Longbox

Digital Comics | Rantz Hoseley posted some additional information and answered questions on the Longbox digital comics in the comments section of the iFanboy article Kevin linked to yesterday.

Those updates include:

• Although only BOOM! and Top Cow have been announced so far, Hoseley said seven publishers have signed on for the launch, and the other five will be announced in the next few weeks leading up to the San Diego Comic Con.
• The software will include a “Manga Mode” that flips the left-to-right reading order. That’s pretty damn clever.
• The software will also allow for “age-restricted sub-accounts,” so your kids can read the Muppets but can’t get to your Black Kiss comics.
• Hoseley says that “while we certainly welcome DC and Marvel’s participation, the entire system was designed to have a business model that would be successful and profitable for all involved if they chose not to participate.”

There’s more at the link, so click over and read. This gets more interesting by the day …

e-Devices | Uclick, which has brought titles like Bone and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the iPhone, announced today that they’ve released an Eisner Award iPhone application, available now for free on iTunes. The app will update with icons indicating the winners in each category shortly after the voting results are announced on Friday, July 24 at the San Diego Comic Con.

I actually downloaded it last night; it only works in landscape, but it includes information on the awards and Will Eisner, as well as covers of all the nominees. It’s pretty slick and well worth the asking price.

Social media | The Castaways and Bluesman writer Rob Vollmar is tweeting a comic script at the rate of one page per day. No doubt that’s one way to ensure that every word — heck, every character — counts. (Via)

e-Devices | Publishers Weekly’s Calvin Reid reviews the Kindle DX, which started shipping June 10. “Comics displayed on the improved Kindle 2 looked dim and small and were hard to read and the device’s zoom feature didn’t really help much,” he wrote. “Comics are now much easier to read on the DX but they still seem dim and veiled by the screen’s grey cast.” He also notes that Amazon was meeting with comic publishers at the BookExpo America to discuss enhancing the device for comic viewing.

Webcomics | Wired.com’s GeekDad interviews Dr. McNinja creator Chris Hastings.

Social media | MySpace announced they are cutting another 300 jobs overseas.

Social media | Coming soon to a theater near you — Facebook, the movie.

At the moment, most of the comics available for the iPod are print comics that have been adapted to the new format, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Overall, it’s a different type of reading experience, and with the right comic and good formatting, it can be as good as or even better than reading the print version.

The chief difference is that almost all comics are viewed one panel at a time, which means the reader gets in closer to the art and experiences it as a series of single panels that scroll by horizontally. (Here’s a handy demo from Uclick.) Obviously, a comic that was originally drawn as self-contained panels will do better on the iPod than one that relies on splash pages and interplay between panels. Consistency is also important: With its fixed height and width, the iPod screen can’t accommodate a wide horizontal or tall vertical panel very well. Those panels have to be shrunk down, which can be distracting. One quickly becomes accustomed to the figures and text being a certain size, so when they suddenly get smaller, it interrupts the smooth reading experience.

One thing that doesn’t seem to have been standardized yet is whether the comic is viewed vertically or horizontally. Of the apps I looked at, the ones from Uclick were all intended to be viewed with the iPod held in the vertical position; rotating it didn’t make the art any bigger. The iVerse apps I checked all displayed the comic in the horizontal mode only, which made for a bigger, more readable panel. The one outlier is Yoshitoshi ABe, who managed to fit an entire page of Pochiyama onto the iPod screen in the vertical mode. This worked surprisingly well and allowed for the interplay between panels that was missing from all the other comics.

Generally, graphic novels with a panel-by-panel storytelling style and straightforward art fared the best on the small screen. Jeff Smith’s Bone, for instance, works pretty well, because the story is told in small, fairly simple panels. I went back and looked at the print version when I was done, and I saw a few places where I had lost a bit of context, but overall, the story was easy to follow and looked good on the small screen.

Ninjatown, based on the Nintendo DS game, was even better. The simple shapes and bright colors of this comic really lend themselves to the iPod. The creators tell their story in a series of single panels and the movement in each panel is easy to follow—there is detail, but no clutter, although variations in panel shape made for some distracting zooming in and out.

