Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Comics of Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at the comic downloading  announcements from recent comic conventions.

Unfortunately family business kept me from writing a column last week, which is a shame considering how at the recent New York Comic Con and Wonder Con so many publishers were good enough to address one of my favorite hobbyhorses--the downloading of comics.

Top Cow made the biggest move in this direction with the announcement they were going to make the first fifty issues of The Darkness, Witchblade, and Tomb Raider available as high-resolution PDFs via Direct2Drive, the download service of Internet giant IGN.  Happily they did backtrack from an erroneous initial announcement that they were going to be put all of their comics online simultaneously with their arrival in comic book shops for the exact same price, $2.99.

This news didn't exactly threaten me (Dark Star sells entirely too few Top Cow comics for that), but the worst part was to get all the way to the press release stage someone at either company must have thought that charging the same amount for a download as you would an actual comic was a good way of getting customers to try a new service.

At the New York Comic Con's 'Comic Publishing Review and Outlook' panel Marvel President Dan Buckley confirmed Marvel was working on the digital distribution of its comics, concentrating on its Classics Illustrated and Marvel Adventures lines.  This seems an awfully timid first step considering Buckley said research done by Marvel indicated online readers would become buyers of both physical comics and trade paperbacks.  If that's true, where's the harm of putting Civil War online now that it's over?

And since reading comics online and reading a physical comic book are apparently different experiences, Marvel is looking at ways of 'enhancing' the online versions of its comics, which I'm going to assume means adding music, voices, sound effects, etc.  I certainly hope that's not the case since this sort of thing didn't work back in the 90s when Marvel tried putting its comics on CD-Roms.  Sadly no date has been given for a launch.

Lukewarm as they may be, at least Marvel's plans are better than DC's; while Paul Levitz was also in attendance at the panel he gave nothing away about his company online plans, if any, for making its comics available for download.  It looks like I'll be waiting to read Rex the Wonder Dog stories online a little longer.

Inevitably one of the Big Two is going to  put original content online; undoubtedly they won't premiere one of their blockbuster 'events' there any time soon. But the day is coming when Marvel will decide it doesn't make fiscal sense publishing the last issue of a mini-series with low numbers and puts it up on its Website instead.   Or DC will decide a new Vertigo title will have a better chance of success if it makes the first couple of issues available for download.

It's just a matter of who blinks first.

And though it didn't garner him much attention from the usual suspect news Websites, at Wonder Con Slave Labor Graphics publisher Dan Vado announced his company was going to be moving away from print comics and towards a combination of digital downloads and trade paperbacks.

He also answered one of my persistent questions, 'Where have all the black and white comics gone?' by going over his company's financial bottom line.  Apparently Slave Labor only receives $1.10 from a distributor for every $2.95 comic book of his they sell, and if a title sells less than 3,000 copies it barely covers the cost of printing, let alone makes a profit.  From now on they'll premiere new material online at EyeMelt.com (where downloads start at sixty-nine cents).  And even though Dark Star continues to sell a large number of copies of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, there are plenty of Slave Labor titles we don't carry.  So what better way to expose new titles to a large potential audience than by making them (inexpensively) available on the Internet?

This also answers another of my persistent questions: 'Where are all the new publishers?'   I mean, we are in the middle of one of our periodic booms aren't we, so where are all the fresh faced start-ups with a dream?  About the only successful new publisher launch I can think of is Virgin, and though others have tried (and failed) at publishing comics while waiting for Hollywood to come through with a movie version formula, I'm guessing Virgin has sufficiently deep pockets to keep them going while they wait.

But given the cold equations quoted above, does it really make any sense for anyone without that kind of financial backing to try their luck at publishing (except of course for the sheer pleasure of it) comics, in black & white or color?

I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with 'no.'