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Edited By Ron Donoho
Holy Digital Debut!When author Stephen King released his latest novella in eBook (electronic format) earlier this year, the masses went mad for his creepy Riding the Bullet. In the first 24 hours after it was made available on the Internet, more than 400,000 people paid up to $2.50 to download the 66-page book. Big players in the publishing industry—Simon & Schuster, Random House—have been quick to jump on the bandwagon.
This summer, a San Diego company hopes to make another King-size splash. ’Net start-up Toonscape will release the first graphics-heavy comic book, retrievable on just-being-introduced hand-held electronic readers. The digital comic books will be illustrated in 16 shades of gray. Forget voice bubbles—you’ll actually hear the characters speak.
The technology was scheduled to premiere at the PC Expo in New York City on June 27. It will also be available at the annual ComicCon International gathering at the San Diego Convention Center, July 20-23, and will be on display at the ProCon, a separate show here for professional cartoonists (July 17-19).
“This will go beyond what Stephen King did, in that what we’ll have is much more visual,” says Toonscape CEO Ken Morgan. “It’s more than just text. And it will have impact because of the expected proliferation of these hand-held devices.”
The world is finally on the verge of a great e-transformation, believes Morgan. “Newspapers are a dying business,” he says. “It won’t be long before people get used to reading their favorite comic strips on their computers.”
Morgan is a “third-generation” cyber start-up veteran (he helped found Digibook Technologies and Netopolis Inc.). He echoes other e-business practitioners who predict the future of computing lies in hand-held devices like the Palm Pilot.
Some background on Toonscape: The company (12 full-time employees and two dozen independent contractors) is Spartanly based in an old church in downtown’s East Village. It launched in December 1999; its Web site (toonscape.com) went on-line in April. Morgan says he’s spent at least $1.5 million so far on the business.
The Toonscape site currently contains more than 300 comic strips and close to 10,000 pieces of content, according to director of Internet marketing Caryn Gordon. As of May, the site was getting about 150,000 hits and averaging about 45,000 unique visitors a month.
What downloadable digital music did for independent musicians, Toonscape plans to do for comic-book artists, illustrators and animators. “Our goal is to empower artists with the technology and marketing support they need to get to the next level,” says Morgan. Along the way, if Toonscape spots a rising star, the company will assist in (and profit from) marketing, syndication and licensing-type deals.
Scanning the Web for good cartoons and artists is content manager Anne-Marie Linas, who previously worked for Cartoon Network in Atlanta and Walt Disney Animation in Burbank. Notes Sheldon Owen, vice president of business development: “Anne-Marie is looking for the next Charles Schulz or Stan Lee—or Pokemon or South Park.”
Owen claims San Diego is the world capital of comic arts. He points to ComicCon, which annually draws 60,000 people to the city, and a large local talent pool. That pool includes Craig “Spike” Decker, cofounder of Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation. Also Jim Lee and Todd McFarlaine, who split off from Marvel Comics and founded Image Comics in La Jolla in 1992. Each set up a studio here—Wildstorm (Lee) and Spawn (McFarlaine).
Toonscape principals have identified a dozen possible revenue streams—and one of them is not on-line advertising. “Very few people make money at that; we believe content is king,” says Owen.
The off-line, mainstream comic-book industry reaps about $750 million in the United States; that number soars to $5 billion in Japan. A very small percentage of that money is made on-line. So far.
www.toonscape.com
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