The Beat's Annual Survey Consensus on the Importance of Digital Online Comics Distribution in 2009

I've been following The Beat's Annual Yearend Survey, 2009 Edition set of articles. It's always cool when you get the top industry experts together to reflect on the past year and make predictions on what will happen in 2009. Check out Comic Industry Annual Yearend Survey Part I, Part II, and Part III.

There's a lot of worries about the health of the comic book industry but some are hopeful that a digital comics solution will surface in 2009. 2009 seems too early to me. Websites take time to launch, solicit feedback, iterate, and grow. For someone to do this in one year is highly unlikely. If this were to come true, it would have to be a company that already exists. Anyone have any idea where this website might be? What is this LongBox Project that Laura Hudson mentions in Part III? I visited longbox.com last year in July. It's literally still a question mark to me...

My favorite "The Economics of Webcomics" author, Todd Allen wonders what Marvel is up to with their $10 million dollar project:
"What will be the biggest story in comics in 2009? What Marvel does with the $10 million they’ve put aside for digital. Mind you, they’re already doing paid download in Europe with cellphones as the platform. While Marvel’s officially expecting to reap the rewards in 2010, by Q4 we have a chance of seeing 1) expansion of the digital subscription program, 2) shorter waits from print to digital, 3) some form of paid, single-issue downloads. If the downloads are in Europe, you can consider it in field-testing for the U.S."

Does anyone have any screenshots of this subscription program in the EU?

I'm not going to provide any predictions for 2009. I just hope Marvel will give us a sneak peak to their project sooner rather than later to solicit feedback from the fans. After all, these are the people who are going to buy Marvel's product. In the meantime, I'll continue to build Kidjutsu - Comics for Kids into a viable alternative to kids flash games. Sorry, did I mention that I went to the library today and saw rows of kids just playing mindless flash games on the computer? That's the subject of another post.

Without further ado, today's featured kid-friendly comic is the very cerebral Womble by my new friend fluffy, who is a software engineer in the Bay Area too!