Seizing an opportunity to leverage the current wave of popularity and notoriety surrounding the new digital graphic novel sensation The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore, MGM Domestic Television Distribution has acquired an option to develop the Factory Publishing property created, produced and directed by British photographer and author Howard Webster as a possible television series.
"The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore is an exciting digital graphic novel that's creating quite a sensation abroad," said Chris Ottinger, MGM's Executive Vice President of Worldwide Television in announcing the company's option of the property. "We see this as a great concept that will make an exciting series for worldwide audiences.”
The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore is a trilogy of graphic novels designed for iPod and PC download, published by Factory Publishing in association with Triumph Motorcycles. The stories combine comic book illustration, with 3D animation, live action photography, newsreel archive and an original music score, pushing the boundaries of the graphic novel genre and , say Factory, creating an entirely new form of media and fan generated content in the process.
Nominated at MIPCOM 2007's Mobile and Internet TV Awards in the Best Short Form Mobile and Internet Drama category and an official honoree at this year's Webby Awards, the online trilogy is set in a time where the British Empire has never ended and America is just a virtual world hosted on a vast global game network.
When Jonas Moore (portrayed online by British film and TV star Colin Salmon -- Resident Evil, Die Another Day, Prime Suspect and the upcoming Punisher: War Zone, and Blood: The Last Vampire), a character personally created by the network's founder, becomes self-aware he is tagged by the network as a virus and goes on the run.
As he moves from one artificial game world to the next, his knowledge of the games and the real-world gamers spreads like a virus to the other game characters, freaks, creatures and monsters who live as slaves within the network - precipitating a revolution and fight for freedom against the murderously addicted real-world gamers.
A photographer, publisher, director and writer, Jonas Moore creator Howard Webster, who lives in London, founded Factory in 2002, a film and entertainment industry magazine exclusively for Hollywood insiders distributed in London, New York and LA. He spent the early years of his life between Lagos and Kaduna in Nigeria and Cheshire in the north west of England. He studied biology at the University of Durham.
Worlds Apart lead singer Steve Hart wrote the score for the production and also stars in the online version.
As well as a great looking comic (download as a PDF from here), The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore web site engages fans by inviting them to become part of the journey by downloading the Jonas Moore digital elements and animating their own stories or creating comic book adventures for Jonas Moore. Garage bands and musicians all over the world are also invited to strip out the music and send in their own soundtracks. The best fan-generated comic books, animations and soundtracks are posted on the site.
One recent competition winner was Birmingham-based Mick Trimble, currently working on the on spy-thriller Septic Isle, one of many ceators who has benefitted from the StripSearch scheme (a comics talent search ) who has had work published in several small-press comics and magazines and is part of the Midlands Comics Collective. Download his winning entry as a PDF here
The whole concept of The Worlds of Jonas Moore seems to be directed at involving as well as enthusing its potentiual audience with a great story. According to Webster, "Branded content and fan generated content is a vast, evolving beast with huge metrics emerging from the web. The business models that drove the revenue big media agencies and global advertising agencies is collapsing and the easy relationship between big media buyers and media agencies and the net and gross fees that earned them massive paydays is thankfully dying.
"It was, in my opinion, a snug cartel based upon suspect metrics that didn't actually take into account how people actually interact with media. All it favoured was a justification of the media spend on the part of the manager who sanctioned it and the fees.
"In an effort to reinvent themselves the global media agencies are trying to claim they are now somehow experts in the field of branded content; the new content digerati.," he continues. "They're not. In branded content terms they're the embarrassing father drunk at a wedding trying to look hip on the dance floor dancing to sounds of the 1980s. The global media agencies are simply trying to copy what teenagers and web-heads are already doing in their millions with content on the web and are attempting to charge brand directors huge sums of money to do it.
"The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore is a wake up call to the global community of content generators mashing up video, music and imagery," he argues. "Jonas Moore calls for web-heads and garage content creators to take back the content on the web; send your ideas to the global brand directors - they will be better than the big media agency's ones (ideas designed by committee and sanctioned by someone in a suit) - get the brands to give you the money to create great content. If you get them 5,000,000 hits a month for an idea they will come back for more and you will be saving them a great deal in agency fees. The average Mac has everything pre-loaded on it for you to go for it.
"Jonas Moore is also a wake up call to the global brand directors - realize that the media agencies are not experts on the web or its content. It's time for the brands to support the global community of creatives and say goodbye to the global media agency dinosaurs and their expense accounts."
US publisher Platinum Studios has announced the global relaunch of the ad-funded e-book distribution service WOWIO (www.WOWIO.com), which was recently acquired by the company that also runs the web comics portal DrunkDuck.com.
WOWIO was founded with the vision of giving readers access to an immense library of ebook titles free of charge, with creators getting 50 cents per unique download. Earnings were generated through ads embedded in each book with the books themselves provided as PDF files with a number of built-in copy protections. (T Campbell, one of the people originally involved in WOWIO, peeked under the hood in his blog last year and explained a bit about the nuts and bolts of the site).
