ABC has officially cancelled the series Life on Mars, but will allow it to gracefully conclude with a definitive ending to the storyline. The network informed show producers it will not order additional episodes beyond the 17 in the works for this season and confirmed it won’t renew the series for next year. Production will continue through this month and the finale will likely be scheduled for early April.
With all the hullaballo as to what happened to scans_daily, we decided that we should hear from as many of the players as possible, especially the ones who have been silent so far. We’re still waiting on an official statement from LiveJournal, but we have been in contact with two of the moderators from the former scans_daily group, "Stubbleupdate" and "Rabican", and they’ve graciously responded to our questions.
ComicMix: What do you know about the circumstances of the shutdown? Has LiveJournal told you what prompted the shutdown? Were you given any warning, or any ability to address the situation?
Stubbleupdate: I crawled out of bed on Saturday morning (which meant that the community would have been deleted late evening/night on Friday, America time) and saw that my inbox had a lot of LJ friends requests from people on the community. I get that sometimes, but four overnight is unusual. They all wanted to know where the community had gone, which is the first that I had heard of it. A lot can happen in six hours on the internet.
There was also an email from the LJabuse team telling me that the account had been permanently suspended. That was it. LJ tends to take a “Shoot first, ask questions later” approach to getting rid of communities that it’s been told are against its policies or laws, so that part shouldn’t be surprising.
As for correspondence from LJ, they didn’t say what had prompted it, just that it had happened. I don’t expect them to.
Rabican: The shutdown occurred overnight while the mod team was asleep, so we’ve had to pull together the story of the shutdown from multiple accounts. The most likely scenario we’ve surmised is that Peter David reported a group of X-Factor #40 scans to Marvel around the 24th; Marvel complained to Livejournal, and the Livejournal Abuse Team shut us down the night of the 28th (US time). We were given no warning whatsoever and told that the account was permanently suspended. The justification, given by form mail, was that our community existed "primarily to host copyrighted material without the permission fo the copyright holder" and this was against Livejournal’s TOS. We’re still looking into finding out the details of the abuse report made to the LJ Abuse Team.
It’s worth noting that both Livejournal and, I suspect, most of the major comics publishers have known about us for years, so it’s interesting to speculate what prompted them to move against us now. It’s possible Peter David making the report removed all possibility of plausible deniability. Or, Marvel wasn’t nearly as well-informed as we thought they were. We don’t know whether they thought the poster had uploaded most or all of X-Factor #40 rather than the half she did upload, although legally it doesn’t matter. The Peter David situation may have been a coincidence and it wasn’t Marvel at all, but Livejournal doesn’t move against copyright violations without a complaint from the copyright owner, so we know it was a comics publisher.
Go to MoCCA’s Benefit Advance Screening of Watchmen on March 5th dressed as your favorite Watchmen character and get a ticket to the benefit, including the advance screening, VIP reception and after party for only $20! (That is $80 off the general ticket price.)
Tickets are limited, so order right away. Call today to order your tickets: 212-254-3511. Tickets available for Advance Purchase Only.
This once-in-a-lifetime evening begins with a reception at MoCCA for The Art of Watchmen exhibition, continues with an advance screening of Watchmen at AMC 19th St., and concludes with an author signing of Watchmen: Portraits by Clay Enos.
5pm: VIP Reception & SILENT AUCTION at MoCCA
7pm: SCREENING at AMC 19th Street 890 Broadway
10pm: AFTERPARTY back at MoCCA with special guests and a signing of Watchmen: Portraits by Clay Enos
Tickets are $100 | $75 for MoCCA members | $20 for Masked Heroes
Tickets may be purchased on-line at www.moccany.org, in person at MoCCA or by phone, 212-254-3511, Tues. – Sat., 12-5pm.
All proceeds from this special event go to support MoCCA programming.
IDW Publishing has announced the upcoming release of The Complete Rocketeer by Dave Stevens, collecting the classic series in its entirety for the first time ever.
After more than a decade out of print, The Rocketeer makes a triumphant return to stores this October with a comprehensive hardcover edition featuring artwork digitally re-mastered from Stevens’ own lovingly maintained collection of originals, and all-new coloring by Laura Martin, the Eisner-Award-winning colorist handpicked by Stevens himself.
