Fans of the classic 1990s CG-animated series "ReBoot" are getting their first taste of new material with the online debut Friday of a new comic story, new website, and word of a writer chosen to write the first of three planned feature films.

The comic, titled "Paradigm's Lost," was developed from and molded by ideas from fans at the comics site Zeros 2 Heroes. Fan participation has been a driving principle of Rainmaker Studios' efforts to revive the property, says Paul Gertz, exec VP of the Vancouver-based operation. So far, the strategy has successfully engaged the diehard fans that are essential to the success of genre entertainment, he says.

"The hard core fans of this kind of entertainment, these are the people that stand in line for a week before 'Star Wars' opens," he says. "These are the people who make or break films their opening weekend."

The new comic was created by writer Jeff Campbell, producer Shea Wageman, artist Shaun Martens and designer Kelly Schmidt. The story features the heroic Guardians and merciless Codemasters setting aside their differences to battle a viral outbreak that threatens the stability of cyberspace. Fan input will continue to shape the story as it goes along, Gertz says.

Jon Cooksey has been tapped to write the script for the "ReBoot" feature film, which Gertz says is in treatment phase. While a feature film doesn't allow the same level of fan involvement that the comic can, Gertz says they are paying attention to what fans want.

"What we learned is that engaging our fan base and engaging our fans in a unique way, in a social way, a web 2.0 way, is a viable course of action that keeps your fans invested in what you're doing," he says.

The Z-Cult FM story continues, with the site receiving and complying with requests from DC Comics and Top Cow to remove all trackers to scans of their comics.

Top Cow comics have been available for legal download at Direct2Drive for a while now, while it’s safe to assume some kind of service for DC’s print comics will be coming at some point.

But it’s interesting to watch this blow up now, as the timing is strangely random. Glenn Hauman over at ComicMix talks about meeting with execs at DC about 2½ years ago in which he laid out an online strateg for the company. The result is telling:

They thanked me for my time, but suggested that a certain higher-up at DC would never go for it-- even though there would have been more than enough support from the online advertising market and from their corporate parents, and even though it would have been an obvious source of revenue that would have benefitted DC's bottom line and supported all sorts of new comic initiatives.

He also recalls meeting with Marvel more than six years ago to discuss building an infrastructure for managing the company’s assets, both digital and not.

Meanwhile, “High Moon” won the first competition at Zuda Comics, which is currently “between competitions.”

Artist Colleen Doran writes about her experience trying to get Marvel’s new Digital Comics Unlimited service to work after signing up for it.

After poking around on the site at a few of the free samples on the site this morning, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot for a month or two to see if I will actually read a lot of comics in this format. While Doran had trouble, I had a surprisingly nice experience reading through a few comics such as The New Mutants Special Edition #1 (one of my all-time favorite superhero comics), the Ed Brubaker-Steve Epting Captain America #1 and Fantastic Four #251.

After a bit of experimenting, I found the “Smart Panel” mode was the easiest way to move quickly through the book, though there were some issues that I hope will be addressed: For some reason, the bottom of the page was sometimes cut off by the frame in the browser, forcing me to switch to another mode to read some balloons in this part of the page. There also were some strange zooms, especially on pages with large vertical panels. In some instances, I could click on part of the panel and the browser would zoom in, making the text easy to read and the art nice and big; but sometimes it didn’t and there wasn’t an easy work around aside from switching to another reading mode. (It’ll be interesting to see if Marvel will adapt the way it makes print comics to make them work more easily in digital formats.)

The comics themselves looked very nice and the way the browser zooms in on the art displays it at a much larger size than you see in the print version. In some instances, it gave otherwise small panels more of an impact and got me to see things I hadn’t seen in print. The art on the older books was sharp looking, keeping the classic color scheme of the era.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it. As long as it always works at least this easily, it’s definitely preferable to the experience of using a reader to look at cbr or cbz files, which usually require tons of scrolling and zooming to get through a page. My few attempts to try to read something in thsi format were frustrating enough for me to just drop the idea of reading books that way. I look forward to experimenting further and seeing if my interest in reading comics this way will hold up after the novelty wears off a bit.

