Will retailers grab their torches and pitchforks to protest this move, as they did when they thought Dark Horse was pricing same-day digital releases below print? Probably not, for a couple of reasons: Bluewater isn’t as big a player in the direct market — it isn’t in Diamond’s Top 10 publishers, and much of its line is aimed at children, who are not the core customers of the direct market.

Beyond that, though, dedicated apps like comiXology and Graphicly seem more like competition for comics stores than e-readers. I think that the latter has broader appeal: While some Kindle comics, like DC’s exclusives, can be read only on the Kindle Fire device, the Bluewater comics can be read on any device with the Kindle or Nook app. This makes the comic more accessible than most, and it’s easy for non-comics readers to stumble upon the comics while looking for books on Romney or Giffords. On the other hand, the comiXology/Comics +/Graphicly ecosystems are set up specifically for comics readers looking for something new — readers who are using digital to supplement or supplant their Wednesday purchases. In other words, with the Kindle and Nook, the subject matter comes first; with comiXology and other apps, the medium — comics — comes first.

This is not black and white, of course. Digital Manga has successfully marketed yaoi manga via the Kindle and the Nook, and DC’s Kindle Fire exclusives were big news. The comiXology app even comes pre-loaded on the Kindle Fire. Still, most of the conversation about digital comics still seems to revolve around comics apps rather than e-readers. Interestingly, I’m not seeing the Bluewater comics on comiXology, so maybe this is a strategy to attract a different audience without cannibalizing direct market sales. (Or maybe comiXology just hasn’t processed the files yet — who knows.)

Eric Stephenson

Publishing | Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson talks about the ups and downs of the past year, including getting Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn on a tighter schedule and the difficulties of selling all-ages comics: “There’s this really blinkered mentality in comics that “all-ages” means only for kids, despite the relatively easy to understand implication that all-ages books can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. Diamond even has this graphic they use for all-ages comics in Previews and it’s these two children that look like toddlers or whatever. People seem to miss the point that most the comics we love from the ‘60s or ‘70s or even the ‘80s to a large degree, were all-ages comics. Stan & Jack’s Fantastic Four was an all-ages book. And it was brilliant.” [Multiversity Comics]

Digital | Viz Media, the largest manga publisher in the United States, began releasing its graphic novels on Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet and Nook Color devices today. As on the Viz iOS app and website, the manga are priced from $4.99 to $9.99 per volume, and they read from right to left, in authentic Japanese fashion. 107 volumes from 18 series are available at launch, although the selection skews a bit older than what’s available on the iOS app, with no sign of the Shonen Jump blockbusters Naruto, Bleach, or One Piece, at least in the initial announcement. [press release]

Art Spiegelman

Creators | Tom Spurgeon kicks off his annual holiday interviews with a talk with Art Spiegelman. [The Comics Reporter]

Comics | Joey Esposito makes the case for a Lord of the Rings comic series. [IGN]

Comics | Health care economist Jonathan Gruber talks to NPR’s Radio Boston about his new graphic novel, stirringly titled Health Care Reform. What It Is. Why It’s Necessary. How It Works, which does for the Affordable Care Act what Project X: Cup Noodle did for ramen-in-a-cup—takes something boring and turns it into a stirring adventure tale. Or at least makes it less boring. [Radio Boston]

Creators | Funky Winkerbean creator Tom Batiuk reflects on the many ways in which Cleveland influences his work, including real places and real people that have popped up in his comics over the years—including fanatical band director Harry L. Dinkle, who was based on Batiuk’s junior-high band director, Harry Pfingsten: “With most real characters, I exaggerate their traits. With Harry, I had to tone him down just a little.” [Cleveland.com]

Reviews | Larry Cruz reviews Tony Cliff’s swashbuckling adventure comic Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. [The Webcomic Overlook]

Comic strips | Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn highlights Fantagraphics’ Pogo collection and a Pogo exhibit at Fantagraphics’ bookstore in Georgetown, Wash. [Seattle Times]

