WHY THE GUILD COMIC IS IMPORTANT

For those of you that don't know, The Guild released their first comic issue today (written by Felicia Day, art by Jim Rugg). It should be available at your local comic shop. For those of you who are fans of The Guild or web series in general, then you understand how utterly cool this is. But for the rest of you, here's why I think this is a big deal:

This is a nationally distributed comic book from one of the major publishers based on a WEB SERIES!

A fan funded, indie to it's core, web series. To my knowledge it's only been done once before and that was for another Felicia Day series, Dr. Horrible.

This is important for a few reasons. First, as Felicia and The Guild continue to break new ground, new opportunities will become available for us other creators. Should this comic perform well, comic companies may begin to take a peek at other properties, hopefully including ones with black-and-white, ray gun toting heroes.

Second, isn't it just thrilling to watch somebody make so much starting out with such meager resources? This isn't like some video game comic tie-in where EA throws some money at Dark Horse. What began as a YouTube series funded through PayPal donations, became a Microsoft sponsored show, a smash at Comic Con, a number one selling artist on iTunes/Amazon, and now a legit comic series. While reading the comic today I wasn't just taking in the story I was internally cheering Felicia and her team on the entire time. Their hard work and humility has broken them through into some pretty cool realms. Hats off! Or since this is a pulp sci-fi site, perhaps I should be saying "aviator caps off!"