One comic that I actually liked better on the iPod was Archie: Freshman Year. The panels fit the horizontal format nicely, with little wasted space and easily readable word balloons. The most heinous misstep was chopping the opening splash page in two (and beheading Veronica) to fit it onto the small screen. The other splash pages were divided up more gracefully, though, and I noticed the designers took the trouble to remove the edges of word balloons that would have impinged on the sides of the panel. What’s more, this is a dialogue-heavy comic and the pages of the print version seem crowded; the iPod version has more breathing room and is actually easier to read.

Adult comics with full-page layouts present more of a challenge, because designers have to chop the page up the way a widescreen movie is reformatted to fit on a TV screen, panning and shifting the center to capture as much of the action as possible. The iVerse Smashout adaptation of The Man Called A-X is a good example of a comic that doesn’t work well on the small screen. The original story is told in large, often full-page panels, and the designers had to shoehorn it onto the iPod by showing pieces of a scene, then pulling back and showing a longer view, often with illegible text. In addition, because the art often breaks the edges of the panels, the designer often had to leave in a bit of another panel in order to display a complete image.

Yoshitoshi ABe can put full pages of Pochiyama onto the iPod because his pages aren’t terribly complex—five or six panels per page—and his art is crisp and clean, so it comes across very well even when shrunk down to iPod size. What doesn’t work as well is the text, which is typeset very clumsily within the word balloons. (Also, either the translation or the writing is bad—it’s hard to say which—either way, the comic is well-nigh incomprehensible, although lovely to look at.)

All this formatting tsouris will eventually go away once people start designing comics specifically for the iPod platform. The screen is a decent size for reading individual panels, the colors are nice and bright, and options such as scrolling, animation, and sound could enhance the comics if used judiciously. Hopefully, artists will start to think of exploiting it as a medium in its own right, but in the meantime, it’s a decent substitute for bulky books for those of us who never want to be caught without something to read.

Update: Corrected the publisher of The Man Called A-X.

The Crooked Man

Webcomics | Corinna Bechko, one of the co-creators of The Crooked Man, says that she and artist Gabriel Hardman are working to turn their Zuda submission into a graphic novel. They placed fifth in the July 2008 Zuda competition. (Thanks David!)

Webcomics | Warren Pleece’s Montague Terrace has started running on the ACTIVATE website. You can also find all the pages at his blog. In other ACTIVATE news, the site also now includes a column by Tim Hall.

Twitter | T Campbell is twittering his thoughts on Crisis on Infinite Earths as he rereads the decades-old crossover series. “Praise, critique, and lots of snark ahead.” [Via The Beat]

e-Devices | The full audio of the South by Southwest interactive panel “Comics on Handhelds: Taking Webcomics Mobile” is now online. The panel features Dan Goldman, Rich Stevens, Douglas Edwards, Molly Crabapple, Dave Bort and Rantz Hoseley “in a let’s-sketch-out-solutions talk for transitioning webcomics to a variety of new petri dishes,” Goldman said.

Webcomics | The Zuda Fan Art blog features exactly what it says it does in its name.

e-Devices | Rumor has it that the new iPhone, announced earlier this week, will have graphic capabilities beyond Sony’s PSP. (Personally I’m digging the new Voice Memo feature it’ll sport). The new iPhone will be available June 19.

Digger

Webcomics | Fleen’s Gary Tyrrell bridges the gap between print comics and webcomics by pointing fans of the former to something that has a similar tone or feel on the web. Or, in other words, “If you like X, try reading Y.” This Usagi Yojimbo fan is now subscribed to Digger as a result, and I plan to check out others on his list (and in the comments section) as well.

Webcomics | Smith Magazine wraps up its Next-Door Neighbor anthology of webcomics with a contribution by Tara Seibel.

Video games | Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro talks to Wired about a variety of subjects, including how the PlayStation 3 is the “Model T” for a new storytelling engine and how video games will one day have their Citizen Kane — as, in his opinion, comics have already had.

“Go back a couple of decades to the birth of the graphic novel—I think we can pinpoint the big bang to Will Eisner’s A Contract With God,” he said. “Today, we have very worthy people doing literary comics. I think the same thing will happen on the Internet-gaming side. In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.”

Webcomics | Becky Cloonan, Melissa DeJesus and Hwan Cho are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their website Estrigious with a table at this year’s MoCCA Festival, where Cloonan and Cho plan to announce a new webcomic coming to the site.

