‘Xxxenophile’ Joins Slipshine’s Adult Offerings
Adult-only website Slipshine.net and Studio Zoe announced that Studio Foglio’s Xxxenophile will now be available at their website starting with the first volume and offering new stories each month.
Xxxenophile is a six volume masterpiece written and illustrated by award-winning creator Phil Foglio, originally released between 1988 and 2000, and has been acclaimed for it’s skillful storytelling as well as beautiful artwork. Xxxenophile has also been nominated for an Eisner award.
The seven year old aduilt website offers a variety of comics material with Xxxenophile the latest addition. Foglio’s own Studio Foglio has also announced they will soon be selling digital editions of the six volumes.
Is Slipshine.net putting up NEW Xxxenophile content or just republishing the old content? At $7 a month (their lowest subscription fee) it MIGHT be worth 10 NEW pages per month of Xxxenophile, plus access to an archive of all the old material. It's not worth $84 a year to have the archive doled out in 10 page segments per month over the next however many years it takes to get through six volumes.
I suspect (as an online comics publisher that's looked at the same problem) the credit card thing is mainly to act as an age-verification system.
That may be true. But, I also don't doubt that I might pay $84 dollars for just 120 pages of Xxxenophile that I've already read. That's not a bargain.
I like how Studio Foglio has made their other comics available online. Passing Xxxenophile to slipshine may be a way to avoid certain legal issues that might be raised if they hosted it at Airship Entertainment, however, I wonder if slipshine will do their work justice. From what I've seen, you can see a free story at 1/3 size where you can't read the text or make much of it out. Phil and Kaja have made their other comics available for free and have seen a rise in their overall sales. Nobody is going to see anything at slipshine without paying for it, so I predict they won't sell any additional work because of it being on the internet.