When WOWIO went offline in June, promising to return soon, Heidi Macdonald, over at The Beat was among a number of US comics journalists who offered the first inkling that the company was being sold, and several creators posted comments, revealing they had done quite well with the service. Probably the biggest winner was Superosity creator and Chris Crosby, co-runner of the Keenspot web comics portal, revealing he had earned some $93,624.50 from 186,736 WOWIO downloads since last August, while Bill Williams, of Lone Star Press, estimated his company through WOWIO has earned about $15,000.
With Platinum’s acquisition of WOWIO, the service has added several new features for consumers, including free browser based viewing capability enabling viewing on both computers and mobile devices. The new features also provide the ability to browse offerings without registering and a revamped and simplified registration process allowing consumers to store, share and gift downloadable ebooks, and an unrestricted ability to download as many ebooks as desired.
Platinum say tthe new set of features for publishers include the ability to reach a worldwide audience via the browser-based viewer, the ability to download to a global audience and access to multiple streams of revenue from display advertising, sponsored widgets, directed e-commerce opportunities and personalized gifts.
Prior to the acquisition and relaunch, WOWIO had over two million downloads in just over a year, and Platinum expects that the new features and capabilities will expand that reach.
Existing partners include Rosetta Books, a pioneer in electronic reading, Arcturus Publishing, the UK-based publisher of the best-selling 3D Thriller series, Soft Skull Press, an independent book publisher and British comics publisher Markosia, which also supports seveela other digitial comic initiatives such as myebook.com and ROK Comics.
Platinum say the improved services and a new accessibility to an international audience positions WOWIO to become a leading global destination for ebook distribution -- although some concerns have been raised about the new contracts for the service, as reported by Johanna Draper Carlson on Comics Worth Reading.
“As a publisher with our own content on WOWIO, we saw the potential of the WOWIO business model to bring unique and lasting value to all of their publishing partners in both the comic and traditional book publishing sectors,” says Platinum Studios’ President and COO, Brian Altounian, who spearheaded the acquisition. “The acquisition and subsequent global expansion of WOWIO was a logical next step in our goal to expand our digital distribution capability.”
“As WOWIO takes its model to a global audience, we are most excited by the reception that we are receiving from publishers, corporate sponsors, and ultimately our readers, all of whom acknowledge that with our next generation business model, WOWIO is able to bring valuable ebooks to a much broader audience,” said Dr. David Palumbo, WOWIO’s CEO.
“We are excited about this next phase in our partnership with WOWIO as they increase access to our content through their global distribution,” said Arthur Klebanoff, CEO of Rosetta Books. “In the time that we have been involved with WOWIO, they have brought us several innovative ideas, and this truly collaborative effort has helped to expand our digital strategy.”
A Birmingham-based company has launched Taymai Comic+, a new online comic which its makers hope will enable which enable the owners of new and existing characters to build fan bases by using the internet.
Described as the first ever internet publication promoting established and new characters and merchandise to tweens, TAYMAI stands for "Tell All Your Mates About It" and specialises in the online marketing of character-based intellectual properties.
Comic+, a free, online, page-turning comic targeting kids aged 8 to 14 years which includes pages devoted to characters such as Roobarb & Custard, an animation gallery and more.
Featuring a mix of old and new media, including 2D hand drawn comic strips, video and online casual gaming, the team behind Taymai Comic+ are aiming to ensure there's something to appeal to every kid within its pages.
In addition to established characters, such as Roobarb & Custard, Taymai Comic+ includes many new characters, such as The Screamers.
“We're all very excited about the launch of Taymai Comic+," says Steve Manley. "Having tested the first edition with school children, the results confirmed what we have always believed, that kids are very open to finding their entertainment online.”
The owner of every character featured in Taymai Comic+ can offer merchandise through an online print-on-demand store, without any stock risk at all. Steve Manley told downthetubes they have been testing this aspect of the service for several months and it has been working very well.
The Comic, whose services are being marketed to a wide range of companies, enables character owners and licensing agents to benefit by both building the public popularity of their characters and selling merchandise direct to consumers. They earn revenue, whilst gaining recognition and sales data, to prove to TV companies and retailers that the character deserves support. Retailers can use Taymai Comic+ to advertise their in-store character merchandise to tweens while licensees can use the digital title for merchandise offers, including competitions and ecommerce, to their target consumers.
I posted this list of Online Comic Creator Tools on the ROK Comics Creator Forum some time ago, but I think it may well be of interest to folks here...
I've been having a dig around on the Internet and had a look at a lot of the other creator tools out there. I was wondering if anyone had tried any of these and if so, what they thought of them? (This list also features on the main downthtubes site).
Please note: this list does not include links to web comic "portal" sites like ComicSpace or Web Comics Nation (although ROK Comics could also be considered one of those).
Comic Creator Tools Comics creator tools comprise software and online tools for the purpose of creating cartoons or comic strips, either for print or online or mobile phone publication. Several companies have developed creator tools, while some online companies and TV channels use them as "value added" services to enhance their web sites. Many online services employ Flash to but some use Scalable Vector Graphics.