Webcomics | Speaking of MoCCA, Kevin Church and Benjamin Birdie will debut the first print collection of their webcomic The Rack at the show.

e-Devices | moconews.net looks at the growing amount of content from the bigger media conglomerates available on iTunes, and wonders if it’s pushing out the little guy.

Webcomics | Karl Kerschl says his webcomic The Abominable Charles Christopher could be coming to print this year. “I’m looking at printing quotes and schedules, and I hope to have something available by mid-summer,” he wrote on the comic’s blog.

Webcomics | MTV has started a new feature where they “take a look at comics that merit attention from filmmakers.” The first one focuses on the webcomic The Adventures Of Dr. McNinja By Chris Hastings.

e-Devices | Alan Moore’s “Future Shocks” short stories that appeared in 2000 AD are now available for the iPhone.

Webcomics | I dig this side scrolling comic by Tymothi Godek that Scott McCloud links to. “Despite the crazed fantasy storyline, Tym is mapping the sort of intersecting, branching, and colliding paths that people in real life take all the time, but that only comics can make visible. Very cool,” McCloud wrote on his blog.

Vs.

Webcomics | Writing for Publisher’s Weekly Comic Week, Ada Price profiles Smith Magazine and its various webcomics, which include Shooting War, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge and Next-Door Neighbor.

Webcomics | NYC Graphic profiles Eisner nominee Joe Infurnari, creator of The Transmigration of Ultra-lad and the Next-Door Neighbor story “Vs.” Joe’s also annotating “Vs.” over at Act-i-vate.

Digital comics + e-Devices | Straight.com has a good overview of comics being made available on mobile phones. The writer, whose credits I didn’t see anywhere on the page, spoke with reps from iVerse, Arcana Comics and Golden Age Collectibles, a Vancouver-based retailer.

Video games | The L.A. Times reports that video game industry sales dropped 17 percent in April. Console sales fell 8% and games fell 23% from a year earlier. The article attributes part of the drop to retailers offering larger discounts to lure shoppers back into stores, while Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research in San Diego, says that April’s 2009 titles weren’t as strong as April 2008′s, when Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart were released.

Video games | Electronic Theatre has an “image blowout” from the upcoming DCU Online. I don’t think any of these images are new, but I could be mistaken … still, it’s a nice roundup of art if you’re interested in the game.

The Iraq War Stories Anthology

Webcomics | Starting this Sunday, the webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE will run The Iraq War Stories Anthology, edited by Nick Bertozzi. Per the press release, Bertozzi asked the students in his Comic Book Storytelling Workshop at The School of Visual Arts to adapt stories that took place in Iraq during the War.

“The majority of the stories were found on blogs, a few were adapted from stories told to the students by friends, and one student, himself a veteran of the Iraq War, wrote and drew a story based on his own experience,” the release says. One story will appear each Sunday for the next 13 weeks.

e-Devices & Webcomics | Here’s a fun case of sibling rivalry — Peter Timony has released The Complete Sir Roland, previously available on the web, as a comic for Amazon’s Kindle device. Not to be outdone, his twin brother Bobby has released a 24-Hour Comic, The Ballad of Basil the Bunny, for the Kindle.

Webcomics | Daryl Cagle discusses the pluses and minuses of allowing other sites to easily embed political cartoons from his site — something that’s becoming the norm in the world of Web 2.0 and YouTube. [Hat tip: The Comics Reporter]

e-Publishing | Range Murata, the creator of anime like Last Exile and Shangri-La, has released his self-published magazine Throw Line dōjin on iTunes.

Kindle DX

e-Devices | Amazon.com this week announced a larger version of their Kindle device, called the Kindle DX. The e-book reader is two-and-a-half times the size of the current Kindle and will retail for almost $500. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, however, will offer “subsidized on-contract Kindles to customers who can’t get at-home delivery when the DX ships this summer.”

So, the natural question for comic fans — is it big enough to show a comics page? Kelson at the Speed Force blog has the same question: “Unless I’ve got my numbers wrong, that makes it larger than the standard manga page, though not quite as big as the standard American comic book page,” he said about the 9.7 inch screen. “And it’s only 1/3 of an inch thick, comparable to a typical trade paperback.” The BBC has more on the specs.