Awards | The Japanese Ministry of Cultural Affairs has given out its 15th Japan Media Arts Festival Awards, and top honors in the manga division went to Hisae Iwaoka’s Saturn Apartments, which is published in the U.S. by Viz. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home also won an Excellence Prize. [Anime News Network]

Archie Comics

Digital | Archie Comics announced that its comics will be available on the recently announced Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. [Archie Comics]

Awards | Stan Lee will receive the Producers Guild of America’s 2012 Vanguard Award recognizing achievement in new media and technology. “Stan Lee’s creative vision and imagination has produced some of the most beloved and visually stunning characters and adventures in history,” Producers Guild Awards co-chairs Paula Wagner and Michael Manheim said in a joint statement. “He not only has created content that will forever be in our culture but continues to make strides in the digital and new media realms, keeping the comic book industry fresh and exciting. Stan’s accomplishments truly encompass the spirit of the Vanguard Award and we are proud to honor him.” George Lucas and John Lasseter are among the award’s previous recipients. [press release]

Creators | Laura Hudson interviews cartoonist Susie Cagle about her teargassing and arrest during Occupy Oakland. [ComicsAlliance]

Heart #1

Creators | The Pitch profiles Heart artist Kevin Mellon. [The Pitch]

Creators | Eva Volin interviews Owly creator Andy Runton. [Good Comics for Kids]

Creators | Todd Battis of CTV News spotlights Kate Beaton ahead of a broadcast profile. [CTV News]

Creators | Cully Hamner chats briefly DC’s New 52, The Shade miniseries and the planned big-screen sequel to RED. [ComicBookMovie]

Creators | The Bowling Green State University student newspaper previews a campus appearance by alum Marc Sumerak. [The BG News]

Conventions | Kevin Czap and Chris Pitzer report on last weekend’s Minneapolis Indie Expo, or MIX. [MIX]

Commentary | Charles Hatfield is writing a new column for The Comics Journal, KinderComics, which will focus on “visual narratives aimed at and/or depicting children, most especially comics.” In the first installment, Hatfield looks at First Second’s Nursery Rhyme Comics. [The Comics Journal]

I used to wonder why Digital Manga only published print books, but over the past few years the company has made all sorts of inroads into the digital realm. The latest: bringing Harlequin manga to the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader. These Harlequin manga are quite a phenomenon: They are actual American Harlequin romance novels that were adapted into manga for the Japanese market. A company called Softbank has been localizing them for American readers and publishing them on Digital’s eManga site, and plans are also in the works for French, Chinese and Korean editions. There will be two versions, one optimized for black and white, the other for the color Nook; the price is $5.99. If you’re not tied to an e-reader (I have both the Nook and the Kindle apps on my iPad), you might check out the Kindle store, where the Harlequin manga are two bucks cheaper per volume. Most comics look like crap on the Kindle app because of its small size and poor resolution, but the digital files for these manga are somehow better and they look fine.

Harlequin manga are a niche within a niche. I have never compared a Harlequin romance and its manga equivalent side by side, but having read some of each, I can say that the manga versions are pretty compressed—after all, a typical Harlequin romance is about 200 pages of prose, while the manga are about 160 pages with very little text. Even given the economies that sequential art bring to the storytelling, that’s tight.

Interestingly, Dark Horse brought some of these manga over about five years ago but canceled the line after a few volumes. They were an odd fit with the rest of Dark Horse’s manga line (which I once facetiously described as “manly manga for manly men”) and an even odder fit with the comics shops that are Dark Horse’s natural ecosystem. Plus they were printed with colored ink—pink for the YA line, purple for the more “mature” titles — which is not unusual in Japan but tends to hurt American eyes.

Sometimes the difference between a success and a flop is how you market it. Digital CEO Hikaru Sasahara told me last April that the Harlequin manga are among the best sellers on the eManga site. That’s not surprising, as Digital’s specialty is yaoi (male-male romances) and as Sasahara observed on some field trips to bookstores, both genres appeal to the same demographic, women of a certain age. The pink and purple are gone, the manga are priced at $4.99 a volume on the site ($5.99 on the Nook), and most importantly, they are placed where readers can find them, on the web and now in the Nook store.

