I alluded to this in yesterday’s post, but as the internets have swelled up in indignation and outrage, I feel it deserves a bit more ink. (If you’re missing scans_daily and just want your fix back, go to the end of the post for the links.)

Scans_daily, in case you just got internet this week, is (was) a LiveJournal community where the members posted scans of sections of comic books and commented on them. I was an infrequent visitor, myself. It was slightly better organized than MySpace Comics but still suffered from that thing where you have to sit and wait for each image to download. My biggest problem with it, actually, was that they didn’t put whole issues or story arcs online, so I would see just the sample and not know how it ended.

Some copyright holder somewhere had just the opposite problem—they felt scans_daily was posting too much of their comics—and they complained to LJ, and now the whole site is gone, because it does, in fact, flagrantly violate LJ’s terms of service, and the fact that they have been doing so for five years doesn’t really exonerate them.

The exact sequence of events is a bit sketchy. Continue reading →

Attention creators: Robot Comics is looking for submissions for comics to run on the Android mobile phone platform. Even non-creators might want to click the link to see the demo.

The Manga Recon reviewers have a roundtable discussion of digital comics that’s worth reading even if you aren’t into manga, because they cover a lot of general issues from a fan’s point of view—keeping the book vs. reading it once, reading it on the screen vs. paper, and of course, the all-important question of cost. I might point out, too, that although the recieved wisdom at the moment is that no one pays for content on the internet, several of the reviewers are fans of Netcomics, which allows you to read manga online for 25 cents per chapter. They also discuss their favorite non-manga webcomics.

According to this report at Comics Should Be Good, longtime favorite Scans_Daily is gone, its account suspended by LiveJournal for violating its terms of service by posting copyrighted material. According to that last link, they are looking for a new home and trying to preserve what they can. Stay tuned.

Something to look forward to: Dylan Horrocks is launching a webcomics site next week.

Over at Comics 411, Tom Mason talks to Larry Latham about Lovecraft Is Missing, which starts with the notion that the stories of H.P. Lovecraft were based on real events. Latham talks about the story as well as the webcomics experience. Good stuff.

Continue reading →

Tom Mason of Comix 411 has an interview up with Norm Feuti, creator of the syndicated strip, Retail, and the webcomic, Gill. As a recent convert to Feuti’s work (Feutism? Feutistic?) I am currently reading through this interview with the man who has captured childhood essence and combined it with adult sensibilities (Gill) and you should do the same.

Also, keep your eyes peeled and ears perked up for a future mini-review of Gill on an upcoming Horizons Watch podcast!

P.S. Newspaper sites take note: it took me forever to find a decent way to view Retail, and even then it wasn’t the best. Tyler Martin has already done it for you, just use it and we’ll all be better off.

Writing at Broken Frontier, Tyler Chin-Tanner is tired of all the gloom-and-doom surrounding Diamond’s new minimums, and he offers a sensible business plan for those who just can’t quit making comics:

Step 1. Put your heart and soul into creating the best comic you can, one that will resonate with its readers.

Step 2. Get as many people as possible to read this comic.

His point: The end of the road may have come for floppies, but not for comics; there will be other ways to survive, but first you have to have the content.

Not only that, you have to market it properly. At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson takes a look at a clumsy attempt to repurpose a print comic as a webcomic—at a higher price point.

On the other hand, this article about the founder of 4Chan is a bit troubling, because it makes the point that eyeballs don’t always equal dollars: The guy not only launched one of the most successful websites evarrr, he also created the highly lucrative ICanHasCheezburger meme, which made a lot of money for someone else, and contributed to the revival of Rick Astley’s career. And yet not only is he not making any money off 4Chan, he’s paying the server fees with his credit cards.

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Hey, there’s another webcomics business-model brouhaha on the internets! Valerie D’Orazio got the latest snowball rolling down the mountain with this post at Occasional Superheroine, in which she predicts that Big Media will take over webcomics and find a way to monetize them:

1) If I was DC or Marvel (or any other media company), I’d pinpoint what the top 5% webcomics are. Offer those web cartoonists competitive exclusive distribution deals that includes a health insurance component. Then make a subscription-based site offset by sales of hard copies and merchandise.

An essential part of her argument is that the Big Two convey “authoritativeness,” versus the “amateur” status of most webcomics. In fact, she sees this happening with the internet in general:

The media companies are going to push “Authoritative” vs. “Amateur” within two years. Look for an all-out assault on the authority of blogs that are not connected with one media group or another. Look for the top-of-the-top independent blogs to get bought up by media companies. Look for an all-out assault on the credibility of Wikipedia.

D’Orazio seems to have missed several fundamental points. Continue reading →

Opportunity knocks: The Daily Cross Hatch is looking for some guest strips.

