This morning, Dirk Deppey links to a newspaper article about Platinum Studios (you know, the “DJ Coffman guys”) that calmly, in passing, mentions that they bought the free webcomics portal Drunk Duck last month, and will be relaunching it as “Drunk Duck 2.0.” It’s been obvious to me for a while that Platinum was on the verge of entering the webcomics world: this is one of the best moves they could have made. Drunk Duck could use the infrastructure and stability represented by a corporate benefactor, and Platinum could use the goodwill and playful image represented by Drunk Duck, whose strong communal spirit has managed to carry it through some deadly serious technical problems in the recent past. There is nothing wrong with Drunk Duck that a little money (and better hosting) can’t fix, and there’s a lot that’s right with it. I’ll be watching this closely! Congrats to all concerned.

[EDIT: while I approached the story from the Drunk Duck angle, and what this means for them might mean for them, Heidi has another perspective, when she looks at it from the Platinum side of things, and what it means for them: "We’ll just note that this effectively make Platinum the latest 'we’re going to the web' publisher, after years of development heck for their properties," says she.]

[EDIT AGAIN: fixed link to Gregory's forum post about the crash. That'll teach me to blog before coffee!]

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