Desktop Comic Creator Software
Comic Book Creator Link:www.mycomicbookcreator.com Windows Software Comic Book Creator 2.0 is a toolkit for self-publishing, whether you're making photo comics or classic comics from your scanned artwork or video game screenshots. The company has created various editions themed to TokyoPop, Marvel and other characters. "Comic Book Creator has become the software of choice for Social Network and user generated content creation and personal media syndication, according to Planetwide Media, publisher and developer of this creative software. Comic Book Creator is a media creation tool that allows you to easily create your own stories utilizing digital photos, music, sound effects, videos and animation. Your creations can printed in book form or published at your own blog or at www.HyperComics.com. The retail version is available for $49.99 US. Video gamers are encouraged to create a professional-looking, high-quality comic book to immortalize an important battle scene or dramatic encounter within their game play. Comic Book Creator lets gamers add in text bubbles to their digital screenshots, as well as classic comic book features like powerful action-word graphics that emphasize their game play. To create a comic, you need to select from one of the 500 unique layout and design templates, drop in your captured digital images and insert text bubbles, icons, captions and clipart to bring to life whatever story you can imagine. Comic Book Creator will work with any JPEG, BMP, or GIF digital image and will allow users to share their masterpiece with friends. Various 'skins' have been created in partnership with gaming companies and publishers such as Marvel.
An award-winning bit of Mac software that lets you create astounding comics, beautiful picture albums, how-tos... and more. The easy-to-use interface integrates seamlessly with your photo collection or iSight. Drag in your pictures, captions, Lettering text ('ka-blam!') and speech balloons and your work is done!
Doozla is the easy-to-use drawing application for children - it is what your kids have always wanted. It's the creation of plasq, who also make Comic Life.
Online Comic Creators
Most of these are flash-based, like ROK Comics
• The Beano UK publisher DC Thomson's flagship humour weekly provides the tools to create comics based on Beano characters. This is a nicely designed comic creator -- probably one of the best from the comics that provide one -- although lettering is a bit fiddly - you choose whole words to add to balloons rather than add your own lettering. Everthing including lettering, is treated as an object, which means you can rotate, scale all items etc. Like many online creators from commercial companies, there's no option to save - just print out your comic.
• Blue Peter A comic maker from the BBC. The Blue Peter engine is accompanied by a talk through from presenter Gethin, and you have to create the strip from the ground up, designing characters (if you want) then you can create a simple three frame strip which prints out on A4. There's no option to save it and the interface uses the same format as the Beano's, clicking and dragging key words to the stage. The stage is a bit small but it's quite a nice design and works quite well.
• Boy's Life This utilises the same style of moving and deleting objects as the Kabam! site (see below) - you click the command (eg Move) first, then the object or character you want to alter. There's no facility to save just print, but this service on the US Boy Scout site does let you click and view the three frame strip as one frame, so you can see how it's shaping up and how each panel looks compared with the others.
• Doctor Who The official BBC Doctor Who web site offers a moderated comic maker enabling users to create comic strips based on Doctor Who using monsters and characters from the TV drama. It's over complicated and the flash is very slow to load, and moderation takes at least three days. Not very impressed.
• Captain Underpants Found on the Scholastic Canada web site. It's a very simple comic maker providing fixed phrases and a limited number of characters, props etc to choose from, and not clever enough to realize you've missed out a frame when you create a story.
• Comic Sketch This SVG-based comic creator enables to you create freehand comics and turn them into a strip. The creators are working on a new comic strip editor (beta at ) for Comics Sketch (that will also be the next core of their calligraphic widget InputDraw). The builders say the main goal of the new version is to empower artists to be able to create real professional comics on the site and allow them to reuse parts/characters/objects of their comics in new ones. It will be SVG standard at its core, aiming for a subset of SVG that is close to the one supported by Firefox or Safari.. or even better and less buggier. This new version is being developed using ActionScript and Flex.
• Comiqs.com A new website that allows people to create comic strips based on their own photos. The Flex based editor allows users to easily add captions and text to photos that they upload. It is also possible to link it to your Flickr account. There's also a community based around these comic strips - with lists of top rated and top viewed comic strips that have been created. You can dive straight in and create a comic based on the photos already uploaded or add your own, without having to sign up. The interface is still in beta and is not instinctive and a bit fiddly, in my view, but there's some interesting implementation of "Web 2.0" themes.
• Gnomz Multi-lingual comic tool requiring sign up before you can create comics based on pixel art designs. The service appears to have some 85.000 members and has been running since at least 2005.
• ITV's I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Flash-based comics creator using celebrity images and scenery from the ITV reality show. The design is similar to the service offered by ROK Comics, who built the tools in 2007 for the show's sixth series as part of a number of mobile promotions. You can either view the completed strip in full or have it delivered to your mobile. There is a charge for mobile delivery.
• Kabam! Comic Creator Part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a bit limited but one nice touch is limiting the number of words per balloon, so it can't get too big - also, lettering is automatically centred within the balloon. This avoids the problem of over large balloons some comic creators have where the text is embedded into the balloon object, like ROK Comics.
