Fabricari has a new gimmick. Steve Harrison has positioned a camera over his art table and records about an hour of comic making and speeds it up to fit into a three-minute QuickTime movie. Steve intends to create a new movie each week to drive folks over to read the comic. Continue Reading
Newsarama has a story on TokyoPop’s partnership with Universal Press Syndicate to bring some manga-style comics to America’s newspapers. This story is being framed by recent news about the continuing decline in newspaper subscribership (down 2.6% this year) as a means to reverse that trend.
It is an interesting development although even the comic book industy has already figured out that it needs to grapple with the appeal of manga so the newspaper syndicate are essentially the last major segment of American comic to figure this out. It’ll be interesting to see how many newspapers pick up the manga offered through Universal Press. Continue Reading
Adam Burke, creator of Diabolica, the grimbles and The Splendid Everlasting, has also recently tried his hand at a more poltical webcomic, this one called Asleep At the Wheel. It’s very funny, although depending on your political point of view, I suppose it also might be very painful. Continue Reading
With all of the news posts yesterday our post about week one of the November issue got pushed down. November focuses on mystery webcomics and we have so far an “Introduction to Writing Mystery Webcomics by Alexander Danner”, another installment of Erik Melander’s news in review column, “Through the Looking Back Glass” and an interview with the creators of Dada Detective. Continue Reading
I’ve got Australia! Come and get me!!
Seriously, this is very cool use of Google Maps. Continue Reading
This is a cool innovation. The newly renamed More Fun (now called Smithson) has a new episode up that has a “drag” navigation, somewhat like you can do with a PDF in Adobe Reader. Now do I want to have to read all of my webcomics this way? No but it’s a great idea and it certainly gave me a feeling of holding the webcomic in my hands which, when you think about it, is a neat trick. Continue Reading
The webcomic satire institution Checkerboard Nightmare turns five years old this week, and to celebrate, it’s ending.
CxN will definitely return in a new form, but the strip for November 11, 2005 marks the end of its existing continuity. Read from the beginning of the storyline that’s sure to be the most important moment in human history ever.
Checkerboard Nightmare by Kristofer Straub is a part of Blank Label Comics. Continue Reading
Freaks N Squeeks will reach it’s 500th strip this thursday, November 10th, a day that will live in infamy, or at least a suburb of infamy.
“500 seems like a big number to me,” said Patric. “I reckon we ought to do something special for it… oh hey… there’s that membership drive going on right now too…”
Although normally, a subscription to the archives of the webcomic is $20 per year, from November 10th to the 17th, the entire archive of FNS will be opened up and free to everyone. And up until the 17th you can subscribe to FNS for only $15. Continue Reading
Roughly 18 months ago, Comixpedia held a community interview with Chris Crosby and Darren Bleuel of Keenspot. I’m not going to systematically revisit that interview today but I thought I’d point out some interesting changes since then.
In the interview, you asked who Keenspot’s competitors were and Crosby responded “We’re competing with anybody and everybody. OÂn the web our goal is to continue to be the top webcomic publisher, and in print our goal is to become a top graphic novel publisher.” Keenspot has continued to roll on and despite the further diversification of webcomics publishing (small collectives, WebcomicsNation, subscription sites, etc.) Keenspot still has as much a claim on being the top publisher of webcomics as anybody does.
But back then Crosby pointed to Keenspot Premium as a lifeline during the online ad market slump. Although Premium is still offered by Keenspot, it’s hard to shake the impression that it remains little more than an afterthought for Keenspot. Keenspot has also shut down it’s Keenprime fee-based hosting service since the interview. Keenspot really does seem to be defined by “free” (i.e., advertiser-supported) services in contrast to other entities such as Modern Tales that continue to experiment with a mix of free and subscription approaches.
A second point of interest is that even at that point in time, Keenspot had already transitioned away from publishing in the “comic book” format and was moving into more of a “graphic novel” format for print versions of Keenspot webcomics. With the presence of on-demand publishers like Lulu, an open question is how successful does Keenspot’s print operation remain for Keenspot and its creators.
And although not mentioned in the interview there has always been Keenspot’s continuing efforts to license it’s creator members’ properties to Hollywood in which there was a success story this year with Owen Dunne’s You Damn Kid. Given the niche that comics as a whole occupies in the American pop culture landscape, it will be interesting to see how the press reports on Dunne’s creation if it makes it to the living room screen (and of course we are hopeful that it does!). Will webcomics share in some reflected glory or will the press ignore that angle? Continue Reading
You’ll Have That and Viper Comics have started the YHT Book Club over at the Viper Comics message boards. Stop by the new forum and discuss your favorite books. Every month we’ll feature a new YHT Book of the Month and display it on yhtcomic.com! Continue Reading
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