Cowboys & Aliens is Universal’s bid for a big summer blockbuster. It will be in theaters July 29, 2011, but the press has already started, with a release sent out announcing the poster and a trailer debuting on Wednesday. They’ve got some big names in the cast — Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde — an easily graspable high concept, and the ability to say “from the director of Iron Man“, Jon Favreau. It’s all “based on Platinum Studios’ graphic novel created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.”

Which is causing some dispute. Comic readers may remember Platinum Studios as a company better at getting hype than publishing comics and with a history of shady dealings. I best remember this particular publication, the Cowboys & Aliens comic, as something that faked its way to the top of a bestseller list by the company paying retailers to take their comic.

Now, those writing credits have gotten some negative attention.

Eight writers and writing teams have worked on Cowboys for several studios dating to 1997. … That [based on line] isn’t sitting well with writers who toiled on the screenplay years before Rosenberg’s comic — based on the film concept — came out in 2006.

The actual comic credits say that it’s written by Andrew Foley and Fred Van Lente with artwork by Luciano Lima, but it appears from the webcomic treatment that the comic was never that important to the company anyway.

According to this press release, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Witchblade, Top Cow will be providing a free digital copy of the anniversary Witchblade #144 “with every copy sold through participating retailers.”

The plan works this way: A retailer who’s agreed to participate (I’m emphasizing that for a reason — I’m not sure a lot of comic stores want to show their customers the value of digital comics) will give a customer who purchases this issue a download code, which will allow the buyer to download the same thing he just bought online through Wowio. So this adds a wrinkle to “day-and-date” simultaneous release — you can only get one if you shell out for the other.

Top Cow is doing this to “usher Witchblade into a new age of comics”. I think she’s already there — this plan, while impressive in its attempt to move forward without throwing retailers under the bus, simply mimics what many customers already do, only without the hassle of DRM and entering codes. If you only want to buy the digital version, you’ll have to wait a month. That’s when it will go on sale from the usual “digital distribution sources”.

To entice retailers to go along with the plan, Director of Sales and Marketing Atom! Freeman said, “not only will they be the exclusive place to receive one of these download codes, but we are then going to give participating retailers a credit toward future Top Cow inventory for every download credited to them by the fan.” That’s a nice incentive. I wonder how this works if you buy the issue a week or two later? Does it depend on how effective the retailer’s filing system is, or whether they still remember the code?

Do you think your retailer will participate? Would you be interested in getting a free online copy with a paid print purchase?

In Maps & Legends has had a checkered history. It originally won the Zuda competition in November 2009, and it was picked up for serialization beginning in May of this year. Then, on July 1, Zuda shut down.

The creators, artist Niki Smith and writer Michael Jasper, describe the story as science fiction/contemporary fantasy, about an artist who finds herself creating a bizarre map of a world that turns out to be real. They’re promoting it for fans of The Sandman or Lost.

In an attempt to find new life for the project, following in the steps of Valentine, the digital comic is now available for purchase in just about every format possible. They’re available through both Comixology and Graphic.ly for the iPad and iPhone, or for reading online in your desktop browser. Robot Comics is publishing them for Android phones starting this week. They have a black-and-white version for the Kindle, due to the device’s limitations. You can buy and download a PDF with DriveThruComics, Wowio.com, or Scribd.

Having so many choices is great — if you buy digital comics through any major outlet, you can probably find a version at a site where you already have an account — but perhaps a tad overwhelming. At all these places, it’s 99 cents an issue, I don’t know for how many pages.

As a potential customer, I’d like to know more about what kind of release schedule they’re aiming for as well as how long they envision the series running. Am I signing on for eight issues and out, for example, or are they trying to go ongoing, which can be frustrating if nothing resolves as a result. (See for comparison House of Mystery.) The writer told me that they’re aiming for a new issue every six weeks, but that information should be on the site. It would also be nice if, given their comprehensive website, some preview of the comic was available there. If you check out all the pages, you can find this preview for the web version of Comixology, but it should be more prominent.