Now that both DC and Marvel have jumped into the digital comics space – albeit with completely different approaches – they’ve been forced to address the issue of comics piracy.

Working together, Marvel and DC sent legal letters last week to the operators of Z-Cult FM, a popular site for BitTorrent trackers that allow users to download comics, including the most recent issues of those publishers’ titles. According to posts at the site, the letters gave the site three days to act before the publishers would take further legal action.

The site, which is based outside the United States, has its own policy for allowing publishers to request their material be removed. After verifying the letters were authentic, the site says it agreed to take down all Marvel trackers from its site within seven days. While the site has confirmed the letter from DC is authentic, they have, as of this writing, not posted any reports of further talks. In lieu of any talks with DC, Z-Cult FM has decided not to allow trackers for any new DC titles until the book has been on sale in comic shops for 30 days.

The publishers also went after a prolific uploader of scanned comics named “Oroboros,” who decided to stop using Usenet forums, though will continue to “scan and release into the wild like I did a year ½ ago.”

You can be sure there will be more of this going on as each company gets further and further into the digital comics realm. There already are some people reporting easy workarounds for saving the hi-res images from Marvel’s new Digital Comics Unlimited site to your hard drive.

How far Marvel and DC will go is unclear. It seems unlikely they would go after end users who download comics the way the RIAA has with music downloads. But going after trackers and the sites that host them is futile, too, as there are already so many copies out there of pretty much everything those companies have published and no shortage of sites willing to post trackers that are beyond the legal jurisdiction of U.S. IP law.

As with music and movies, the best plan would be to make legit copies of comics available so easily and so inexpensively that it’s just easier to buy them than it is to steal them. But given how long it’s taken both companies to get this far, that’s unlikely to come along any time soon, especially with DC still not making any of its vast library available online in any way or at any price.

If there were truly any doubts left that the Internet is going to succeed Howard Stern as the king of all media, the number of recent announcements that blur the line between new media and the historically resistant to change comics industry should help dispel them.

It’s taken a while, but with DC and now Marvel both getting into the web with major initiatives designed to bring in new readers and eventually money, the merger of comics and the web is starting to look extremely promising. It’s so promising in fact that a lot of companies that would previously have never considered having comics as part of their business plan are now crossing that line. It surely won’t be a smooth ride to riches for everyone involved, but it’s also unlikely that with so many approaches being tried that at least some of them won’t be successful.

Kicking off this train of thought is Marvel’s big announcement last week of its Digital Comics Unlimited service, for which you can read the PR here and journo Douglas Wolk’s interview with editor in chief Joe Quesada and online VP John Dokes here.

Marvel has opted for a subscription model, charging fans either $9.99 a month every month or $59.88 for a whole year, which comes out to $4.99 a month. Those fees give the reader access to a bunch of new and classic titles. There will be limits on what’s available, with new comics going online six months after they’re published and the mix of classic titles said to be in a rotation that will see some stuff go down after a while to be replaced by new offerings. Readers won’t be able to download the comics to their hard drives and can only access the comics through a web browser, requiring an internet connection. The interface is not bad — it’s basically the same as they’ve been doing for a while now with promotional digital comics — though reading it on a smaller screen like a laptop or iPhone will be a bit of a challenge.

My Monday post on the WGA strike and comics got a number of responses across the internet. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter took issue with some of my points here; my response to his response (and a few more comments from Tom) is here.

* Zuda Comics is up and live. The first thing that strikes me is the interface, which appears to have been well-thought out but still has some bugs to work out. The art looks great on my laptop in full-screen mode, but so far the keyboard commands for advancing through pages doesn’t work in this mode. Conversely, shortcuts work fine in the regular browser window, but the lettering on the image at that size is jagged and too small to easily read. Again, there’s a few bugs to work out, but the presentation overall is pretty good.