At Robot 6, JK Parkin interviews Thom Zahler, creator of Love and Capes.

Blog@Newsarama chats with Dean Haspiel, the prolific creator of Immortal, Fear, My Dear, Street Code, and a heap of other stuff.

And Jennifer Contino talks to Mike Dawson about Jack & Max Escape from the End of Time at The Pulse.

Larry Cruz has a thorough discussion of characters at the Webcomic Overlook.

NYCC reports continue to trickle in. At Wednesday’s Child, Paul DeBenedetto recounts the Comics and New Media panel, which apparently consisted entirely of people associated with A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. It’s a great comic, but Paul was disappointed by the panel.

Literary webcomics: Tom Gauld does pithy, colorful little drawings based on letters to the Guardian Saturday Review letters page. Many are cutely enigmatic, made more so by the fact that he doesn’t reproduce the letters they refer to. (Thanks to Derik Badman, via Twitter.)

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By now you’ve probably seen at least one story about Karen Ellis, creator of Planet Karen, and the fire that engulfed her apartment building, killing the neighbor upstairs and destroying everything she owned, leaving her essentially homeless.

It’s been proven, time and time again, that the webcomics community can work some amazing magic when someone is in need, and Karen needs as much as you can give right now. She’s since updated (via extremely sporadic Internet access) that she appreciates any donation and that giving actual, physical items right now is more of a burden as she has nowhere to put it.

Visit Karen’s page and click the donate button on the right side to give whatever you can to this webcomic creator in need.

OK, here’s someone who is taking digital distribution to its logical extreme: Dave Baxter talks to Hermés Piqué, who collaborated with Juan Romera on Misery Depot. The comic was published under a Creative Commons license which means anyone can redistribute it—digitally or in print—as long as they do so for free. This means the comic is being shared all over the place, via peer-to-peer networks, downloads of .pdf and .cbz files, online at its own site, and through iComics where, because of the CC license, it is the default comic. The conversation is well worth a read for its discussion of how to distribute a comic electronically, but conspicuously absent is any mention of how you monetize that.

Meanwhile, this newspaper interview with Howard Tayler explains how he did it the old-fashioned way, building an audience with Schlock Mercenary and then self-publishing the print edition to maximize profit.

At Blog@Newsarama, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis discuss webcomics formats and whether webcomics, like newspapers, can go beyond the daily gag strip to present long-form adventure stories. (Yes, I know that’s already happening.) To explore the possibilities further, Latino posts his own adventure webcomic as part of the column.

Stephen Schleicher says he likes reading comics digitally—not too many people are admitting to that just yet—and he considers some of the possibilities for the future of comics. Read the comments for more. (Found via Robot 6.)

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It’s like a dream come true for anyone who has followed webcomics, heard of webcomics, or who may have come into contact with webcomics (consult a physician).

This week, the Webcomics Weekend was announced, and it is packed full of webcomic talent, the likes of which has never been found under one roof. Taking place in Easthampton, MA, this meet-and-greet-and-possibly-buy-some-merch-not-a-convention get-together already has a huge list of guests and it’s just going to get bigger before the March 20th kickoff date.

Visit the Webcomics Weekend site, join the Facebook group, follow the webcomicsweekend bird on Twitter, and get yourselves to MA come March to take part in a milestone in webcomics history!

In a post that’s almost two weeks old now, Jeph Jacques defends the current selling-t-shirts-and-prints webcomics business model, pointing out that it’s just as valid as any other way of making money off of comics. Key quote:

Saying webcartoonists are t-shirt hucksters is like saying Charles Schultz was an insurance salesman because Snoopy is on the Met Life blimp.

Dave Roman considers the many possible ways of monetizing webcomics and ends up rather dubious about the notion that readers will pay directly for content, either online or on some sort of device. He sure asks a lot of questions!

Marvel exec Ira Rubenstein is more optimistic about paid content. Anthony Ha casts him as the Clueless Suit in this now-famous (on the internet anyway) exchange at the ICv2 Graphic Novel conference:

Rubenstein: Those are our characters. How could someone else write another Spider-Man story?

Roman: Because fan fiction is becoming so powerful. I’ve seen the power of fan fiction. Working at Nickelodeon, there are people out there doing ‘Avatar’ comics that are soooooo much better…

Rubenstein: But that’s like saying YouTube is a real entertainment channel. It’s not.

He leaves out the part where Roman and a bunch of other people yell “It is!” But Rubenstein responds in the comments that he was taken out of context, and he makes a good point:

I made the comment that only Marvel could create compelling new stories with our characters. To which Dave made the comment about Fan Fiction.

The point I was making was comparing fan fiction to our Marvel Comics is like comparing an Episode of LOST or HEROES to user generated content on YOUTUBE.

In other words, Continue reading →