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Dashtoon wants to make anyone with a story to tell into a comics artist, even if they can't draw. It provides aspiring comics creator with a suite of generative AI tools, and a publishing platform that releases new episodes daily for impatient readers. To seed the platform, called Dashtoon Comic Reader, Dashtoon commissioned about 30 comics and will start adding almost 1,000 new episodes every month. It started monetizing in October and expects to make $15,000 in revenue during the first month, with plans to grow to $100,000 per month over the next two to three months. The startup operates on a freemium model that gives users one free episode a day for each comic. The San Francisco and London-based startup announced today it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Matrix Partners India and Stellaris Venture Partners with participation from angel investors. Dashtoon was founded in December 2022 by Sanidhya Narain, Lalith Gudipati and Soumyadeep Makherjee. Before Dashtoon, Narain and Gudipati were on the founding team of Pocket FM, where they worked on growing the India-based audio content platform in the United States. Mukherjee comes from a deep-tech background, including Morphle Labs, which builds cancer diagnosis robotics....
Each July, comics fans, professionals and scholars descend on San Diego, California, for Comic-Con International ' a celebration of the art and business of the comics industry. Comic books used to be a niche genre of interest to a narrow subset of popular culture enthusiasts. Since the 1970s, however, they increasingly have supplied the characters and stories on which film, television and streaming media empires are founded. Marvel, home of the Avengers, turned an almost broke comics and toy company into one of the most lucrative movie franchises in history and became one pillar of Disney's streaming media empire. Sony continues to make money from its share of the Spider-Man franchise. DC Comics originated fan favorites Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Although their transition to film did not match Marvel's success, WarnerMedia has doubled down on its investment in DC superheroes. As comic books' cultural impact has grown, scholars have explored how they have reflected and shaped attitudes about everything from politics to war to economics to gender, race, ability and sexuality....
Jokes that focus on physical traits ' fat bellies, bald heads, bumbling speech ' foster negative candidate views that can exhaust voters, as does mocking scandals, whether it's the mishandling of classified documents, sexual misconduct or family drama. There was record turnout during the 2020 election. Nearly two-thirds of eligible voters cast a vote, 7 percentage points higher than in 2016. However, recent polling data suggests that 2024 may be different, with 38% of voters saying they were already exhausted at the prospect of another matchup between Trump and Biden. Political comedy is complex and highly varied, but it can be divided roughly into two camps: mockery and satire. Mocking comedy tends to negatively affect political participation in two ways. It can create negative views of candidates, and this, in turn, can lead to voter apathy. Communications professor S. Robert Lichter and political scientists Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris surveyed years of joke data in their 2015 book, 'Politics is a Joke!' They concluded that the political humor on late-night television was inherently negative and tended to focus more on scandals than on policy. What's more, they found that there was a connection between negative jokes and negative public perceptions of candidates....
