By Michael Climek

Earlier this week DC comics announced that they would be creating a website with the intent of being an online original comics hosting portal. You should really check out the site yourself but we can give you the really important bullets from their site.

1. · Zuda Comics will be all-new, original comics made specifically for the web.
2. · Zuda Comics will collect submissions from the Zuda community — that means you. You make the web comics and send them to us for publication.
3. · Not only that, but the majority of comics we publish will be selected by the Zuda community. We’ll put up a batch of the comics you submitted each month. Then you and all of the other users will vote, comment, and rate the comics. The one you guys like the best is the one we’ll sign up for a one-year contract.
4. · Zuda Comics are all-original — that means we’re not taking ideas based on characters or stories from DC Comics’ other imprints — you know, like Batman.
5. · Westerns? Biographies? Actions? It’s all good. What we’re after is quality. We look forward to a full range of genres and styles

I have actually been debating all week how to properly synthesize this info for you the faithful Foot2mouth reader. I was seriously overwhelmed by the massive amount of negative reaction to this. The Beat did a good job of chronicling the senseless negative reactions here and here and she even excerpts an interview with Paul Levitz here. Essentailly the online community of artists that has been producing comics just fine without DC’s portal for years is suspicious and occasionally downright rude about DC’s new initiative.

Essetnially people are worried about creators rights on the Zuda, and whether or not Zuda will amount to a work for hire gig where DC ends up owning all IP published on the site. This is totally silly however as no contracts have been seen yet and no content is on the site. The snarky online artist community (some of them at least) are crucifying DC for imagined sins that haven’t even occurred yet. And truthfully I find it unlikely that DC will try to own the IP at all as DC has a fairly decent stance on creators rights and they are fully aware that the online community will treat things much differently than the print community.

I am personally pleased with the idea of Zuda as I support ANY thing that might get more people reading comics. Webcomics are not very centralized at the moment and certainly no webcomics have the backing of one of the ‘Big-2’. Combine this with DC’s recent purchase of Flex Comics (which will put comics on phones and on the web) and DC is clearly investing in the future. And that makes me happy.

However, I am just one man. So Newsarama has gotten several known industry professionals to comment on their initial reactions to the Zuda Comics idea. You should read them right now with great haste as it food for thought. And don’t worry, the first reaction is from Warren Ellis and he’s always entertaining.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.