As I teased earlier today, King Features Syndicate is launching a new comic portal called Comics Kingdom. The go-live date is tomorrow. The new portal will replace their DailyInk comic subscription service. Paying Comic Kingdom subscribers will enjoy an ad-free experience, deeper archives not available to non-subscribers. Non-subscribers will still be able to read their favorite comics each day as well.
Other new features include:
- More puzzles
- Discussion with comments using Disqus
- Sharing comics through email and social media
- Keyword search for a comic
- Order prints of comics
- Cross device/screen support so it looks great on your phone or tablet
- Expanded access to vintage comics
Here’s a sneak peak at what Comics Kingdom will look like on a variety of screens. Click to see a larger view:
To clarify one thing that Michael Jantze asked in my teaser post, “Comics Kingdom” has been used for King Feature’s comic delivery platform for newspapers. This portal does not replace their newspaper offerings, but brings DailyInk under the Comics Kingdom digital brand.
3 days after “launch date” and still no site..
Friday 5 days later — no site still. Was this an elaborate joke?
now they’ve taken the blog post down announcing the new Comics Kingdom site entirely.
Well, judging from what cartoonists have said about the Affordable Care Act, I guess this means that we should all just give up on cartoons entirely. If the website doesn’t launch on time and perform just as expected, the entire enterprise is surely a failure and everyone at King Features should be fired.
Back to Thomas Nast everyone. Modern cartooning is a failure.
You’re a bit of an over-reactor.
But maybe they should learn to fully test something before they ANNOUNCE its launch?
Maybe even a soft launch? If it’s not ready don’t tell everyone it is.
Or maybe update us why it didn’t launch? All Business 101.
It is odd to start making big announcements before the product is ready to launch. I know they’re anxious to get it out the door. I’ve been in IT long enough to know how crazy it is the weeks and days before a big launch.
I’m told as soon as it’s ready, I’ll be one of the first to know. I’ll post a notice when it goes live.
They done broke the system for most of the features. Terrible! Especially on a Sunday!
We are all signed up for the new service but the new service just doesn’t recognize we all have subscriptions.
It looks like the site is live now. Although not completely functional. For example when you hover over the print button it says “This function is almost ready. Check back later.” You can purchase a print though so at least they have their priorities right.
Nice. Looks sharp.