I don’t think Dark Horse necessarily did a bad job on the digital manga — they were operating according the demands of the market at the time, which included a $9.95 price point and an “authentic” feel. The pink and purple inks were authentic, but sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. Digital has built an audience of romance readers over the years with its yaoi manga, and they also have a tradition of good communication with their audience (as Dark Horse does with its male readers). So for Digital, the Harlequin manga are simply the obvious next step.

First, there’s a new the Peanuts website, which is very nicely designed and gives you a daily Peanuts strip (the same one that’s in the paper, I’m guessing, but my paper doesn’t get Peanuts) as well as links to Peanuts merchandise, character profiles and video clips, and a page for the Charles M. Schultz museum. It’s a good start, and I hope they continue to add content.

The second part of the push is digital comics and e-books. The first product to launch was Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown, an original graphic novel published by kaboom!, the kids’ imprint of BOOM! Studios, which is available both in print and digitally via comiXology and a special Peanuts app (not in the iTunes store yet, as far as I could see). There are more original graphic novels on the way.

But wait! There’s more! iVerse is putting together a collection of Peanuts strips that will be available via the iTunes store, while Happiness is a Warm Blanket and the classic Happiness Is a Warm Puppy will soon be available for the Nook and Nook apps. Capcom subsidiary Beeline is developing a freemium game for smartphones and tablets, due out this fall. The Peanuts folks are spreading their product out among a number of different digital providers, rather than sticking with just one for all their needs, which is an interesting strategy (probably hedging their bets).

Also, Snoopy has his own Facebook and Twitter. That’s standard, of course, but the rise of Snoopy is one of the things I liked the least about Peanuts. Snoopy is cute and bland. Charlie Brown is neurotic and interesting. I’d follow his Twitter: “Sitting by myself in the cafeteria again.” “Off to play some football with Lucy. Maybe she’ll let me kick it this time!” “Ow! My stomach hurts!” The older Peanuts had some bite to it, and it would be nice to see the rights holders of this leading global multimedia property find a little room for that. Happiness is seeing your own insecurities and fears of failure reflected in a cartoon character, Charlie Brown!

Digital Manga Publishing, which is certainly living up to its name nowadays, is now selling manga for the Kobo e-reader. This is a logical extension, as they already sell manga via the Kindle, the Nook, and their own eManga site, and Digital vp Fred Lui told me a few weeks ago that their revenues from the Nook are fast approaching their Kindle sales. And with Amazon removing some of their manga from the Kindle Store for reasons that remain unclear, it makes sense for them to diversify into as many channels as possible.

Since I haven’t heard about any graphic novels for the Kobo, I went to their store and poked around a bit. A search on “graphic novel” turned up Ted Dekker’s graphic novels, which seem to be on every medium, an adaptation of the children’s novel Artemis Fowl, and… Pokemon Graphic Novel, Volume 2: Pikachu Shocks Back, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I was a little surprised to see that the guy who coined the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” had written a Pokemon book, especially as he died in 1873, so I downloade it; alas, it turned out to be just another badly written 19th-centry novel. This suggests that the Kobo bookstore is not quite ready for prime time, but given that Digital is about to greatly expand its digital offerings, it makes sense to maximize the number of channels as well.

Mark Wayne Williams is ... Batman

Crime | Police in Petoskey, Michigan, arrested a 31-year-old man early Wednesday morning after he allegedly climbed to the roof of a downtown hardware store dressed as Batman. Mark Wayne Williams of Harbor Springs — yes, his middle name is Wayne — has been charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace and possession of dangerous weapons, as he reportedly carried a folding steel baton, weighted (sand-filled) gloves, and a can of chemical irritant spray.