I’d lost track of Wowio. Once it changed owners twice, and it quit paying publishers to put comics online for free, it didn’t offer much for me to pay attention to. Publishers pulled their works, so as a reader, there wasn’t material for me to look at. And as a reporter, “we’re still not paying people” isn’t much of a story.

So bless Sean Kleefeld for teasing out the latest news, by following the company’s current owner on Twitter. Sean quotes Wowio owner Brian Altounian as saying:

every publisher was paid entirely and I even added an interest payment on top of it as a good-faith gesture to apologize for the delays in payment.

Based on that, Sean says, “To my understanding, Wowio is now debt-free.” Me, I hope that’s true. The debts dated from June 2008, and that’s a long time for an artist to wait for funds. And given that a year ago Altounian had no plans to pay, I’m glad he changed his mind.

Flashback Universe posts an interview with Brian Altounian, CEO and President of Wowio. In it, he reveals that the company is no longer owned by Platinum:

Platinum … has narrowed its focus this year to be strictly on its core film and television business. I personally formed a holding company that acquired 100% of WOWIO from Platinum on July 1 of this year.

Wowio had been acquired by Platinum about a year ago, so that didn’t last long. (And the combination was generally unsuccessful.) Practically, I’m not sure how much of a change this actually is, since Altounian is still President and Chief Operating Officer of Platinum, and he was the one defending the company when people pointed out that they still owed creators money from June 2008. That debt has still not, to my knowledge, been paid. The interview didn’t ask Altounian about financial matters.

Altounian is now plugging the “richer experience” of including audio and video as additional content in their ebook PDFs. He concludes by promising a brighter future:

[W]e are exploring additional media elements such as audiobook and other formats for our readers to broaden their collection of material. We are exploring new revenue-generating opportunities for our publishing partners. We are looking at new corporate sponsorships, and we recently launched a new non-profit initiative that will expand our readership greatly. Look for new announcements to come out over the next couple of months.

Given the number of times the company has said “trust us, good things are coming”, it appears that even though, on paper, the leadership may be different, it’s the same old Wowio.

Me neither. But Sean Kleefeld reminded me.

To recap: A year ago, Wowio was something of an online success story, making thousands of dollars for participating publishers. Six months ago, Wowio was acquired by Platinum, a dodgy company with a shady track record. The changes they implemented, including eliminating most of the free PDFs, were unpopular. Then the payments stopped.

Now, if I’m reading Sean’s post correctly, Platinum hasn’t ever caught up with the Wowio obligations and has no definite date on which they’ll be able to. The company president, Brian Altounian, said (over Twitter, of all things) that they had to get more investment money since there wasn’t enough revenue coming in, and investors didn’t want to pay “old debt”. Given Platinum’s track record, I wonder how likely it is that anyone wants to pump more money into the company, especially given the current economic environment.

Most fascinating about Sean’s post is that Altounian shows up in the comments to spar with him. Understandably, the official doesn’t like people pointing out what bad shape his company’s in or how low the readership has dropped, but the explanation boils down to “you don’t understand how big business works; we’re trying our best”. Sean responds:

… it’s a superiorly bad business decision to either A) buy a company which owes any amount of debt with no plan for repayment, or B) buy a company with no knowledge of the debt it already has. I’m not familiar with the due diligence that may have been done on your part, certainly, but the only other option I’m seeing is amoral … I simply do not understand how a business run so poorly can continue to operate.

In a followup at Digital Strips, Brigid Alverson reviews the Wowio site as a new reader.

Sean Kleefeld notes that, per TeleRead‘s Alexa figures, Wowio’s traffic now is about what it was when the site was shuttered during the handover to Platinum. This has not been a successful acquisition.

Wowio, the troubled online publisher, is over three weeks late paying publishers their earnings for second quarter 2008 (which ended in June, assuming they use a standard calendar). Their Editorial Director told a publisher that she didn’t know when fees would be going out, but to apologize for the delay, they’d pay an extra 2.5 – 5% late fee when the money did arrive.

5% of nothing is still nothing. “We’ll make up for our delay by giving you more when we finally do pay you,” sounds like a con man’s trick to keep the fish on the hook.