Over at the Daily Cross Hatch, Brian Heater has the first of three Q&A’s with BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow on his comic work with IDW and Creative Commons licenses:
How did the project with IDW come about?
They wrote to me. I literally got an e-mail out of the blue one day, saying, ‘we’re IDW, we make comics, we like your stories, and would like to make some comics out of them.’ I checked out some IDW comics, and they looked like good stuff. The only question in my mind was the whole Creative Commons thing. I kind of assumed that, comics being a quasi-traditional medium, relative to book publishing, that I’d have some trouble selling them on that. Turns out I didn’t.
My agent said, “Creative Commons—you guys okay with that?” expecting to get a, ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, “oh yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?” And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.
When the book is collected into a trade, Doctorow says it’ll be made available online as high-res PDFs.