The Rocketeer, a rollicking tribute to pulp novels and Saturday morning matinee serials, follows the high-flying adventures of stunt pilot Cliff Secord and his girlfriend Betty, after Cliff finds a mysterious jet pack and takes to the sky. The graphic novel went on to become a much-loved major motion picture directed by Joe Johnston.
In addition to the mass-market hardcover, a very special deluxe edition is planned. Presented in a larger format, the deluxe edition will be filled with behind-the-scenes material, a treasure of additional pages featuring previously unpublished Rocketeer designs, preliminaries, and sketches by Dave Stevens, many taken from his personal sketchbooks.
“It is an honor to work on The Rocketeer,” said IDW Special Projects editor Scott Dunbier, “I’ve been a fan of Dave Stevens and The Rocketeer since I first read it in the early 80s. It was a dream of Dave’s to see his creation return to the shelves in a complete collection. We are dedicated to making this the definitive edition, a book Dave would have been proud of.”
Just letting people know, since folks have been asking:
PeterDavid.net was not pointing to the right folder for a while last night as part of the update brought on by the traffic update, but the nameservers have updated and it seems to be resolved now. Some of the older entries are still migrating over, but you should be able to reach it. As part of the upgrade, you may want to check your RSS feeds.
MichaelDavisWorld.com, on the other hand, has been having server problems for a few days now, but we’re told it should be resolved soon.
One of the arguments that’s been trotted out in the wake of the scans_daily closing– sorry, scans_daily is how I see it should be written — is that having things posted there tipped people off to cool things to read. We have anecdotes of people spending $2800 because of books that they saw on s_d, pitted against sales figures for monthly comics that have been going down month after month, year after year. Most of this is difficult, because there are very few correlations that can be pointed to that make us say, "Ah! Someone posted five pages of Stupendous Man #73 and sales went up!"
However, we actually do have data that we can point to– webcomics.
At various times, people used scans_daily to promote their webcomics, books that couldn’t be gotten any other way. And at one point, so did ComicMix. I posted the first seven pages of The Original Johnson to scans_daily on January 19th, Martin Luther King Day, to see what sort of traffic we could get.
How much traffic did we get? A negligible bump. Fifty click throughs at most over a few days, and not many of them stuck around.
As a point of comparison, the New York Times ran an article on The Original Johnson a month prior on Christmas Day, 2008, the least visited day of the year for the website and the newspaper. The article was buried in the sports section. And we got well over twenty-five times the click throughs from the Times alone, and seventy times the traffic.
So– was scans_daily a good promotional platform? I’d have to say no. Why? Because it was an illicit group, and had to stay under the radar. As an illicit group, it was limited as to how much it could grow– it had less than nine thousand readers when it went down. As Warren Ellis pointed out, it couldn’t be used to promote anything. What it could do– and did very well– was reproduce a lot of comics storylines well enough, month after month, so that people didn’t need to actually buy the comics over time.
There have been a lot of successes from online promotion. And we’ll see what sort of traffic we get from a link on Ain’t It Cool News, which wrote Lone Justice up today. But scans_daily has not been seen to have a positive impact on readership from our point of view. We’ll update you in a few days when the traffic dies down. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to publish any other actual data — Kevin Church, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo woo woo.
In the meantime, a few more links:
Well, this has been an entertaining weekend.
To recap: on Friday, the LiveJournal community scans_daily has been suspended for posting copyrighted material without the permission of copyright holders, which is against LiveJournal’s ToS.
Many people, looking for a focus to blame, have taken out their venom on Peter David, bombarding his site with comments, some supportive, some abusive, and pretty much chewing up computer cycles. This has required moving up a planned migration and upgrade to the site, and there’s nothing like doing an upgrade while a comment storm is going on.
(Incidentally, this person is one of the more obnoxious pinheads I’ve come across in a while, whose argument seems to distill to "I was rude to someone I stole things from, so he took back what I’d rightfully stolen, I think, and this makes him a bad man". I suspect this person felt that the three bears had no right to chase Goldilocks away, let alone eat her– especially since she didn’t like two-thirds of the porridge that she ate.)
