Digital comic sales totaled between $500,000 and $1 million at retail inNorth America in 2009, according to the ICv2 White Paper presentation at C2E2 last weekend.  The total includes sales in mobile formats such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Kindle, and PSP formats.

One method used to inform the estimate was to consult with the largest players in the digital comics space on their estimates of the market, each from a very different vantage point.  The range of the estimates reflected those different vantage points and the nascent state of the market; there was almost an order of magnitude separating the lowest and highest estimates.   We received estimates both below and above our $500,000 to $1 million range.

Although digital comic sales in 2009 were a relatively modest number, they represent a huge jump from 2008, when only iVerse and uClick had digital comics available.  In 2009, Panelfly and Comixology launched for the iPhone, IDW began offering a wide range of titles initially through iVerse and then through its own apps, and PSP launched with 500 comic titles in December.

Among the big sellers in 2009 were IDW’s Star Trek: Countdownand Transformer:  Alliance iPhone apps, which IDW CEO Ted Adams believes were the top digital comic sellers for the year. The Star Trek:  Countdown example is instructive, because not only did IDW sell more digital copies than print copies, the print sales were robust and did not appear to have been impacted by cannibalization.  In fact, sales of the print version went up between #2 and #4, perhaps indicating that readers were becoming aware of the series through digital sales and migrating to the print versions for later issues.

In 2010, sales are going to expand dramatically, with a full year of sales for the companies that launched in 2009, more launches in 2010, the impact of the iPad, the launch of the Marvel store, other launches TBD, and continuing growth in the number of titles available.

Read the rest here.

After finding the ideas to craft a story, the pencil lead worn down drawing, the layers and selections of coloring, you’d think lettering was the easiest part of making a comic, but you’d be wrong – especially with the size of our iPhone pages. Cramming all of Jeff’s awesome dialogue onto a 320×480 screen is a challenge without obscuring Erik’s awesome artwork.

We brought on a letterer to help us finish the series off and he’s doing a great job, so to make sure we don’t fumble the deadline again we’re going to finish the remaining 4 issues and have them all in the can before letting #2 out in the App Store so that you can be assured to get them week after week in April to go alongside your shiny new iPad. And once that’s done its going to the Android Marketplace as well.

So now we’re just finishing off Chapter 11 which concludes the secret origin of the Super Kaiju Hero Force.

What’s next? A Super Kaiju Hero Force game is now being developed and the programming side is just about done and we’ll begin the final artwork soon – hopefully it’ll be out in May just as you start to go into final kaiju withdrawl.

That’s it for now – hopefully next week we’ll be closer to submitting the chapters to Apple.

We’ll keep this quick:

1. The new Super Kaiju Hero Force #1 is now in the App Store for 99 cents – it collects the first 3 chapters that are no longer available for free. We kept the first chapter in there for free as a Kaiju Lite for new people to try and hopefully continue to support us.

If you already have them, we have re-done all the lettering and shifted some of the pages around to make them more of a “Directors Cut” so if you want to dump those 3 apps on your iPhone and combine them into 1 you can buy it here.

2. We just hired a new letterer – all the art is done for the entire 5-issue Colossal Series and now its just being lettered so at this speed we should have the entire origin series in the App Store by late-March, early April – from there we will be developing the series for Android, iPad, Windows Phone 7 and (maybe) Samsung’s Bada OS.

Ok that’s it for now. We are working on more Super Kaiju Hero Force stuff but its just taking time to get it all together (even an iPhone game featuring these crazy characters) so again thanks for your patience and more will be coming soon!

We will say that very soon we will be pulling all the free issues off of the iTunes App Store and modifying them all into paid apps. We do this so that we can bring some more people on board to help get the new issues out. Yes, we know we promised free for the first run, but our advertising market hasn’t fared as well as we’d hope so we need to ask you to help us out by purchasing future issues which will be bigger than the free ones and hopefully we’ll be getting these out very soon on iPhone (and Android as well.)

Thanks for your patience again – we’re going to revamp this site as well to bring more people in on what we’re doing. Stay tuned for more. One thing we will say is we guarantee we will complete the origin story in its entirety on the iPhone!

Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in the US.

Sorry for the lack of updates and basic all-over hiatus of the Super Kaiju Hero Force. We wanted to make sure we were ahead in the game for the backend of the 1st season before releasing anymore. So we are now putting together #6 and #7 together at the same time so that hopefully from the time #6 hits that you will really be seeing new issues every 2 weeks until the conclusion of the origin.

