The Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza 3000 is a cut above the average Kickstarter campaign, both in the breadth of the project being considered and the originality of the prizes being offered.

The Kickstarter drive (which has already garnered over $10,000 worth of pledges, over three times its original goal) will pay for Stevens to compile a downloadable e-book of all his Diesel Sweeties strips. While the strip is a free webcomic, and Stevens has made smaller collected editions in a variety of formats, this would be a 3,000-page book that would include every strip; Stevens plans to correct typos and other errors, do some minor editing, and index them—in other words, this would be the definitive edition of Diesel Sweeties.

This e-book would be released as a DRM-free iBook or PDF under a Creative Commons license. Stevens is emphatic on this point:

It’s also very important to me that this ebook collection be done in the spirit of the original work: Free to read, free of geographical restriction and accessible to as many people as possible.

I care about credit and copyright, and love the idea of selling ebooks, but as long as I am able to work on Diesel Sweeties, I would like payment to be optional. That’s the model which has supported me as my main job since 2003, through boom and recession. That’s the model this comic was designed for and where it’s going to stay.

…

I hope you’ll also store this collection and share it with your friends. Remix it for devices that don’t exist, buy a decommissioned missile silo and Apocalypse-proof it, print it out and ask me to sign a twenty-pound stack of paper when you see me at a convention. Once you get a copy, it’s yours. The only copy protection I need is the fact that tomorrow’s comic doesn’t exist yet and my brain’s the only place that bakes that cookie. I only ask that you respect the Creative Commons license and do not use them commercially without permission.

So if the book is free, what do Kickstarter pledgers get for their money? Advance copies, a physical copy (on a thumb drive), a commissioned print of any two Diesel Sweeties characters in bed, pixel sculptures built of Legos and glued together, a life-sized pixel portrait of a pet. There are also two torture-the-artist pledges: For $666, Stevens, a vegetarian, will eat a pound of bacon (supermarket bacon, he specifies in the FAQ), and for $10,000 he will swear off coffee for a month. (Both pledges are currently unclaimed.)

What makes this work is that Stevens has been making Diesel Sweeties for the past ten years, and in the process he has built a fan base that is more than willing to pay him to make it, despite the fact that the comic and all his e-books are free. With that kind of a following, voluntary donations are not too heavy a risk.

Here’s good news for fans of the television show Smallville who were left without their fix in May when the series went off the air for good: DC announced today that Smallville is coming back as a comic, which will be released first in digital and then in print form. The series will be written by Bryan Q. Miller, who was a scriptwriter for the show, and will pick up where the television story left off. Pere Perez, who worked with Miller on Batgirl: The Flood, will handle the art, and the digital cover above is by Cat Staggs.

DC has an interesting strategy for this comic: It will launch as a digital comic on April 13, with a new digital chapter coming out each week. (No word on pricing or length.) About a month later, it will come out as a print comic, collecting the chapters and adding an episode guide; the first print comic is due out on May 16, and Gary Frank (Superman Secret Origin) will be doing the covers for the print issues.

The weekly chapters are an interesting twist. Not only do they mimic the timing of the original show, they make the comic more of an immediate experience, something people come back to frequently and discuss in real time, as opposed to a monthly event. IDW is doing something similar with its Transformers series Autocracy, publishing an eight-page digital chapter every two weeks, priced at 99 cents. And of course there’s Shonen Jump Alpha, the digital reincarnation of Viz’s Shonen Jump, which publishes a chapter a week of six different manga within two weeks of their Japanese release, with a teen-friendly price of 99 cents per issue (less if you get the yearly subscription).

I spoke to Viz senior vice president Alvin Lu about the weekly chapters at NYCC last year, and he made an interesting point: “Manga is a live medium in Japan,” he told me. “It comes out in popular form every week and is enjoyed at the same time by millions of readers. Creators feed off that energy, and that is the secret of manga’s success.”

Aside from that energy, the weekly chapters are generally priced lower than a comic, and it’s a basic psychological fact that most people will be more comfortable spending 99 cents four weeks in a row than spending $3.99 all at once, no matter how much they get for the money.