Social media | Ypulse, a teen marketing blog, wonders if teens would follow Twitter feeds for characters from young adult novels. Apparently teens haven’t embraced Twitter (which surprises me … I figured they’d been using it and dropped it when all the old people showed up, kind of like Facebook), and the post wonders if they’d start using it if, say, the sparkling vampires from Twilight had their own feeds.

“Protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters (the latter might be especially intriguing) would continue to gain depth and dimension in the intermittent period between books and meanwhile, readers would feel more connected to the world that the author created,” writes Meredith, who blogs for the site. “Or, as connected to them as they choose to be depending on whether they simply read the tweets or actually respond to them and engage in dialogue.” She also notes that characters from Mad Men showed up on Twitter last year, which everyone assumed was a marketing ploy for the show, but turned out to be more along the lines of fan fiction.

BOOM! Studios recently launched a Twitter feed for one of their fictional characters, the talking teddy bear who thinks he’s James Bond, Mister Stuffins. Is it a marketing ploy, an extension of the story, or maybe both? And would comic fans follow the Twitter feed for, say, Batman, Luke Cage or Scott Pilgrim, if their tweets were written by Grant Morrison, Brian Michael Bendis or Bryan Lee O’Malley, respectively?

Digital Comics | Nerd Dads points out that Atomic Robo #6 moved into the top 20 ebooks on iTunes. Several of IDW’s Star Trek books are also on the list.

Digital comics | Speaking of which, in this week’s Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Heidi MacDonald writes about IDW’s success with porting their Star Trek comics to iTunes.

Webcomics | Rich Lovatt, whose Mecha Simian webcomic came in 7th place in Zuda’s April competition, shares some of the things he learned during the process.

Digital comics | Robot Comics and Alterna Comics, which publishes Jesus Hates Zombies and Birth, announced a deal whereby Robot Comics will bring the publisher’s titles to mobile devices.

Split Lip

Webcomics | The long-running Split Lip horror webcomic is now available in print. Split Lip Vol. 1 is a 158-page trade paperback collecting 11 horror comics, all written by Sam Costello and drawn by artists such as John Bivens, Jason Ho and Sami Makkonen.

Costello is selling copies on the Split Lip website and will sell them at conventions as well.

E-devices | BoingBoing points to an announcement from Gamma Dynamics that they’ve developed “a new electrofluidic reflective display” that uses colored pigments. Mark Frauenfelder wonders if this could lead to a color version of Amazon’s Kindle device. Matt Maxwell says, “And you will end up reading your comics on it, sooner or later.”

Webcomics | The Opera web browser recently celebrated its 15th anniversary by sharing a comic that detailed its not-so-secret origin. [Hat Tip: Kelson Vibber]

Webcomics | French cartoonist Raphael B. uses the scroll bar to his advantage in this very cool Spider-Man webcomic that transcends any language barriers. [Hat tip: Laura Hudson, at the relaunched Comics Alliance blog]

Humor | Meet the world’s first Post-Paper Evolution Consultant. “I’m 29. I was practically raised by an original Nintendo, so I was there the first time a video game (Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest) showed a richness of characterization, lyrical language, and elegant plotting that rivaled the finest novels. I was blogging by ’02, Facebooking by ’04, bored of Facebook by ’06, thinking it was lame how thirty-five year olds got super in to Facebook in ’08. Like it or not, I’m the future.”

Gyakushu!, Vol. 3

Digital comics | Cartoonist Dan Hipp, whose Gyakushu! was among the titles caught up last year in Tokyopop’s seismic restructuring, has announced the third volume is complete and apparently will appear online: “So, will you get to see it? The answer is yes, but not as originally intended, as the plan is STILL to put it online. Apologies to anyone assuming otherwise, because naturally I’d love to see it in print someday, in its full 600-page horrific glory. Don’t hold your breath, but who knows what the future will bring.”

Talk of Tokyopop moving the bulk of its “OEL books” online began in June as soon as the company announced its shakeup. However, no official announcement has been made.

Digital comics | In this week’s “MyCup o’ Joe” Q&A, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada touches upon the uncertainties of the digital “format”: “I think the next big commercial format will be the digital format. It’s paradoxical, because I think we all ‘know that,’ but we don’t know what form it will take. Thousands of people are experimenting with different formats and different techniques in digital. And I’m sure we’ll all continue experimenting for the next few years until the apple falls on someone’s head and they figure it out.”

