Spider Woman the Motion Comic?

As dead-tree publishing (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.) tries to figure out where they fit into our increasingly digitized media world, it's really no surprise that the comic book industry would experiment as well.

Both the "Big 2" and Indy comic companies have experimented with "Motion Comics"--not quite animated versions of print comics set to musical scores and with voice acting. The motion comes in from taking elements of the original panels and zooming, panning, moving of certain elements of panels, etc.

Up 'til now, motion comics have made from pre-existing comics--Image's Invincible or DC's Watchmen, for example. I enjoyed, but wasn't crazy about the former, and from the samples of the latter I glanced at, I figured I'd have a similar reaction.

This week, Marvel Comics released the first issue/episode of Spider Woman: Agent of S.W.O.R.D. which promises (and may deliver) to be a game-changer. This series was designed to be a motion comic from the get-go. The drawings, script, etc. were intended for the medium, not revised for it (a print edition, which will have some new elements should be released next month).

And the improvement in quality is obvious.

I'm not the biggest fan of Jessica Drew/Spider Woman, nor of the artist, Alex Maleev. The writer, Brian Michael Bendis, is almost never fails tho, and I wanted to see how it worked. I'm glad I did--episode 1 worked so much better than anything others have tried, the voicework was spot-on, the art was compelling, the length (about 10 min.) was long enough to satisfy, but not so long as to bore (can't imagine this format working for longer pieces), and the script was...well, I said Bendis wrote it.

Will this be enough to broaden Marvel's audience? Will other motion comics follow the same scheme? Who knows, but it's worth a shot. And as long as iTunes has it for $.99 (for another week or so), you can't go wrong.