News

We are still having problems where people's private emails are visible on the site. It's a very, very weird problem, evidently related to our use of Supercache to alleviate the GPU problem. We're actually in the process of moving to a new server. I tried turning off comments, but that doesn't work either. What I would recommend to people who don't want their private emails available to the next few posters is to use a dummy email for now. The way the controls are presently set, there is no technical reason to post a working email. I will of course continue to monitor comments and remove asshats, so this is not carte blanche to go nutso.

Nominees for the 2010 Lulu Awards, recognizing "the people and projects that helped to open eyes and minds to the amazing comic and cartooning...

Another tweak in the ongoing book distribution shifting: Cartoon Books, Jeff Smith's company and publisher of the 1 Volume BONE and RASL books, is moving from Diamond Book Distributors to PGW. The move affects only Cartoon Books' returnable sales -- direct sales will continue to be offered through Diamond Distribution. Recently out from cartoon Books: RASL POCKET EDITION #1, collecting issues 1-7 of the story of a dimension-jumping art thief. Good reading.

Presented Saturday night at the Small Press Expo, here are the 2010 Ignatz Award winners. Nominees were chosen by a panel comprised of Anders...

A lot of you have been emailing me about the comment glitch wherein the previous commenters information is still in the commenting box, and some bogus posting has resulted. Unfortunately, I've had to disable comments until we can figure out what's going on.

Re the current discussion following the actual creative costs quoted by Glenn Hauman in a recent post ,Todd Allen reminded me of a piece he wrote for PW COmics Week a while ago breaking down printing costs vs profits. Here's an excerpt ( but the whole piece is very long and should be read in its entirety.)

Khepri Comics is a web-based comics seller that's been around for over a decade, offering a lot of indie books but specializing in work by Brian Wood, Cliff Chiang, Becky Cloonan, and other "new mainstream" creators. Over the years, owner Brian Scot Johnson has built a strong relationship with these creators by promoting their work via special sales and so on. By partnering with Khepri these creators -- who, in addition to their distinctive work, have well-defined fanbases which they maintain via web interaction -- would be able to, say, offer a blog preview of their small press work with a link to Khepri and know that consumers would be able to purchase a copy.

Over Labor Day, Glenn Hauman at ComicMix had a fine post about the actual cost of comics which I'm quoting at length because it's so true:

That's about how much it costs for an average page of comic book art, in terms of labor. Figure $100 for the writer, $150 for the penciller, $130 for the inker, $90 for the colorist, and $30 for the letterer. Those numbers go up and down depending on talent and publishers, but that's a nice round number for us to work with.