An animation and comic creator inspired, it seems, by the imagery of Escher. It's Flash based and the menus are completely visual which was a little confusing. If you register you can save your designs and do other things with them. The makes say that with Kerpoof you can make artwork (even if you aren't good at drawing!), make an animated movie, earn Koins which you will soon be able to spend in The Kerpoof Store (not sure how this works yet), make a printed card, t-shirt, or mug and comment on other creator's work
• Make Beliefs Comic Simple web site utilising comic characters and props to create three panel strips. The creation of Bill Zimmerman with art by Tom Bloom.
• Patent PlaceVery slick Flash site based on Patent's Place the everyday story of Biotech folk.
• Read • Write • Think ReadWriteThink is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. The Comic Creator is designed to be used in a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). The organizers focus on the key elements of comic strips by allowing students to choose backgrounds, characters, and props, as well as to compose related dialogue. This tool can be used by students from kindergarten through high school, for purposes ranging from learning to write dialogue to an in-depth study of a formerly neglected genre. Once you have finished your comic you can print it out.
• ROK Comics (I'm guessing you've heard of this one!) This service lets users upload their own comic frames and photographs to make comic strips and provides speech ballons special effects and a number of characters and 'props' with which to create comic strips. Professionally-published strips earn revenue share but users can also publish strips for free and have access to embed code which can be inserted in web sites and some blog services. Sign up is required before you create a comic and the professional service is moderated.
• Strip Creator Stripcreator is a website that allows users to create and save their own comic strips. It officially went in January 2001. The site is donor supported: donors get to use more features than casual visitors. Registration is required. Comics can be read on the site or in the site's Read My Damn Comics forum (http://www.stripcreator.com/forums/listthreads.php?forum=14), where the regulars are most receptive to people who are polite and funny. Stripcreator works best in Internet Explorer 6. It also works in Firefox, though there are some glitches. "I've heard that it works in Opera and Safari as well," says creator Brad, "which would just be luck."
• Strip Generator Hailing from Slovenia, this surely set the benchmark for Flash-based comic creator tools and is now on a 1.3 model. The creators of Strip Generator created a simple to use flash based application utilising online charcaters, props and balloons. The service has gone through several upgrades, and has been used in some very successful projects, like for BAR TV reality show and for using it for political online cartoon creation for a US newspaper. Stripgenerator is free of charge project created to embrace the internet blogging and strip creation culture, helping the people with no drawing abilities to express their opinions via strips.
• Telltale: Sam and Max Comic Creator Now you can give everyone's favourite canine shamus and hyperkinetic rabbity-thing the power of speech from the comfort of your own home or office. It's easy! Just drag the panels you want into the empty strip. Then type funny things in the speech bubbles. (If you leave a bubble empty, it will disappear when you submit your comic.) Site claims copyright on all strips created.
• ToonDo ToonDoo offers more robust features with a twist of social networking sites similar to myspace or friendster. It offers a huge range of cartoon stock graphics and emotion icons for you to add with your photos or you can just use the characters to make up your own. You can get yor comics reviewed by other members, embed the cartoons on your website, and even add the toons to your favourite bookmarks sites. ToonDoo offers nearly 400 characters, props and backgrounds and the ability to create one, two or three-panel comic strips. You can also customize characters, props and speech bubbles and upload pictures and photographs, then share, mail, recommend and bookmark your comic strips. The editor interface does not have the ability to tune digital photos and apply filters. Registration is required to use the comic creator which is Flash based.
• Toonlet Another relatively new service. Rather than focus on photos like comiqs for example, toonlet puts the focus on character creation, and features a powerful avatar tool so you can make characters that look authentically hand-drawn. Tour at: http://www.toonlet.com/tour. They're looking for creators to contribute "art packs" based on downloadable templates.
• TOXIC UK publisher TOXIC has a "Monster Maker" that is part of its online comics suite for members of the TOXIC club. While not strictly a comic tool the elements are certainly comics-inspired.
Good news for online comic creators comes via research from KenRadio.com (registration required) that nearly a quarter of the world's population – roughly 1.4 billion people – will use the Internet on a regular basis in 2008.
This number is expected to surpass 1.9 billion unique users, or 30% of the world's population, in 2012,, which means that the Internet will have added its second billion users over a span of about eight years, a testament to both its universal appeal and its availability.
By the end of 2008, the research suggests, the Internet will be more deeply integrated into the fabric of many users' personal and professional lives, enabling them to work, play, and socialize anytime from anywhere. These trends will accelerate as the number of mobile users continues to soar and the Internet becomes truly ubiquitous.
The PC is still currently the dominant means of gaining access to the Internet,, but only in certain countires. In many third world countries people access the web via their mobiles and the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet is now expected to surpass the number of online PCs by 2012.
So waht are all these millions of surfers doing online? Once on the Internet, it's expected users will continue to spend time on Web 1.0 activities like searching, shopping, and sending email. But Web 2.0 activities, such as watching user-generated videos (Youtube, MetaCafe), streaming media / VOD (Hulu, ABC.com), posting blogs (Blogger, Typepad), and participating in social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are quickly capturing the attention and time online of more and more Internet users.
