Partnering with another Macmillan imprint, the comics and graphic novel publisher First Second Books, sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor Books has launched, Tor.com, its own online comics imprint. The site features a high-profile collection of notable comics artists including Andi Watson, Sean Bieri and Shooting War co-author/artist Dan Goldman, whose original Obama-centric sci-fi goof, an online psychedelic satire called "Yes We Will," was published on the site the day before the presidential inauguration.
The new Tor.com imprint is simply a comics expansion of one of the publisher's better ideas: publishing online-only science fiction and fantasy prose stories that give creators access to a broader market without costing the publishers much of anything to distribute them. With the expansion from prose fiction into sequential art, Tor hasn't simply gone fishing for new talent like Elizabeth Genco (who’s set to create a comics strip about the Greek gods with a teen focus), they've also picked up established webcomics as well. The Tor.com site features strips like Emily Horne and Joey Comeau's "A Softer World," which has gotten more SF-centric since its migration to the website.
Pablo Defendini, the Tor.com producer, said that the site will probably stay online-only for a while yet: "There are really no concrete plans to go print. Every once and a while we talk about it. There's a chance that toward the end of the year we'll start putting something together." Defendini says that he's not anxious to start a print version a la the MySpace Dark Horse Presents site, which acts as an online publishing outlet for the Dark Horse print anthology. "One of the reasons Tor.com exists is to experiment with alternative kinds of publishing," he explained. The site also offers s story by noted science nonfiction comics writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Sean Beiri (a sci-fi spoof called “Better Zombies through Physics 01”) and Bieri’s “12 Days of Zombies” has also been singled out for praise. Defendini said that the Tor.com initiative has met with a lot of positive feedback.
The site offers a new comics work by illustrator Wesley Allsbrook, who describes her contribution thusly: "A set of triplets, primordial dwarfs (in proportion, but still tiny), perform at a folies bergeres-style show. In the evenings they're three separate women, but during the day they coalesce into one whole woman." Allsbrook's penchant for surrealism is already at play in her illustration work and more than apparent in her Tor.com story, "The Leviathan," an impressive and beautifully illustrated story that has since been chosen to be included into the Society of Illustrators annual exhibition and will be published in print (read it here)
Defendini said that the site has other adventurous ideas in the works: author Jeff Vandermeer's story "The Situation" is being turned into an online graphic novella with Eric Orchard illustrating, and Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr are creating "One-Page Wonders"—online but printable, foldable stories with two images each that tell different tales depending on how they're assembled.
The level of quality in the Tor.comics’ site is a testament to the increasing profile of webcomics, but it also marks the continuing migration of a new generation of comics artists from work-for-hire gigs at the larger comics-only publishers to more traditional book publishing houses like Tor Books with an emphasis on original work and creator-owned properties. "Tor.com comes from two very distinct traditions—book publishing and the creative-commons inspired Cory Doctorow-ish kind of ethos," said Defendini. "We're all about creator-owned."