Williams said at his arraignment that he didn’t realize the items were illegal, but didn’t offer an explanation as to why he was hanging off the roof of Meyer Ace Hardware dressed as the Dark Knight. The incident apparently isn’t Williams’ first encounter with police: The city’s public safety director said he had previously dressed as the Crow, but didn’t give any further details. [Petoskey News]

Crime | The expired website domain of defunct manga publisher Go! Comi is being used in a scam by an unknown party to solicit donations under the guise of resurrecting the company. “It is not real,” Audry Taylor, Go! Comi’s former creative director, warned last night on Twitter. “Do not donate. Gonna my lawyers on them.” [Anime News Network]

One Piece, Vol. 62

Publishing | The 62nd volume of One Piece has sold 2.37 million copies in Japan, making it the 13th consecutive volume of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate manga to break the 2 million-copy mark. [Anime News Network]

Digital comics | Todd Allen looks at the growing number of comics offered for Barnes & Noble’s Nook eReader. [Publishers Weekly]

Awards | Shojo pioneer Moto Hagio has won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award, which will be presented June 10 at the 40th Japan Cartoonist Awards ceremony. [Anime News Network]

Creators | CNN profiles Geoff Johns, with an eye toward DC Comics’ Flashpoint event: “I didn’t want to take the DC universe, put it in a box, shake the box and pour it out. I wanted to take the major characters and show what they could be like if they were put on a different path.” [CNN.com]

Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson

Creators | Walter Simonson discusses his landmark 1983-1987 run on Marvel’s Thor: “My intention was when you were reading the Thors I was doing, they would not feel like the Thors you were reading for some years – they were different. I wanted to create something that had the excitement of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby work, where they introduced new concepts every 20 minutes. While I didn’t want to go back and do those stories, I did want to create the feeling I had when I had read those stories and loved them … You have to find some new way to bring in new ideas and throw stuff at the readers. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy it and stick with you.” [Mania]

Creators | Chester Brown is spotlighted in advance of the Saturday launch party for his new graphic novel Paying for It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John. [The Gazette]

Creators | Alex Fellows, who won this year’s Doug Wright Award for best emerging talent, chats about his comic Spain & Morocco. [CBC Books]

Vasilis Lolos

Creators | Vasilis Lolos talks about his webcomic Hats, which debuts this week at MTV Geek: “Hats is about not giving a fuck about the comic making process and cutting it close, haha. I just wanted to do something that I set myself free of coming up with a script, making thumbnails or any kind of plan. Comics tend to be OCD and by the numbers — and at some point, I felt that I wanted to move away from it, initially it wasn’t even a conscious effort it was more like ‘I just want to make something fun.’ When I start on a Hats comic I have no idea what I’m doing, it’s like automatic writing.” [MTV Geek]

Art | Illustrator Jason Crosby walks through the process of creating a cover for SF Weekly. [SF Weekly]

Fandom | Steve Wing explains what attracted him and his childhood friends to Marvel comics in the early 1960s: “The Hulk was this rampaging engine of destruction, sure, but still, deep down, he was basically a nice guy. That is, he was the reverse of how we actually were in seventh grade, me and Rick and Jerry: all too nerdishly nice on the surface, but underneath raging. Raging, because in our day-to-day lives we were subjected to casual schoolyard violence and related humiliations. We might sidestep, we might negotiate, but sometimes an actual fight happened, messy, clumsy, sweaty, nauseatingly fearful and confusing. So of course we were drawn to the glory of comic book battles, the perfectly framed punches, the clean hard connections, the grace and balance displayed by heroes even in the midst of a complete ass-over-teakettle wipeout.” [Salon.com]

The digital comics scene is still developing, but the iPad was the game changer. For many people, it was the first time that they could comfortably read comics on a handheld screen. Now, it’s just a question of marketing—this year, publishers will grapple with bringing comics to a wider audience, outside the existing readership, and balancing the digital marketplace with the established brick-and-mortar retail structure.

Here, then, is a look back at our digital year.

January

Apple announces the iPad.

February

Graphic.ly

Graphic.ly, which at this point still hasn’t released their product to the public, acquires iFanboy.

Forbes.com reports that Apple’s iBookstore would have “Comics and Graphic Novels” as a top-tier category. Plans must have changed, as the current version, sadly, features no such category.

