing much of his programs on the need to bridge the North-South and East-West divide.

"The clash of civilizations has no place in Marrakech, Morocco since public appreciates as much as Hollywood or Bollywood films as they do appreciate Moroccan films," he recently told the German press. (This doesn't stop Morocco's authorities barring access to sites that might offend the King, as they did with YouTube for a time last year - a bar now lifted. I'm guessing Facebook isn't very popular right now, either).

I can see British journalists picking up on this and scouring Facebook for Prince Charles or the Queen's profile even now. The closest they may come is to the "Campaign for the Return of Prince Charles' Moustache"or links to news stories about the Prince's decision not to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing, posted by a Free Tibet Group.

Best Videos of 2007?

It's the time of year for "Best of.." lists and a look back at highlights of 2007, and here at downthetubes we thought our readers might be interested on what made it into the animated “all star” highlights over at Joost, one of the new ways of watching TV on the internet featuring thousands of shows and more than 400 channels in broadcast quality.

According to our friends at the company, over four million people downloaded the free service last year.

The top videos include Count Duckula and Wallace & Gromit, which stood out as some of the best loved for Joost from their growing library of 20,000-plus videos.

To see those clips on Joost and discover who also made it to the list, download the Joost viewer (available for Windows or Mac OSX) and then head over to www.joost.com/featured/bestof2007/

Dare versus Dredd

No, not a new comic from Virgin (although I'm sure it's been considered somewhere): this is the result of my first test opf google.com/trends, which offers a snapshot of web searches, comparing the number of search results for specific terms.

The results don't indicate just how many searches have been analysed, but it does let you know from where searches have been taking place. The snapshot above compares 2007 searches for "Dan Dare" with 2000AD's "Judge Dredd" and you can see Virgin Comics PR machine played its part in boosting the space hero's web popularity with launch of their new comic last month.

Of course, compared with the number of searches for Marvel characters our Brit heroes still have a long way to go, but as a general guide to what comics fans are looking for this new tool should provide hours of endless fun for marketeers...

-- and talking of marketing, just a quick addition to this: Virgin Comics is promoting their new Dan Daretitle with a free episode online twice a week: www.virgincomics.com/dandare.html

How to make yourself really popular in Starbucks

Sometimes technology people come up with ideas that sound great on paper but in real life - and in the case of this bright idea from Apple, especially in queue-conscious Britain - they're likely to cause a riot.

Last month, Apple (makers of the iphone and Mac computers) applied for a patent for a system that would allow customers to place coffee, fast food or merchandise orders from a wireless device, then jump in front of those ordering in person when picking up their order.

You can just imagine how this will go down here. As someone who seems to end up regularly spending ages in post office lines at lunch time waiting for three counter staff when there are eight windows, the idea that someone could jump that line because they have a posh phone rather makes my blood boil.

I am now awaiting the first "iphone rage" news report... I'm sure it won't be long coming.

New ways to order comics?

With 2000AD going digital (see information on our new comics page), here's another interesting use of new technology.

MocoNews reports UK tabloid Sun has rolled out a quick response (QR) mobile barcode service that it hopes will enrich print ads by giving readers a quick way to access mobile web sites and their content.

Readers must first download the QR reader from software firm i-nigma on to their phones (some 150 handsets are supported), though some of the latest Nokia handsets have it pre-installed. (That's a plus, as I know from experience that the vast majority of web users don't like to download additional software to make a web site work, and I expect this will be even more the case for mobile, with their still limited memory capacity).

Once they have the reader on their phone, the service enables readers to send a photo of the QR code found in its paper in a print ad to launch them directly into its mobile sites where readers can download content such as videos, film trailers, and music.

There are of course other applications beyond providing connections to the mobile web: imagine taking this one stage further than downloading electronic content and being able to take a photo of an image, send it off and voila, you've just ordered a comic or magazine, the cost charged to your phone bill (the price of an item may admittedly might be higher than buying it in the shop, but I suspect publishers will set the prices to encourage usage at first). Fulfillment is a doddle: no filling in addresses as the seller simply uses the billing address for the mobile.

NMA.co.uk reports that News International, the Sun’s owner, is watching the take-up of the service closely, and may roll it out across all of its titles (which include The Times) if it proves successful. For its launch yesterday, the tabloid splashed the service across an eight-page pull-out supplement.

QR codes have proven highly popular in Japan since their introduction in 2002, where they have allowed people to download content as dense as mobile novels (and, I expect, mobile comics). Almost every Japanese phone ships with a built-in barcode reader that can decode both QR Codes and standard barcodes you find on retail items.

