Graphic.ly Catalogue nears 1000 books, talent search continues

Digital comics site graphic.ly, which offers both mobile and iPad comics, is making a big push to bring its catalogue offering up to 1000 books within the next few days.

It's pretty much on course to do that, too - with 120 books added to the store in the course of just the past week.

"With a week to go, our goal of getting more than 1,000 books in the store in almost there," enthuses graphic.ly co-founder and CEO Micah Baldwin, whose backers include Microsoft (the site uses some of their technologies like Windows Azure to deliver its books and also offers comics using Windows PD), Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Dave McClure (who also recently invested in OneTrueFan.com) and venture investor Chris Sacca. Northstar Ventures were the first investors in Graphic.ly through the Proof of Concept fund in August 2008 and are now the sole UK investor.  (Despite the clever choice of domain, we can't find any evidence to suggest graphic.ly is backed by rich Libyan oil barons...).

Graphic.ly also owns the online comics book community iFanboy, which they bought for an undisclosed figure back in February.

graphic.ly is the brainchild of founder Kevin Mann, who, frustrated by the difficulty of keeping up with his favourite comics from the confines of “a small town in the northeast of England,” (graphic.ly has an officie in Middlesbrough as well as its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado) and, struck by the ease of downloading digital content from iTunes, determined to create “a similar experience for digital comics.”

graphic.ly is aiming to appeal to a broader market than just teenage fanboys. “We’re out to make comic books cool for everybody," says Baldwin. "We’re not building a system solely for collectors.“

Pushing its offering to 1000 books, graphic.ly, which already features books from publishers such as Marvel, BOOM! Studios, IDW, Tom Dell’Aringa and Top Cow, is on the hunt for more titles from indie creators.

"One of the questions I get asked a lot is about our willingness to distribute independent comic creators and publishers," Baldwin notes in a recent newsletter to graphic.ly subscribers. "Our answer is simple: Yes. If you are an independent creator or publisher, just shoot us an email and we will go through a short review process and work with you to submit your work and any bonus features you might have that you want to include.

"A great example of an independent creator who started as a web comic is Hot Mess by Diana Falzone," he continues. "It's a great book about a girl's mixed emotions when going to high school for the first time. Another cool independent book is Modelinia's comic The Silver Silhouette, which is a follow up to their comic from last year's Fashion Week that starred Hiedi Klum.

Diana Falzone's Hot Mess comic - check out the official web site at http://hotmesscomic.com

"We couldn’t be more excited about being on their service," says Hot Mess writer and producer Geoff Skinner. "Their graphic interface work most anywhere including iPhones, iPads, Android, Mac and PC.  Plus, there are all kinds of special features that come with their downloads."

Of course, Baldwin also knows that having big brands on his platform will help drive traffic, and when Marvel came on board in September he was quick to acknowledge its importance. But, as he told Robot6 over at Comic Book Resources, the success of digital comics distributors will, at the end of the day be all down to creating a community and engaging an audience socially.

"We want to work with publishers, big and small, who work on how they interact with that community," he added, clwarly feeling some other digital comic distributors aren't doing enough to give themselves a clear identity since, ultimately, all of them will probably offer the same catalogue.

"... ComiXology’s primary focus is selling books," he cites as an example. "That’s all they want to do right now. We want you to talk about it, engage, interact, and it’s not possible to do that if you don’t have at least an account. If you look at our iPad app, you’ll see you can peruse everything, you can peruse the books and then decide if you want to buy. We haven’t put social into the iPad app, but it’s coming, and I think when the web app comes along we will have more of that."

While there are plenty of other digital comics publishers in the marketplace vying for attention, graphic.ly does seem to be making a determined effort to engage with the existing comics fan community as well as building an audience beyond it, an approach that has gone down well with Top Cow publisher Filip Sablik who likes the “slow and steady” sales curve of digital titles, the opposite of the boom-and-bust curve for print editions. “My hope is eventually it will replace the spinner racks that used to be in grocery stores and drug stores,“ Sablik told CoBiz Mag back in August. “We’ve kind of lost that feeder system.“

graphic.ly are also hugely enthusiastic about creating comics solely for digital platforms, arguing that as long as print publishers see digital comics simply as another distribution channel, they are doomed to fail. Which they might well be...