Meanwhile, Zuda has announced its first instant winner: "Bayou," by Jeremy Love.

* MySpace is hosting an interesting experiment called Coalition Comix, in which readers have a chance to shape a new comics project. Running the project as “MySpace Storymaster” is Mike Carey, a veteran comics writer currently guiding the fortunes of the X-Men for Marvel. According to the PR, Carey determines the questions that will be put to readers, who have a chance to influence the story “on the deepest levels.” Coalition is a partnership between the MySpace Comic Books site and publisher Virgin Comics.

* Platinum Studios has teamed up with Skyward Mobile to create Mobile Comics, which the companies describe as “a new application that delivers a never-before-possible comics experience to users over their mobile devices.” Platinum’s “Hero by Night” and “Kiss 4K” will be the first comics featured in the application, which works on multiple platforms and can be downloaded for free www.platinumstudiosmobile.com and at www.skywardmobile.com through Dec. 31.

Meanwhile, Platinum has terminated its involvement in the comics news site Broken Frontier. The site reverted completely to editor in chief Frederik Hautain, who explains things here.

DC's long-awaited webcomics initiative Zudacomics.com goes live on Tuesday. The company is ready to kick things off with a submissions party in New York City. Official PR on the party (and a link to the invite required to get in) follow in the jump.

Zuda also announced the 10 candidates for its first competition, featuring some interesting indie comics names such as Corey "Sharknife" Lewis and Pop "Spyboy" Mhan. Descriptions from the PR:

Title: Alpha Monkey
Writer/Artist: Bobbie Rubio/Howard M. Shum
Summary: In a misguided attempt to save his son from the destruction of Earth by a comet (which then happens to miss the Earth entirely) a scientist rockets his son into another dimension. The child ends up on a parallel world ruled by Monkeys! Given unique powers by the planet’s bananas, the young boy fights off invading monsters as the planet’s new defender, Alpha Monkey!

Title: This American Strife
Writer/Artist: Jason Longo
Summary: A quirky, humorous “Dear Diary” recounting of the artist’s observations on life, This American Strife is a sharp-witted visual stab at editorial blogging.

Title: Battlefield Babysitter
Writer/Artist: Matthew Humphreys
Summary: In a family of superheroes, in a city of superheroes, in a world of superheroes, Katherine Fields is a babysitter. But when a routine night of babysitting turns into a villainous invasion, Katherine finds herself transformed into a super strong heroine. At $8.00 and hour, it’s going to be a long night.

Title: Black Swan
Writer/Artist: Mulele Jarvis
Summary:  A young college student, Nina, is embroiled in a 500-year-old vendetta when she encounters a spirit bound to a mystic dagger left on her doorstep. Implicated in murder and on the run from a detective possessed by a rival spirit it’s up to Nina to relive an age-old battle – without dying in the process.

Title: Dead in the Now
Writer/Artist: Corey Lewis
Summary: When Braz – a young, cynical boy – discovers the world’s first authentic zombie he decides to end Earth’s monotonous routine and usher in an age of zombie-infested, chaotic adventure! Gathering supplies and weapons, Braz sets his friends up like modern, urban Lost Boys with himself as their Pan.

Title: The Dead Seas
Writer/Artist: Pop Mhan
Summary: Legions of undead controlled by Necromancer warlords destroy life as we know it, plunging the Earth into a futuristic Dark Age. But it’s adventure and romance on The Dead Seas as a swashbuckling young pirate named Devin teams up with an adventurous crusader name Luna. Armed with the secret of Pandora’s Box, they set out destroy the Necromancers and save the world.

