To Publish or NOT to Publish Fan Art ... that is the question!

Speaking of Colleen .... pop onto her A Distant Soil blog and find out more about the pitfalls of publishing fan art and read her post "And now a word about that fan art... this is why we can't have nice things". We personally love fan art but we've always had friendly, respectful and lovely readers who thank goodness haven't exhibited any form of delusion, narcissism or misapprehension such as what Colleen has encountered. After reading this article, we're putting out to the universe that this kind of relationship and communication continues. A good disclaimer clause for the new kids on the block won't go astray either!

2009 Eisner Award Winners

We're happy that Comic Book Tattoo: Narrative Art Inspired by the Lyrics and Music of Tori Amos which was edited by Rantz Hoseley (published by Image) won the Eisner Awards Best Anthology category. We've both got copies of it at home – it's a stunning production and a larger than life book featuring works from our friends and colleagues Colleen Doran, James A Owen, as well as Aussie Trudy Cooper. Well done all to all the contributors and to Rantz for his vision. Another books we have on our shelves is Neil Gaiman's Coraline (published by HarperCollins) which picked up the Best Publication for Teens/Tweens. The film adaptation is screening in our cinemas even as we speak. The overall Eisner winner with three awards for Best Limited Series, Best Graphic Novel – Reprinted Material and Best Publication Design was Mike Mignola's Hellboy (published by Dark Horse). ICv2 has a full list of Eisner nominees and winners winners. Congratulations to all.

Aussie Comics Creators Podcasts and Interviews

Just found a great website – The Comicspot's Podcast – which contains monthly interviews with Australian comics creators and overseas creators living in Australia. Previous guests have included Eddie Campbell (From Hell), Queenie Chan (The Dreaming) and Bruce Mutard (The Sacrifice). The ComicsSpot itself is a monthly radio program produced and hosted by John Retallick with co-hosts Bernard Caleo and Jo Waite, which discusses Australian comics and Melbourne comics culture, and talks to creators, publishers and readers of Australian comics and zines.

MUST READ: ComicsMonkey Launch – Print on Demand Comics Distribution for Direct Market Comic Shops

This is an important initiative for the comics community. Ka-Blam – the company that also runs IndyPlanet, the comic book print on demand service, has just launched ComicsMonkey, a "No Benchmarks, No Thresholds, No Minimums and No Fees" digital printing direct market comics distribution system. 

According to its blog, Ka-Blam has been working on and testing this model since 2005, and has now launched Comics Monkey nine months ahead of schedule in response to the recent Diamond Distributors announcement, which we covered in a previous post.

... you'll find a lot of similarities between the way IndyPlanet operates and the way ComicsMonkey will operate. The primary difference of course being that IndyPlanet is a retail site that will accept orders from anyone and ComicsMonkey will accept orders only from registered, verified comics retailers.

The products will be sold to retailers on a firm sale basis and with a beginning 35% discount off the cover price. Publishers should get 10% off retail price for every unit sold, although this figure has not been confirmed yet.

You can check out the Retailer policy here.

You can check out the Supplier (Publisher) policy here.