Jason Fliegel has a report about the Zuda panel in Chicago over at Howling Curmudgeons. Fliegel talks about the some of the legal aspects of DC’s new webcomic initiative, as well as their (un)plans for “viral marketing”:
On a related note, I asked what, if anything, Zuda planned to do to make itself known to that portion of the public that doesn’t read Newsarama and attend Wizard World. Brunning and Johnson’s response was to basically say “It’s the internet. We don’t need to advertise — it’s viral. Everyone’s seen that dramatic hamster, right?” Interestingly enough, I had dinner that night with Mike Leib, who does viral marketing (among other things) for a living. One thing that Mike made very clear — not that I didn’t already know this — is that viral marketing doesn’t just happen. It takes planning. Sure, every now and then something will catch on with the YouSpaceBook crowd and take off on its own (like the hamster that Johnson referenced, which is actually a prairie dog, but whatever). That’s the exception, though, not the rule, and one ought not to count on lightning striking.
He also reports that they said they aren’t taking advantage of the corporate relatonships that exist in a company like Time Warner. Fliegel writes: “Brunning’s response was that DC very much wanted to retain control of Zuda, and so had made a decision not to involve AOL.”
Dark Horse teams with MySpace, and they aren’t even related. Reaching out to a sister company like AOL seems like a natural move to make to help promote the site.
Meanwhile, Sami at Comics Crew talks about the preview for the Zuda Comics reader that was posted at the site. He says it doesn’t suck:
So far it doesn’t look all that bad. It seems to be more functional than flash and dazzle, and that is a good thing. There is a reason CDisplay is popular: it is simple, it works, and it lets you get to the content with ease. Looking at the images it seems like there is a possibility it is Flash based, which can either be good or bad. Good in the sense that it makes “stealing” images out of it a little harder than a CBR/CBZ package, you won’t have to install any 3rd party programs on your computer, and it will make centralizing the comics DC plans on releasing a lot easier. Bad in the sense that users haven’t been all that impressed by other flash based comic readers. Especially Marvel’s own version, which has some features that I’d enjoy for about 5 minutes, but seem obtrusive in the long run.
