This week marked the end of another failed experiment by Marvel Comics.  Written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Alex Maleev, Spider-Woman was a really good comic. Lasting only seven issues, Marvel tried to simultaneously release the comic along with what everyone keeps calling a “motion comic”. I call it a cartoon. I think the idea was to sell the motion comic online while selling the regular comic in comic stores. But the motion comic is available for free on several sites and the comic didn’t sell as well as it should have.

To create the motion comic, they took the comic and animated minor parts of it. By trying to compete in the digital age by coming up trying to come up with some thing new –  all they’ve managed to do is create a poorly animated cartoon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b310FHi_Vw

In 1965, a Canadian animation company called Grantray-Lawrence Animation produced a show called The Marvel Super Heroes which featured a variety of Marvel characters. They took the actual art from the comics and provided limited animation or a motion comic if you will.

If I want to read a comic, I will read a comic book. If I want to watch a cartoon, I’ll watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Yh027xYaA&feature=player_embedded

I hope that Marvel will have learned a valuable lesson from this failure but I doubt it.