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What is the best integrated rôle of emerging hybrid Media in the current market place?

Perhaps you have heard of those portable audio recorders for students that adjust the pitch down as you speed up the play rate, so as to keep voices intelligible when speed listening to one's class notes. But what about video? A good movie or TV show often succeeds in manipulating the use of time, the viewer sense of time, or both. But imagine a control, perhaps even bio feedback, so that a digital video player would speed up and slow down in response to the viewer. Steadily speeding up like a Mike Jittlov short as the viewer becomes most receptive, engrossed and eager for the narrative to unfold, and then slowing down, even dissolving or tweening between frames, as the viewers attention is arrested by a dramatic moment as it transpires on screen.

Well, reading is already something like that. Only reading benefits in quite that way from the effort of concentration entailed. The viewer is a witness, while the reader is, in effect, downloading, processing and digesting from the text body. While video is still a medium trapped in real time, without the subjectively regulated input rate intrinsic to reading, and reliant upon capture of audience attention to the pace of the moving images. Yet text alone, however informative, though it may grip the imagination, cannot engage the senses the way that movies and TV can.

Comix, however, draw the concentration of reading, like text alone, while engaging visually, like video. There is a story narrative to better pull the reader under the spell of the Fantasy art work, to dwell upon. Though the images are still, the artist draws the readers eye according to the intention of the work. And so, there is movement. But as, such and when, elicited from the reader. What could be more engrossing? All that is missing is real sound...

Radio shows on LPs packaged with comix have proven unwieldy. Trying to read comix at the same pace as the audio dialogue is just annoying. Removing the text entirely, and synchronizing a slide show of the comix frames with the audio dialogue, would be far better. But then, in that case, one might as well have video rather than static print at all. Or, then again, just play dramatically appropriately music while reading your comix.

Existing Competition:

Marvel Comics has innovated upon, and then long abandoned, a superior integration of audio into the comix medium: Instead of a full sound track, each Marvel CyberComics page on the computer screen has it's own looping background atmosphere, such as falling rain or city traffic noise, or whatever is consistent with the story line at that point. The effect is ethereal and hypnotic! But punctuated by transitional sound effects and exclamations for the action from each page to the next plus very sparing use of Flash animation.

However rarely, the self proclaimed House of Ideas yet gleans innovation, as once in those halcyon days of yore! But, clearly, they don't understand the full potential what they've got. Indeed, Marvel CyberComics are a far more effective use of the Personal Computer Online as a medium, than all of the other lack luster clunky compromises to badly duplicate the utility of television while we all still wait for the needed proper streaming video on demand band width.

More sophisticated atmospheres, such as showcased by the likes of Beatnik, can also be integrated into an enhanced Online comix experience. Also more interactive FX and deeper Hypertext. Not to mention Hyperfiction branching story lines and character perspectives, some left blank for site visitors to add text chapters and join communities of future interaction on the frontiers of advanced Sociometry.

There has also been a trend towards movies adapted from comix, successful independent publications in particular, for the kind of Science Fantasy they offer, innovative and flashy, visual, and not so cerebral as classic text Science Fiction. Because big box office has relied less on solid storytelling, and tended more toward clever and extravagant commedia dell'arte entertainment experience. (And even that's only for an audience segment still holding out for anything at all rising above the inane SFX thrill ride format.)

Existing Competition:

Now Hollywood Comics at http://www.hollywoodcomics.com/ has posted a solicitation at http://www.businesspartners.net/open/display/listingdetail.cfm?id=7172&class=a for an investor to help them try to accomplish the same result on purpose, of licensing a property for adaptation into a major motion picture, by means of a tailor made comic book series central to a promotional campaign and market demonstration.

"Our goal is to produce a top selling comic book and then option it to Hollywood. [...] The marketing strategy is to keep like-minded fans of this comics' genre at the forefront and flood film studios with material, while creating a buzz on the internet."

And why not? The rich fantastic vistas and visualizations and sometimes complex literary narratives of modern comix have often been classified as an abbreviated form of the Story Boards by which Cinematography is planned, and the less akin to traditional newspaper Comic Strips (not to mention antecedent pictorial narratives through out history) which are more characterized by clear and simple sequential images and broad expressive character body language and facial expression, feared by some to be fading into a lost art.

The flaw in the Hollywood Comics strategy, however, and the high risk which they willingly acknowledge, is really a problem of economies of scale. Instead of an under powered one shot effort, what is needed is a larger enterprise with the where withal to sustain a more robust effort with multiple offerings on behalf of any number of clients and strategic partners or clients.

Production, webpromotion, Media services, finance, all interfaced intofuture interaction on the frontiers of automated Sociometry.