Zach Hazard fights the man.

Both of artist Colleen Doran’s sites — A Distant Soil and Colleendoran.com — have been hacked, she confirmed in a phone call. Luckily, all her sites — which host her webcomic serialization of A DISTANT SOIL and her popular, pithy blog– had been backed up and have been moved to a new host and should be available over the weekend.

According to Doran, she suspected something was amiss when she noticed someone from Turkey hid visited her site oftimes. “I could see something was wrong, but I didn’t have the technical know how to fix it,” she said. Unfortunately her webhost, Media Temple, wasn’t able to catch the hacking until it was too late and both her sites had been infected with malware. Even Goggle cache shows the sites as suspicious and won’t let a viewer in.

“It’s annoying because I was planning to do a whole series of blog posts about how to build your traffic,” Doran lamented.

Hopefully she’ll still write that series! We’d read it.

Web serialization of an original GN is increasingly being used at First Second to build some pre-awareness for their books — see Mark Siegel’s own SAILOR TWAIN and ZAHRA’S PARADISE.

Via PR, a story that touches the current comics business on so many levels. In short, Scott Kurtz is taking his print PvP collections of his very popular webcomic PvP and returning to self-publishing via his Toonhound Studios imprint. PVP has been published by Image since 2003, and Image will continue to sell his existing collections. However, future print editions of the comic will be sold online. According to the release, Kurtz won’t be selling them through Diamond at all, although he’ll work directly with retailers who want to carry his books.

The new PvP collection (above) — the eighth in the series — will be available for sale from Kurtz at San Diego.

We have an email in to Kurtz for more info, but it isn’t hard to see that, as the release states, the pamphlet/floppy/periodical is just not a viable format any more for a comic that appears five days a week on your computer screen. And one would presume that holding on to 100 percent of the profits of selling collections directly to fans would offset any losses incurred by not being in the front of the Diamond catalog any more.

Scott Kurtz is releasing the latest print collection of his popular online comic PvP, but he won’t be doing it through publisher Image Comics. After 8 years with Image, PvP is returning to its self-publishing roots, printing all future collections under the Toonhound Studios banner and selling them online via PvP’s store at http://www.pvpstuff.com.

“Over the last three years our business has shifted,” says Kurtz. “Sales through brick-and-mortar stores are declining and online sales are increasing. Readers who discovered PvP in comic shops have shifted from monthly readers to online readers, and their buying habits have changed. The monthly floppy is selling less and the trade paperbacks are selling more.”

All existing volumes of PvP are still available from Image Comics through Diamond Distribution, including the PvP Awesomeology hardcover, a 600-page retrospective celebrating the strip’s recent ten-year anniversary. The PvP monthly comic book, which Image also published, has been cancelled and ended with issue 45.

“Image has been an amazing publisher. Jim Valentino believed in Webcomics before anyone else in the industry. Erik Larsen and Eric Stephenson were instrumental in helping PvP shine. I still believe that Image is the best game in town for independent creators. I’m proud to continue offering my existing trades through them,” says Kurtz.

Although Kurtz has no immediate plans to offer future collections through Diamond, he’s still eager to work with interested retailers.

“The retailers have always supported PvP and I want to make it as easy as possible for those who wish to carry our books moving forward. Any interested retailer can contact me directly via email and we’ll do our best to get them whatever they need.”

Kevin Mutch’s story is just getting going, but things around the orphans Max and Molly are sure getting strange.

About half an hour ago, a memo was sent to Zuda creators announcing that the original digital comics line website was being shut down. A few of the better known Zuda titles, such as I RULE THE NIGHT, BAYOU, and HIGH MOON will be folded into the newly announced DC Digital program.

Begun in 2007 as DC’s fledgling attempt at the world of comics on the Web, despite some quality content, Zuda was plagued by a number of problems including a widely derided Flash-based interface and a monthly contest format that often killed the best content after 10 pages. However, it did have successes with the award winning BAYOU comic, and other print projects such as the Harvey award-winning HIGH MOON by David Gallaher and Steve Ellis and THE NIGHT OWLS by the Timony Twins.

Asked for comment, DC sent out the following press release:

DC Entertainment announced today that select ZUDA titles will be available through comiXology and the PlayStation®Network. Each ZUDA issue will feature approximately twenty pages of content; the first issue will be available for free and each subsequent issue will be priced at $.99. Effective today, www.zudacomics.com will be shut down. The Collective, the Official ZUDA Blog, will continue to be updated at http://zuda.blog.dccomics.com/ with information about upcoming releases and behind-the-scenes information.

The first issue of Jeremy Love’s Eisner nominated Bayou was available at launch for free. Issue 2 is now available through ComiXology and the PlayStation®Network. The first issue of David Gallaher and Steve Ellis acclaimed’ High Moon is now available, with the second issue available next week.