Could the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker have a real-life cousin in a nuclear plant? Researchers are puzzling over a white, “cobweb-like” substance that was found on spent uranium rods at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. The British tabloids are having a field day, with headlines like ‘Mutant’ spider fears at nuclear waste lab (at The Sun) and a rash of Spider-Man refereces. ABC News, on the other hand, talked to a real scientist:

“We observed it, it was unusual, it appears to be biological in nature but we don’t know that for sure,” said Will Callicott, the lab’s manager of executive communications. “It doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.”

The webs were found in the pools of water in which the spent fuel rods were submerged, but no one seems to have found an actual radioactive spider yet.

ABC News also interviewed Robert Baker of Texas Tech, who pointed out that wildlife flourished in the area around Russia’s Chernobyl nuclear plant after the accident there. The reason: The humans left, so the wildlife had the area to themselves. “They’re going to live a lot longer lives, because humans are worse for them than the radiation was,” Baker said.

Over at The Sun, their Spidey sense is tingling:

Experts say that any creature inside in the pools of water – which are intended to protect workers – would have been exposed to the nuclear fuel.

This raises the prospect of a creature having morphed into a new species of ‘extremophile’ after being exposed to uranium.

The Guy Delisle Chronicles from phillip rashleigh on Vimeo.

Thanks to our friends at The Forbidden Planet blog for pointing us to this trailer for filmmaker Philip Rashleigh’s documentary about Guy Delisle. Here’s the blurb:

Captured over the course of a 1 year period in the south of France, the film follows the gradual realization of Guy’s latest travelogue ‘Jerusalem Chronicles’ and includes an in-depth look at Shenzhen, Pyongyang, Burma Chronicles aswell as an intriguing insight into the rise of the independent graphic novel. Equally explored are Guy’s beginnings in animation, his studio, his inspiration, his career thus far and the travelogues that never saw print: Vietnam and Ethiopia.

The film is in French, but it’s subtitled, and it looks like a nice combo of watching the artist at work and hearing what he has to say about comics in general and his comics in particular.

Jack Kirby

If Twitter had existed back in the mid-1980s, things might have turned out differently for Jack Kirby and, ultimately, his heirs. Perhaps Marvel’s demand that he permanently sign away the copyright to all his work for them in return for very limited rights to his original art would have triggered the sort of online firestorm that scotched the Bank of America debit card fees, SOPA/PIPA, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s brief moment of collusion with the hard right. Then again, maybe not—the internet can be fickle.

A number of creators criticized Marvel’s actions at the time, and in the end they did soften a bit and come up with a deal Kirby could sign. More recently, Kirby’s heirs tried to claim ownership of a number of copyrights for characters he created, but the judge in that case ruled in Marvel’s favor without even going to trial. Now Change.org is giving it a second try, with an internet petition asking Marvel to make things right with Kirby and his heirs:

We strongly urge Marvel Entertainment and its owner Disney to acknowledge Jack Kirby’s authorship and primary role in the creation of these characters. As well, we urge Marvel to pay Kirby’s family royalties or other just compensation for the use of these characters and stories.

The petition calls on the signatories to boycott Marvel until that happens. So far, despite appearing on The Beat, the petition only has 229 signatures, which isn’t likely to move the sales needle enough for Marvel to notice.

The ‘emo’ thing is both really funny and really annoying. All my books have been called ‘emo’ at one point or another, since Demo in 2003. Even Northlanders was called ‘emo’. Clearly its a meaningless insult, issued by lazy people who don’t have the proper words to describe something that is even a little bit less than 100% macho and straightforward. So Becky draws a sketch of Conan with a smile on his face, and only reaction available is to call it ‘emo’. It’s absurd. The funny part of it is these same people don’t even know what ‘emo’ is, what the word really means. A fun variation on this, something I spotted on some forum, was “Conan looks like a barista!”. I almost emailed Becky to ask her to sketch Conan working at Starbucks for the fun of it.

Brian Wood, talking to MTV Geek about his new Conan series, which launches this week, and the critique on some message boards that his character was too “emo.”

As funny as it is to imagine an emo Conan (paging Kate Beaton!), what I like about this quote in particular is Wood’s healthy attitude about criticism of his work. It’s not easy to put things out there and have them critiqued by the world at large, but dealing with it is a part of the job. Wood talks a little later about the passion of serious Conan fans and remarks that creators really should stay away from forums that discuss their work, saying, “I think readers should have the privacy and feel free to talk openly about a book without the writer or artist lurking over their shoulder, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice. It’s a little creepy, really.”

