Reinventing Comics on the Internet

Press Release: Reinventing Comics on the Internet

• Duck Soup Productions serves up free humor and adventure every week.

For Immediate Release

(Albion, ME) Two free Sunday comic strips by a Maine cartoonist are appearing every week at the Duck Soup Productions website ( http://www.ctel.net/~thornsjo/ ). Now you can log on to the web and follow the adventures of:

• Quirk - banished from the planet Sombra V for committing acts of unspeakable levity," Quirk and his pals Carpy, Smith and Sludge roam the galaxy in their extra-dimensional spaceship the FRIGID, always running into trouble with the meanest folks in the galaxy! Space fantasy at its wonkiest!

and

• Tinsel*Town - If you like vintage movies and jazz, this story of
Hollywood in the Great Depression is for you. Meet Eddie Fox, '30s movie
star and jazz musician: Watch as he rubs elbows with real stars of the time period. Learn about his uneasy rise to fame, his life and loves, and the facts behind his mysterious disappearance!

Both features are in vibrant color, with a full page - not just a panel or two - added every Sunday morning. Two months worth of strips are kept archived at all times so that new readers can catch up. In addition, readers of Tinsel*Town can write to Eddie Fox, the star of the series, and receive a personally autographed photo of Eddie by email which they can then print on their own home computer.

Why the internet?

The comics publishing industry has been in crisis for the last two decades. Thanks to the high cost of paper, the once-majestic newspaper comic strip has suffered reductions in size to the point of becoming illegible. Meanwhile, the comic book publishing industry has priced themselves out the market with cover prices running as high as $4.95 or more for a single issue - which defeats the point of comics as cheap
entertainment. With rising prices and dwindling entertainment value, it should come as no surprise that sales are way down.

At the same time, the rise of the internet has given us what has been called the most revolutionary publishing medium that has ever existed." With no paper and no publishing or distribution costs, comics can reach a world-wide audience at a bargain price - Duck Soup Productions joins the small group of comics artists (you can visit the links page at Duck Soups website to find a few of them) who are taking the medium back into their own hands.

Duck Soup Productions is also the publisher of the free on-line literary 'zine Millennium (which will be featured next year in a book about internet magazines that work from Rockport publishers), plus a full line electronic books and comics in PDF format.

For more information, contact:

Doug Thornsjo
Duck Soup Productions

email: dsp@ctel.net
http://www.ctel.net/~thornsjo/
quirk comics serial: http://www.ctel.net/~thornsjo/files/fresca.html
tinseltown comics serial: http://www.ctel.net/~thornsjo/files/soupfair.html
Millennium: http://www.etext.org/Zines/Millennium