This week issue 300 of  the Comics Journal, the last regular edition before a relaunch as a larger bi-annual magazine, was online for free. For a day. Then it got unceremoniously yanked from the net. Joe covered it here when it went online and here when it went AWOL.

Well, now that Dirk’s had a chance to calm down a touch, here’s the reason why:

“Before we begin, let’s take a moment and end some of the speculation surrounding The Comics Journal’s plans for the Web, shall we?
* We pulled TCJ #300 offline largely due to retailer concerns over not having been given adequate warning about said plans before ordering the issue. It was a fair point, and one that we hadn’t properly considered.
* The issue will again be made available online in late December, after retailers have been given time to sell the print edition.
* All future editions of The Comics Journal will be freely available online, in their entirety.
Our apologies for the learning-curve wipeout. We’d love to assure you that it won’t happen again, but you know as well as we do that it probably will…“

So there we go. Hopefully that’s that. Hopefully we’ll see the Comics Journal back online, free and readily available in 2010. And hopefully we’ll see that this free model can generate sales of the print edition. It may be infuriating and even nasty at times, it may not be your idea (or mine) of what magazines about comics should be about, but it does what it does so very well. Long may it continue.

I imagine many of you will have Dirk Deppey’s !Journalista! blog as one of the must read daily blogs (Tom Spurgeon’s Comic Reporter would be another, and hopefully the FPI blog!), so I imagine Dirk Deppey interviewed by Tucker Stone at Comixology will be of interest.

Especially when it’s full of the sort of snark mixed with a general common sense approach to comics that we’ve come to expect from him:

“Take a look at bookstores: YA series like Harry Potter and Twilight might be serious blockbusters … but bookstores don’t devote their entire sales strategy towards teenage fantasy novels. A good chunk of sales come from new books and perennial sellers in a wide range of genres and interest topics, which is why a wide range of consumers still shop in such places.

The Direct Market doesn’t have this advantage. Thanks to the various sales and distribution fiascos of the 1990s, comics shops have pretty much been reduced to hardcore superhero fans and a smaller collection of art-comics readers for their bread-and-butter, which effectively cuts off the oxygen for publishers of most other kinds of books. And “most other kinds of books” is what most other people in North America tend to read. “