The latter will create new opportunities and challenges for online businesses and advertisers. But it's all good news for webcomic and mobile comic creators!
If there was ever a reason to buy an iphone, surely the PhoneSaber app is it, now available free from the Apple "App Store".
This fun little app fires up a virtual lightsaber that uses the iPhone accelerometer to crackle and fizz as you swish your phone around.
For Star Wars fans this is possibly the greatest technological event of the year... and with tongue in cheek, the sugust techie organ ITPro has declared "this alone proves that the iPhone is an elegant device for a civilized age, rather than the crude mobiles that most people have by their sides."
Apart from the demo above, here's a video I found on flickr of another Star Wars fan enjoying their find -- part of a continuing series, apparently.
Alternatively, how about a much more useful application: iBeer. Sadly, virtual...
Esbjorn Jorsater, who runs the Comic Art School forum on Ning, has come up with a novel use for ROK Comics -- as a way to deliver tutorials!
Esbjorn has created this simple guide to creating a cartoon cat, which can be viewed in full above. To get the embed code to put the tutorial on your own site, visit this page on ROK Comics!
Just launched in the past few weeks is Myebook.com (www.myebook.com), a new web-based ebook community from a British company, which aims to give people the tools to create book content and 'get it out there' for free. Every aspect of publishing content is covered - from creating, to sharing and reading - in a slick and simple way.
The service has been met with a great deal of interest from several comic creators, with a number of comics from Markosia and Orang Utan already available on the service.
"Comic book creators love it," enthuses Simon Whitehall, head of myebook.com communications. "The system is a great environment to create and publish comics and graphic novels. The power and richness of the design features are out of this world, certainly by web standards."
"Forget web 2.0," he says, "We've just turned the page to chapter 3.0. With myebook.com, we've made it possible for anyone to upload or create from scratch beautifully simple or adventurously complex page designs and covers online, in no time. What's more, users can publish their book with a single button and release it to the world before the (virtual) ink's dry! They can create as many publications as they want. And it's all free."
Readers may think myebook.com sounds too good to be true. So where's the small print?
"There isn't one," says Whitehall. "The only limit is our users’ imagination. An over-used cliché but never more appropriate than now. Ourethos is: create, publish and share.
"Our audience is everyone from the kid at school who's just written a short story in English class; to his sister who wants to document a recent family trip; to the author who wants to share the novel he's just finished; to his friend who wants to share the novel he's sat on for 20 years!
"My grandmother, for example, has led a rather 'colourful life' and has always threatened to write a book some day. 'But who would publish that?' she would ask. Well, we would - so all her friends could read it online."
"It's the ultimate ebook platform for any personal or corporate publications," Whitehall continues, "whether it's for novels, childrens books, magazines, comics, photo albums, leaflets, brochures, instruction manuals. You can even embed or link to videos, audio, documents, images and flash files to make your books fully interactive. And what's more, since the whole myebook system is community-based, getting your word out to your audience is easy."
The team behind myebook.com feels that the service has ‘stolen a march’ on the rest of the publishing industry. While judging a book by its cover is never advised, spending a few minutes on the site will convince even the most hardened bookworm.
"Like the digital music revolution, myebook.com aims to give back total control to the content creator and the reader," Whitehall concludes. "Itprovides a way for users to publish what they want and connect with their audiences directly."
myebook.com are however, not trumpeting the death of print. The company is quick to point out that, while print is an excellent medium, it is the advantages of the traditional publishing and distribution model that are fading.
British book trade weekly Publishing News, which has occasionally covered graphic novels and related illustrated books in its pages, is to cease publication. The issue of Friday July 25th will be the last.
In a statement on the magazine's website the publishers stated the publication, founded in 1979, has been hit by the same problems that have affected all magazines and newspapers: advertisers have shifted increasing proportions of their spend to online and direct sales.
The closure reflects problems facing all niche publishers. Titan Magazines, for excample, moved its SF magazine Dreamwatch to the web some time ago.
'This has been a sad and difficult decision to make," commented PNL's founder and Chairman, Fred Newman, commented, "but the nature of the book trade which today offers a multiplicity of ways for publishers to sell books both to booksellers and to consumers has changed dramatically. For the biggest book publishers, the trade press is now only one of many options for the promotion and sale of their titles."
Newman stressed that all other activities of PN Ltd are unaffected by the closure of Publishing News. The company will continue to organise the British Book Awards and has recently signed a new two-year contract with its headline sponsor, Galaxy. The team involved in the management both of the Awards and the British Book Industry Awards, Alastair Giles, Merric Davidson and Midas PR, will continue in their roles.
Also unaffected is the Christmas Books Catalogue, a joint venture with the BA. The 2008 edition is now in production and close to one million copies will be distributed through bookshops. BML, the leading research agency for the book business, will also continue, mounting its usual Books and the Consumer Conference in March 2009.