E-devices | Michael Fitzpatrick reports that Fujitsu plans to ship 50,000 units of its color FLEPia e-book reader by the end of 2010. The devices sells for about $1,000.

E-devices | Sean Kleefeld considers the drawbacks to reading comics on a smart phone: “How long does it take you to read a comic panel? One or two seconds? Then what? You’d have to scroll/click/slide/whatever to the next panel. Then you spend another second or two reading that panel, and then you’d have to scroll/click/slide/whatever to the third one. You’d end up spending as much time navigating the document as you would reading.”

Applications | Brendan Wilhide reviews the ComicZeal comic-book viewer/storage app for iPhone.

GrimJack

The webcomics/news site ComicMix and IDW Publishing announced a deal where IDW will publish several ComicMix properties as monthly comics and trade paperbacks. The deal will start with two properties IDW has published before — Mike Grell’s Jon Sable, Freelance, and John Ostrander and Tim Truman’s GrimJack, as well as Hammer of the Gods by Mark Wheatley and Mike Avon Oeming.

Per the press release, available after the jump, the deal will also allow IDW to publish the titles on handheld devices.

Both GrimJack and Jon Sable were published by First Comics back in the 1980s. IDW has collected both comics in a series of trade paperbacks, while ComicMix began publishing new stories online in 2007.

*****

SAN DIEGO, CA (March 25, 2009) – IDW Publishing, a leading publisher of comic books and graphic novels, has begun an innovative partnership with ComicMix.com, a free website offering new and classic comics. Through this multi-year agreement, IDW will publish graphic novels, books and comics for ComicMix.com properties, enabling both companies to expand their offerings to customers and retailers, and combine their audience reach.

“ComicMix has a great line up of original and classic brands that are currently only available online, and despite the shift to the virtual world, there is still something unmistakable about reading a real-life book” said Greg Goldstein, chief operating officer of IDW. “IDW is known for producing some of the highest quality books in our industry, and we are looking forward to offering this to fans of ComicMix properties.”

Beginning in the fall of 2009, IDW will release trade paperbacks of ComicMix comics, as well as monthly comics, including many new stories that have previously been only available online at ComicMix.com. Initial titles will include GrimJack: The Manx Cat by John Ostrander and Timothy Truman, Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden by Mike Grell, and Hammer of the Gods by Mark Wheatley and Mike Avon Oeming, among others.

“This is a bit of a homecoming for many of us at ComicMix, because we have had a professional relationship with IDW Publishing over the past several years,” ComicMix Editor-In-Chief Mike Gold noted. “We’re honored to be among such first-rate comics and graphic novels. Quite frankly, I don’t think the ComicMix properties could find a better publishing home than IDW.”

The partnership with ComicMix allows IDW to distribute comics via mobile devices, increasing the company’s growing digital, downloadable publishing program, which already includes several major titles such as Star Trek: Countdown and Ghostbusters.

About IDW Publishing

IDW is an award-winning publisher of comic books, graphic novels and trade paperbacks, based in San Diego, California. As a leader in the horror, action, and sci-fi genres, IDW publishes some of the most successful and popular titles in the industry, including television’s #1 prime time series, CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation;” Paramount’s “Star Trek;” Fox’s “Angel;” Hasbro’s “The Transformers;” and the BBC’s “Doctor Who.” IDW’s original horror series, “30 Days of Night,” was launched as a major motion picture in October 2007 by Sony Pictures and was the #1 film in its first week of release. In April 2008, IDW released “Michael Recycle,” the first title from its new children’s book imprint, Worthwhile Books. More information about the company can be found at IDWPublishing.com.

About ComicMix.com

Organized in 2007, ComicMix.com is the free website for brand-new comics, news, opinion and historical research. Organized by comics veteran Mike Gold (DC Comics, First Comics, Image Comics), Internet pioneer Brian Alvey (WebLogs Inc., Blogsmith, AOL, Netscape) and print and online publishing vet Glenn Hauman (Random House, Simon & Schuster, BiblioBytes, DC Comics), ComicMix has been leading the comics industry in the production and online distribution of new comic book stories by major talent.

Chickenhare: The House of Klaus

Conventions | Rick Marshall, Gary Tyrrell and Bob Weiner file initial reports about the first New England Webcomics Weekend.

