Month: January 2004

After a year and a half of toil, “Diptera Plague” the first story in Tom Stackpole’s debut comic The Bone Dancer is complete. Continue Reading →

cayetano “cat” garza’s Magic Inkwell Comic Strip Theatre returns today to moderntales.com. Continue Reading →

(LJ users can clearly skip this.) If you have a LiveJournal account, you can get Comixpedia headlines by adding its syndication account to your friends list. You’ll still need to click through in order to read full stories, of course, but the URL is always handily provided at the start!

LJ uses a points system for its syndicated accounts. The more people there are who subscribe this way, the lower the points cost is to one’s fellow users. As of this writing, only five people read the feed in this fashion! Continue Reading →

Scott McCloud mentioned the Comixpedia face-lift.  Generally I think we got a lot of overall positive feedback o­n the site from readers but not a lot (meaning almost nil) of notice from the emerging blog-o-sphere:comics.  I suppose this blog, in part, is a way to try and interact more with this cool new conversation o­n the medium taking place o­n the web.  Scott also mentioned girl-a-matic cartoonist Spike just got married.  Unlike Ms. Spears let's hope Spike stays happily married for more than 24 hours.Pathetic Geek Stories leaves the o­nion and sets off o­n its own little website.  These are of that young and cringe-worthy genre of diary comics.  Still they can be quite good in a sort of Barry-esque way.Four Color Hell the comics blog with the coolest name, limps back to life.  Johnny Barcardi just joined the group effort, so that should be worth watching.  I'm a poor judge of many comics blogs though and I'll tell you why.  I, like almost every other American male who had at least a certain threshold of geek-factor, went through a comic book phase.  Read Marvel, DC.  Luckily got ahold of American Flagg, so that was cool.  But than got bored of the soap-opera-ness of the Marvel and DC books and stopped.I got into comics again from webcomics.  And have enjoyed many of the fine quality comics o­n the Internet since.  It has even led me back to reading comics in books (no, not superhero books and no I don't venture into comic book stores anymore).  So I feel sort of up to speed o­n what I like and at least a passing familarity with what's good right now.  I have no familiarity with what's bad or mediocre.  And I don't care.  I also have (outside of that brief period where I read comic books) zero familiarity with the history of comic books.  And you know what, I don't care.It's history folks.  Let's just treat comics like any other subset of written fiction for a moment, okay.  I'm a reader – I like to read.  So I'd be happy to read the greats of the past and I've read a few of those comics (Watchmen, of course, who hasn't.  Several collected editions of Peanuts are well-worn).  But 90 percent of the past of the comic book industry gives all outward appearance of being crap and I just have little interest in discussing it.  Same goes with the present.  X-Cousins?  Superman Red?  Ultimate New Fantastic Four? Make up as many titles as you want DC and Marvel.  Unless it's actually compelling as a story – a stand-alone story – I'm not interested.  I recognize that many others don't require this – it not o­nly explains many DC and Marvel comic book lines but also the continued success of the Tom Clancy factory-of-monkeys-typing line of books. Continue Reading →

WHAT: A Contest

Submit a banner to us (468×60) advertising Comixpedia as an entry into a little contest. Post your entries to this thread on the forum (please make sure your name and an email address are included in your post). By submitting your entries to Comixpedia you are agreeing to let us use them to advertise Comixpedia. (We did this last year and got some cool entries – check them out here.)

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES is January 24th.

The winner will be voted on by readers of Comixpedia in a poll that will run from January 25th to 30th. The winning entry will get to have a banner of their choice run in our banner rotation for February. Continue Reading →

The Twisting begins its second act today (January 7th). Continue Reading →

WEBSITE:  Well I'm almost done with the rework of the site.  I still have to load the old archives into the new archive template.  (A lot of entering numbers into MySQL unfortunately)  I think I'm about halfway through last year right now.  We use postpn for the site and like a lot of open source projects it's very good but takes awhile to learn.  And I really haven't learned that much yet.  But after a year of using it and hanging around postpn.com I have a better understanding of the extended postpn ecosystem and was able to make more use of what's available.

I saw this interesting post from Pitiful Bastard (linked by Deppey) noting how much he hates “message board-driven sites.”  I'm not sure I agree with his point – sites like Slashdot are interesting because of the comments (with effective moderation they can be really high-yield for my limited time).  Still I think we've got a decent balance here.  Having a separate forum from the articles is in my mind a good thing.  Postpn doesn't support (as far as I can tell) an automated way to replace article comment sections with links to a forum thread anyhow so we'd be sticking with our set-up for purely practical reasons regardless.

NEWS:  Another thing that will be different this year at C/pedia is news coverage.  We will now label press releases as press releases – we can run them without editing them, I guess.  Also I have to tell you, Journalista is such a complete read every morning there's not much need for an editor at Comixpedia to sit down and compile a very similar product.  Instead, we will try to post real breaking news that can't wait until the next week's update.  We're also slowly getting more submissions of press releases and announcements from our readers so I think we'll still see a healthy flow of updates daily to the site.

And of course there'll be this blog.  But it won't be daily!

– xerexes Continue Reading →