Thanks to a deal between ROK Media (publishers of ROK Comics) and top Hollywood photographer Sue Schneider, you can now buy wallpapers featuring some top SF TV and film stars -- along with other celebrities -- for your mobile.
Mobile service Fonepark is offering a number of 'wallpapers' for mobile featuring the likes of William Shatner, Jeri Ryan, Robert Picardo and many others, along with TV theme ring tones and more.
More SF celebrities will be added to the service in coming months.
Fonepark is also set to add wallpapers by top comics artists already creating comics for mobile, complementing existing comics and magazine-sourced imagery from titles such as Look and Learn and The Bible Story.
When the G8 governments met in Japan this week, one of the items on the agenda that has been discussed in secret for months was signing an agreement that could enable customs officers and others to search your laptop or MP3 player for illegal material as you pass through a country's borders.
The Guardian reports on government plans to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in an article weighing up the pros and cons of the 'free' internet and attempts by various copyright owners to keep a hold on their material and their right to do what they want with it, Such efforts, says Saul Klein, a venture capitalist with Index Ventures who has invested in the free database company MySQL, exhibit a "finger in the dyke" mentality.
"In a world of abundance - which the internet is quintessentially - that drives the price of everything towards 'free'," he argues. "People don't pay for any content online. Not for music, not for video. They get it, either legally or illegally."
The battle between content creators and content users wanting it for 'nothing' is growing, encompassing the comics as well as the music and film industries. The Guardian reports that Scott Adams, the cartoonist best-known for his Dilbert strips, stood up for his work in a blog post in April last year, where he reasserted his ownership of his products.
"When you violate a copyright, you take something valuable from the copyright owner that he can't get back," he noted "... After I published The Dilbert Principle, within days it had been illegally scanned and was widely available on the internet for free. Technically speaking, it wasn't theft. But I still lost something. I (and my publisher) lost the ability to decide if, when, and how to publish as an e-book."
Unmentioned in the Guardian article is the fact that all this action by governments to combat what they see as widespread copyright theft is the apparent lack of any opportunity for the public to comment on the plans.
The Act would of course lend more weight to US government search and seizure of laptops and other eletronic equipment, highlighted by the Los Angeles Times recently, as we previously reported.
IP Justice, which is campaigning against ACTA, notes on its web site that as of 25 March 2008, no draft text had been published to provide the public with substance of the proposed international treaty. A “Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” was reportedly provided to select lobbyists in the intellectual property industry, but not to public interest organizations concerned with the subject matter of the proposed treaty. Indeed, it wasn't until Wikileaks posted the leaked ACTA discussion paper on 22 May 2008 that such groups got any idea of what is being planned.
• Comics writer Jason Cobley is a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show The Learning Curve at 8.30pm tonight, Monday 23rd June, discussing using Classical Comics' Shakespeare books in the classroom with the legendary Libby Purves. "I'm not sure whether to be excited, terrified, or just cool as a cucumber," says Jason, author of Bulldog Empire and one of Britain's best known indie comic publishers.
• Waterstones is celebrating 25 years of Terry Partchett's Discworld in many ways, one of which is an interview with the celebrated author by Neil Gaiman. Terry talks candidly about his career, how he is now an honorary Brownie (for writing a proper girl in a book, The Wee Free Men. "I've got a woggle and everything..."), his battle with early onset Alzheimer's, and his approach to writing. "planning. 'Planning, planning, planning," he reveals. "It's more like those guys in the desert who pick up a handful of loam, or sand, and taste it, and they know whether there's any oil nearby. "It's the same thing with writing: you can tell where the legs are in an idea but don't know where the idea comes from. I think it's some kind of alchemical thing, made up of lots of other things. Your apprehension of the world around you. Your knowledge that you are one of the few people that use the word "apprehension" in that last sentence in exactly the right way. Which doesn't mean to be fearful about something. I hope you noticed this."
• If you're wondering just how important the online comics group you've just joined is, digital communications expert Pete Ashtonis on a mssion to convince people that digital forms of communication are as important as what we might call traditional ones. "That communities and relationships that are formed online are as important as those formed in the real world," he argues. "In fact I’d go further and say terms like 'real world' are redundant as the online environment is just as capable of creating results of lasting real value as face to face interactions are, especially when the two work together." Pete is one of Birmingham’s experts on the social internet and the city’s first professional blogger. Since setting up and running the Created in Birmingham weblog (”Linking up Birmingham’s artistic and creative communities”) in January 2007 he has been in great demand from businesses and organisations who feel they need to use the internet more effectively but don’t really understand how.
MicroStock Insider, a guide blog to selling stock photography on the web, reports on TinEye, a visual search engine which allows you to search for your images by submitting an image for it to analyse. It returns a series of hits which are pages where it thinks it has found a match for your images. It works by comparing the pixels and shapes in the images not by searching for meta tags or matching file names. (Meta tags, for those who don't know, are information you can add to an image to describe it using photo applications such as Photoshop -- surprisingly, few artists seem to do so).
