The TfC Ramble is a weekly digest of content from the intersection of technology and comics.
Digital Comics
Popverse: Amazon is jumping into the webtoons game in a big way (and without comiXology)
GoodEReader: WEBTOON prepares to compete against tech giants like Apple and Amazon
The battle of the vertical scroll is on, and for good reason. Imagine riding public transit and almost everyone has their head in their phone, but not everyone is watching TikTok or Instagram reels. Instead many, many are reading verticle scroll comics.
That was my experience riding the trains in Tokyo during a trip I took with my son shortly before COVID. This is a comic market that can’t be ignored.
AI
AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause
AI Art Copyright Ruling Invites Future Battles Over Human Inputs ← Includes a link to the text of the ruling.
This is a significant ruling that definitely has ramifications for comics. On one hand, it can be seen as a significant win for human artists. However, it may also inadvertently introduce hazards for humans if the definition of what counts as AI is not addressed. If it is limited to “generated by a prompt,” the definition is pretty straight forward. But if an artist uses Photoshop’s “content aware fill,” might it make the work “uncopyrightable” if it is shown that the process is arguably an AI tool? This is not a trivial issue, as virtually every graphics program I use has some feature that could be considered AI-enabled, at least from a computer science point of view. At what point is it “human enough.” I suspect we are headed to a world where AI, in the legal sense, explicitly refers to a technology that uses a large language model and neural networks (but not necessarily a text prompt), but we’ll have to wait and see.
*insert more legal wrangling here*
NFTs
nft.dcuniverse.com
Aug. 24 Vengeance of Bane (1992) #1 Price: 9.99 Total Editions: 4,000
Veve.me
Aug. 21 Loki (2004) #1 Published: 2004 Price: 6.99 Total Editions: 5,000 (Sold out)
Aug. 23 Tarzan of the Apes #213 Balu of the Great Apes Published: 1972 Price: 6.99 Total Editions: 3,500 (Sold out)
Industry News
This week, I sat in on a demo of the creator tool for the dReader digital comic app and it literally gave me goosebumps. (This video is of the reader.) The team has so many awesome features planned for this Solana-based digital comic/collectibles project. This no-code “digital comic store” environment could end up being the equivalent of VeVe, except for independent creators. I’ll be sure to share more details when I can. Follow them on
Just Charts
Data sources: Marvel_Comics.csv & Complete_DC_Comic_Books.csv via kaggle.com
In this case, “appearances” means “the times the name appeared in the title” and does not accurately reflect the actual number of times the character appeared in a comic.
Writer Accountability
This was a hugely productive week. The goal was to dictate the remaining parts of my book, “Comic NFTs - An Ethical Approach,” including the glossary. Having six episodes “in the can” will allow me time to figure out what comes next for the podcast. I am contemplating expanding the scope to a more general “Tech for Comics” podcast.
As mentioned, I was super impressed by the dReader Creators presentation I attended this week. It was also extremely gratifying to find out one of the founders had read my book and suggested during the presentation that others read it! They have a lot of things on the go that will come to fruition in the next two months.
I watched “Flatland The Film” for a project I am
noodlingwriting.Thank you to Patrick Lugo for the demo of “Streamyard” and discussion about awesome crows.
Just for Fun
Sound on. I know exactly the person who would roll up to my place on a scooter sounding like this. 😂