March

Jason Thompson explores iPhone apps that pick up manga from illegal scan sites. At the end of the year, many of these apps are still going, but with less content than before.

Rantz Hoseley tells Heidi MacDonald that Longbox, billed as “iTunes for comics,” would launch its public beta at Emerald City Comicon.

Tokyopop CEO Stu Levy tells ICv2 that Tokyopop would publish its own iPhone content this year and that he is very excited about the iPad, especially the iBookstore. At the end of the year, only one new Tokyopop book (Hetalia: Axis Powers) is available digitally, and Tokyopop is completely absent from the iBookstore.

iVerse, one of the pioneers of iOS comics apps, announces it will have a comics app ready to go the day the iPad launches.

April

With the launch of the iPad just days away, Marvel announces that it will have its own app, developed by comiXology.

Comic apps on the iPad at its launch include Comics by comiXology and Comics+ by iVerse.

IDW announces four iPad apps, mirroring its iPhone apps: an IDW app and branded apps for G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Star Trek. (IDW’s apps were developed by iVerse.)

The Japanese publisher Animate begins publishing yaoi manga directly to the Kindle, in both English and Japanese.

Apple rejects a proposed iPhone app from Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore because it “ridicules public figures”—which is pretty much what political cartooning is all about. A few days later, Apple reverses that decision.

ICv2 estimates North American digital comics sales at between half a million and a million dollars annually.

I note that all the manga apps in the iTunes store take content from illegal scan sites.

May

Masaaki Hagino, of the Japanese e-book developer Voyager Japan, says that the iTunes store rejected 30% of the Kodansha manga his company adapted for the iPhone due to relatively mild violence and nudity

IDW announces it is creating comics apps for the BlackBerry; it is the first publisher to do so.

June

Marvel announces its first comic to be released in print and digital form on the same day: Invincible Iron Man Annual. The total cost of the digital version, which was released as three separate issues, was a dollar more than the print comic. Six months after this was big news, the price of the digital version has not dropped.

Longbox launches its public beta.

Apparently unaware of the irony, Apple forces the creators of Ulysses: Seen, a graphic-novel adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, to re-frame a number of panels to eliminate some nudity. A few days later, they reverse their decision.

Boom! Studios unveils its iPhone/iPad app and announces that it will make its entire backlist available digitally through comiXology, iVerse, Graphic.ly, and Panelfly.

DC announces its iPad app, developed by comiXology, and reveals that it will pay royalties to creators for digital downloads of their work. Joe Quesada hastens to clarify that Marvel is also paying digital royalties to its creators.

July

Fraud arrives in the digital paradise, as a rogue developer hacks into people’s accounts and uses them to buy his comics apps (poorly translated bootleg manga) and boost their ratings in the iTunes store.

Graphic.ly launches a Windows 7 version, making digital comics more accessible to non-Apple users.

As things get crowded in the digital ecosystem, webcomics entrepreneur Joey Manley says the big publishers are getting it right, for once.

August

Just in time for summer vacation: The Scott Pilgrim iPad app (developed by comiXology).

Image Comics joins the growing number of publishers who have their own iPad app.

Webcomics creators rise up in arms against a mobile app that is basically an RSS feed pre-loaded with comics—but that accessed their sites without their consent, and which they fear would steal readers.

September

Chip Mosher of Boom! Studios says that making their backlist available digitally has grown their audience rather than cannibalizing print sales.

Comics come to the digital library service Overdrive.

Marvel comics become available on the Graphic.ly platform.

The Walking Dead goes day-and-date in the comiXology app with a cover price of $2.99 (higher than the previous delayed issues but the same as the print comic).

October

At New York Comic-Con, Dark Horse announces its digital initiative (a stand-alone app that will debut this month) and Boom! Studios reveals that its titles will be available on MyDigitalComics.com. Yen Press becomes the first manga publisher to announce its own app, which is also a stand-alone app (and which has not yet launched).

ComiXology launches a Walking Dead comics app.

Barnes & Noble unveils a color version of their Nook e-reader.

