Publishers Weekly has an article on webcomics with all the usual suspects covered.
Mention Web comics and you’ll most likely get a blank stare. Although there are probably thousands of comics on the Web—and more going up every day—they remain esoteric to the mainstream comics world, let alone to the book publishing world. However, for their growing legion of fans—who number in the millions—Web comics are the wired world’s answer to Garfield and Dilbert. But even as their popularity grows, questions remain. Will print collections of the best known Web comics cross over to the book audience? And can print comics find a wider audience on the Web?
Not a bad article. Pretty good, actually– it does have a very “usual suspects” aspect to it, but at least it actually mentions some of the important names in web comics. A lesson is learned from the NY Times’ mistake.
It is kind of funny that it ends on the “big news” that Marvel is re-re-launching its sorta-kinda attempt at breaking into webcomics. How much of “Something Positive”‘s audience is HulkSmash online going to steal?
…I meant to say “in that paragraph except for MT.”
As far as I can see, what she’s saying is that none of the titles mentioned in that paragraph have had anything like the success in print that they’ve had on the Web. That much is true. There have been a few other web-to-bookstore leaps like SHUTTERBUG FOLLIES, but MEGATOKYO’s the only one I remember as a notable bestseller in that marketplace.
Nice article from longtime comics reporter Heidi McDonald. There’s a list of resources here – http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6292538.html too.
In one para. though she conclusively states that very few webcomics have made it in print. I can only assume she means in the comic book/direct market format b/c lots of webcomics have sold lots of books in print format. It’s possible that the numbers don’t match up to the numbers in the comic book/direct market channel but I don’t think Heidi really looked into that and it’s something that would be interesting to crunch some numbers on.