Amazon has quietly pulled off another exclusive content deal this week with the Kindle Fire. DC Comics has agreed to offer 100 digital comic titles only on the Kindle Fire.

It’s an impressive selection of titles and it includes such well known works as V for Vendetta and Watchmen as well as  Y: The Last Man,Planetary, Superman for All Seasons, and many other comics starring DC’s main stay characters like The joker, The Flash, Green Lantern, and more.

“We’re thrilled to work with the leader in digital books to bring many of the world’s most beloved and best-selling graphic novels to Kindle readers,” stated Jim Lee, co-publisher of DC Entertainment. “We’ve learned from the success of DC Comics – The New 52 that making our graphic novels available whenever and wherever our readers want is critical to the future growth and health of our publishing businesses–both in print and digital format.”

Watchmen and a few other titles are up for pre-order now, and more will be released in the coming months.

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Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, has pulled together his usual magic and come up with a pithy statement about sharing and DRM.

The Giving Tree is a poem by the late Shel Silverstein, and it’s also the title of one of his poetry collections. In the poem, the tree gave everything of itself: shade, apples, and eventually its very wood. Click on the image above to see the rest of the comic and read what Randall wrote about DRM. If you hover your mouse over the image you will get to read a second joke:

In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.

via xkcd

Graphicly is a new company lets comic book publishers sell digital comics through a Facebook app. We caught up with Graphicly CEO Micah Baldwin to discuss how the app works for publishers.

EBN: How does the Graphicly app on Facebook work?

MB: The app is very easy to use. It is added to a Facebook page much like any app, and it includes Graphicly’s technology, which is the reader wrapped with engagement tools like Twitter, Google+ and comments. The interactions that occur around that graphic novel stay with the graphic novel across the web and on Graphicly.com. The comics come from more than 250 publishers and 4,000 creators that have partnered with Graphicly to share and promote their content digitally. Read more

Ursula Vernon, creator of the web comic Digger, claims that her digital comic, was stolen by NY pop artist Chad Love-Lieberman. The comic book artist discovered the theft when her artwork showed up in a feature story about on Love-Lieberman on Campus Socialite.com. It was inaccurately credited as Love-Lieberman’s work.

Robot6.com has the story: “After running a feature about ‘New York Multimedia Pop Artist‘ Chad Love-Lieberman, nephew of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the website Campus Socialite retracted its story upon finding out that Love-Lieberman ‘is a fraud, taking other people’s art from the web, touting it as his own, and worst of all – selling it for profit.’”

In a post on her blog, Vernon gives credit to Campus Socialite for removing the story. She writes: “Mad props to the staff at the Campus Socialite, who got back to me in under ten minutes and promised to pull everything and edit the article—they were just as outraged as you’d expect them to be.”

The iPad and other tablets have made it possible to bring comic books to life as eBooks. In fact, comic book apps have been dominating Apple’s Top Grossing Apps list in the book category for the past couple of months. We caught up with David Steinberger, President/CEO of ComiXology, a company that designs digital comic books for Marvel Comics among others, to discuss how ComiXology is addressing the growing digital comic book market.

EBN: When formatting comic books for tablets, what elements are you trying to preserve?

DS: Our focus is always on the reading experience, which is why we developed our Guided View Technology that allows the user to go from panel to panel. We are always trying to author the comics to guide the reader through the comic as the creator intended. Read more

Gen, a new title led by Editor-in-Chief Robert McGuire, has just released its first issue.

According to Robert’s interview in Manga Maniac Cafe, Gen is going to have a monthly release schedule in Japan and the US. Each issue will have original seinen and doujinshi manga, and there’s only going to be a limited print run.

Rather than go the usual path of reprinting existing comics, Robert found Japanese artists to create original manga for an American audience. The work was translated in house as it was created, and Gen works with the artists to make sure that the nuances of the story aren’t lost.

DC Comics has made a couple earth-shattering announcements this past week, and they did not go by without being noticed.

Starting in August, DC Comics plans to reset all of its current series to issue zero. At the same time, it will also start releasing the digital edition of its comics on the same day as the print editions. The digital comics will be priced the same as paper for the first month ($2.99), but will drop $1 in price thereafter.

This move isn’t simply a plan to clear the past history of the various series; much of the continuity will remain. No, this marks DC Comics decision to try to reboot its entire business model.

Yesterday Aspen Comics and comiXology announced a new partnership.  Digital comics from Aspen Comics will now be available for purchase from the comiXology store. You’ll be able to read the comics on Andorid, iOS, and you’re computer.

The initial launch will include 15 titles, including some of Aspen’s more popular series, such as Michael Turner’s Fathom and Soulfire. Single issue titles will be priced from $.99 to $2.99 (depending on issue size) with over-sized titles priced accordingly. comiXology also plans to offer full series sets of Aspen’s various titles at a discount.

Aquafadas has just added a new tool to its suite of software that’s designed to help comic book publishers convert their existing content into a digital form.

Comic Composer will make it easy to publish comics to iPhone, iPad, Android, Facebook or blog. It allows you to add transition effects as well as zoom and camera movements, which means adding a guided reading to comic books is within the reach of any comics publisher.

Aquafadas also offers plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and QXP to create interactive apps based on previously designed print books, magazines and brochures. Comic Composer is a solution tailored to the specific needs of comic books publishing.

Digital Manga announced yesterday that it had signed a deal with Kobo books, and that its digital comics were now available in the Kobo Store. There are currently 90 titles from its DMP, Juné, and 801 Media imprints available for Kobo in a wide variety of genres.

The name Digital Manga should ring a bell. This is the publisher that recently saw a number of its titles pulled from the Kindle store because they were too explicit. Several of the new titles in the Kobo store are in the same genre as the ones pulled by Amazon, which means we could see some fireworks if and when Kobo starts getting complaints.

via Digital Manga