DC Spills The Beans. Slush Pile or No?
We now know the name of DC's online initiative: Zuda Comics. Comics will be submitted by users and selected by editors, and the most popular of them will get a one-year contract. Comic Book Resources has an interview with Ron Perazza while The New York Times has more details (reproduced for non-subscribers at CNET.)
For now, a few thoughts:
Ron is a bit slippery when it comes to who gets which legal rights, but it does sound as if Zuda's contracts will be worth a closer look: "I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not exactly sure what the specific legal terms are to use, but throughout the company we make all sorts of deals and they're not all buyouts or work-for-hire and so forth. This is a creator driven initiative, so our deals reflect that." Glad to see they're at least taking the creators' rights question seriously, but we'll have to see a contract before we see what their answer really is.
Paul Levitz: "One of the problems that comics have today, I think, is that open door is much more closed. This creates a more open door." In other words, "We're tearing down the wall..." Backlash will probably begin before I post this, but I think Levitz, like Rosenberg, is using the word "comics" as shorthand for "direct-market comic books." This is a mistake, but it's a common mistake, and it's a hard one to avoid when your audience knows little about true webcomics.
The New York Times gets it wrong with its first paragraph. I wish I could say I'm surprised by that. This is not a "slush pile."
Slush piles contain every submission that a publisher receives, which means that many Web 2.0 sites like YouTube or Blogger, where publication is instantaneous, are like "digital slush piles" that almost never get edited.
But as Ron says at CBR: "If you want to actually make comics, you can submit your stuff to us and all the submissions will be poured through internally to make sure that things are of a certain quality or standard, then we select a bunch of those and put them online every month."
So, apparently, Zuda is a collection of its best submissions as chosen by editors. What you'll see on the site will already be filtered, unlike the content of a Webcomics Nation, Drunk Duck or Comic Genesis. More like Modern Tales.
It might be more on target to call this an "online comics reality show." American Idol puts twelve singers through a competition, and one of them gets a recording contract, a similar incentive to the one-year contract Zuda is offering. But obviously Idol gets thousands of applicants, and has to filter them before broadcast.
The San Diego Comic-Con initiative is interesting: would-be cartoonists will be given postage-paid postcards to send back to Zuda. That idea seems to respond to the popularity of Postsecret, a blog that's currently #9 on the Technorati Top 100. Explosm.net, which topped two of our recent webcomics traffic surveys and placed fourth in the third, is #32 on Technorati. Postsecret usually features words and pictures in combination, in a sequence chosen partly by chronology and partly by the site creator. If you're flexible with your definitions, you could argue that this means Postsecret could be the most popular online comics series in existence. But that's another discussion.
We'll see where things go from here.
(Cross-posting to Broken Frontier.)
P.S.
P.P.S.
For now, a few thoughts:
Ron is a bit slippery when it comes to who gets which legal rights, but it does sound as if Zuda's contracts will be worth a closer look: "I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not exactly sure what the specific legal terms are to use, but throughout the company we make all sorts of deals and they're not all buyouts or work-for-hire and so forth. This is a creator driven initiative, so our deals reflect that." Glad to see they're at least taking the creators' rights question seriously, but we'll have to see a contract before we see what their answer really is.
Paul Levitz: "One of the problems that comics have today, I think, is that open door is much more closed. This creates a more open door." In other words, "We're tearing down the wall..." Backlash will probably begin before I post this, but I think Levitz, like Rosenberg, is using the word "comics" as shorthand for "direct-market comic books." This is a mistake, but it's a common mistake, and it's a hard one to avoid when your audience knows little about true webcomics.
The New York Times gets it wrong with its first paragraph. I wish I could say I'm surprised by that. This is not a "slush pile."
Slush piles contain every submission that a publisher receives, which means that many Web 2.0 sites like YouTube or Blogger, where publication is instantaneous, are like "digital slush piles" that almost never get edited.
But as Ron says at CBR: "If you want to actually make comics, you can submit your stuff to us and all the submissions will be poured through internally to make sure that things are of a certain quality or standard, then we select a bunch of those and put them online every month."
So, apparently, Zuda is a collection of its best submissions as chosen by editors. What you'll see on the site will already be filtered, unlike the content of a Webcomics Nation, Drunk Duck or Comic Genesis. More like Modern Tales.
It might be more on target to call this an "online comics reality show." American Idol puts twelve singers through a competition, and one of them gets a recording contract, a similar incentive to the one-year contract Zuda is offering. But obviously Idol gets thousands of applicants, and has to filter them before broadcast.
The San Diego Comic-Con initiative is interesting: would-be cartoonists will be given postage-paid postcards to send back to Zuda. That idea seems to respond to the popularity of Postsecret, a blog that's currently #9 on the Technorati Top 100. Explosm.net, which topped two of our recent webcomics traffic surveys and placed fourth in the third, is #32 on Technorati. Postsecret usually features words and pictures in combination, in a sequence chosen partly by chronology and partly by the site creator. If you're flexible with your definitions, you could argue that this means Postsecret could be the most popular online comics series in existence. But that's another discussion.
We'll see where things go from here.
(Cross-posting to Broken Frontier.)
P.S.
P.P.S.
Posted at
7:48 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home