Title: The Enders
Writer/Artist: Tim Smith III
Summary: Aluna didn’t ask to be given godlike power and she certainly didn’t ask for her parents to be killed in the process – but the enigmatic alien known as The Ender works in mysterious ways. Without time to grieve, Aluna is tasked with using her power to save the Earth from imminent destruction.  The only question – how?

Title: High Moon
Writer/Artist: David Gallaher/Steve Ellis
Summary:  It’s the fading days of the Old West in the late 1890’s when an enigmatic drifter, Matthew Macgregor, ambles into the dusty town of Blest, Texas.  The nights are cold in Texas as Werewolves secretly haunt the town, but Macgregor has a supernatural secret of his own.  When the sun sets it’ll be a showdown at High Moon.

Title: Leprenomicon
Writer/Artist: Greg DelCurla/Fernando Ruiz
Summary: In old Ireland, when the banshee sings for you it means that your time on this Earth is coming to an end. But American Michael O’Connor refuses to take this news lying down. With the (forced) help of a kidnapped Leprechaun, he intends to solve the mystery of his own death even if it turns the world of faeries, gods, and plain old normal folk upside down.

Title: Raining Cats and Dogs
Writer/Artist: Sho Murase
Summary:  A young, snake-haired gorgon named Mika, winds her way through the contemporary, everyday wonderland of dating, work, after-hours adventures and everything in between alongside her friends Apple (a rokurokubi energy-vampire),  Feebe (a bake-neko cat girl) and Akiha (a normal human).

A cool offer from BitTorrent, the P2P downloading service that now offers legit downloads of movies, TV shows music and games, creates an opportunity for a little experiment.

The offer is for readers of this blog to follow this link to a page where you can try the service and download a legit, licensed copy of "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" for a mere 99 cents, a big savings off the regular $14.99. This offer is good through 3 p.m. PT on Oct. 23, 2007.

That's the cool part.

The experiment is this: It only supports Windows XP computers and I'm an all-Mac guy, so if anyone out there gives this a shot, please drop me a line and let me know how well the service worked, what the quality of the offering is, and (if you feel strongly about it) what you thought of the movie. I'll post a follow up after getting some responses.

Zuda Comics web site is making its Comic-Con debut, in advance of its October launch.

DC's director, creative services, Ron Perazza, says a few projects developed in house will be ready at launch, when submissions will start being accepted. The first submitted work will begin to appear about a month later, he says.

Perazza says there are plenty of advantages to webcomics creators for going with Zuda. "You're working with a major publishing partner," he says. "You don't have to do everything." That includes promotion and the intricacies of running a website.

DC promoted the site at the show with postcards that people can draw something on to create a giant webcomic. (The first one on the site comes from Jim Lee.)

The interface for the site was unveiled at a Comic-Con party Friday night. We were unable to attend, but those who did see it were impressed and said it worked well.

Still, making the grade at Zuda will require a strip to have something special. "We're not looking at this as an amateur thing," he says. And those who successfully pitch the site will get solid support from the company. Contracts for the deal will go online soon, but it's been clarified on the site that ownership for comics selected for the site will remain with the creators. "It's a good deal for a lot of people," Perazza says.

“ReBoot” was a pioneer in computer animation series, debuting in 1994 — the year before “Toy Story” first brought the technique to the big screen — and earning an enthusiastic fan base in its run on ABC, YTV and Cartoon Network.
Rainmaker Studios, the Canadian VFX and animation house that evolved out of original “RBoot” creators Mainframe, is looking to bring it back as a feature film trilogy — and has asked the fans for help along the way.
The studio has teamed with Zeros 2 Heroes, a new social media company that is hosting a competition on its webcomics site in which five fan pitches for the relaunch have been chosen to be developed in conjunction with Rainmaker producers. Pitches will begin appearing today, with the vote for the winning pitch set to take place a month later. The winning pitch will be produced as a webcomic based on the winning idea.
At the end of the process, development on the film trilogy will begin in earnest, and Rainmaker plans to make the connection with “ReBoot” fans established in this contest a big part of that.