November

The manga publisher Viz announces its iPad app.

Due to a glitch in the system, comiXology releases Ultimate Thor #2, which Marvel is publishing simultaneously in digital and in print, a week early. Benjamin Simpson buys it, reads it, and wakes up the next morning to find that Marvel has locked the comic on his device, making it unreadable until the official release date. This raises the question of whether digital comics readers are buying the comics or just a license to read them, a question later explored in depth by David Brothers.

ComiXology announces it will make their developer tools available to a select group of publishers to help speed up the process of getting their comics onto the platform.

December

Apple posts its lists of top apps of the year, and comics do very well: ComiXology’s Comics app and the Marvel and DC apps (both developed by comiXology) are among the top-grossing apps.

Digital Manga Publishing makes its Vampire Hunter D manga available on the Nook.

ComiXology launches a version of its app for Android devices.

IDW begins releasing graphic novels as stand-alone apps.

Someone figures out how to put bootleg manga on the Kindle.

Marvel announces that the Death of Spider-Man arc in its Ultimates line will be released simultaneously in print and digital.

Dark Horse announces the initial lineup for its comics app, which will launch with full story arcs of Hellboy, Conan, The Guild, Umbrella Academy, and other comics, both bundled and as single issues.

Finally, just as Time Magazine has its Person of the Year, I think it’s appropriate to designate a Digital Creator of the Year. It’s a tie, actually, between Alex De Campi, creator of Valentine, and Mike Jasper and Niki Smith, the co-creators of In Maps and Legends. Alex, Mike, and Niki published their comics on every imaginable platform this year—iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle, Nook—and that sort of versatility is what creators will need to have in the coming year, as digital comics expand and develop in, hopefully, a variety of niches.

Digital, which has been in the vanguard of, well, digital manga publishing, with their eManga website and Digital Manga Guild, will launch with Vampire Hunter D, in both color and black-and white-versions, divided into two parts for $3.99 each. It’s also available on Kindle for $7.95, and the cheapest way to read it is on the iPhone/iPod Touch, where each of the six chapters in volume 1 is priced at 99 cents. You get what you pay for, though—I read the first volume on the small screen, and it doesn’t adapt well. This is a book that needs a little breathing room.

comiXology

Digital comics | Kiel Phegley talks to Ira Rubenstein, Marvel’s executive vice president of digital media, about their partnerships with comiXology, iVerse, ScrollMotion and Panelfly. comiXology, meanwhile, has added another Marvel title to their catalog this week — Civil War.

Digital comics | Don Reisinger over at CNET reviews several comics applications for the iPhone, including comiXology, Clickwheel, iVerse Comics and Comic Envi.

Tablets | Publishers Weekly‘s Calvin Reid was at the unveiling of the Barnes & Noble nook. (Via)

Digital comics | Valerie D’Orazio reports on an iPhone application called Strips, a webcomics-reading application that apparently didn’t have permission from many of the webcomcis creators to include their strips. The application developer has offered an apology on his site.

Digital books | “In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book.” They’ve also surpassed video games as the No. 1 category of new applications released on the iPhone. (Via)

Google, meanwhile, isn’t working on a device, but they do plan to launch an e-book store in order to deliver electronic books to “any device with a web browser.” Time will tell what any of this means for the comic industry, but with a color tablet coming out soon, you can see the possibilities.

Webcomics | Writing for PBS’s Mediashift blog, Simon Owens writes about what newspaper cartoonists can learn from web cartoonists. He spoke with both Richard Stevens and Howard Tayler for the piece.

Digital comics | With the movie coming out soon, IDW has released a whole bunch of Astro Boy comics for the iPhone.

Digital comics | Alex De Campi shares her thoughts on the various digital comics applications that are out there.

Webcomics | Questionable Content creator Jeph Jacques offers up a State of the Webcomics Union, discussing what’s changed in online comics over the six years he’s been making them. (Via Scott McCloud)

Video games | OK, this probably isn’t the usual Slash Print material, but I’m kind of stoked about this Epic Mickey game that Disney is working on.