Omnitarium

Jamie Gambell’s comic Omnitarium came out a couple of years ago—we ran a five-page preview of the first issue right here at Robot 6 at the time.

Two weeks ago, he put up offered a free download of the comic through a link on his site, making it as easy as possible for people to get it. He promoted it via a variety of social media and invited people to both spread the word and express their appreciation with a tip.

Last week he reported the results, and while it’s clear that giving away free indy comics is not the path to fame and riches, he is happy with the numbers. The page got 478 views in a week, making it his highest-viewed post ever, and 61 people downloaded the comic. He got two donations via PayPal and is pleased with that. Twitter brought in the most views, in part because he posted multiple times and got into conversations with people on Twitter. (That’s where I first saw it, come to think of it.) Deviantart was the least powerful of his social media channels. And surprisingly, given the generally opinionated nature of the comics blogosphere, no one has given him any feedback.

Gambell drew three lessons from this.

Not everybody wants something for free.

Twitter can be a very effective tool for spreading news.

Even with free things, creating can be a vacuum.

The second one comes as no surprise, especially since Gambell obviously put some effort into it, but the other two give me pause. Gambell’s comic looks interesting and the art is nice—I’d pay money for it—and usually people who download a comic have something to say about it. Anyway, it’s always interesting to see someone try this experiment, and props to Gambell for attaching actual numbers to it.

Superman

A new book, due out in April, will shed some light on the story of the Superman radio shows that took on the KKK back in 1946—and hopefully straighten out the record once and for all. Several versions of this story have made the rounds over the years, and the basic facts are not in dispute: In 1946, the Adventures in Superman radio show ran a 16-episode arc titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” in which Superman took on an organization that had many similarities to the Ku Klux Klan. (You can listen to it here.)

Much of the background material from the shows came from journalist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Klan and then wrote about it. Kennedy claimed the Superman shows included real Klan code words, causing great frustration to the real Klan leaders, who had to change them after every episode. (Our sister site, Comics Should Be Good, discussed the story as part of their Comic Book Urban Legends series.)

Author Rick Bowers researched the matter at length for his new children’s book, Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan, and concluded that, although it makes for a great story, it just ain’t so. As he said to J.L. Bell, in an interview at the Horn Book site,

The reality is that “Clan of the Fiery Cross” — while dramatic and to a degree realistic—did not contain actual code words and did not force the Klan to scurry about changing their code words. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the Superman producers for creating such a powerful program and to give a nod to the anti-Klan efforts of Stetson Kennedy — even if he was prone to exaggeration and tended to grab credit.

The code-words story was included in the first edition of Freakonomics, but the authors amended the story in later editions. Bowers said he began working on his book after that, and the public debate led him to research the matter carefully. The truth, as is usually the case, is more prosaic than fiction—but still pretty good!

Over on her blog, Gingerbread Girl artist Colleen Coover takes us step by step through the design of a cover for her short story a male/male romance titled Home Port. Coover has a nice, fluid style, and the drawing comes together pretty quickly, but it’s interesting to see how she keeps on toying with it after that.

She also talks a bit about using photo references from the web: “Now, it’s important to note that I did not just trace these photos directly, or stick ‘em in a Photoshop filter or anything like that; that would be a violation of the photographers’ copyrights. I drew from them as one would from a live model–to place the features in all the correct proportions and angles–but I made significant changes.”

If you’re a regular Robot 6 reader, you will probably already have seen some of Cunningham’s work, as we have linked to it several times; his comics are little mini-documentaries that take on controversial topics and debunk bad science. He has posted a number of the chapters of Science Tales on his blog and in a recent post he compared their popularity. His chapters on Evolution and the Moon Hoax are literally off the charts with over 250,000 hits each, while his autism/vaccine story, The Facts in the Case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, which made the rounds of the comics blogosphere, got about 40,000 hits. Cunningham observes in the post that many of the visits come from folks who are interested in the topic covered, rather than comics per se:

It shows, I think, that the comic strip medium has a huge audience waiting out there beyond the tiny bubble of fandom. Readers coming to my blog to read these chapters were not the usual comic book crowd. They were drawn to to read these comics because of the subject, not because of the medium. Many noters commented that they didn’t usually read comics at all.