• Graphic.ly and comic book creator Jim Mahfood (Clerks, Spider-Man and more) recently invited illustrators and graphic novelists to submit three pages of one of their comic books in order to win three mentoring sessions with Jim and have their comic published and promoted by Graphic.ly. Check out details of the competition here.

• More from Micah Baldwin about graphic.ly's philosophy here on YouTube:



• Check out graphic.ly at http://graphic.ly/

• graphic.ly on Facebook

• graphic.ly on Twitter

• Marvel and Graphic.ly part 2: Graphic.ly’s digital difference (Comic Book Resources)


• An Interview with Micah Baldwin, CEO and co-founder of Graphic.ly (TechCrunch TV)

• Getting Funded: An interview with Kevin Mann on Fuel Your Venture
"The best advice I can give around getting funding is to research, research, research. Find the firms and partners that are interesting. Then ask, ask, ask. Find everyone you know who might know someone either at that firm or connected to the firm, and with a succinct, well thought out email, ask to be introduced."


• Michah Baldwin's 'Learn to Duck': Success Through Failure blog

• An Open Letter to Print Publishers by Micah Baldwin 
"Create for digital. Expand your vision beyond the printed page. Think about all the amazing things that digital gives you. Want to change the story on the fly? Digital can do that. Want to allow your readers to engage within the story itself? Digital can do that. Want your story to actually move? Digital can do that.
"Imagine a world where your readers are not consuming but engaging with your content. Digital can do that. Imagine a world where you can connect directly with your fans. Digital can do that. Imagine anything. Digital can do that..."

Be My Valentine

Making waves among dedicated digital comic fans is Alex de Campi’s new graphic novel series for wireless devices, Valentine, featuring art by Christine Larsen.

Film maker and Eisner-nominated comic book writer Alex has been working hard to ensure this comic is available on a variety of digital platforms (and different languages) including iPhone, Android and iPad - and a print edition is also in the works.

Valentine tells the tale of a cavalry lieutenant, lost and dying in a snowstorm during Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Russia, who stumbles across an ancient conflict between beings more powerful than humanity can imagine, a conflict which now threatens to consume the Earth and all upon it – because those who have stood in the horror’s path, the few bastions of light, are going home.

Alex de Campi has published graphic novels in both America and France. Her quicksilver imagination takes us, in finest pulp thriller style, from the stormy wastes of the Russian steppes to worlds and futures that, like all great fantasy and science fiction, comment obliquely on our own.

She's been planning wireless comics since 2003, and her cinematic eye and inventively literary style is a perfect fit with the medium. Her ambitious serial, available in 13 languages and counting, in a multiplicity of formats, across multiple platforms, is the first truly professional wireless comic, raising the medium out of its infancy along with a number of other enterprising creators who've embraced this new digital comics world with open arms.

In Valentine, 23-year-old country boy Valentine Renaud and his best friend and superior officer Oscar Levy are thrown into a world of peril they barely understand, filled with miraculous and deadly actions. Their simple attempts to fulfill promises unexpectedly cause them to be branded deserters by their own army.

Valentine in Japanese

Their problems only grow from there, as Valentine returns to France to look for a woman who had saved his life, and in doing so unleashes a plot by the last remnants of a malignant race, their magic drained and stagnant, to wreak their revenge upon the world.

The format of Valentine is, possibly, best compared to manga as it is serialised in weekly, 30-page chunks in Japan. Fans of suspense and thrillers will be drawn to the story's action-packed, visually stunning tale of a world where magic has departed, but evil is here to stay.

