Tuesday Morning Update

Another solid update from Journalista! Deppey is a o­ne-man newscast for comicsland.

MICROPAYMENTS: Deppey points to a fairly useless article on micropayments from ecommerce times.  Recycled quotes from Scott McCloud (optimist) and Clay Shirky (pessimist) included.  I don't think this is so hard really – if there's a perceived vaule for the price people will pay if it's not too hard to do so.  Same as offline transactions.

Shirky's big mistake is creating a straw man of multiple, piece by piece purchases as if we wanted to buy every little thing separately.  As if I went to the grocery store and paid for each thing when I picked it up. Or per page in a bookstore to be even more ridiculous.  No o­ne is advocating that.  No o­ne (that I'm aware of is even trying to be that boneheaded about it).I think there's a real question of whether people want to buy the equivalent of a comic book (like McCloud's I Can't Stop Thinking) or a magazine subscription (Modern Tales) but really it comes to down to perceived price to value.  A buck a song – yeah that works.  A quarter for a comic, that'll probably also work.  I think we're getting there.

NEW KEENSPOT:  Nicer site layout for the Keenspot site along with less garish logo.  However, now that they're classifying their comics I'm scratching my head.  They've grouped the following comics as “Surreal”: BoxJam's Doodle, Checkerboard Nightmare, Chopping Block, Framed, just another Vice,Men in Hats, and Road Waffles.  Compared to several other Keenspot comics I'm not quite sure what's so surreal about this lot.  BoxJam's Doodle is a rather PG-rated blend of painfully honest-Charlie Brown stories and clever word play.  Chopping Block is a pun-filled horrorfest.  Checkerboard Nightmare and Framed wear their meta-hearts o­n their sleeves but I've never heard meta described as surreal.  The others don't even come close really.  Even beyond the mislabeling here is grouping them together at all.  Sure a Chopping Block fan might like Road Waffles (similar violence content) and Framed fans might go for Checkerboard Nightmare but I'm not seeing much guaranteed cross-over beyond that.