Poor Mojo's Newswire

Rantz Hoseley, the editor behind Image's “Comic Book Tattoo” anthology of comics inspired by Tori Amos, introduced his latest endeavor at Heroes Con this weekend. Longbox, a digital comics platform similar to iTunes, is expected to launch later this year as a free download for Mac, PC, and Linux. Developed by Quicksilver Software, Longbox comics can be download for a suggested price point of $.99 per issue, with the potential for block and subscription pricing. The first two publishers confirmed for Longbox are Top Cow and BOOM! Studios. CBR News caught up with Hoseley to discuss the details of Longbox and its potential impact.

“Everyone's been talking now for half a decade about the holy grail of digital comics, and how do you solve that problem: How do you make something that everyone gets on board with?” Hoseley told CBR. “And rather than just kind of jump into it willy-nilly, we've done a lot of research and actual development on the platform prior to even discussing it with any publishers.”

In an effort to make the Longbox platform appealing to publishers, the software toolset used for creating the secure digital files integrates with publishers' existing production process, plugging in to Adobe InDesign and Quark to add an “Export as Longbox”-type menu option. “The problem with a lot of digital comic solutions is that they require per-comic either adaptation or alteration in converting print comics to digital, in order to customize it to the platform. That immediately incurs an overhead cost that the publisher has to recoup they're even at a break-even point,” Hoseley explained. “Depending on what that cost is, immediately that's a negative for the publisher, especially when monthly sales are dropping, cover prices are going up and distribution costs are going up. The last thing they want is another expense on something that isn't proven. One of our keys is having a toolset that works as a natural extension of their existing production path so that it doesn't take additional production time or effort to simply create a secure digital version of the print comic that they're already producing as part of their ongoing publishing line.”

In an interview with Jam.canoe.com, Mr. Gaiman explained the dearth of new Sandman stories for the series' 20th anniversary like this: “I wanted to do a 20th anniversary story and it broke mostly because DC Comics would have loved me to do a 20th anniversary story at the same terms that were agreed upon in 1987 when I was a 26-year-old unknown. And my thought was, ‘You know what guys, it really doesn’t work like that.’ I wasn’t going to do a deal at the same terms we had in 1987 and they were not willing to do any better than that.”