This past week, Diamond Distributors, the largest and basically only company responsible for getting comic books into people’s hands, announced that they were upping their minimums, essentially shutting out many small-press publications from earning widespread distribution. As soon as the news broke, Brigid caught the story and commented about the image of the webcomics model getting better and better with each new restriction Diamond enforces.

Enter Ka-Blam. The already popular digital printing service has posted an intriguing banner at the top of their site:

Breaking News!! Ka-Blam to Launch Direct Market Comics Distribution System! Details Coming Soon!

Excitement doesn’t begin to describe the energy surrounding this possible paradigm shift. Stay tuned for the big news or immensely overhyped disappointment, coming soon!

One of the biggest stories of this week in webcomics, and one that Brigid has already briefly touched on, is the more widespread exposure of the pay-for-play service, Assetbar. Before this week, the only notable webcomic to take advantage of this pseudo-subscription-based,  fanbase barometer was Achewood. Now, both Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub have linked up their respective strips to this fan club of sorts and the floodgates are sure to follow, being opened by the sheer force of webcomics creators eager to share more of their already public lives with their readers.

Continue reading →

Brandon Thomas hates reading comics on his computer screen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not inevitable. This column sounds like it would be flamebait, but it’s really not; he takes a good hard look at the industry as a whole and concludes that while digital distribution is part of the solution, it’s only a part. The bigger issue is that people are reading the same old comics with the same old licensed characters, and one way to get them to read something new is to lower the price barrier.

On the other hand, digital comics are not immune from the recession: The Beat reports that layoffs at MySpace include Sam Humphries, who ran the comics features. We here at Digital Strips have been quick to criticize MySpace as a webcomics interface, but the fact is that it brought more eyeballs to comics, and that’s a good thing. Best of luck to Mr. Humphries, and we hope that MySpace Comics sticks with us for a while. EDIT: And it looks like it will!

The biggest publisher in Japan, Kodansha, is launching a new manga simultaneously online and in print; they are even allowing bloggers to republish the comic Misako-San under a Creative Commons license.

Related: This post at Oz and Ends discusses why people don’t enjoy reading from a screen, and there are links for those who want to dig deeper. If nothing else, this seems like an excellent argument against blinking banner ads.

Continue reading →

Rob Staeger interviews Shayna Marchese about her webcomic, Voids, at Blog@Newsarama.

Also at Blog@, Troy Brownfield has a few quick questions for David Gallaher, whose High Moon Zuda comic will be released in print form in October.

Larry Cruz talks to Neil Kleid about his erstwhile Zuda comic, Action, Ohio, and the experience of having a webcomic at Zuda versus Shadowline, Action’s current home.

Joamette Gil interviews Dava Butler, the creator of the My Little Pony fumetti Kimono’s Townhouse, at Manga Punk.

At Talk About Comics, Shaenon Garrity interviews Alexander Danner and Edward J. Grug III about Gingerbread Comics.

Brad Guigar rounds up the webcomics panels at NYCC at Webcomics.com. Brad also addresses an issue that is likely to become more prominent in the near future: Long-form webcomics. His post brings out an interesting issue, actually: Coming from the gag-a-day context, he recommends that each page of a comic be “satisfying,” with some sort of hook or cliffhanger on each page. That seems like it would change the pacing in a way that might not work so well if one reads a big chunk of the comic at once—a clear case of the medium affecting the message.

The notion of an online exhibition of webcomics makes Johanna Draper Carlson scratch her head at Comics Worth Reading, but there is an explanation in the comments section.

If you’re curious about what the world might be like if chickens demanded equal rights, you can download a free copy of issue 1 of Elmer, by Gery Alanguilan, at his website. You’ll need the CBR comics reader to read it, but you can get that there as well. The dead-tree version of the first issue is sold out, which is actually a pretty good reason to put it on the web.

At Manga Xanadu, Lori Henderson writes about Tokyopop’s foray into e-book formats, particularly the e-reader. One big problem: They only have one volume of most series available.

Reviews

Larry Cruz on Femmegasm (The Webcomic Overlook)
Greg McElhatton on the print version of Never As Bad As You Think (Read About Comics)
Ren C. Henry on Sorcery 101 (Manga Punk)

The news that Diamond, the sole distributor for print comics to comics stores, has raised its minimums has prompted some serious examination of the whole comic marketing system, and there’s no doubt that webcomics and other electronic media are suddenly looking better and better. Sean Kleefeld’s post about rethinking your comics habits seems eerily prescient, even though it was only written two weeks ago.

Kleefeld has more to say after the fact, of course, and he points out that Dwight MacPherson has been taking a nuts-and-bolts look at a lot of alternate distribution options, including Wowio and IndyPlanet, a print-on-demand site, webcomics, and a handful of other sites, including e-books and Eagle One Media, which runs an online store where readers can purchase PDFs of comics from a variety of publishers for as little as 99 cents. Along the way, MacPherson asks creators and publishers to rethink what they want.

Kleefeld also links to Brian Clevinger, who explains why the shift to webcomics has been inevitable for some time now: Print comics expensive, webcomics cheap. He’s not the first to make that argument; here’s an older post from a superhero guy making that point and noting that digital also allows more freedom from the constraints of format.

In fact, digital comics are one of the factors making that whole comics culture of Previews and pull lists and dark little stores in out-of-the-way places increasingly irrelevant. Try explaining the Diamond system to a civilian: You have to go to a special store, and you pre-order the comics from a catalogue—yes, you are supposed to pay for the catalogue—and then you get them two months later, but of course they might change from the catalogue description in the meantime, and—hey, where are you going?

Continue reading →

I do my best to keep the webcomics conversations around here as positive as possible, but the folks over at Comics Worth Reading have taken a special interest in Zuda winner, The Black Cherry Bombshells, particularly the (perceived) desire to alienate all women from the Zuda brand.

Taking a look at the promo art for the strip (which CWR also notes is “non-representative of what it’s supposed to be selling”) it’s hard to argue with the over-sexed, scantily-clad images of the women who are admittedly nothing like the cartoony depictions seen in the comic (the actual content style can be seen on a small film strip, surely meant to invoke the recent, overly-indulgent Grind House double feature).

Continue reading →

I kick off the 2009 bloggin’ year (what? It’s still January) with a post about what else? Other people talking about webcomics that I would also like to comment on.

This instance is a very special one, however, as it’s the folks over at CNN.com who are asking the age-old question, “Where do you read your comics?” See, many people still insist on getting their strip fix in the good ol’ fashioned Funnies section of their local paper (primer: A large, printed daily blog with a record of all the local goings-on). Why they feel they must, when the Funnies section typically doesn’t live up to its name, is a concept those who have made the digital transition can’t comprehend.

Continue reading →