Attribute Twitter with yet another news catch worth posting.

Steven L. Cloud has announced that his critically-praised, existentially-presented strip, Boy on a Stick and Slither (heretofore known as BOASAS) has seen its final update on Comics.com, the official realm where webcomics go to lose their souls. 

Steven requested, via a Tweet today, that people be alerted to the move for those who (for whatever reason) read BOASAS on Comics.com, and so, it is done. Change your bookmarks, if necessary, to Boasas.com (gosh, so much easier than www.comics.com/boy_on_a_stick_and_slither).

Also, enjoy the short conversation The Geek and I had about the matter, as dramatized below:

What’s tougher and sharper than a Diamond? Could it possibly be a… Comics Monkey?

Ok, so the ad slogan might be a bit difficult to write, but Ka-Blam has taken the wraps off its new direct distribution alternative to the Diamond Distributors behemoth and its name is Comics Monkey. Thus far, there’s little to go on other than pure speculation and hopes and dreams which may or may not be shattered, so I’ll let the presser speak for itself.

Distribution into the direct comics market system is something we’ve had on the drawing board almost since we launched in 2005. It’s a daunting prospect and we’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years puzzling through how we wanted to approach it. We had planned to roll out a brief pilot program of sorts – offering a limited catalog of items available only to a handful of volunteer retailers – by summer of this year. And then take what we learned from that program, retool a bit, add the full catalog, and launch the actual service sometime this fall.

Continue reading →

Sean Kleefeld noted on his blog yesterday that things don’t seem to be going to well at Wowio—one of their creators still hasn’t been paid for content that ran in the second quarter of last year (before Platinum acquired the site), and their staff is making minimum wage. Then he takes a look at the Alexa numbers, which suggest traffic to the site is way, way down.

Click on the comments to get to the good stuff, though. That’s where Brian Altounian, president and COO of Wowio’s parent company, Platinum, posts a spirited response to Sean’s comments. He starts by pointing out that the entire economy is down, and therefore no one should be surprised that the numbers are down at Wowio as well. And then he reveals something interesting: You remember the big bucks that folks were making on Wowio? Altounian says that money came from investors, not revenues:

Who do you think was paying publisher royalties during the two years prior to Platinum’s purchase? Advertisers? Sponsors? NO! They came from Wowio founders and initial investors who, after two years, decided they didn’t want to shell out royalties without an income stream… Our change in the business model has been to pay the publishers when a book is paid for, either by a reader or a corporate sponsor.

Then there’s some back and forth, as Kleefeld and Altounian discuss the wisdom of investing in a company with significant debt, and it all ends more nicely than it started.

All this made me curious to see what was going on at Wowio, so I clicked over and took a look. Continue reading →