You can see this in the comments to each comic, which generally include a lively, but civil, debate about the topic at hand. (The readers also do Cunningham’s editing for him, pointing out typos and other small errors.) The posted chapters serve as the beta version of the book, but for fans of Cunningham’s work (his Psychiatric Tales is already available in the U.S.), the print edition will be well worth seeking out.

Gamers and global manga fans are already familiar with King of RPGs, a graphic novel about, well, RPGs, by Jason Thompson and Victor Hao. (Thompson is well known in the manga community as a former editor and the writer of Manga: The Complete Guide.)

Now they are taking a new tack, extending their story on the web via a King of RPGs webcomic. It’s a nice brand extension, as the webcomic looks like it will be accessible to readers who aren’t familiar with the books as well as those who are longtime fans. Thompson and Hao have added plenty of bonus content to the site, including the original story pitch, and they plan on updating the webcomic two or three times a week.

Renee Basham's day begins

Yesterday was Hourly Comics Day, but it would have been more appropriate to have it today, on Groundhog Day, so everyone could relive yesterday in comics form. Hourly Comics Day brings journal comics to their logical extreme: Every hours, creators stop what they are doing and draw a comic about it. There’s an inherent flaw in the concept, in that the best artists are the people who draw comics all the time, which makes for a dull diary. Let’s just say there’s lots of messing around with social media and eating of ramen in these comics. It’s not like anyone was rescuing people from the Tokyo underground or breaking up a crime syndicate yesterday. Still, some are quite well done, and peering at someone else’s life in such detail has a certain voyeuristic appeal. What’s more, the comics submitted to this year’s archive page show an impressive array of talent, although most are from creators I have never heard of before.

Some creators posted their hourly comics at their own sites. Dean Trippe has a charmingly simple comic about a day that was apparently dominated by the letter D. Sarah Becan has a day of minor annoyances at work, and Jeph Jacques covers all the comics-creator bases: He plays video games, eats junk food, checks to see what people are saying about him online, and worries a lot. Check the Twitter hashtag #hourlycomics for more.

And now it’s coming to print: Dark Horse announced yesterday that they are collecting the story into a print edition, with volume 1 due on July 4. That’s pretty much it for details, but as Norton says, “When I first made the Battlepug T-shirt, people kept asking when the comic was coming out. So, I put out the webcomic and now everybody wants to know when the book is coming out! I guess now people will want to know when the movie is happening?” Not soon enough, Mike. Not soon enough.

Kevin Keller, the first openly gay character in Archie Comics, gets his own series starting today, and when you think about it, that in itself is pretty historic—when was the last time an Archie character got a new series? It seems like all the individual comics (Jughead, Betty and Veronica, etc.) have been around since I was a kid.

Anyway, Out Magazine has a preview of the first six pages of the comic. It starts with typical Archie exposition, but there is a plot: Kevin gets asked out on his first date. Up till now, Kevin’s gayness has been purely theoretical, so it will be interesting to see him join in the romantic hurly-burly of Riverdale. Hopefully there are at least two other gay guys in town, so he can accidentally invite both to the prom or send flowers to the wrong one.

Out also has a brief interview with Kevin creator Dan Parent, who says that he based Kevin’s look on Justin Timberlake, although he ended up looking more like Glee’s Mr. Schuster. And Kevin’s husband Clay (who is seen only in the Life With Archie magazines, not the regular continuity) was inspired by the Old Spice guy. Life is good in Riverdale!

One Piece, Vol. 46

Crime | An energetic thief stole all 64 volumes of One Piece from a Japanese bookstore by stuffing 10 volumes at a time in his duffel bag. As One Piece is the most popular manga in Japan, he could have gotten a good price for his booty at a used manga store, had the forces of law not intervened. [Kotaku]

Legal | Michael Cavna talks with cartoonist Susie Cagle about being taken into custody again over the weekend during Occupy Oakland protests. [Comic Riffs]

Creators | Kiss member Gene Simmons still remembers the postcard he got from Stan Lee as a kid. [Noisecreep]

Comics | Jeff Parker and Erica Moen’s webcomic Bucko has reached its last panel, but Parker says a book is on the way, and there will be “exciting news” at Emerald City Comic Con. [Parkerspace]

