It’s no secret that we here at Digital Strips don’t dig the MySpace model of reading comics. It’s clunky, ugly, and infested with poor, user-manifested web design. This would be the main reason why I’ve never bothered with the Dark Horse comic series, Dark Horse Presents. Today, however, there is hope at the end of this long, dark, dank, diseased tunnel.

Three webcomics all-stars are now featured in the twentieth edition of DHP. In this edition, you can find:

• The Catch! A Wondermark Tale by David Malki!
• An Achewood tale by Chris Onstad
• A Darwin comic by Kate Beaton

As loathe as I am to say this, you should very quickly and very carefully check the DHP site for some webcomics goodness from three of the industry’s (community’s?) finest.

Dylan Horrocks has launched a new webcomics site, Hicksville, with four comics—two short stories and two longer serials. The design is nice and clean—I wish all webcomics sites were like this!—and the comics look good, so go take a look.

Larry “El Santo” Cruz urges everyone to be a good citizen and contribute some updates to Comixpedia. He also has new reviews up of Anders Loves Maria and Nedroid’s Picture Diary, as well as an interesting interview with T Campbell, writer of Penny and Aggie and A History of Webcomics.

Shaenon Garrity interviews Aaron Neathery, whose post-apocalyptic webcomic Endtown debuts this week at Modern Tales.

The Amway of comics? Johanna Draper Carlson looks at an online “manga,” Guardian Angel, that allows readers to set up their own purchase link and get 50% of the price. Interestingly, Guardian Angel bills itself as a MangaFox top manga. MangaFox is a scanlation site, and when I clicked over there, I saw that Guardian Angel is listed as a sponsor. So they expect people to pay for their comic, but they have apparently teamed up with a blatant violator of copyrights to promote it.

At Blog@Newsarama, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis look at webcomics apps for the iPhone. And at the Gillians Heart blog, Dave Baxter waxes enthusiastic about the Android Comics Reader for Google phones.

NYC Graphic Novelists catches a video of Dean Haspiel talking comics and other stuff with Seth Kushner, who photographed him for NYCGN.

Therefore Repent, Jim Munroe’s post-Rapture graphic novel, is now available in its entirety here in a variety of formats. (Thanks to Matthew J. Brady for pointing that out.)

If you scroll down far enough in this Cup O’Joe column, you will see what Joe Quesada thinks of digital distribution of comics. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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 →