Harnessing the Web's Power in Hunt for New Superheroes

The publishers of some of the most cherished names in comic book history, including Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman, are launching a new website designed to open up the world of comics to a new generation of web-literate and talented amateurs.

DC Comics, a division of Warner Brothers entertainment, is setting up a new web imprint called Zudacomics.com in the hope of filtering out some of the best young writers and artists from the current boom in web comics.

What sets it apart from the mushrooming number of comic websites is that it will award the best entries to its site a year-long contract to produce content that it will then feature on the web and in print form.

The first of a monthly series of competitions will be launched in October, inviting comic fans to submit entries of their work, in standard size and conforming to a uniform eight panels. The company's executives will then boil down the entries to the best 10, which will in turn be voted upon by the registered members of the site to produce a winner every month.

Paul Levitz, the publisher of DC Comics, would not specify how much money winning entrants would be paid over the year they would be contracted to work for the company. But he said they would be paid an upfront fee, followed by royalties on any strips that made it into print.

"People creating their own comics and putting them up on the web has become a phenomenon in our field, but many artists haven't worked out how to monetize their efforts. We hope to bring some of those people on board, to the benefit of both sides," Mr Levitz said.

Of DC Comics's famous stable of characters, Batman and Superman were both created by in-house draughtsmen, working for the company. Wonder Woman, the superheroine who was as beautiful as Aphrodite and stronger than Hercules, had a less traditional start in life: its creator, a psychologist called William Marston who believed in women's empowerment, was approached by DC Comics and invited to try his hand at the form after he wrote an article in 1940 for Family Circle magazine about the growing comic book industry.

More recently, the craze in manga comics has helped the comic industry to avoid the troubles of other print media in the US, which have suffered falling circulation as a result of migration to the internet.

This autumn, no fewer than 87 new manga series are planning to launch, according to the comic news website ICV2.

"Comics are thriving in print in America. The graphic novel format that has evolved has been terrific for growth and more is being published and sold than any time I can remember," Mr Levitz said.

He said that the attraction of the new website was the hope that talented new writers and artists might be discovered and go on to do great things.

He pointed to the example of Fred Gallagher, whose comic Megatokyo about the adventures of a manga fan and his video-gaming friend began on his own website and still appears free on the site three times a week, but has since sold well in comic book form.