Digital Comics, Circulation, and the Importance of Being Eric Sluis

Abstract

rubber-stamped words appear smack in the middle of the first frame of the first page of the first issue of Marvel's The Fantastic Four. That is, if you're looking at the PDF version of the comic on the DVD-ROM 44 Tears of Fantastic Four, issued by Graphic Imaging Technology (GIT).1 In the version of Fantastic Four # 1 on Digital Comics Unlimited, Marvel's online comic service, not only are those words absent, but the entire issue has been retouched and recolored. Further, all of the print comic's advertising and editorial content has been excised.2 The Marvel Comics iPhone application also uses a retouched version of the issue, but it differs in another significant respect: it does not allow the viewer to ever see an entire page of the comic, moving instead from frame to frame. All digital comics are not created equal. Imagine for a minute that you have access to the DVD archive of Fantastic Four. Digging into the editorial material in the comics provides some clues about how Mr. Sluis rose to his brief notoriety. The fan mail page in issue #10 reveals that by the time it appeared, back issues of #1-9 were long gone: If anyone has a large supply to sell, we would be glad to print his name and address.3 There were evidently other gaps in Marvel's archive as well: the file copy of Fantastic Four #101 used for the DVD had the numbers 5 and 1 2 inexplicably stamped on the cover before digitization. Certainly not having imagined a digital future in which an original copy of Fantastic Four would be needed again after its 1970 publication, Marvel was rather lucky that Eric Sluis was a better archivist than they were. As comics continue their decades-old process of migrating off the page and onto the screen, the insights of Film Studies scholarship become increasingly relevant to their study. I began with the Eric Sluis example because I want to argue that the branch of cinema theory that deals with circulation is especially