Creators | Patrick Smith interviews Jeremy Whitley, co-creator of Princeless, an all-ages comic that has been getting good word-of-blog lately: “I think you’ll see as story progresses that fight scenes especially get pretty comical. In fact, I think that things like the lampooning of outfits and fairy tales and princess culture are the important heavy lifting of Princeless. They make adults who have lived with this stuff go “YES! THAT!” but hopefully kids who are seeing this stuff for the first time will be conditioned to see those sorts of things as ludicrous from an early age. It’s hard to get bs past kids on stuff like that anyway.” [Spandexless]

Jill Thompson, by Seth Kushner

Creators | Jill Thompson reminisces about modeling for P. Craig Russell and talks about her work on Wonder Woman, Sandman, Finals, and the all-ages comic Scary Godmother in a wide-ranging interview with Christopher Irving. [Graphic NYC]

Creators | Mike Jasper, co-creator of In Maps and Legends, talks about his love of fantasy and his experience launching the comic on Zuda and then moving it to other digital programs when Zuda folded. Fun fact: Although they have been working together for two and a half years, Mike and his collaborator Niki Smith have never met in person. [Graphicly Blog]

Comics | Funky Winkerbean fans rejoice: Tom Batiuk will release the first volume of collected Funky strips earlier this year. Readers who are familiar with the current depressing storylines will be surprised by the earlier strips, which are much more light-hearted and in fact quite funny. [The Daily Cartoonist]

Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether

Comics | Greg Rucka discusses plans for the collection edition of the webcomic Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, and with a variety of digital and print formats on the table, asks readers what they would prefer. [Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether]

Graphic novels | The American Booksellers Association has published a list of the best selling graphic novels in independent bookstores for the two months ending Jan. 22. [Bookselling This Week ,via Graphic Novel Reporter]

Graphic novels | Paul Gravett lists some tempting graphic novels due out in March. [Paul Gravett]

Webcomics | The collaborative site Act-I-Vate celebrates its sixth anniversary today. [Acti-I-Vate]

Review | Robot 6 contributor Christopher Mautner reviews Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s to 2000s, which he finds as dreary as its subject matter, despite a few high points: “Easily the best comic of the bunch is Walt Kelly’s “Pogo Primer for Parents”, a visual lecture on the importance of properly monitoring your child’s television habits that is so charming and funny that it only serves to underscore how drab and lifeless all the other excerpts are by comparison.” [The Comics Journal]

Jillian Tamaki (Skim, Indoor Voice) is between projects right now, with one project on the editor’s desk and another not quite under way. So when the New York Times asked her to illustrate a piece on political sex scandals, she was ready, willing, and more than able. Here’s the main illustration, and click through to her blog to see some other sketches. (Mildly NSFW—this is the Times, after all—but she includes one drawing that was apparently too hot for them.)

Terry Moore announced on his blog last week that he will release his comics digitally via comiXology, beginning with Strangers in Paradise and hopefully going on to Rachel Rising, his current series. Actually, he lets one of his would-be readers, Aaron, do most of the talking:

I went to Bedrock Comics today, asked about Rachel Rising #5, and was told that they only ordered two copies, and both were pre-orders. The shopkeeper said when the book first came out, he ordered more, based on track record, but they didn’t sell. I simply don’t have the time to go searching around, and I don’t buy enough comics to warrant a pull list. I’m not sure what the problem is that there “isn’t a single penny” for you with digital, but I’d buy PDFs straight from this site if I could. Unfortunately, I can’t justify $6.99 plus shipping for a comic….

There is something profoundly wrong with the distribution system when a title from a leading creator can’t be found at a comic store in a major metropolitan area. I can’t see how digital would be any worse for you, and it would be a lot better for me (and I’m betting plenty of others). I want to support your work, but it shouldn’t be this difficult.

This is the problem, in a nutshell, for independent creators like Moore. I’m sure if Aaron were looking for the latest DC or Marvel title, there would be no problem, but it’s hard for retailers to take a risk on titles that may not sell — or that don’t sell well for the first couple of issues. You can’t blame them for that, but it presents an obstacle to new or alternative creators whose work may take a while to catch on. Moore isn’t abandoning print, or the direct market, but he’s a good example of a creator who will probably add readers with digital.

