Some interesting coverage of Platinum Studios as of late starting with PW Comics Week's general overview of Platinum circa mid 2007:
These comics are part of the company's overall plan to put characters into as many media as possible. In addition to its film and TV projects, Platinum has a mobile-device division; an apparel company called Number Zero Ltd., which sells reversible T-shirts; a comics news site, Broken Frontier; an online store; and Web comics site DrunkDuck.com. It also hosts the Comic Book Challenge, a talent contest held at Comic-Con International in San Diego for comics creators, now in its second year.
In addition, the Beat has a short bit about Platinum publishing some of it's "library" of comic material on Drunkduck as webcomics; apparently a Dave Roman-penned never-published comic for Platinum is now appearing as Alien Circus at Drunkduck.com without crediting Roman or the other creators. Obviously work-for-hire material (which Alien Circus is) is the property of the copyright owner (which isn't the creators by definition in a work-for-hire situation) but it's not good manners and I'd say not good business sense as well to not credit the creators. Not good manners because it costs Platinum nothing to credit Roman and others who worked on the comic and so Platinum is needlessly creating bad blood with these and other creators. Not good business sense because Dave Roman is a budding star in comics and while there's never a guarantee of success in any creative business (triply so in comics) Roman has a very commercially appealing sensibility and I wouldn't be shocked if he created a story and/or characters that might be successfully translated to television or film. There's just no reason to strip the credit of any creator but it seems even more foolish when the creator's name in question has some odds of actually becoming commercially valuable.
UPDATE: Dave Roman and Luke Weber are now credited on Alien Circus.
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