This has been a big week for Webcomics news: 1) Melonpool is back! Blank Label Cartoonist Steve Troop was one of the very first webcartoonists, and Melonpool is one of the longest-running properties online. He's been burning the candle at both ends professionally puppetteering for the last several months, but he's back on his inkin' game now. 2) Comicspace and Webcomicsnation announced a merger. I had some conversations with Joey Manley about this during the summer and again a few weeks ago, but had to keep my mouth shut. Interestingly, I STILL have to keep my mouth shut. Their stuff is really that cool. 3) Zudacomics.com, DC's big foray into the world of online comics (and buying intellectual properties for peanuts and page-views) launched on the 30th. Their launch was HUGE, with over 23,000 pages viewed in just one day. (Ummm... yeah. To put that in perspective, you people view over a quarter-million pages at schlockmercenary.com each day. DC may get more traffic from this blog post than from their launch.) 4) Blank Label Cartoonists Brad Guigar, David Kellett, and Kristofer Straub, along with BLC Unofficial Advisor Scott Kurtz bid a fond farewell to Blank Label. They're doing their own things, some of which will be done jointly under the Halfpixel banner. This fission leaves Blank Label Comics with Melonpool, Real Life, Ugly Hill, Wapsi Square, Shortpacked, and of course Schlock Mercenary. 5) That Wikinews article about webcomics and notability ( the one I blogged) got slashdotted. As did I, I suppose. Traffic here blipped up by about 8%. Webcomics have come a long way since the days when Slashdot could actually hurt our hosting. More importantly, however, the discussion under that article has lots of very meaningful, articulate posts, and only a few all-caps trolls. Of all of this stuff, I'm sure the folks at DC would like to think their news is the most worthy. Personally, I think the WCN/CS merger (Item #2) is the biggest news. If comics were geopolitics, that merger is like if England and France teamed up to colonize the Americas in 1530. Zuda is like if Columbus arrived in America in 1906 and tried to announce that he was discovering it. And then unloaded a sack of beads and asked if Manhattan was still for sale.
