Rolling Monday news update...

HEADLINES

• Dirk Deppey has a good roundup of recent steps by DC and Marvel to try and crack down on file-sharing of scans of their monthly comic books. It's their right to do so of course under the current copyright laws, but both companies are still not offering legal alternatives for consumers to obtain their current material in a digital format. Carrot and stick usually work better than just the stick.

BSC Webcomic Idol 2.0

• The voting was over last night but it may still be going (I just voted). In any event, current results have and Templar, AZ won with 60% of the vote to 40% for Lucid TV. This is the second year of this event and all things considered it seemed to go pretty well. Hopefully it drew some more attention to some worthwhile comics.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

• Anne@FLEEN plugs We The Robots and after giving it a read I'd have to agree. Creator Chris Harding also recently appeared on the Half Pixel Webcomics Weekly Podcast.

DEAD TREES

• Comics Worth Reading has a review of HeavyInk.com which aims to be "both Amazon and Facebook for comics".

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Neil Cohn writes about recent research on eye movement across the comic page. The research shows that for an average of 8.5 panels per page, there are an average of 20.3 fixations. Most of their study focused on panels that were skipped over for one reason or another. Two types of changes to the page showed significant effects in decreasing the rates that they were skipped: balloon position and panel layout.