The potential cost savings in terms of advertising are enormous: publishers could run ads with a number of simple images for subscription deals for their entire stable of titles, enabling them to promote many more titles or products in a smaller space - a poster? a beermat? - than they could through traditional advertising.

This system could surely combine an electronic download with a real world item very easily. It will be interesting to see how this develops...

The growing pains of the New Media...

This comic from Hijinks Ensue elaborates changes in new media, and will for many be a fantastic and encouraging statement on the future: that media is becoming more. Becoming less about directly monetized intellectual content and instead focusing on the mass of human brains who choose to tune into this digital art.

Imagine a world where it is almost a silly idea to pay for media. Digital TV, Music, Feature Films, Books and Print Media will be widely and easily available. The public, amateurs and fans will have unprecedented power... Is that scary -- or exciting?

Read the cartoon

Ringtones: The Ultimate Horror

Ring tones are a matter of personal choice (I will confess to currently having Shaun the Sheep on my mobile, much to my wife's despair no matter how much she likes the show), but imagine the sheer horror of your phone ringing -- and it's someone else's ring tone.

Not only can I see this becoming very confusing if your phone rings in a public place like a restaurant or bar (in which case, why isn't it switched off, you inconsiderate git!), but the very idea that thanks to the "Push Ringer" technology just announced by California-based company Emotive, my phone might start blaring out some godawful Spice Girls number, or worse, fills me with unimaginable alarm...

This has to be one of the worst ideas for mobile phone development ever, although I have to admit, the idea that you could make some CEO's mobile start mobcasting "Kinky Boots" in the middle of a meeting is rather appealing...

Time Piece Trivia

Tipped off by SciFiTech over on scifi.com, I thought these rather nifty-looking Pixel Watches, available in white, brown or pink, reminiscent of Blake's 7's teleport bands as featured in that inexplicably popular BBC show.

Available from online store Red 5 in the UK, The electroluminescent (EL) band intensifies the watch's colour by shining through the translucent case. At night, the watch puts on a special light show, with onscreen scrolling animation, every hour from 9 p.m. until 3.00am

The actual watches on sale display white numerals rather than the rather cool green in the picture above, but as SciFi Tech's Charlie White points out, it's another illustration of how much more commonplace electroluminescent tech is becoming. I particularly like this Time Table Clock! (Available for now only, it seems, from the Tokyo-based store Normal Design).

New Planet discovered

The European Space Agency's discovery of a new planet five times the size of the Earth that just might have water and thus could support life is great news, although it probably means we'll now start getting scare stories about alien terrorists from the wackier members of the House of Lords. The news has of course already provoked comic comment...

Talking of topical SF gags, this satirical item ("Star Trek Geeks Could Be Up In Arms Over Proposed New Phaser Laws") will I am sure provoke howls of anger from the US where the terrible events in Virginia are still raw. I gather that a similar gag about Daleks over on Outpost Gallifrey forums has not gone down well, either...

Surely straight from the imagination of Charles Stross...

Dutch researchers have recently announced a piece of kit called "RFID Guardian", which sounds like something straight out of the devilish imagination of SF author Charles Stross (I'm still trying to finish the mind-boggling Accelerando) and could be one in the eye for the corporates and criminals who see ways of exploting this chip technology, already being rolled out by supermarkets to track things like razor blades - a top shoplifted item.

As the inventors of the RFID Guardian explain in their web sites:

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the latest phase in the decades-old trend of the miniaturization of computers. RFID transponders are tiny resource-limited computers that do not have a battery that needs periodic replacement, inductively powered by their external reading devices, called RFID readers. Once the RFID tag is activated, the tag then decodes the incoming query and produces an appropriate response by modulating the request signal, using one or more subcarrier frequencies. RFID Tags can do a limited amount of processing, and have a small amount (<1024 bits) of storage.

RFID tags are useful for a huge variety of applications, as well as open to abuse. Some of the applications include: supply chain management, automated payment, physical access control, counterfeit prevention, and smart homes and offices. RFID tags are also implanted in all kinds of personal and consumer goods, for example, passports, partially assembled cars, frozen dinners, ski-lift passes, clothing, and public transportation tickets.

Implantable RFID tags for animals allow concerned owners to label their pets and livestock. The Verichip Corporation has also created a slightly adapted implantable RFID chip, the size of a grain of rice, for use in humans. Since its introduction, the Verichip was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and this tiny chip is currently deployed in both commercial and medical systems.

This sounds similar to the technology we saw used in the original Star Trek series - Kirk and Spock adapted their subcutaneous transponders to escape a cell in the bizarre space Nazi story Patterns of Force. But I digress...

