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Take four scoops of a comic book, two teaspoons of a Hollywood film, a side of new media and you’ll have yourself one delicious helping of a motion comic.

In this new medium, companies like Gain Enterprises, scan pictures from an existing comic book, hire voice actors, add sound effects, and then include some of their own animation to make the motion comic.

“I like to think of it as cinematic comics - digital cinematic comics,” said David Gale, executive vice president of MTV New Media, in a interview with The New York Times.

One of the comic industry’s most loved franchises is flying fearlessly into the new medium. In preparation for the most anticipated movie of 2009, The Watchmen, a motion comic has been created containing all twelve issues of the original series.

Watchmen’s first chapter is available for free download on iTunes until August 2nd. After that, each chapter will cost $1.99.

According to Diamond Comics Distributors, DC comics (the publisher of Batman) sold an estimated 274,035 Batman comics last month. Compared to the 45,805,055 tickets sold so far of The Dark Knight, one can assume a lot more people are watching comic movies than they are actually buying comics. (Just to be fair, Iron Man’s publisher, Marvel, sold 156,239 Iron Man comics and the Iron Man movie has 44,487,003 sold tickets so far).

So, how do you market a comic book movie to people that aren’t reading your comic? Just scan the comic and make it look like a movie!

Another comic series, Invincible, who’s own movie is apparently (according to the rumor mill) about to start pre-production, is having the first motion comic television series starting on MTV2 this fall. A video preview is posted below:

Invincible Episode #1

Is it pure genius or just hard to watch?

“I don’t know…I have a hard time reading and watching the pictures at the same time,” said Brogan employee Jo Lynn Agee. She is a big fan of the CW’s Smallville (the young adventures of Superman) and several comic movies but actually got sensations of motion sickness watching Invincible. Although, she did say the images looked very good.

“I really liked it. It was a throwback to the comic cartoons I used to watch as a kid,” said another comic book movie fan, and Brogan employee, Ennis McGee. He added, “I could have watched a whole episode.”

It looks like time will have to tell if the motion comic is an effective marketing tool, new form of media, or an experiment gone wrong.

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Finally! A way to make yourself look dumber - despite that Chinese lettering tattoo you got back in ‘99.

Advertisers have been tapping the final frontier of advertising - the human body - for a few years now. Starting back in 2001, Internet gambling site GoldenPalace.com paid boxer Bernard Hopkins $100,000 to wear a temporary tattoo on his back during his championship fight with Félix Trinidad. GoldenPalace.com followed that up with Fox’s Celebrity Boxing in which Tonya Harding, Todd Bridges and Danny Bonaduce wore temporary tattoos.

According to USA Today, that stunt increased GoldenPalace.com’s web traffic 200% in the 24 hours after Celebrity Boxing.

So, is branding a human being wrong? People have been standing on street corners for decades wearing signs advertising everything from the end of the world to shoes. In fact, one of my mildly respectable friends held a “$5-a-pizza” sign for Little Ceasars in college. Given that, what’s the big deal if the tattoo is temporary?

Well, aside from consumer action groups, like Commercial Alert that protest the temporary tattoos as demeaning, the main opponents are advertisers and promoters. The problem with advertising on an athlete’s back is that it cuts into the profits of other advertisers that sponsor the event or paid to have their logo posted around the stadium (or ring). It’s not bad for the athlete though: they get paid directly.

Since 2001, tattoo advertising has gotten even crazier. Goldenpalace.com paid streakers at the 2003 French Open and UEFA Cup to run across the field with Golden Palace’s logo on their backs, Toyota paid 40 people to walk around Times Square with “Toyota Scion” written on their foreheads, and 22-year-old Jim Nelson sold the space on the back of his head to advertise CIHost.com with a PERMANENT tattoo for $7,000.

Just do a quick search on google for “tattoo advertising” and you’ll get plenty of opportunities for advertising on yourself. For example, leaseyourbody.com promises “BIG $$$$$” for leasing your body. I mean with five $ symbols, how can you go wrong?

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“Holy dancing queen, Batman!”

Chances are, if you are over the age of 13, you went to see a movie this weekend. It’s not just that The Dark Knight broke the majority of box office earning records; Hollywood made history by having its most successful weekend of all time bringing in $253 million for the top twelve movies.

Not only can Hollywood appeal to younger (and probably masculine) audiences, the second place movie, Mamma Mia, successfully targeted everyone who didn’t care to see Dark Knight.

Sure Mia’s weekend earnings of $27.6 million is no where near Dark Knight’s $155.34 million, but that still makes it the #247 movie in opening weekend history. Not bad, considering the way the two films were marketed entirely differently.

The marketing of both films not only gives us clues to their success but how to advertise to dissimilar demographics.

The Dark Knight’s aggressive viral marketing campaign began over a year ago with the website IbelieveinHarveyDent.com. The fictional website was set up for Gotham City’s district attorney. The website, along with nine others that came along, let fans participate in the hype by working for clues by calling phone numbers, emailing, and completing puzzles, apparently given to them by the Joker.

The first website, IbelieveinHarveyDent.com, eventually was “vandalized” by the Joker, complete with blood stains, faces drawn all over pictures of Harvey Dent, and “Ha ha” being scribbled all over the homepage.

Scavenger hunts were also set up all over the United States for fans to uncover clues to reveal a new photograph and audio clip of the Joker on the third website, RorysDeathKiss.com. One of the clues was a phone number written in the sky during last year’s San Diego Comic Con.

In the months leading up to its release, Dark Knight advertising got even more frantic. The Gotham News, a four-page newspaper set in Gotham City, was produced and mailed to various websites and magazines two months before the movie began.

Then, one week before the film release, the producers of the film pulled out all the stops. On Wednesday, July 10^th the “Citizens for Batman” group (a fake citizen action group that supports Batman) shined a huge bat signal on the Woolworth Building in New York City and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Of course, another movie was promoting its way all the way to the box office: 3 million packages of Athenos Hummus, Pita Chips, Neo Classic Hummus and Feta Cheese varieties featured codes for free music downloads from the Mamma Mia movie soundtrack.

Well, clearly the two movies aren’t on the same level, but if we can take a guess and say that Mamma Mia appealed to older audiences, then it isn’t strange to assume that they don’t know how to use a computer.

Or, was the marketing itself tied to the films’ content?

You see, yours truly is uniquely suited to judge both of these films. On Friday night, after months of eager anticipation (like probably a lot of other 25 year old men), I went to see The Dark Knight. Then, unlike most men my age, I was dragged to Mamma Mia with my mother the next night.

Laugh it up. Ok, now to my point.

The Dark Knight was one of the most complex movies I have ever seen. It had so many plots and subplots going on that even after a lifetime of reading comics, I didn’t even know what was going to happen. Without giving too much away, I just have to say the film probably ends unexpectedly for most people. Walking out of the theatre, I was speechless. I wasn’t even sure what I thought about the film until a few days after I had processed everything.

Then, I went to see Mamma Mia. The basic plot is this: a girl, Sophie, grows up not knowing who her father is. So, she invites the three men who MIGHT be her father to her wedding to find out who it is. It never gets any more complicated than that.

So, the lesson I contrive from this is that if you have a complex movie, or product, market it with complex and challenging promotions; your audience will reward you for it. But, if you are marketing something Mamma Mia-level simple, throw your logo on a box of feta cheese and call it a day.

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