Image Superstars Discuss Genre in Comics

Image Comics held a panel Saturday at Comic-Con to discuss the genre renaissance currently occurring in the comic book medium. The panel included Ed Brubaker, Frank Barbiere, Tim Seeley, Mike Norton, Kurtis J. Wiebe, John Layman and Ron Marz.

Moderator Ron Richards got started saying that Image Comics publish comic books that didn’t fit into the traditional “superhero genre” that many publishers focused on. He had the panel each describe what genre their titles fit into and answers ranged from “slasher/humor book” to “rural noir.”

“Comics have been dominated by superheroes for a long time and I think the bubble had kinda burst,” Tim Seeley said. He pointed to exposure from TV shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead that opened up popular culture's mind to a comic book world beyond superheroes.

“As superhero comics have become more corporate and more editorial controlled, we have wanted to have other outlets to do new things,” Marz added. He pointed out that the comic medium allowed from bigger concepts and genre mash-ups. “I love pizza, but I don’t want to eat it every day, I want a variety.”

Panelist Ed Brubaker showed up a few minutes late and asked the panelist if they had “got to porn yet?”

When asked what sort of genre he would say his books fell into, Brubaker answered, “All of them. I’m very interested in horror and how it works in comics. You can’t control the reader’s pace and how they see that panels. I’m good friends with Joe Hill and he said I should just do shocking things, like having a guy get hit by a plane, so I did that!"

“I think genre can be an easier sell than superheroes. I mean, how do you describe Spider-Man? How do you pitch that without digging into all the details? With genre you can say horror or noir or zombies,” Seeley said.

Richards asked the panel if they felt that they had to follow the rules of their particular genres in their comics. Marz said he didn’t feel confined by rules, but he was mindful of them. “There is no one looking over our shoulder when we do this stuff, so we tell the stories we want to tell.”

“I think the art is what keeps you unsettled,” Norton said of Revival. He pointed out that the visuals of the series didn’t fit into a traditional horror or noir look, but that worked to play with the reader’s expectations.

“I think you can play with genre tropes,” Brubaker added. He pointed to writer John Sandford who plays with the expectations of crime fiction in his Prey series of novels. He noted that writers and artists needed to be mindful of the rules and tropes, but breaking them was an important part of the process.

On the subject of romance comics, the panelist said the genre could still come back. “I don’t want to read it,” Layman yelled.

Brubaker said that he felt that there would be a market for the romance genre, but finding the right avenue to distribute it would be difficult. “Saga is a romance comic, it’s also science fiction.” The rest of the panelist expressed their love of the romance genre and hoped that it would come back into the popular culture.

On the subject of research, Wiebe said “I do quite a lot for Peter Panzerfaust. I have to.”

“Have your story first and then make the research fit your story. Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out that doesn’t fit. You just go with it, you are writing fiction, not fact,” Brubaker said. He noted that being too confined by research can hurt a story.

Marz said that making the reader feel that what they read was the truth, whether it was or not, was what was most important. If what the reader is absorbed in the story, then creators have done their job.

Benjamin is a writer and storyteller. He owns many leather-bound books and his office smells of rich mahogany. Follow Benjamin on Twitter @616Earth, or find him on IGN.

Advertising: Trying to Burnish Its Image, Johnson & Johnson Turns to Emotions

The company’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit recalled more than 280 million packages of over the counter medications like Motrin, children’s Tylenol liquid and Benadryl in 2010, and the same year, its DePuy Orthopedics unit recalled two popular artificial hip replacement models.

About 10,000 lawsuits have been filed involving those artificial hip devices and while a Chicago jury this month rejected claims of wrongdoing by Johnson & Johnson in one suit, another lawsuit in March yielded a less favorable outcome when a Los Angeles jury ordered the company to pay more than $8.3 million in damages to a Montana man.

In the midst of that turmoil — and perhaps to distance itself from the bad press of product recalls and pending litigation — the company on Thursday is introducing its first corporate branding campaign in more than 10 years. The company will announce the campaign, called For All You Love, at its annual shareholder meeting in New Brunswick, N.J.

The cornerstone of the campaign, a 60-second black and white video, begins with a shot of a sleeping baby about to get a gentle kiss from its mother. In the background, a softer, almost childlike version of the Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” plays.

“Love,” says a woman’s voice. “It’s the most powerful thing on the planet.” Happy clips from everyday life — a father bathing with his baby, a grandfather playing piano with his granddaughter and a teacher playing with her students — are seen during the spot, as is the occasional Johnson & Johnson product like Band-Aids and baby shampoo.

“Love is family,” says the voice-over. “Love is the reason you care for the tiny and the fragile.”

