Digital Comics

BY JEN VAUGHN - Comic writer, podcast host and serial blogger at his own website, The Invincible Super Blog, and Comics Alliance, Chris Sims sat down to have a chat with me about his upcoming Dracula comic to be fully released on Monday, October 31st, also known as Halloween. Six delicious pages are up as a preview now.

Mike Romo writes over at iFanboy that things have changed since he purchased an iPad. Among the plusses -- easier to find back issues, comics look better and...NO BENT PAGES.

As the glow of the Amazon Kindle Fire begins to appear on the horizon, many questions over just how comics are going to work on it are still unanswered. But it looks like publishers will be able to adapt their own works using Amazon's tech specs. Amazon has announced some new author tools for the Kindle Fire on their website:

While Heidi and Torsten were off having fun at NYCC, the rest of us had to sadly experience all the comics-related mayhem vicariously. Nevertheless, on the digital comics front matters continue to develop in interesting ways, particularly in relation to online retailing behemoth, Amazon. The explosive Amazon-DC graphic novel exclusive agreement for the upcoming Kindle Fire tablet device remains a hot topic and shows no signs of fading from view, with even the New York Times jumping on the controversy.

The NY Times digs in to the DC/Amazon/B&N/Books-a-MIllions spat and doesn't get too much further than the vague statements that everyone has made so far, but you can read between the lines a bit.

Over on the Vertigo blog, we find an announcement that Vertigo's titles are starting to be released simultaneously in both print and digital ("day and date" is an insipid phrase; let's all stop using it).

Yen Press has announced two manga style adaptations of bestselling YA novels: Sherrilyn Kenyon's Chronicles of Nick and Cassandra Clare's The Infernal Devices trilogy.  HyeKyung Baek...

This is interesting.  Viz is migrating Shonen Jump to a digital edition that's only 2 weeks removed from the Japanese original.  (And you can...

Yesterday, Apple servers were challenged when the world rushed to download iOS 5 with a host of new features -- and something called Newsstand, which will help readers subscribe to their favorite magazines available on iPads. Graphicly is there, so far the only mobile comics platform to be available, with titles like WALKING DEAD:

This iFanboy interview with a comics pirate who recently quit indicated that even among the scanning community, the good old days were awesome. Now, not so much.

Following his stint at BOOM! Studios, Chip Mosher has joined comiXology as VP of Marketing, PR and Business Development, where he'll run the digital distributor's West Coat office. Mosher was in on BOOM!'s early experiments in digital comics, so he'll doubtless bring much of that experience to comiXology, as well as his formidable talking abilities. It's a strong move for both parties. As if you hadn't figured out that digital comics are here to stay, they are now hiring real people for real jobs for, presumably, real salaries.

While googling for an image of Girl Genius in the previous post, we can across this Chris Butcher post from 2007 -- was it only fur years ago that the digital to print model was a new, uncertain thing? It was then that Phil Foglio began to serialize Girl Genius online and sell print collections, and pronounced it a success, a claim that Butcher analyzed: