The BBC website has an article up featuring regular 2000 AD artist PJ Holden and Northern Ireland company Infurious. They had the comic Murderdrome, a future sport where decapitation is a method of point scoring, rejected by Apple’s Iphone as inappropriate content, only to find that media coverage of this brought it to the attention of US broadcaster NBC, who have now licensed it for the comics spin-offs from their Heroes TV series.
(screen shot from the BBC video showing how the comics panels can be navigated up and down easily and zoomed for more details and to read text – a growing market for comics creators?)
“The humour was very dark but very funny, and the level of violence was like Itchy and Scratchy in the Simpsons – it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. After Apple rejected it, we put out a press release which attracted the attention of news media like the Wall Street Journal, and three days later a video on YouTube demonstrating the comic got 40,000 views. We were amazed by the response. A week after that, NBC emailed us – we just didn’t know what was going on,” PJ Holden explaining events on the Beeb site. (thanks to Matt B for the heads-up)
June 1st, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I’ve yet to see any iPhone comics app that can touch the interface PJ and his mates came up with. Hopefully he’ll make a ton of royalties from licensing it over the years.