Author: GiantPanda

Business

• Ka-Blam, the print-on-demand printer specializing in comics, moves into new office space seven times their old, replaces their old press with three new ones, and hires more staff. The POD business seems to be going well.
• I had no idea there existed an unofficial Project Wonderful blog and forum. Here’s one post discussing the costs of ads.
  

  Project Wonderful’s prices are low, but I don’t think most users realize just how low they actually are. I did some comparisons between ads on PW sites and other similar ads sold through conventional channels, and the results are pretty clear: the same ad space sold through PW will command a much lower price.

News

• Time magazine covers webcomics. Penny Arcade, PvP, Achewood, and Diesel Sweeties gets ink (errr… pixels?).
• And speaking of Diesel Sweeties, here’s an article on it in The Daily News.

Misc.

• The 2006 Comic Book Challenge, which blasted Platinum Studios into the consciousness of webcomic creators last year will be back this year according to the website.
• The Pulse has a short report from the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing that was held on March 17.

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The entry for the third volume of the comics anthology Attitude, edited by Ted Rall, has been deleted from Wikipedia. The cause for deletion according to the newly created “deletion review” (which is a petition to overturn the deletion) was that it was advertising.

Why is this news (albeit on a slow day) on a site about webcomics? Because the complete title of the third volume is Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists. While perhaps a bit paranoid, the fact that the articles for the two previous Attitude volumes, covering political cartoonists and alternative cartoonists respectively, remain and have the same format as the deleted article certainly makes one wonder.

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• Sequential Tart interviews Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick.
• Tod Allen, author of The Economy of Webcomics, has a short essay on why last weeks Captain America media event would have benefited from digital distribution.
• Derek Kirk Kim is working on two new books, one with Jesse Hamm and one with Gene Yang. The information is rather limited at this time, but one is slated for release this August and the other at the end of 2008 (if I read the entry correctly).
• Preparations for the Penny Arcade Expo 2007 is well under way. If you want to save some money, there is an early-bird registration rate for those who register before March 31st.
• Finally, from the “not-webcomics at all” department. Shaennon Garrity makes a note of a “Get Your Girl Into Comics” thread on the Johm Byrne forum.
  

  The thread currently running on the Byrne board is notable only because it’s such a perfect, Platonic example of the genre. It’s like a template for all Get Your Girl Into Comics threads on all comic-book forums for all eternity. It’s got every one of the essential elements

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The Associated Press has a profile on the ACT-I-VATE collective and Naples’ Daily News takes a look at webcomics, focusing mostly on the success stories of PvP and Penny Arcade.

From the AP piece:

Serialized, episodic graphic novels have been around for a while, published by behemoths Marvel and DC Comics, among other imprints. “Love & Rockets,” by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, was the indie comics success story of the ’80s. Now, Web comics communities like ACT-I-VATE (other similar sites include Chemistry Set http://www.chemsetcomics.com/; Sugarskull http://community.livejournal.com/candycalavera/ and Lunchbox http://lunchboxcomic.blogspot.com/) have begun to develop cult-like followings.

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Is digital distribution of comics going to get its breakthrough this year? Marvel confirming digital distribution and Top Cow‘s first Bambiesque steps on the digital ice, as well as whatever it is that DC has planned has been making headlines so far.

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