Call it serendipity: I was poking around looking at something else, and somehow I stumbled on the Coconino Classics website, a stunning treasure trove of early comics. The site includes beautifully designed sub-sites for a number of artists, including Krazy Kat creator George Herriman and Little Nemo creator Winsor McKay, that feature biographies, bibliographies, and generous samples of their work. Artists from the pre-history of comics, such as Hokusai, George Cruickshank and Rodolphe Töpffer, and more recent creators such as Rube Goldberg and George McManus get more modest pages that still include digitized versions of their work and the occasional article by comics scholar Thierry Smolderen.

It’s all part of a larger site, Coconino World, that features contemporary as well as classic comics. It’s a French-language site, but much of the text is translated into English, and of course the comics are in their original languages.

Valiant Entertainment

Retailing | Former retailer Atom! Freeman, now sales manager for the revived Valiant Entertainment, has set out to contact every comics retailer in the direct market to promote the publisher’s upcoming superhero line. What has he learned? Retailers are divided on the importance of variant covers, and they don’t place a high value on returnability, but they care a lot about timeliness: “I try to ask every retailer I speak with what his or her biggest concern is in dealing with a new publisher. The number one answer I get is timeliness. Retailers want to know that they will have a consistent product shipped on a consistent schedule.” [ICv2]

Retailing | Todd Allen’s survey of readers of The Beat, admittedly a specialized audience, reveals that more than two-thirds use pre-ordering as their primary method of buying comics, although many will pick up a few off the rack as well. [The Beat]

Awards | Paul Register, founder and organizer of the Stan Lee Excelsior Awards, writes about how the awards, which are selected by 11- to 16-year-olds in the U.K., came to be and why they are important: “In a system that rarely studies complete texts and doesn’t overtly place a huge importance on the clear benefits of children reading outside the classroom, comics have become marginalised in schools at a time when their potential for raising literacy standards amongst teenagers has arguably never been greater. The Excelsior Award is an attempt to give children the opportunity to take ownership of their own reading and to feel that reading books that they actually want to read – as opposed to being told to read – is not a waste of time.” [Comics Forum]

Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

Publishing | Fantagraphics President Gary Groth comments on Matthias Wivel’s review of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, adding some insight with regard to re-coloring the comics, numbering the volumes, the order of the stories, and the shortcomings of earlier reprint editions. [The Comics Journal]

Digital comics | Webcomics creator R. Stevens used iBooks Author to compile a collected edition of the December Diesel Sweeties comics, and just a week later, he reckons that 10,000 people have downloaded the free e-book. He discusses the pros and cons of the system, as well as distribution (he chose to use Dropbox rather than the iBooks store) and sees it as a serious strategy for the future. [Diesel Sweeties]

Creators | Alex Berry talks to Zegas creator Michael Fiffe about making comics and writing about them: “Well, I’m a cartoonist first and foremost. All the other stuff is just a way of sorting through my own interests and learning curves. The first interview I conducted was based on a personal need to find something out. I had tracked down the cartoonist Trevor Von Eeden and wanted to know what he was up to and how his career developed. You know, basic interview stuff, except it didn’t exist for him, so I sought it out myself. From that, I learned to somewhat voice my own views and approaches to comics.” [Spandexless]

Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story

Creators | David Robertson talks briefly about his graphic novel Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story, which tells the true story of a Native American girl who was sent away to a boarding school and subjected to abuse and discrimination. There is a short preview at the site as well. [CBC Manitoba]

Comics | Ben Morse celebrates the exploits of The Ray, a superhero who didn’t quite make the big time. [The Cool Kids Table]

Comics | Tom Gill takes a long look at the work of Garo manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge, with particular attention to his classic work The Incident at Nishibeta Village. [The Hooded Utilitarian]

The fantasy-action-comedy comic Skullkickers was one of the surprise hits of the past year, and now the creators are going to post the back issues on Keenspot. The web version starts out with two prequels, short stories that writer Jim Zubkavich and artist Chris Stevens created for Image’s Popgun Anthology.

While it may seem odd to post a comic for free while it’s still available for sale, this move makes a lot of sense: I’m guessing single issues that came out more than a year ago are no longer readily available (although digital editions still are at comiXology), but as the trades have sold pretty well, the creators may figure the value of the new readers who will come to the comic through Keenspot — and ultimately buy the print or digital editions — will more than compensate for any sales lost from those people who might have paid but decided to read Skullkickers for free instead.

This is a calculation every creator should make, because it may lead them to choose, as Zubkavich & Co. have done, to pre-empt the pirates and make their work available online on their own terms.