image004.jpg
The USA Network and DC Comics recently launched a webcomic to tie in with the Season 5 premiere of Burn Notice. And readers seem to have liked it.

Cable network USA and DC Comics debuted Chapter 1 of its “Burn Notice” interactive graphic novel, “A New Day,” alongside the show’s Season 5 premiere on Thursday. To date, “A New Day” has scored more than 100,000 page views, according to the network.
…
“Working with innovative partners, we’ve created a dynamic and fun interactive comic book that gives our fans a level of engagement that they’ve never had before,” said USA’s VP of Digital Jesse Redniss. “We are pushing the technology boundaries to enhance the user experience beyond the one-hour telecast and expanding the story arc into new arenas.”


Written by show writers Ryan Johnson and Peter Lalayanis with art by Tony Shasteen, the comic has some mildly interactive features like clickable content and so on. It’s available for desktop, iOS, and Android.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

1 COMMENT

  1. If I’m reading that correctly, those 100,000 views came within just a day or two. The online comic debuted with the show’s new season, on June 23. This article is timestamped the evening of June 24.

  2. Yowza! Those page views – pretending they’re all from different people, which is unlikely but bear with me – would easily set it at the top of this month’s sales chart.

    ‘course, it’s free, and subject to less geographical restrictions because it’s online . . . but even if we chop that number down to 1/20th, it’s still 5,000 – not terrible for a non-DC/Marvel title in this market.

    Disney, you own ABC and Marvel – keep turning your hit shows into comics! Warner Brothers, you own DC and . . . okay, CW isn’t much of a ratings hog, but a 90210 comic might be interesting? Maybe try some more Supernatural comics.

  5. they actually managed to reach .02% of BURN NOTICE’s audience

    They have an audience of 500 million? Is that domestic or worldwide?

  6. haha, that show doesn’t have 500 million viewers. More like 50. It was probably just 50 Bruce Campbell nerds that clicked it 2k times each.

  9. AACRO: What’s so wrong with reading a comic because it’s based on a TV show? It’s the same “I want to read more about the characters I like” principle that leads to chart-toppers like the Twilight and Maximum Ride adaptations, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander graphic novel, Buffy “Season 8” . . . people are drawn to things because the concept or characters appeal to them. You don’t read the comics you read just because “they’re comics,” after all!

    Besides, odds are for a lot of Burn Notice fans this is the first long-form comic they’ve read in ages, maybe ever. If it helps break their image of comics as just superheroes and/or kid stuff, perhaps it will encourage them to read and even purchase others!

    Jee-eez, the lengths some people go to be party poopers . . .

  10. Angelica: “AACRO: What’s so wrong with reading a comic because it’s based on a TV show?”

    Yeah, that’s kinda like saying there’s something wrong with a movie ‘cuz it’s based on a comic book.

    Oh, wait … people actually used to say that … and still do :)

    My biggest problem with the online comic is the strange portrait of Michael Westin that appears in select captions. I appreciate trying to make the medium accessible to newcomers … but do they really believe the general public is that dense, that they won’t figure out that Michael Westin is narrating? Especially since that’s a staple of the show …

  12. @ Angelica, what I was talking about was not because it was an adaptation but this trend of plopping IPs on any and every form of media as ad-space for the core property.

    This comic was more a interactive ad that was cheap to make compared to filming. using Buffy as an example is a little off, the Buffy comics are a continuation of the series, not a cheap money grab of an adaptation like Maximum Ride and Outlander( I recall the Outlander comic being poorly recieved by fans and critics). In a way comics have become the new “film-novelizations” for the top tier media outlets(Film, TV, Video Games), cheaply produced objects to splash your IP’s on, even cheaper since it’s online.

    Sorry I’m not desperate to celebrate 100k views on borrowed fame. obviously no i’ll will to the artists or writers, jus news like this is a hollow win to me.

  13. *shrug* Hey, crummy comics is still comics.

    And I’d hardly characterize Maximum Ride and Outlander as “money grabs” . . . sure, they made bank, but they just as easily could not have. Plenty of GNs based on book series have fallen flat sales-wise.

    I’m not sure how invested James Patterson is in the comics medium, but the Maximum Ride comics are enjoyable enough (at least to one who’s never read the books!) and Diana Gabaldon is definitely fond of comics, however good or bad the Outlander GN may be (haven’t read it, myself, and many of the really “bad” reviews on Amazon and the like are just rants from fans who felt “tricked” into reading a “picture book.”)

    I’d also hesitate to call the Outlander GN a “money grab” – at least any more than any side-book in a series is – simply because such a large segment of that audience is leaning-on-the-older-side-of-adult women, a group that (as a whole) isn’t that familiar with comics.

    I get your frustration at the “IP farm” mentality, but telling/re-telling a story across multiple mediums isn’t always a bad thing.

    This Burn Notice fan-goodie could easily have been released as a novella, or an alternate reality game, or “webisodes” – but clearly someone in a meeting room said “hold on, I think our viewers might really respond to a comic.”

    Given how Burn Notice is outside the typical “automatically gets a comic” range (that is, it doesn’t run on SyFy,) I welcome it. If this success encourages the producers of other shows to make tie-in comics, however crummy, I’m all for it.

    . . . this enthusiasm may or may not be related to my continuing desire for an Ugly Betty Season 5 comic. x[)