Retailers | Publishers assured attendees at this weekend’s meeting of ComicsPRO that, despite pushes toward digital content, print comics sold through the direct market are still important.

“You still represent the dominant sales force of graphic fiction,” Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley told members of the direct-market trade organization.

Webcomics | Chickenhare creator Chris Grine has decided that since Dark Horse isn’t interested in publishing a third graphic novel, he’ll take the series online beginning this fall.

Digital publishing | Marvel has announced it will launch The Spectacular Spider-Girl as a digital comic beginning April 15. The initial story will debut at the Marvel Digital Comics website, and then appear in print two weeks later in Amazing Spider-Man Family #5.

Blogosphere | British comics website Down the Tubes has launched a blog devoted to digital comics.

Digital publishing | Gia Manry asks members of the Anime Vice message board whether they’d foresake scanlations for legal, inexpensive digital copies. Response is light so far. (via Brigid Alverson)

E-devices | At Slate.com, Jacob Weisberg looks at how Amazon’s Kindle 2 will change publishing and reading: “The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

E-devices | Dan Frommer runs down the 10 things he loves and hates about Kindle 2 for The Business Insider.

Webcomics | The journal Interface offers a brief webcomics primer.

Fujitsu's color e-book reader

E-devices | Fujitsu has unveiled Japan’s first full-color e-book reader, the FLEPia.

It would seem like a major leap forward for comics, but CNET UK points out that the FLEPia only supports XMDF and .book format e-books. Plus, the device is now only available in Japan, where it sells for ¥99,750 — or a little over $1,000.

Publishing | At ICv2.com, retailer Steve Bennett returns to the “collectibility” well to argue that the urge to bag, board and sort will save the printed comic from being replaced by the digital version.

E-devices | At Publishers Weekly, Ada Price talks with a handful of publishers about their early experience converting titles to Amazon’s Kindle.

Conventions | The program schedule has been released for the New England Webcomics Weekend, being held March 20-22 in Easthampton, Mass.

Copyright | At Reason Online, Henry Jenkins examines how illegal copying and distribution helped anime to succeed in the United States.

E-publishing | IDW Publishing has made available the first two issues of its sold-out Star Trek: Countdown at the iTunes app store.

E-publishing | Uclick and Tokyopop are making the first volume of Svetlana Chmakova’s Dramacon available as a free app on Apple’s app store.

Webcomics | Joey Manley looks at the use of webcomics as promotional tools for TV shows and print comics.

Multimedia | From SXSW, Wired.com considers the “deep media” approach Electronic Arts used for marketing the video game Dead Space, an effort that included comics, animation and interactive web features.

Blogosphere | David Brothers talks e-devices, webcomics, digital comics, and more.

Comics on Handhelds

South by Southwest is currently underway down in Austin, Texas. The giant music, film and multimedia festival runs through March 22. On today’s agenda is a panel called Comics on Handhelds, hosted by Dan Goldman and featuring Diesel Sweeties creator Rich Stevens, Uclick.com CEO Douglas Edwards, Dr. Sketchy’s creator Molly Crabapple, Google Android engineer Dave Bort and The Longbox Group’s Rantz Hoseley.

No doubt this will be a great discussion, and if you’d like to participate, you don’t need a plane ticket to the Lone Star State … all you need is a Twitter account. Goldman explains:

And those of you not attending… you’ll still be able to interact with us over Twitter during the panel using #comicsonhandhelds. The panel will be available in audio+video online soon as well; watch this space for details.

That means if you Twitter a question, just be sure to include #comicsonhandhelds in the body of your tweet. The panel begins at 5 p.m. Central, so be sure to get your questions out there before then.

Civil War #1, on a bed of Mylar

Publishing | Louis Holt argues that “collectibility” will save the printed comic from being replaced by the digital version.

“The fallacy of thinking that digital comic books will kill print comic books is that it ignores the collectible value of comic books,” Holt writes. “There is no telling how many comic books sold today aren’t even read but are immediately slid into protective sleeves with backing boards. People can’t trade or wrap digital comic books in plastic.”

I suspect Holt creates a flaw of his own by overstating the hold collectibility has on readers. Handling monthly comics like 1,000-year-old parchments before sealing them away in Mylar bags may be common practice among a segment of the audience (particularly those of a certain age). However, I don’t believe “collectibility” is a driving force — the driving force? — for the readership at large. The increasing popularity of trade paperbacks, the whole wait-for-the-trade “movement,” and, yes, webcomics would seem enough to cast Holt’s notion into doubt.