Upcoming Zuda titles for the PSP and ComiXology app include John Zito and Tony Trov’s Black Cherry Bombshells, Dan Govar’s Azure, Andy Belanger’s Bottle of Awesome, Sheldon Vella’s Supertron, and Adam Atherton’s Lily of the Valley.

DEVELOPING.

UPDATE: Creative Services VP Ron Perazza has made the official announcement on the Zuda blog:

The submissions question is simple: It is the new DC Co-Publishers’ plan to expand submissions beyond just Zuda Comics and the Online group into a larger, more comprehensive system that covers all of DC Comics’ wide variety of needs, skills and interests. Jim and Dan are very excited about bringing in and developing new talent so look for more information about that from them as plans develop.

As for the site, from here on out, Zuda Comics will be folded into DC Comics’ exciting, new Digital Publishing initiative. Expect more Zuda series to be released through the DC Comics and comiXology Apps, the Sony PSP and on both the comiXology website and, eventually, the main DC Comics website as well. You’ll be able to read all of your digital editions and manage your entire library in one place, whether DCU, Vertigo, WildStorm or Zuda. The goal there is convergence of technology and convergence of editorial.

Ty Templeton is doing webcomics!

The week started off, of course with BOOM! Studios making two big announcements. First, they joined Marvel with their own iPad/iPhone comics app, which quickly went to the top ten of downloaded book apps:

We’ve yet to really dig in to comics on the iPad, but this rise of the comics apps mirrors early iPhone comics apps which sailed to the top of the charts when first introduced.

But then BOOM! went ALL THE FUCKING WAY and became the very first company to make all its back issues available for download.

HALLELUJAH, GOOD-BYE LONGBOXES! But not LongBox — see below.)

¶ Graeme McMillan interviewed Comixology’s David Steinberger for Techland on the success of their program:

Something that I feel has been happening, particularly with the Boom! and Marvel apps, has been that comiXology has been really coming to the forefront in terms of digital comics and digital comics distribution.

Yeah, it certainly seems as if we’ve innovated enough in the space, and with our connections to retailers, we’ve gotten a lot of publishers behind us and, you know, we’ve been in the top ten iPhone app books for the last ten months. On the iPad, we’ve been top ten since launch. We have the biggest audience, we’ve innovated faster than any of our competitors, we’re the first ones to have true multiplatform – outside of some beta testing you may have seen out there. I think that we’re proving to have some value to these publishers, and I think that we do our best to be really good partners to the publishers, to let them experiment. I think it’s been working quite well.

Much more in the link of vital import.

BUT THAT WAS NOT ALL!!!!!

¶ Long-awaited LongBox, a desktop and not device-based comics sale system, also went into public beta this week! Brigid Alverson caught up with CEO Rantz Hoseley:

In terms of the content providers, we don’t have the kind of gating that Apple has. As an independent creator, it’s very difficult to get anything onto iTunes. iTunes doesn’t have a [comics] reader built into it, and it is not built to handle a large mass of sequential images. If you have Blankets or Bone, your experience purchasing that through iTunes and then having a third-party reader to read it is not going to be exactly enjoyable. We really want to keep that experience as clean and focused as possible.

¶ Gating? What’s that you say? Yes, even as the iPad was seemingly the savior of the comics industry, it turned out it was just another Big Brother with VERY mercurial approval procedures. The iPad made news this week as not one but two apps were rejected for “inappropriate material” — one of them an adaptation of the classic literary work Ulysses by James friggin’ Joyce and the other a gay version of another piece of classic literature, The Importance of Being Ernest.

Chris Butcher does the heavy lifting this time with a great timeline of who and what, but we’d like to draw your attention to this incredibly excellent piece by Charles “Zan” Christensen that shows a bit of a double standard for the old sex and violence:

Kick-Ass is a comic from Marvel Comics’ ICON imprint that is famously ultra-violent, and which was recently made into a feature film. The preview images from the book show that it clearly contains graphic language, situations and nudity. Not only is the book available for purchase through iVerse with Apple’s approval, it does not appear to have been censored at all.

So yes, basically we are dealing with a weird, reactionary and mysteriously uptight delivery system as our future. We remember TWO YEARS AGO when we first ran across an example of an iPhone rejecting an app for inappropriate political content for reasons about as clear as America’s game-winning goal being called back earlier today.

At that time, the publisher wanted the whole thing kept quiet, but now it’s clear that publicizing these silly decisions is the only way to bring some pressure to bear on keeping Apple honest.

Or, as Butcher put it:

Are we really prepared to hand over the keys to the digital kingdom to a company that has to be aggressively shamed into behaving well?

