Interesting post from Frumph today on his new plans for Comic Press and his previously announced new project Comic Easel. The first thing you might note is the new URL comicpress.net that Frumph says he is now using for all of his work on Comic Press. I met Frumph in person at Intervention – really nice guy. He has taken on a lot of the work on Comic Press and in many (all?) ways has been the entirety of it publicly for the last year or so. Read his post – although I'm not aware of hard data, it's a pretty safe bet that Comic Press remains the most widely used "webcomic management" system today and anything that sustains the project's development and technical support is a good and needed thing. It's crazy in a way I don't fully understand but Frumph says he hasn't gotten much more than nothing for all of the work he's done. So if you've ever benefited from Comic Press – and more specifically from something Frumph has done – head over to his site and hit the donate button.
I don't see any reaction yet from Tyler Martin – the original creator of Comic Press – but it doesn't seem like there should be any issues here. I don't know the exact license on Comicpress but since it's built for WordPress it likely shares the same GPLv2 license from the Free Software Foundation. I will keep an eye out for any comments though.
While absolutely wishing Frumph the best here I will point out that this should be a bit of a red flag reminder of how NOT institutionalized support for a key webcomics tool is right now. Unlike other more general purpose website management tools, I've rarely seen a webcomic tool sustained by a community of developers. I don't know how we get from the five to six or so existing webcomic tools run by one person to collective support for one project but I think there should be some discussion about it. Obviously Frumph and other developers like him should do what they think is best — they don't need anyone telling them what to do — but I am curious as to why we haven't seen a collective effort on a single project.
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