TinEye is in beta development and there is currently no charge for it: you need to request a membership. Test results were very good, according to MI, and the engine also offers a Firefox plugin which it makes it as simple as navigating to any page (e.g. one with your images on them) right clicking and selecting Search Image on TinEye.
This makes checking your images much easier if you have a gallery of them online at a reasonable resolution that Tineye can access.
Due to the limited size of the current image index it's not really possible to use Tineye to perform any sort of license enforcement checking or measure how frequently used your images are used, but this could be a useful tool as it expands its search parameters. TinEye also cannot do facial recognition or find similar images, it can only find the exact same image, but it's worth bookmarking, I think.
Top technology site TechCrunch has also just posted their review of TinEye, making the point that there are other ways the technology could be applied. If Idée can figure out a way to seed the images it finds with tags, or combine its approach with a text-based index, it could create an image search engine that is really good at finding exactly what you are looking for.
Interest in TinEye has been understandably huge and has bowled over the engine's development team, Idée, who develop a range of advanced image recognition and visual search software, who say TinEye has now had hundreds of mentions on blogs, forums and websites around the world.
British comic creator Adam York Gregory has just released his new book based on his webcomic, The Flowfield Unity -- but has abandoned trying to sell it by Print On Demand in favour of a tried and tested distrbution method -- print.
"After selling Flowfield Unity for a year via print-on-demand, I've decided to make the book by hand, from start to finish," Adam told downthetubes. "The reasons for me doing such a thing, and some of how I do it are on my website, but the truth is, I've spent the last five years of my life dealing with printers, publishers and outlets and distributors, and whilst POD is a good way to get a professionally finished product out there, it has also lost some of its appeal for me.
"Actually, there's a lie there, about the professionally finished product,' he confesses. "I worked as a typesetter and designer for a publishing house for a while, and I know how to set books, but using a couple of the POD services I found that whilst 90% of the time the end product was fine, there would be a few occasions where the printers would mess up – lost pages, bad cropping, someone else's book appearing in the middle of mine – and since the books are sent directly without me, or apparently anyone else checking them, the first I would hear is when I received an email from a disappointed customer… and that made me feel rather bad.
"That's just not on. At least by hand, making the book I get to approve every copy.
"It has taken a bit of time, but I also believe that as a physical object, the book is made to a better standard by me than it is by the POD printers," feels Adam. "The reason for this is that I use a traditional method, stitching the pages into sections (or signatures) and combining them before I add the cover. Compare this to the POD books where individual pages are bunched together and glued directly to the spine. I'm not saying that my new books are indestructible, but in my tests the only way a page is going to come loose is if you tear it.
"[There are issues with] paper quality and the card stock too… Understandably, there is a limit on how much a POD service can offer. But in my opinion, different books have different requirements and since this is primarily a book full of pretty pictures I want them to look their best in a suitable setting. No more 80gsm high-white!
"But construction standards and quality control aren't my only reasons for doing this," Adam adds. "One of the main reasons I've decided to go in what some people may consider a backwards step is that POD is so impersonal. There was a time with these sort of comics when you knew that the person drawing them had very likely stapled your copy together… there's a contact link right there… and I wanted to go one further, I wanted to make each book an individual.
"I can do this by making them by hand. I'm no longer restricted to set content for a start. If someone wants a particular strip, they can have it, if they want a different cover design, they can have that too… I can customise it as a gift, I can draw and write in it, in much the same way that I make my original strips.
"It just seems to fit the ethos of my comic, the whole hand-drawn ideal translated reasonably well on the web, but in the process I lost something when turning it back into a book. Now, I've corrected that.
"The price of the book is important too," Adam acknowledges, "and you'd think that by hand-making books you are going to negate all of the savings gained from mass production. But in my experience that isn't the case. The unit costs of POD books is quite high. First there are the material costs, then there is the POD company's cut, followed by delivery costs… and since they can't always be trusted to send decent copies, you may even have to pay twice for those delivery costs – once in having them delivered to you, and then again when you send them out to stores… just so that you can check the quality. Believe me, there's little worse you can do than sending defective copies to a store that has agreed to stock your book.
"So, by my calculations, the hand-made version shouldn't be too much more expensive. The bulk discounts you may get offered for buy from POD in bulk are easily compensated for by buying your own materials in bulk.
"And speaking to a few store owners, the majority of their self-published comics are now coming through POD channels. There was a time that my book stood out due to that same fact, and now it would be just adequately camouflaged.
"I'm not trying to say that I think all comics should be made by hand," Adam expands. "I've seen some excellent work with POD, but whilst those books looked mint, I always felt that Flowfield Unity looked a bit like a tramp in an expensive-looking suit… albeit one that would occasionally fall to bits.
"So there you go, control, cost, quality and personalisation… these things that I consider to be important in a self-published book, I can now achieve."
(First posted 9/4/08, updated, 15/5/08): The Adipose began to take over Britain just days after the screening of the opening episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who, Partners in Crime.
The episode saw the Doctor and Donna (Catherine Tate) the villainous Miss Foster, a powerful business woman and alien Nanny (Sarah Lancashire), and her army of alien Adipose.
