Who says Comics are dying?

 Not us, for sure. We recently spoke to David Campiti founder of Glass House Graphics, and  former publisher of Innovation Publishing (that gave us comics ranging from adaptions of Anne Rice’s novels Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned. Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality, On a Pale Horse; the TV series Dark Shadows, Quantum Leap, Beauty and the Beast and Lost in Space; as well as the movie series Child’s Play, A Nightmare on Elm Street and others. Some of Innovation’s original series included Angel Heat; Dangerous Secrets; Dream Angel; The Experimentals;  Al Rio’s Exposure; Galaxy Girl; Greylore;  Kevin Juaire’s Hero Alliance; Legends of the Stargrazers; and Mike Barr’s The Maze Agency). In it’s day, Innovation was the #4 comics publisher in market share, after Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse. With Glass House Graphics he represented numerous artists that worked for many of those same companies.

Well, he was telling us about a very cool company called Red Giant that is looking to, well essentially re-invent, revive, and completely resuscitate the comicbook industry. Now while this may sound like a very noble cause, we too were wondering how Dave and Red Giant plan on doing this, and well, what he told us came as something of a surprise. Red Giant is looking to develop its properties for not only the comicbook market but for other media as well; such as movies, video games, television, novels, toys, apparel and telephone wireless applications. Currently the company has a number of such properties that it is publishing on the web as web comics, but plans to reverse-engineer itself and go to print, producing a million copies of comics on a weekly bases that can be distributed free of charge in comicbook shops but elsewhere across the country.

Yes, you read that right, a million copies, weekly, free of charge.

Recently, the company was written up in not only  The Orlando Business Journal (several times), but the  The New York Times as well. Personally, while we are admittedly a tad skeptical of their plans, we totally love that they are seriously attempting to “put their money where their corporate mouth is” and give their plan the old college try.

As we have come to learn, they did an IPO last year, as a penny stock, and turned a very nice profit. Now they are working out the next steps to realizing their very noble (as far as we are concerned) business plan.

Needless to say, we wish them the very best of luck in their endeavor, because we know as well as anyone that — while comicbook characters are doing box-office business at both the movies and in the videogames industry, comicbooks themselves are experiencing something of a downturn in numbers of comics printed every month. Hopefully, Red Giant’s plan will play out and  we will get to experience yet another golden age of comics.