Penny Arcade today announced Diane Melville of Babson College as the winner of the 2008 Penny Arcade Scholarship for students intending to pursue a career in the game industry. Ms. Melville will receive a $10,000 award to apply towards her education and professional goals.

For the 2008-2009 academic year, Penny Arcade received hundreds of applications from students at schools across the country. Eligible students must be currently attending an accredited US college or university and be full time during the academic school year for which the scholarship is applicable. Selection criteria include GPA, service record, leadership, character, financial need and gaming skillz. After months of review and deliberation, Ms. Melville was selected for this year’s scholarship, based on her history of and dedication to using games for positive social impact.

Those interested in learning more about the Penny Arcade Scholarship, scholarship winners, or submitting applications for the 2009-2010 academic year can visit http://www.penny-arcade.com/pas/ for further information.

About Penny Arcade: Equal parts online comic and commentary, Penny Arcade ( www.penny-arcade.com) keeps its finger on the pulse of the gaming industry, prompting conversation and controversy alike. What started as a hobby in 1998 for Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik has grown into an online phenomenon serving over 70 million page views a month to millions of readers worldwide. In addition to the comic strip, Penny Arcade has expanded its reach to include merchandise, the annual PAX gaming festival ( www.pennyarcadeexpo.com), a video game and management of Child’s Play ( www.childsplaycharity.org), a gamer-driven charity for children that spans the globe.

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Brian Cronin: “What do you think of digital distribution of comics? Is it a viable additional outlet to print comics?�


Mark Waid: No. It’s the future outlet for comics, period. Not tomorrow, not next week, but soon. Which is a shame, and the end of an era, and I’m not necessarily advocating it–I’m just being realistic.


But then I read this, and my heart sank.

Mark Waid: Paul Levitz had a great quote about digital comics, though. If I may paraphrase– the reason we’re not “there� yet has a lot to do with trying to find the right synthesis of format and delivery. For the first decade of its existence, television was really nothing more than radio with pictures. Everything was still dialogue driven, and you didn’t really have to WATCH it. You could just listen. But then Lucille Ball came along and wedded the visual comedy of vaudeville to the structure of radio comedy, and the whole medium transformed.


Mark Waid: And that’s what we’re waiting for vis-a-vis cybercomics. That ‘x’ factor that turns it into its own medium and not just pictures of comic books.


Brian Cronin: Right.


Mark Waid: That’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard, but then, Paul’s really smart.

People are not waiting for webcomics to become limited animation cartoons. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have web strips like Penny Arcade or Achewood or PvP or Diesel Sweeties being read by people in numbers that DC and Marvel would kill their collective grandmothers for. Homestarrunner.com isn’t popular because it’s an animated webcomic – it’s popular because it’s a site with a ton of funny cartoons. Anyone who truly believes that animated word balloons, pulsating sound effects and swiveling arms, legs and torsos are the way to bigger success with digital comics is completely missing the point of them.

People want to be able to read comics, at a reasonable price, wherever they go, at any time. They don’t want the Zuda-esque flash interface or the need for a special browser plug-in to read a daily strip. They don’t want to be able to have access to 20,000 comics on Marvel.com, but only when you have a net connection and only once the newest comics are 6 months old. They want to be able to download their comics the week they come out and be able to use one of the pre-existing comic book reader programs already out there.

The “x-factor” is already in existence – it’s the ability to capture a worldwide audience at a fraction of the overhead of print comics. It’s the ability to charge so little – in many cases nothing – in order to draw in more fans than you ever would at $2.99-plus a book. It’s the ability to get back to the days when if one person read a comic, they could easily and without regret pass it on to their friends, and so on and so on. I said it before, and I’m more convinced of it now than ever, DC screwed the pooch by not converting Blue Beetle into their first print-to-web Zuda comic. They could still reap the rewards of such a move, but the longer they wait, the lesser the benefits will be.

People download comics illegally for free right now, but if the comic companies would develop some sort of fair and equitable subscription program, it would be a almost overnight success. I’d gladly pay $9.99 a month for access to Marvel or DC’s complete catalog, and I would still continue to buy the TPB editions of series I really like. Believe me, once the first full-color e-book reader comes to market, DC, Marvel, Image and the rest had best get themselves correct, because as soon as it hits a reasonable price, it’s gonna be game over, and no amount of animation, sound or any other bell or whistle is gonna help.

EDIT: Mark Waid responds in the comments, and corrects my misunderstanding about what he was saying.

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My suggestion is simple – continue to publish the series, but do it online through Zuda.

The obvious benefits are pretty simple to see. Blue Beetle has a built in fanbase that would absolutely love to read the series, especially if it were online for free. People exposed to Beetle strictly through the cartoon and internet appearances would have a simple way to access additional stories about the character without having to go to the store or find the collections on Amazon while being convinced to lay out their own cash. Thinking beyond brand new material, if DC were to retrofit existing issues into the Zuda format while simultaneously advertising the TPBs, they might actually see an increase in those sales. This does assume that fans of the book won’t be turned off by the notoriously sub-standard Zuda interface, but that’s an argument for another day – let’s work with what we have.

The fact of the matter is, DC could easily come out of this a winner in all ways. The goodwill garnered from the online community alone would be worth giving this a shot – it’s really a far more vast and varied amount of potential customers than I think DC realizes. Additonally, bringing the series to the web would theoretically bring new and/or lost eyes back to Zuda, potentially increasing the fanbase for the site’s existing series. That alone, I would think, has to be worth trying this out for a few months.

Look, DC is already planning on publishing “Bayou” and “High Moon” as print collections, so why not reverse the process, bring an established character and book to the web and hope to flip it around again in 4-6 months with another new collection? Heck, if they had actually thought ahead and planned this out correctly, they could have had issues already formatted and online with appropriate meta keywords in place to benefit from the increase in “Blue Beetle” searches that have taken place over the last week or two.

Of course, the fact that when I mentioned this to my boy, Andrew, his first question was “What’s Zuda” just speaks more to DC’s utter inability to promote themselves at all these days, much less move in an interesting and unexpected manner like this would require, but hey…

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Could this be a viable business model for the electronic version of print comics like the mess that is Platinum Studios’ Wowio and Marvel’s current Digital Comics Unlimited sub service? Or could it just be a means of getting as much money out of a deceased comic book line as possible? Until there are more titles from different publishers offered, I would have to subscribe to the latter theory.

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Last Friday, John Allison provided a guest strip for his own daily strip, Scary Go Round (yep, you read that correctly). As enjoyable as SGR is on a regular basis, Allison’s “guest strip” proves the mathematical theory once again that “X + Batman = More Awesome.”

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Click the comic to see it in it’s full-sized glory.

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