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.”

Continue reading →