Alex de Campi has published the Eisner-award nominated graphic novel Smoke (published by IDW), middle grade manga series Kat and Mouse and Agent Boo (both released by Tokyopop) and, in France, the fantasy-adventure middle grade series Chromaland and the teen sci-noir thriller Messiah Complex (published by Humanoids). Her music videos and short films are festival favourites worldwide, having been shown at SXSW, Flanders, Synch (Greece), SFIndiefest, Marfa, Renderyard and a dozen more.

Music fans will know she  had a worldwide number-one music video on Youtube, “Those Rules” for The Schema, filmed on a mere £500.

Alex de Campi

After 15  years spent mainly in Hong Kong and London, she has recently returned to New York. She snuck across the Russian border when she was 19 and, in her early 20s, raced offshore yachts across the South China Sea.

"The multiplicity of languages was a primary reason we chose to release Valentine as a wireless project," says Alex. "I have a lot of friends in a lot of places around the world. Most of them like comics. Some of them have very little access to comic stores. All of them, not unreasonably, enjoy reading comics in their own language. So because of the nature of Valentine, with us not having to do a separate print run or sort out distribution for 'foreign language' editions, it became super easy for me to just whack something up on Twitter and Facebook and say, 'anyone want to translate my comic?' I believe the fancy term for that is 'crowdsourcing'.

"Before I knew it," she continues, "we had 13 languages, and translators who include one of Rolling Stone's writers in Brazil, a British pop starlet, a Los Angeles film composer of Polish descent, a Serbian artist. Each translator gets half the earnings of the book in their language.

Valentine in Italian

"One of the wonderful things about comics has always been its participatory nature, the interaction between readers and authors (something to which the book publishing world has only cottoned on recently)," Alex feels, "and Valentine uses that participatory element to create something that, well... that big publishers could never do. Immediate, multilingual editions.

"The thing you also need to keep in mind is that comics overseas are far, far bigger than they are in America. In France and Japan, there are single issues of a bande dessinee or a manga tankubon that regularly outsell in volume the entire US comic industry’s output for the year."

And the format thing? Valentine is available on an impressive number of formats already, considering it only launched recently.

Valentine on Kindle

"Well, frankly, that's just showing off," she says, obviously with tongue firmly in cheek. "No, seriously, as I was talking to people about Valentine, everyone was like, 'Oh, I read on Stanza, can you have it for Stanza?' and 'Could I get it on my Kindle?' and 'But, I have a Sony e-Reader'... and the joy of doing one panel per screen is that it makes the format very adaptable, both for different size screens and for right to left languages.

"One panel per screen may not be the way of the future, as technology evolves on an almost moment by moment basis, but it has worked very well so far for Valentine."

• For more information, check out the brilliant Valentine web site at: www.valentinethecomic.com

How to get Valentine...

• iPhone: Comics by Comixology (all 14 language editions); Robot Comics (Chinese, French, English and Spanish only); Ave! Comics
• iPad: Comics by Comixology (all 14 language editions)
• Android: Robot Comics (English only); Ave! Comics (coming soon)
• Kindle: Kindle Store or the Valentine comic web page
• e-Reader: Valentine Comic store
• Laptop/web: Comixology
• Printed book: Volume I (collecting Episodes 01-08) due out from Image Comics later this year.

Morecambe-based Comic published for iPad

We're pleased to report that Lancaster cartoonist David Hughes comic story Thomas Wogan is Dead, first reviewed on downthetubes last year, is now available to read on Apple's iPad.

This is British publishers Tabella's first ebook on Apple's iPad platform, the result of what they say comes after reading many books on iphone development, doing tutorials, submitting forum posts and more.

Tabella picked up reprint rights to the quirky tale set in Morecambe (and the hereafter - although is there a difference?) partly after reading the downthetubes review.

• Buy Thomas Wogan is Dead for the iPad

• Thomas Wogan is Dead is still available in print from Tabella Publishing for £5.99: more details here.