The campaign was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of TBWA Worldwide, a division of the Omnicom Group. It is the first time the agency has worked with Johnson & Johnson.

“This is the chance to reassert this very iconic brand to the world,” said Rob Schwartz, the global creative president of TBWA Worldwide. The creative team at the agency was inspired by a company statement produced in 1943 that highlighted its responsibility to its consumers, employees, communities and stockholders. Mr. Schwartz described the statement as “one of the best corporate documents ever.”

Based on that, the agency created a manifesto about love that will appear in print publications, including The New York Times and People magazine on May 10. Television commercials and digital ads will begin appearing on May 6 during shows like “Modern Family” on ABC, “The Voice” on NBC and “American Idol” on Fox, and on Web sites like abcnews.com. The videos feature real people and real relationships, not actors, Mr. Schwartz said. Subsequent videos for the campaign will also focus on the philanthropic work the company supports. The campaign is estimated to cost $20 million to $30 million through the end of the year.

While a Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s recalls or the lawsuits it faces, Michael Sneed, the company’s vice president for global corporate affairs, said the goal of the campaign was “to continue to reconnect with all of the people who come into contact with J.& J. in their daily lives.”

A campaign focused on love creates a sense of trust with the brand, said Kapil Bawa, a marketing professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. “Corporate branding tries to instill a sense of trust in the company and for J.& J., given the kind of products it makes, that trust is very, very critical,” Mr. Bawa said.

Mr. Sneed agreed. “I do think people want to understand what’s behind the brand,” he said. “They want to understand what they value.”

Many brand campaigns of late have included a major emotional hook, including a Procter & Gamble campaign from last summer’s Olympics about mothers and their athlete children and a Dove campaign about a forensic sketch artist drawing women based on their own descriptions. “They are trying to humanize the corporate entity,” Mr. Bawa said. “That’s why emotion is so important.”

Emotion was also present at the ad agency table, Mr. Schwartz said. “The smell of the baby powder, the scent of the shampoo, everybody got very emotional just from our meetings,” he said. “This is a very emotional brand, so we’ve got to deliver a very emotional idea.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Adjusting a Camera’s Image Quality Settings

The photos from my point-and-shoot digital camera definitely do not look at good as when I first got the camera. I clean the lens regularly, so what might have caused this?

One quick thing to check is the camera settings for file quality. “Quality,” in digital camera-speak, typically refers to the amount of compression the camera uses when saving the photos you shoot in the JPG format. (The photo files are compressed to save storage space on the camera’s memory card and make room for more pictures.)

The higher the compression, the less visual data is saved with the file. This means pictures with a high rate of compression will not generally look as sharp and detailed compared to those that are saved with a low level of compression. Files with higher quality/low compression take up more room on the memory card than images with lower quality/high compression, though.

Most cameras let you choose the level of compression in the Quality settings, although the terminology varies between camera manufacturers. Some use terms like “Normal, Fine and Superfine” or “Good, Better and Best,” but they are all relative to each other — the “Best” setting uses less compression and therefore makes for a richer-looking image. (The Image Maven site has examples of different quality settings.)

So it is possible the image-quality setting may have gotten changed inadvertently, which is not all that uncommon on cameras with tiny buttons and multiple menu screens. Changing it back could resolve the issue. Many cameras also include settings for image resolution as well, which affects the look of the pictures when printed. Photos that have too low a resolution for the chosen size of the print will look blurry and jaggy.

If a trip through the camera’s settings doesn’t fix the problem and the lens is clean, there could be a problem with the camera’s image sensor or another hardware issue. Check the support area of your manufacturer’s Web site for troubleshooting and repair information.

The Cloud Factories: Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Mr. Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the Web site from going down.

That was in early 2006, when Facebook had a quaint 10 million or so users and the one main server site. Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.

They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled about 20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies.

“This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,” said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company’s reputation. “If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway.”

These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the “virtual” world and all manner of memory is stored in “the cloud.”

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers.

“It’s a waste,” said Dennis P. Symanski, a senior researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group. “It’s too many insurance policies.”

The Cloud Factories: Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Mr. Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the Web site from going down.

That was in early 2006, when Facebook had a quaint 10 million or so users and the one main server site. Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.

They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

A server is a sort of bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to process data. The study sampled about 20,000 servers in about 70 large data centers spanning the commercial gamut: drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies.

“This is an industry dirty secret, and no one wants to be the first to say mea culpa,” said a senior industry executive who asked not to be identified to protect his company’s reputation. “If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway.”

These physical realities of data are far from the mythology of the Internet: where lives are lived in the “virtual” world and all manner of memory is stored in “the cloud.”

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers.

“It’s a waste,” said Dennis P. Symanski, a senior researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit industry group. “It’s too many insurance policies.”