That said, the band shouldn’t start the funeral dirge for the printed comic anytime soon (whatever “soon” means). Any sort of seismic shift by the industry toward digital comics still faces numerous obstacles — e-device quality and affordability, and the necessity of new business models, among them. I just don’t think “collectibility” is one of the more worrisome ones.

Matt Maxwell also weighs in: “Well, pulp novels are collectable, so are wax cylinders. So are vinyl records. Anything can be made collectible. Collectibility doesn’t mean that a format survives or is necessarily a standard currency any longer. It just means that someone wants the artifact and is willing to pay for it.”

Copyright | Although manga publishers have yet to clamp down on scanlators — fans who translate Japanese comics and post them online — a University of London professor thinks conflicts could arise as the global market becomes more lucrative. She estimates there are more than 1,000 scanlation groups worldwide.

E-devices | Matt Springer sees Apple’s rumored touch-screen Netbook as a contender for “ultimate eComics reader.”

Social media | Advertising Age reports that Facebook is driving more traffic than Google to some large websites.

"Watchmen" on the Kindle

Conventions | Registration is closed for New England Webcomics Weekend, the March 20-22 event in Easthampton, Mass., that some already are calling “Webcomicstock.”

What’s Webcomics Weekend? It’s not really a convention, organizers say; it’s more a gathering — a free one, at that. It will feature panels, livedraw events, book signings, and guests such as Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes (Unshelved), Danielle Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots), Rene Engstrom (Anders Loves Maria), Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie), Scott Kurtz (PvP), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) and R. Stevens (Diesel Sweeties).

E-devices | At Gearlog, Brian Heater tries out Bone, Jimmy Corrigan, New X-Men and Watchmen on Amazon’s new Kindle: “In my humble opinion, the best device for reading comics at the moment (besides, you know, old-timey comics themselves) is the iPhone.”

Webcomics | The Floating Lightbulb and The Comic Chronicles’ John Jackson Miller try to figure out what to make of GoogleTrends data showing a steady decline of unique visitors for many of the most-popular webcomics.

E-devices | Jason Ankeny lays out why mobile devices are the future of comic strips: “Few forms of creative expression are better suited to that kind of brief consumer engagement than comic strips. Life in Hell — a crudely illustrated but consistently sharp and insightful black-and-white strip  — would seem like a natural on a Kindle or on an iPhone, as would any number of classic daily efforts including Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Krazy Kat or Doonesbury.”

Blogging | To mark the second anniversary of Super Punch, John Struan offers some good tips about blogging, with special attention to increasing traffic.

Social media | Gay & Lesbian Times looks out how artists are using DList, a social-networking site for gay men, to promote their work.

Podcasting | The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profiles local comics podcasters.

E-publishing | Fictionwise, the e-book retailer recently purchased by Barnes & Noble, has sold an estimated 5 million digital titles since its launch in June 2000. (via GalleyCat)

Twitter

Scans Daily | Glenn Hauman chats with a couple of moderators from Scans Daily about LiveJournal’s closing of the community, copyright, fair use, and whether the site helped or harmed comics.

In related news: “Hand of God Suspends Homoerotic Scans Daily Comic Book Community.” (via Christopher Bird)

Social media | iFanboy has begun compiling a list of Twitter accounts of comics publishers and creators.

Social media | Someone has formed a webcomics Twitter group.

Webcomics | Michael Sisk is looking for beta testers for the WebComic plugin and InkBlot theme for WordPress.

E-devices | ComicXP is offering its online reader as a free download.

E-devices | Amazon has released a free iPhone application that allows users to read Kindle books on mobile devices. The top iPhone-app companies apparently aren’t too concerned.

This morning a Morgan Stanley analyst predicted Amazon will sell 1 million Kindles by Thanksgiving.

E-publishing | Warren Ellis points to the success actor-author-online personality Wil Wheaton has had with the PDF version of his new book Sunken Treasure.

E-publishing | Barnes & Noble has acquired Fictionwise, one of the largest independent e-book retailers. Although Fictionwise will operate as a separate business unit, B&N makes it clear the retailer is part of its larger digital strategy, which includes launching an e-bookstore later this year.