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 follows up on a couple of topics near and dear -- online comics and comics for girls.

I've found a couple things I think worthy of confessing this week:

I have to admit I was strangely pleased by the timing (immediately after I went on and on here about the potential of online comics for a couple of weeks) of the announcement concerning the launch of Josh Blaylock's Pullbox Online.  It's a site where you can download comics like Kore, Defek, Breakdown, and Voltron for only ninety-nine cents.  But clearly these downloads are an attempt to find a way to distribute comics that circumvents the direct sales market, raising the obvious question 'isn't this going to create even more unwanted competition for retailers?'

I really don't think so.  Maybe your shop was different but to be honest Dark Star was never able to shift a substantial number of the comics being made available for download at Pullbox, in large part because our shelves were creaking under the weight of the comics we already had.  I realize I'm stating the obvious here but getting your customers to try new original titles is notoriously difficult given their money is usually tied up in the comics they're already getting. 

And when it comes to licensed titles like Voltron, well I'm sure somewhere there are people who would be thrilled to have new adventures of the Voltron crew - but they sure didn't come into our store looking for them.  Posting issues online where anyone typing the new of the animated series into a search engine can find them seems to make a lot more sense then just hoping its fans will come into a comic book shop.

There are of course worries operations like this will drain off some of our customer base, and while it's certainly possible our customers will go online to download these comics, I'm not all that worried about losing their business (and not just because of the limited number of comics available online right now).  Clearly these folks like the experience of going to a bricks and mortar comic book shop or they wouldn't be shopping with us in the first place.  It's entirely more likely Pullbox will grow the market by making comics available to people who don't have easy access to a comic shop.

Next there was the announcement of the impending launch of DC's female-skewing Minx line, an attempt to get girls who've 'grown up' (more or less) reading manga to make the leap to indigenous American comics. There's been grumbling amongst some retailers that, given the amount of money DC has spent on market research to try and find an audience for the line, they won't be coming to us for them.  Well, I think that depends on your individual shop.  Dark Star already sells quite a bit of manga as well as girl friendly graphic novel graphic novel series like Nancy Drew, W.I.T.C.H., and The Babysitters Club, so of course we'll be getting the Minx titles as they come out.

But as to whether you can 'convert' manga fans that way, it's been my experience that all the salesmanship in the world can make a customer take something they don't want.  Which, in a round about way, brings me to Marvel's plans to attract new female readers (as laid out in Part Two of the interview with Publisher Dan Buckley published last week on ICv2).  Sure Anita Blake has been a strong seller for us and (so far) these new readers have been back for more, but only for more Anita Blake comics.  As I was saying there's no way to make these people pick up another title, but it would have been nice if Marvel had at least offered us a couple more titles that might have appealed to this group.

Next time Marvel does one of their revival 'event' months for some forgotten genre why couldn't it be their line of all but forgotten girl comics (which kept the company afloat in the late 40s when no one was buying super-heroes)?  Imagine everything from Sun Girl to Millie the Model not as they were but reconfigured as comic book 'chick lit' (a.k.a. the modern 'shoes and kisses' romances which owe such an enormous debt to the Sex and the City TV series).

Finally if you go to the Disney Comics Worldwide Website you'll read two pieces of interest to American comic fans.  First, a piece about how the Walt Disney Company Italy is creating a new comic called Speed Loop.  I quote: 'The new series is much more a cross between a manga-style comic and a video game, than your usual classic Disney comic.  The exciting story is told like a true novel, interpreted in the form of a comic strip with an original graphic style.'

And second, America isn't the only place where comics featuring traditional Disney characters have been cancelled; Portuguese publisher Edimpresa is doing the same, focusing instead on girl titles like W.I.T.C.H.   It's commendable to see a company like Disney make a concerted effort to create new characters that will appeal to today's kids  instead of (like so many American companies) misguidedly trying to 'update' decades old characters until they're no longer recognizable (the Shazam! Captain Marvel anyone?).