The House of Ideas lived up to their name at SXSW Interactive today with the announcement of Marvel Infinite Comics: a new approach to comics that focuses on building them digitally from the ground up with the digital experience in mind. The result is a cleaner, more fluid comic experience with digital comics, where the word boxes, dialogue, and even some animated movement pop up in progression as you read the digital comic. Marvel also announced some pretty spectacular AR (Augmented Reality) features– the ability to scan comics, art, etc, and get “bonus features” from them. It looked just absolutely spectacular, and my mind is officially blown.
Onhand were Axel Alonso (Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief), Jeph Loeb (Head of Marvel Television) and Peter Phillips (SVP & GM, Marvel Digital Media Group) to make the announcements.
“You’re going to see something that’s going to blow your mind.” said Jeph Loeb. Boy was he right. “We’ve always been digital innovaters,” added Axel Alonso.
They branded some of their new changes as the “Marvel Re-Evolution”, which includes both Infinite Comics and the AR app. The first story we’ll see in the Infinite line is Nova story that leads into this spring’s Avengers vs X-men written by Mark Waid and drawn by Stuart Immonen. They showed us the first 20 or so pages, and it is spectacular.
For the Augmented Reality features, the best way is just to show you. CNet has some footage here– check this out— especially that 3D Iron Man rendering!!
This was Marvel’s first appearance at SXSW and boy did they bring it. The only problem? The stage where they set up, while being right in the middle of the mayhem of the awesome Screenburn Arcade (which is awesome), only had seats for maybe 100 people. So we had a standing room crowd for the biggest announcement of the festival since. . . well, since Joss Whedon denied that the aliens in The Avengers were Skrulls yesterday. But whatever, still a big announcement that people were excited about.
As for the Ultimate Spiderman footage, it was pretty awesome. Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes has a worthy companion show. Ultimate Spiderman premieres April 1st on Disney XD.
I speculated yesterday on what Infinite Comics would be. . . and. . . well, you can be the judge how right I was. (mostly wrong– ok pretty much completely wrong.)
See more from Marvel about it here.
I’ll be sitting down with Marvel execs and talent in a couple hours to hash this out more– come back in the coming hours for updates, and keep watching tonight for reviews of Indie Game: The Movie and 7 Days Without Print.