There are dangers to RFID, too. Businesses and governments are not the only ones interested in it. Civil liberties groups, hackers and criminals are also keenly interested in this new development, albeit for very different reasons. Civil liberties groups are concerned about RFID technology being used to invade people's privacy; RFID tags enable unethical individuals to snoop on people and surreptitiously collect data on them without their approval or even knowledge. For example, RFID-enabled public transit tickets could allow public transit managers to compile a dossier listing all of a person's travels in the past year -- information which may be of interest to the police, divorce lawyers, and others.

... A completely different category of threats arises when hackers or criminals cause valid RFID tags to behave in unexpected (and generally malicious) ways. Typically, computer-bound or mobile RFID readers query RFID tags for their unique identifier or on-tag data, which often serves as a database key or launches some real-world activity. For example, when an RFID reader at a supermarket checkout counter reads the tag on a product, the software driving it could add the item scanned to the list of the customer's purchases, tallying up the total after all products have been scanned.

Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionally) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software. From there it can be easily spread to other RFID tags. No one thought this possible until now. Later in this website we provide all the details on how to do this and how to defend against it in order to warn the designers of RFID systems not to deploy vulnerable systems.

The RFID Guardian that's been developed is what I call a mobile device - when it detects someone trying to query an RFID tag on your person ( transit passes, perhaps even credit cards), it smartly looks-up a previously compiled access control list to find out what to do. That could be nothing, or else the device will answer the query with data the user specifies, or else it will broadcast noise on the frequency in question to drown out the tag. Should it not have instructions for the tag in question, it asks the user for a decision.

BoingBoing describes it as "a must-read paper for anyone who cares about electronic privacy and who wants to catch a glimpse of the future".

With the interest in these things constantly on the rise, there's a lot of concern about the civil liberty implications of this technology, and the dangers they pose. More at: www.rfidvirus.org and www.rfidguardian.org

Lest you think all this a bit way out, students at the University of Washington have developed a device which can track the RFID technology used in the Nike+/ipod set up, enabling someone to track or, more scarily stalk a user. It seems that because the technology used isn't encrypted, the transmitter in your Nike+ sneaker can be read up to 60 feet away. So a stalker would quickly be able to build up a picture of that person's habits while using the set up, opening them up to all sorts of potential dangers, not least of which being the stalker would know when the person was out of their house.

CNN reported on the invention after security expert Bruce Schneier described the issues raised as "very scary" on his informative blog. Because the radio frequency identification, or RFID, transmitter broadcasts a unique identifier, people can be tracked by it, the University of Washington researchers said in their paper on Nike+iPod Sport Kit (click for PDF). The team said they built a surveillance device, which cost about $250, and integrated the surveillance system with Google Maps.

I think I'll take the stairs

Inspired by the human cannonball of circus fame, US defence researchers have patented a device to fire police officers, fire-fighters or special forces to the top of a five-storey building, New Scientist reported earlier this week.

Apparently, the device could put a man on the top of a five-storey building in less than two seconds. The invention comprises a launch ramp that would be placed on the ground at an angle of about 80 degrees to the building. A person would then sit in a chair attached to the ramp, and compressed air from a cylinder underneath would shoot the chair up the ramp's guide rails.

"At the top, the chair would come to an instant halt, leaving the person to fly up and over the edge of the roof, to hopefully land safely on top of the building," the magazine reveals.
In circuses, the human eyeball is used to estimate the best angle for firing the cannon. But the patent, filed by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), says the ramp's precise elevation and the chair's speed of ascent would be calculated by computer.

I think we should start nominating some politicians to test it...

The Doctor Sings

This is a labour of love: "The Doctor Sings" will I'm sure eventually fall foul of both Tom Baker and BT, but someone has taken advantage of Tom Baker's use as the company's voice of text messaging (well, until recently, anyway) and created this site which has him 'singing' various songs.

Apparently, Baker spent 11 days recording 11,593 words and phrases, and, as the Pitchfork site points out, "if you subscribe BT you can access them all, making the most famous voice in British sci-fi tell dirty jokes, flirt with your girlfriend, or in the case of "The Doctor"-- an unidentified remix artist-- speak-sing songs".

Songs covered include Pulp's "Common People" and Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here".

An innspired mis-use of BT...

New technology may be changing the human brain

Thought-provoking article in The Guardian yesterday (and even more thought-provoking responses from readers) about expert warnings about the potential impact of digital communication on how people think and learn.: is technology changing our brains?

• See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1759704,00.html • Read the original House of Lords debate that inspired the article (tinyURL link)