Further commentary has been brought up by Johanna Draper Carlson and Gail Simone on the "you’re shutting down a free comics site! Bad!" side, Kevin Church and Lisa Fortuner on the "About bloody time" side, and Digital Strips’ Brigid Alverson giving equal time to both.
As for the scans_daily moderators, the best summation seems to be from schmevil. Stubbleupdate has offered to answer questions in an interview; I’ve already sent a list.
The message on Live Journal is very simple:
Error
This journal has been suspended.
And with that, it’s gone and the comics community has changed.
And before anyone asks, no, Peter David isn’t responsible for drawing attention to the powers that be any more than Dirk Deppey is responsible for posting a link to it almost every day for years in a news publication. If you post enough stuff on there and you don’t own the copyright, your foot shall slide in due time; sooner or later you will get noticed and the hammer will fall.
Before you ask, yes, I posted stuff to scans_daily to promote The Original Johnson, because it’s a large community of readers. But ComicMix controls the rights to the book and used it for promotion.
I hope that scans_daily can reconstitute, but remember, to stay outside the law, you gotta be honest.
If any of the group administrators would like to contact us to comment or for an interview, please feel free.
So far, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Fox have all had ties with Watchmen. Now, we can add NBC/Universal to the list.
Next week, NBC Networks will be airing never before seen exclusive Watchmen character profiles during the programming of shows on NBC, USA and SCIFI to gear up for the release of Watchmen on March 6th.
Here’s the schedule:
Following their network airing, the clips will be available for viewing on nbc.com/watchmen.
Meanwhile, Disney is trying to figure out a way to tie things in. Some Ozymadias/ScroogeMcDuck crossover, I suppose. Or Donald Ducktor Manhattan, he’s already not wearing pants…
We received the following statement from Marvel:
Due to an unprecedented number of unsolicited art and writing submissions, Marvel has altered its open submissions policy effective immediately. Marvel has remained the only major publisher to continue accepting open submissions, however that practice has been halted as we review our strategies for accepting future submissions.
Marvel has a proven track record of attracting new and emerging talent and does not plan on ending those efforts in any way.
"If you look at our track record over the last 18 months, I think you’ll find the names of more new writers and artists in Marvel books than ever before. Maybe more than at any other major comic book publisher, as a matter of fact," says Marvel Talent Liaison C.B. Cebulski. "We pride ourselves on finding new voices and artistic styles to help us shape the Marvel Universe in original and exciting ways. And while the hunt for new artistic resources to help us ever expand the Marvel mythos will continue, we’ll just be going about it in different ways. We’ve examined all our past practices concerning talent recruitment and it quickly became clear that more ‘reactive’ methods such as open submissions were the least effective ways to open the Marvel door for up-and-comers. So instead we’ll be continuing with the more ‘proactive’ methods of artist and writer discovery that we’ve found so successful of late, including some soon-to-be-announced new outlets."
While the open submissions policy has ceased, Marvel will continue its active recruitment of artists through its Talent Management department. Artists are also encouraged to bring portfolios for review to the major conventions at which Marvel will have a presence this year.
Talent Coordinator for Marvel, Chris Allo adds, "In regards to finding new artists, we in the Talent Management department will still continue to look at online websites such as Deviant Art, Comic Art Community, as well as comic art blogs, and other related sites. Online comics are rapidly becoming a source for scouting as well. And, of course, we will still go to the comic book stores on Wednesdays and see what new artists are out there working for other companies and on independent books."
With the successful discovery and publishing of writers in the fields of comics as well as TV, film and literature, Marvel will continue to search out new voices in all published fields, as we have for the past number of years.
As new media and means of publishing comics on the web as well as small and independent press, we encourage all new creators to continue honing their craft by using all of the tools available during this time. Marvel will be announcing a new submissions policy in the near future.
Let the speculation begin. Is this because Marvel’s been laying off people one at a time, and one of the folks let go was the guy who went through the slush pile of submissions? Is the market full up right now, and Marvel has enough talent to produce the limited number of books they’ll be doing? Have they finally figured out a way to clone Bendis?
And with this door closing, how many other people are just going to migrate to the web and start there, and not need Marvel at all? Don’t forget, Marvel Digital’s chief exec doesn’t think YouTube is a real entertainment channel… despite what Nielsen says.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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