With the appearance of #6 on the App Store we’ll be taking formal orders for the  Super Kaiju Hero Force iPhone case/microfiber pouch/poster/paper toy combo-pack. So you can get our first piece of limited edition merchandise that was available at this year’s SDCC.

Also we’re announcing here that once #6 comes out, we will be packaging Super Kaiju Hero Force #1-6 into Volume 1 of what we call the “digital collection.” Volume 1 will be a paid app with no ads, behind the scenes artwork, chapter bookmarks and maybe some other goodies. The price has yet to be set but, that means the original individual free issues will be removed from the iTunes app store. So if you haven’t read the rest go get them now. But each new issue will be free until we publish the Volume 2 collection.

And finally, this is a bit of a stretch seeing as we’re so far behind on new issues of Super Kaiju Hero Force, but we do plan to release some new titles. Lets say they will be ready in December for Christmas and see if that can actually happen. If you read the interview with me over at Geeks of Doom or follow our Twitter you already know what the new mobile comics will be.

Ok to wrap this up – please tell your friends about Super Kaiju Hero Force. We have multiple ways to communicate with Crispy Comics:

www.kaiju.mobi

Use your iPhone/iPod Safari web browser to go there and you will have instant click buttons to download all the issues.

www.facebook.com/superkaijuheroforce

This is our small but growing fan page on Facebook – join up and we’ll feed info there as well.

www.twitter.com/crispycomics

This is the most active, as I like to tweet about comics, mobile comics, tech and weird creative stuff I find online. If you’re on Twitter follow us there. You can probably read the last bunch to the right of this post —>

Ok the next time you hear from me, it should be to announce that #6 is ready for download. Here are scenes from our next episode (Always wanted to say that):

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/10/digitalbiz.comics/

While we did a long interview with her, she was only able to slip in that one quote. Which is cool since we’re just so happy to be on CNN. But for those of you interested in how articles are done, might like to see the email interview Casey did with Cherise and then you can compare that to the final piece. Casey is so longwinded he needs to be edited down anyways

CNN: How has the response to Super Kaiju Hero Force compared to your expectations, given the plethora of comics currently flooding the App Store?

Casey Lau: It is far beyond our expectation. People just find it and then recommend it to their friends. We have done print comics in the past and the download rate of the iPhone comic has surpassed that on all levels.

One of our main things is that Crispy Comics is producing all-original content for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Most of the other companies doing it are reformatting print comics to the small screen, which depending on who is doing it comes out like “pan and scan” does when they reformat widescreen movies for TV. While we love all the other comics on the iPhone we are excited about more creators coming in and doing original stuff. But for us, currently you can only read Super Kaiju Hero Force on the iPhone, so it’s building a smaller but extremely loyal following that we hope to build on with even more characters and products.

Right now we’re putting a flag in the ground and saying that Super Kaiju Hero Force comics will never hurt a tree and be printed. Our plan is to proliferate the comic on as many electronic devices as possible so you’ll never feel like you didn’t get a chance to read it because it wasn’t printed. We’re readying for Android phones, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable and when it’s ready color eBook readers etc.

Comics on the go! Never go looking for a comic book store ever again, we want to bring them to you.

CNN: What were the particular challenges of creating your comic specifically for the iPhone OS?

CL: As long time comic fans the biggest challenge is working in the confines of the screen size. Where print comics seem to be getting bigger to show off the super-detailed artwork we are going the other way and need to try and keep a balance between the art and the story. But we think we’ve found a good balance.

The upside of course is that with Apple, the installed user base of iPhone and iPod is around 45 million and people are always looking for cool new apps and content for their devices, and when we start releasing Super Kaiju Hero Force in other languages we hope to reach even more “iPhanatics” around the world.

CNN: What do you think of “motion comics” and other enhanced interfaces of comic-readers?

CL: To us, we love the format if its done right. So far the most recent offerings have been a mixed bag, but I think there is a learning curve to see which format works the best. The Watchmen motion comics were incredible as its amazing to finally see the original artists work come to life but the casting of one male actor to do all the voices (while perhaps a budgetary thing) left something to be desired especially when it came to the women characters and pulled me out of the story a bit.

But the medium is exciting and expect an “enhanced” Super Kaiju Hero Force done in a similar way by early 2010 with a big media partner supporting us.

