After a seven-year absence, Dark Horse Presents is back, this time on MySpace. The Dark Horse folks sprung the announcement at the San Diego Comic-Con, in a panel ostensibly devoted to the history of Dark Horse Presents, and it’s good news for everyone: Readers get free comics by acclaimed creators such as Joss Whedon, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba, and creators get the opportunity to be discovered—but only if they are posting their work on MySpace.

Dark Horse Presents was Dark Horse’s debut title when the company launched in 1986. The editors conceived the black-and-white anthology as a vehicle for new talent, and over the years it served as a launching pad for successful series, including Hellboy and Sin City, and gave early exposure to creators such as Eddie Campbell, Ed Brubaker, and Doug Mahnke. After a few years of slack sales, Dark Horse ended the title in 2000.

The new version will showcase an artist discovered on MySpace, Dark Horse editors told Andy Khouri in this interview for Comic Book Resources. Continue reading →

Uclick has announced the first comic designed primarily to be read on cell phones: Thunder Road, by Sean Demory and Steven Sanders. This is Demory’s first book, but Sanders’ art credits include Five Fists of Science.

Here’s a description of the story from the Kansas City Star:

Thunder Road is a multi-panel, manga-style comic series, described as a “slow-apocalyptic, dieselpunk action adventure” set in an alternate middle-America. The series follows the trials of Merritt, a soldier/circuit rider working for the Department of Transportation who travels America’s Great Plains, a ravaged and desolate land suffering the consequences of decades of global atomic warfare.

GoComics provides a trailer for Thunder Road, and it’s worth a look. But will people pay for it? According to Uclick’s info page, a subscription is $4.99 per month. For that you can subscribe to six or more titles and get at least one new installment every day, plus access to the archives. The catch is Continue reading →

The great comic wheel has completed its revolution: Kodansha is publishing a Japanese version of vol. 1 of Megatokyo. I posted the press release in full at MangaBlog, and Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week has a story on it as well.

This is, of course, richly ironic, since Megatokyo is not only a thoroughly American comic, it is a comic about Japan as perceived by Americans. I can see the appeal, though. When I lived in France, I totally loved reading travel guides to the U.S. and earnest magazine articles that explained our peculiar customs. It’s always fun to see your culture refracted through the lens of someone else’s. I especially like the fact that Kodansha is adding special notes for Japanese readers, as I could have used some explanatory notes the first time I read the first volume.

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DC is going into the webcomics business, and the site may provide an opportunity for creators with more talent than connections to break into the biz. The site is zuda.com, and there’s a placeholder up right now. Publisher’s Weekly has an overview, and ICv2 has more detail. Even the New York Times has picked up on the story (registration required).

The Times gets it right away, describing Zuda as “a virtual slush pile, accepting submissions from the public and paying for the best comics that come in.” Creators submit an eight-page sample, and every month, starting in October, DC Director of Creative Services Ron Perazza and Comics Online Editor Kwanza Johnson will choose 10 submissions for readers to vote on. Continue reading →

Wendy Pini’s new comic, The Masque of the Red Death, has finally gone live at the Go!Comi site. You’ll have to register to read it, but registration is free and they promise not to hand your name over to the spammers. As I registered, I kept getting a message that Safari is not fully supported, but it worked fine nonetheless.

I interviewed Pini for Digital Strips and Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week about the comic, which is a tale of love and betrayal set in a utopian future. It was inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name but mixes up the elements of the story in a whole different way.

What I want to talk about here is the presentation. Continue reading →

For the most part, webcomics are a 19th-century idea presented in a 21st-century medium.

Readers of The Yellow Kid, back in horse-and-buggy days, saw the strip as lines and areas of color on newsprint. Readers of The Perry Bible Fellowship have an almost identical experience, except the lines are on a screen and they click links rather than turning pages.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is the first webcomic that I have seen that takes advantage of some of the possibilities only the internet can offer.

First of all, let me say that this is an awesome webcomic. Written and drawn by Josh Neufeld, it follows a handful of different characters—all based on real people—as they face the storm. Continue reading →

Comics creator Lea Hernandez has put her graphic novel Cathedral Child, book 1 of the Texas Steampunk trilogy, on the web for free. It’s her way of thanking the comics community for their outpouring of support after her home was destroyed in a fire last year.

Texas Steampunk?

Yes, it’s a great combination of several concepts, a semi-supernatural love story swirled in with a Victorian computer and the mythology of the west. It’s set in Heaven, Texas, where two partners are trying to build an “analytical engine” in an old, mission-style church. Both the computer and the church are known as “Cathedral,” and the natives who work on it are called “cuerpo de Cathedral.”

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The main point of Free Comic Book Day seems to be to get people into their local comics stores, but the free comics serve another purpose as well: It’s a way to check out new work you might not otherwise see. So now that FCBD is over, here are a few of the freebies that I found online, all of which are worth at least a look.

The FCBD people have put short samples of six titles online using ettitude’s reader: You click on a corner of the page to turn it. The best of these is Fantagraphics’ Unseen Peanuts, because it crams so many strips into such a short space. I really thought this comic was the best of the bunch, and the six-page online sampler has enough of Charles Schultz’s “lost” strips to be satisfying. Thom Zahler ladles out a generous eight pages of Love and Capes, the funny and very amiable romance between a superhero and a bookstore owner. Continue reading →

I managed to spend two whole days at Anime Boston without seeing any anime at all. In fact, they should really retitle it Anime and Webcomics Boston, as there was a strong webcomics presence in Artists Alley and I saw some really interesting work. One of the highlights was chatting with artists J. Dee Dupuy and Dan Hess about their webcomics.

Dee was promoting her new webcomic, Singularity, which just started this weekend. 'It's a flat-out, no holds barred, no apologies made romance,' she said. 'It is absolutely the sweetest story. It is so far from OniKimono,' her comic on Wirepop.

Singularity is a romance between men, but Dee insists 'It's not yaoi. It doesn't have a lot of violence and angst. Well, it has a bit of angst.' Continue reading →