Fortunately for Adipose fans, there seemed no need to wait until Christmas when such a toy might appear, because the nation's knitters stepped up to the plate and a lady known only as "Mazzmatazz" delivered a guide to making a woollen alien. Huzzah!
Unfortunately, this fan-created, not for profit pattern was ripped off by pirates who started selling Adipose online, prompting Mazzmatazz to remove the pattern from her site -- just as the patterns were also apparently attracting the attention of BBC Worldwide. Shame, but totally understandable. Given that knitter Hannah's talents extend to providing woollen hats for an Innocent drink ad campaign, perhaps the BBC will get her to come up with some official patterns - she also created designs for a knitted TARDIS, Ood and more.
A BBC News report published 14 May stated the patterns of Ood and Adipose were removed from her website after the BBC's commercial arm complained that they breached its trademark. "Mazzmatazz" says the corporation was "making an example of her".
"The patterns I created, inspired by Doctor Who, were never for sale," she stated on her web site. "They were shared under Creative Commons licenses, to prevent resale, so that other fans could enjoy and share the fun too.
"All I want is for the BBC to be fair. They either need to pursue all parties who have published without authorization instructions for Doctor Who crafts, or, they should permit all parties to publish fan-created instructions so long as they do not threaten the BBC’s intellectual property. To single me out for breach of copyright seems more like an act of making an example than a good faith defense of their copyright."
BBC Worldwide said it acted because finished figures were being sold by others on auction website eBay.
It also denied threatening legal action and as I hopd, it said it had indeed offered to consider marketing the designs itself.
The case is being publicised by the Open Rights Group, a lobbying organisation which specialises in digital rights issues. (There is a detailed analysis of the issues raised on Technollama by Andres Guadamuz, a member of the ORG and who has seen all the correspondence between the pattern creator and the BBC. The dispute boils down to the grey area of a fan providing a knitting pattern for fans in a not for profit manner and whether that is actually allowed. ORG's executive director Becky Hogge told BBC News: "["Mazzmatazz"] doesn't feel she's doing anything wrong yet she's being threatened with legal action."
"In the offline world, what she'd be doing would be fine. But because she's doing it online, which is a public space, it causes a problem."
A BBC Worlwide spokesman countered that it has every right to protect the BBC's commercial interests. "If you don't protect your trademark, it's taken away from you," he said. "And Doctor Who is massive for the BBC. It's up to us to earn money from it so we can re-invest it in the BBC,."
However this all turns out, and whether some flexibility in copyright law can be discovered - both for fans and for the BBC - I don't think there's been as big a rush to wool shops since The Clangers first aired in the 1970s...
(The official knitting pattern for the Clangers, by the way, is available from Peter Gregory of G K P Ltd, Springmill House, Baildon, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD17 6AD. But there's an unofficial pattern here on the Radio and Space Plasma Physics Knitting Patterns page, if you're interested. (Amazing what you can find on a site supposedly devoted to a site supposedly about Leicester University's Co-operative UK Twin Auroral Sounding System...)
The BBC has just published an 88-page full-colour online interactive comic called Crash Course drawn by top British comics artist Neill Cameron.
Neill told downthetubes he spent "a good chunk of last year working on the comic for the BBC" which can be read for free via: Neill Cameron has just gone live, and can be read and enjoyed for free via www.bbc.co.uk/schools/studentlife/games/crashcourse
In Crash Course, eight students embark on a school trip where they end up learning more than they expected. Some find love, some find courage and others find goats. Join them on their journey and choose where the story takes you.
You will need both JavaScript enabled and Adobe's Flash Player plug-in to access the comic reader. BBC Webwise has a complete guide to downloading and installing Adobe's Flash Player and how to enable JavaScript, but for most web users it's easy to use and requires no "under the bonnet" fiddling with your computer settings. "Just click 'Play Game' and then 'Start New' to start reading the comic in all it's zoomy-inny-outy choose-your-own-adventure glory!" says Neill.
"It was a lot of fun to do and I hope people enjoy reading it. For a sneak peek at the art in its virginal, unlettered state, pop over to www.neillcameron.com, where I've posted a few pages.
In other news, Neill reports he is still working his socks off on Mo-Bot High, my strip for The DFC, the new British subscription-only weekly children’s comic launching later this month from Random House.
"It’s all starting to get rather exciting," says Neill. "The official press launch is this Thursday at the British Film Institute, so if all goes to plan you should all be hearing all about it in various papers, radio
Seizing an opportunity to leverage the current wave of popularity and notoriety surrounding the new digital graphic novel sensation The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore, MGM Domestic Television Distribution has acquired an option to develop the Factory Publishing property created, produced and directed by British photographer and author Howard Webster as a possible television series. 
When Jonas Moore (portrayed online by British film and TV star Colin Salmon -- Resident Evil, Die Another Day, Prime Suspect and the upcoming Punisher: War Zone, and Blood: The Last Vampire), a character personally created by the network's founder, becomes self-aware he is tagged by the network as a virus and goes on the run.
