There is an interview with SLG president Dan Vado at Newsarama, with the bold title "BECOMING THE FUTURE." Dan talks about Eyemelt.com, our digital download site. He explains why we chose not to use digital rights management (DRM) and what the future holds for Eyemelt.com.

The transition to physical product to digital is an interesting one to me. Did anyone ever have an epiphany that, mp3s are the way of the future!? I didn't. I just downloaded music from Napster like everyone else did, and now here in 2007, I haven't stepped foot in a CD store in months and yet I have all this new music from eMusic or iTunes. It was a transition, not a jolt, became a natural part of life without any shock to my sensibilities.

Will it be the same for comics? Well, it's a bit different, since reading a comic as a tactile experience is different from reading it on screen in a way that listening to a CD and an mp3 are not (though we all know of people who insist on vinyl!). But it's certainly something that I think will become the norm as more and more people grow to find reading comics on a screen a natural experience rather than a "Boyhowdy, that's not the way it was done when I was a lass!" one.

It's something to consider. Augie De Blieck does a bit at his latest Comic Book Resources column, but he notably doesn't mention anyone who is already distributing their comics digitally. (Dan speculated that this is because De Blieck would like to write about about the subject without seeming to promote any new venture, but I am cynical, and I found this phrase in the column telling: "I don't care whether you're a DC or Marvel partisan" -- those are our choices, eh? All right, so the column was inspired by DC's slumping sales in February, so he's just staying on-message. But I am tired of hearing about DC and Marvel, all right? They're like older siblings who can do all this amazing shit but are nothing like you. And I don't get the whole partisan thing, anyway.)

And there are publishers getting into the digital comics business. PullBoxOnline.com launched just before Eyemelt.com, and Top Cow recently announced that they would be releasing digital comics through the pop culture news site icv2.com at video games site IGN.com. There's also a site called Wowio.com, which distributes free books, which "AbacusComics" hipped us to through the comments. It's interesting to know about, but why, when someone is telling you about a new business venture would you choose to give him them advice that maybe he would like to scrap all the work he's put into it and the vision he has for it, and, you know, do it the way you do it instead? "Might be a better, less labor intensive track for you to try," AbacusComics writes. Wowio certainly sounds promising -- this person claims 1,000 downloads in a week, which, admittedly, is far more than we get on Eyemelt.com. Hell, let's throw over all this work we've done to get started establishing a site and brand and do that instead!

I'm kidding.