First webcomics get booted off Wikipedia, now this: Diamond has rejected three webcomic-related comic books that were planned for this year’s Free Comic Book Day. Johanna Draper Carlson has the scoop at Comics Worth Reading, and she interviews Keenspot Entertainment co-owner Chris Crosby about the decision.

Keenspot has been participating in FCBD since 2002. Crosby is also affiliated with ComicGenesis.com and Blatant Comics, both of which have also participated in years past. Blatant’s planned 2008 FCBD issue would have promoted a print graphic novel scheduled to come out this spring. Keenspot planned an anthology of its print comics, and ComicGenesis, which is a webcomics hosting site, was putting together an anthology of webcomics plus a how-to guide.

But no. According to Crosby, Diamond’s FCBD committee rejected all three titles on the grounds of Continue reading →

I love Ryan Armand’s Minus. If for some reason you have missed the memo on this one, it’s a well imagined, beautifully rendered comic that mixes magic and childhood to good effect. It’s whimsical without being cloying, and the best comics in the series, like this recent one, have a hallucinatory effect not unlike a looser version of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Apparently I’m not the only one who likes it: This week, the Japan Media Arts Festival recognized Minus in its Manga Division; it is one of only a handful of online manga that were “recommended” by the jury, and the only non-Japanese title in the group.

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Who needs Cliffs Notes when you’ve got the web? Recently I stumbled on two webcomics based on classic books, each completely different but each well worth a look. Somehow I made it through college and grad school without reading the originals, but the comics versions are so entertaining I’m tempted to pick them up.

The War of the Worlds: This is a straightforward adaptation by Ian Edginton of H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name, rendered with a smooth, very readable look by artist D’Israeli. The story is straightforward: Aliens arrive from Mars and terrorize the populace for a while but ultimately are dispatched in a surprising and satisfying way. For a story about aliens terrorizing the earth, this comic is strangely soothing. Maybe it’s the glimpses of pastoral English countrysides.

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Free pirate comics! Swords of the Swashbucklers, by Bill Mantlo and Jackson Guice, will be available for free download on Wowio.com next week. Here’s an interesting wrinkle, from blog@Newsarama’s coverage:

“The downloads are completely free. Creators get paid due to Verizon and Careerbuilder sponsorship,” said Steve Horton, Smashout Comics publisher. “The catch is you have to be in the U.S. to download.”

I was at the New York Anime Festival last week and heard a lot of talk about online downloads of manga and anime, which are clearly coming (well, they’re already here, but I’m talking about legit versions). A lot of people are thinking sponsored downloads are the way to go, although Continue reading →

Ever since high school, I have been suspicious of popularity contests, so when it comes to webcomics, I wonder: Does the most votes=the best content?

Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s hard to argue with the results of the first Webcomic Idol competition. Templar, Arizona, is the winner, and I can’t imagine a better choice.

Some disclosures are in order here: DS was involved in Webcomic Idol, sponsored by Bomb Shelter Comics. Not only are we co-sponsors of the competition, but Daku was a judge in the first round, and our own Jason Sigler, a.k.a. The Midnight Cartoonist, is a member of the BSC collective.

Webcomics Idol works on a fairly simple model: The judges pick the finalists, and after that, the readers vote every week for their favorites; each week the comic with the lowest total is dropped.

In this case, Continue reading →

You weren’t planning on doing any work today, were you? Because thanks in part to the Marvel thing, the internet is abuzz with news and commentary about digital comics.

Item: CNet says that Amazon will be debuting its e-reader today. According to the advance hype, it has a WiFi connection so you can get books on the road, and Amazon seems to have a deal with Sprint as well, in case there are no nearby hotspots. List price is $399. Simon Jones (NSFW!) is not impressed with the prototypes he has seen so far.

Item: German comics magazine Comicgate interviews Dirk Wood of Dark Horse Comics, and the conversation turns to digital comics. He discusses Dark Horse Presents, their free webcomic at MySpace, and talks about eventually implementing an iTunes model, Continue reading →

Anime News Network reports that sales of electronic manga in Japan totaled 10.6 billion yen, or about $95.7 million, in 2006. That’s a respectable increase over the 3.4 million yen spent in 2005. One aspect that is being watched on this side of the Pacific is how much is going to cell phones rather than computer screens: It was pretty lopsided last year, with 2.4 billion yen being spent to view manga on computers and 8.2 billion to read it on cell phones.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that many Japanese people commute by train, not car, so they have big blocks of time to read cell phone manga. But this article, translated by Manganews earlier this year, touches on another important difference: Continue reading →

In this week’s PWCW, Ed Chavez unwraps the new service Manganovel. The Toshiba-owned site allows readers to download manga and upload their own translations. At the always NSFW Icarus Blog, publisher Simon Jones comments:

[Manganovel] promises to one day grind the bones of print manga publishers into powder, mix them with the puréed hearts of professional translators and the severed fingers of touch-up artists, to make a frozen almond tofu dessert OF PURE EVIL!

The site is basically trying to monetize something that is already happening on the web: Fans scan in Japanese manga and supply their own translations. Continue reading →

Of course, it was inevitable that the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited site would crash on its first day. Less predictable is the fact that Marvel would give the new intiative the acronym DCU, which caused audible snickers all over the internet.

Props to ICv2, which asks Marvel’s Dan Buckley, with a straight face, “Can you cite some non-porn examples of successful subscription sites for entertainment content?” (Buckley comes up with a handful.)

Buckley also bends the rules a bit, saying that Marvel may put up new comics (i.e. less than six months old) to promote a trade—and they will pull books off the site after a while. At ComicMix, Dan Grauman reacts badly to that news and also fills in some background. (Via Journalista.)

And this seems a bit ominous: Continue reading →

OK, the magic hour has passed and the news is official: Marvel will be putting 2,500 comics online, for a price.

Here’s the deal: you pay $9.99 a month, or $4.99 a month if you’re willing to commit for a year, and you get unlimited access to the archive. Plus they’re keeping 250 comics online for free. As USA Today’s David Colton breathlessly reports:

Subscribers will be able to access the first hundred issues of key titles, turn pages with a click of the mouse or navigate a battle against Dr. Doom frame-by-frame with a “Smart Panel” viewing feature. The user can zoom in on details of art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko from the 1960s or catch up with today’s The Ultimates and New Avengers.

Well, not “today’s” The Ultimates and New Avengers: Nothing goes online until it’s at least six months old. And the big catch is that it’s a subscription model, not downloads, so you can read it but you can’t take it with you. Continue reading →