CNN: Is the Special Edition of Super Kaiju Hero Force still on track for this summer, including on other mobile platforms?

CL: Absolutely, the free versions are there to generate interest and give readers a taste of what we are offering, and that has helped us build a fanbase. We’re working in a TV DVD model, where individual comic book chapters are free but we’re going to compile them and add in special behind-the-scenes features on how we create it as well as pre-production art and other things you see on “Special Edition” DVD’s and introduce those as paid apps in the App store and in multiple langauges.

We’re looking at the Android platform next and Windows Mobile and we’re talking to other mobile manufacturers to get Crispy Comics out on more cellphones.

CNN: Have you received any original submissions since you launched in March?

CL: Actually we have and from around the world from Australia to Spain to Argentina – and just now after exhibiting at Comic-Con International alot of print creators are asking how they can be able to get their comics out to a much larger audience than what is now available to them. So I think with the handful of mobile comics publishers out there with us, the next Comic-Con will see all kinds of new books available.

CNN: Now that even Stan Lee is making comics for the iPhone, how do you see the future of both original content and the comics archive on mobile devices?

CL: We attended the panel at Comic-Con where Stan Lee made this announcement in person. But Stan has always been ahead of the curve even being one of the first to get his new creations on the web as well as revolutionizing the whole comics industry in the 60′s.

This is definitely not the death of print, its just another version of it. DVD’s are offering digital copies of the movie so you can enjoy it anywhere you go. Japan is offering SD cards with the movie on it so people can watch on their cellphones. Comics will be the same, buy the trade paperback get the iPhone version too.

Looking to find out what happened in the first fight between Joker and Batman? Easily search and downlad this comic from the 1940′s anywhere you are.

The web brought down a huge barrier of entry, now mobile does it even more so and it’ll be everywhere soon enough. And this is not just comics, its newspapers, magazines and any kind of print media.

With Stan Lee on board it brings a new level of legitimacy to the industry and we have no doubt by this time next year there will be at least a dozen major players in the field offering new and archived content as smartphones get better, cheaper and replace laptops and netbooks. I was going to say even when your grandmother has one, but then my grandmother DOES have an iPhone already

http://cully-hamner.blogspot.com/2009/08/mikey.html

Mike Wieringo: One of the nicest guys ever and most amazing artist talents the comics industry has ever seen. We had the chance to work with him on designing a new series we were developing called Hamburger Girl and some of that art appeared in the Modern Masters book on Mike which we strongly suggest you pick up as well as that giant Tellos book that Image put out that has Mike’s art super big so it can suck you into the world of Tellos.

We mirror Cully’s sentiments: “Didn’t want to let the day pass without remembering my friend– everyone’s friend– Mike Wieringo.”

His blog is still up so you can oogle his awesomeness, we look at it all the time.

Thanks to all who came by the booth and loaded up on free posters and bought our new iPhone cases. If you want one just email us, they are US$20 each (which includes shipping anywhere you are) you’ll also get a free signed poster (while supplies last):

We’ll make it bigger and more crazy for the next show too! You can see some photos of our set-up on Flickr. Thanks to Just Mobile for supplying us with the Xtands too! A great looking stand to read Crispy Comics on and we’ll be working on a limited edition Super Kaiju Hero Force Xtand in the near future too!

If you’re coming down to the Comic-Con anytime from July 23-26th (and the preview night on the 22nd) then please come by and see us at Booth S3 (sexy times 3)

We’ll have these limited edition microfiber iPhone pouches emblazoned with images of the Super Kaiju Hero Force on it for sale at the booth. The microfiber allows you to keep your iPhone screen clean whenever you pull it out. Come by our booth to purchase one of the 500 pieces we made for the show and co-creator Casey Lau will be on hand to sign them as well, making this one of the only offline collectibles for Super Kaiju Hero Force.

Sorry for not updating the blog more often with Kaiju goodness, but we are just working hard to get new issues ready that blogging is taking its toll. We’re more active on our Twitter feed so if you want immediate news and even answers to questions you may have.

So the big news for this week is that Chapter 5 is now available on iTunes – so click here to download it now.

We’re going crazy preparing for next week’s San Diego Comic-Con International. So if you are going please drop by our table and say “hi” and tell us what you think and get one of our convention exclusives – we’ll announce that in the next post.

Leave comments on Chatper 5 below, or tweet them to us here and most importantly leave a rating on the actual iTunes page so that more people can read what you thought and hopefully download it more.

Ta for now!