¶ Finally, the whole war against piracy set sail an armada of tall ships aimed with cannons and muzzle-loaders this week, as Brigid Alverson reports the huge manga downloading site MangaFox has taken down a bunch of Viz titles after pressure:

A MangaFox administrator announced in a forum thread that they have pulled a number of manga, and a list of deleted titles shows they are mostly from Viz Media and include the powerhouse series Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. MangaFox is one of the sites that hosts scanlations of the most recent chapters of those series, so this is quite a blow to them; fickle readers, however, will be able to find them, at least for now, on other sites.

Brigid’s story is full of awesome links and quotes from sad manga thieves, that covers the digital comics bingo card of responses.

WHEW — is that it? What else can happen???

The program kicked off today with a feature on Janet and Alex Evanovich’s new graphic novel, TROUBLEMAKER, which appears to be a digital comic with some kind of Flash interface looming over a profile of the Evanovii. Okay then! PR below:

Three leaders in pop culture have come together for a groundbreaking new program to bring comics to your desktop, doorstep, and digital TV! Following up on the success of USA Today’s Wednesday Comics program, it was announced today that the nation’s top-selling print newspaper will bring comics to the forefront of culture yet again. The program will showcase exclusive and all-new original content from Dark Horse Comics’ top properties and creators across a variety of media platforms.

“As an entertainment company, Dark Horse prides itself on pushing the boundaries with groundbreaking creators and content,” said Mike Richardson, president and publisher of Dark Horse Comics. “We’re excited to continue this tradition by showcasing some of our most exciting stories in this all-new program with these great partners.” 

“As a leader in home entertainment built on Toshiba’s rich 130-year history of groundbreaking technologies, we are proud to associate our products, including our new LED HDTVs and Blu-ray Disc players, with the compelling and legendary Dark Horse brand,” said Maria Repole, vice president of communications for Toshiba. “This truly exciting campaign will help Toshiba build a connection with a passionate group of consumers eager to experience fresh content in innovative ways.”

“USA Today is excited to be partnering with Toshiba and Dark Horse on this innovative program. It’s a terrific example of how USA Today can take exclusive content and turn it into a compelling cross-platform reader experience,” said Susan Lavington, senior vice president of marketing for USA Today.

The DH:HD (Dark Horse: High-Def) program kicks off today with an exclusive look at best-selling author Janet Evanovich’s first graphic novel, Troublemaker, in USA Today. The newspaper and Toshiba will maintain momentum by continuing to showcase Dark Horse’s content online, in print, and at the Comic-Con International in San Diego and New York Comic Con. In October, Dark Horse will roll out a series of all-new stories created exclusively for the program.

Above, a page from DrunkDuck strip Fate Running Wildby Ashveira and Ryse, Selene and Mara.

WOWIO, Inc., an established market leader with an online destination (www.wowio.com) that provides access to rich digital media content and eBooks, today announced the acquisition of leading webcomics community DrunkDuck from Platinum Studios. Following last week’s acquisition of social networking site WEvolt, the acquisition of DrunkDuck will expand WOWIO’s existing library of content available for viewing, as well as broaden the site’s user base through its 95,000 community members.

“We have been exploring ways to enhance our consumer experience with additional and relevant content,” said Brian Altounian, CEO and President of WOWIO. “This acquisition provides advertisers with additional avenues to brand an even broader range of content and publishers with a new and growing digital distribution platform.”

DrunkDuck maintains one of the leading webcomics communities, where creators are able to post comics and interact with their fans daily on forums to discuss the latest news, releases, content and even collaborate on ideas. WOWIO purchased DrunkDuck from Platinum Studios /quotes/comstock/11k!pdos (PDOS 0.10, +0.01, +5.26%) , an entertainment company that controls a large international library of comic book characters. Platinum continues to focus on film and television projects such as the just-completed, self-financed DYLAN DOG: DEAD OF NIGHT film and the upcoming COWBOYS & ALIENS feature film project with DreamWorks, Imagine Entertainment and Universal, set to begin production this month. The graphic novel of COWBOYS & ALIENS is currently available for free download on WOWIO.

“DrunkDuck’s primary goal has always been to provide the community with the content and tools they need to create the stories they want to tell,” said Scott Rosenberg, Platinum Studios’ Chairman and CEO. “WOWIO shared our original vision and will now provide a platform to continue to grow the community and strengthen the DrunkDuck brand. We couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity and are thrilled that DrunkDuck is now going to be an official part of the WOWIO family.”

“The DrunkDuck site, community and existing library of content will remain unchanged,” added Altounian. “Fans, publishers and advertisers will be pleased to know that it will be business as usual for DrunkDuck as well as WOWIO, and with our recent integration plans with WEvolt, we are unifying known entities and melding them into one superior comic and eBook destination.”

[Via Comics Alliance]