Month: June 2009

Shaping up to be an interesting week in comics:

MILESTONES
Jason Little’s Motel Art Improvement Service wrapped up today.  It was a very well done sequel to the first Bee story.  The somewhat sudden ending is still surprising to me but the middle three panels of the last installment are masterfully done.

BUSINESS
D.J. Coffman writes about warning signs that Diamond may be in trouble and speculates on it’s implications for the future of the direct market for comic books.

REVIEWS
Johnanna Carlson writes a negative review of Jon Rosenberg’s new Goats book and then the two of them exchange polite remarks in the comments.  Always nice to see a little civility on the Internets.  I haven’t read the book so I can’t offer a contrasting view I’d like to offer up a quote from Carlson’s review that was meant critcally, but that I think is actually a pretty good way of describing Goats positively:

The point seems to be the dialogue more than the events. The characters talk a lot. The art is serviceable but not particularly attractive, and it’s often pretty static

That’s always been the case with Goats – even more recently when the comic has had actual plot and science fiction trappings.  Rosenberg is the Kevin Smith of webcartoonists.

INTERVIEWS
An interview with Amy Pearson of the comic Mathema which started off on Zuda but now appears on Pearson’s own site.

CRAFT
Matt Madden recently offered up an exercise in comic improvisation you might want to take a crack at.

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James Turner’s been posting some great stuff on his Live Journal.  The latest is "Misunderstanding Comics" with the return of everyone’s favorite beaver and lizard comedy duo.

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The Daily Cartoonist has a list of the comics published on GoComics.com with the most subscribers.  In this case "subscribe" means people who have signed up for an account with GoComics.com and than have clicked subscribed to individual comics so updates show up on their personalized GoComics.com portal.  More of a "favorites" list then a full readership count.

I’m going to quibble with the statement that only one of the comics on the list is a "webcomic" — they’re all available on GoComics.com!  I think the point Alan is really making is that only one of the comics, We The Robots, (and ironically WTRs is on indefinite hiatus as of this month) is not represented by a newspaper comics syndicate.  I’ll also add that a full half of the list is represented by the newspaper syndicate Universal Press – which corporately is in the same ownership family as GoComics.com.

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Another review of the Kindle-DX in the NY Times today.  Even though I’ve been reading webcomics for more than a decade now, I don’t think I’ve seriously thought that I would someday be carrying around an electronic book from which I would read comics.  For some reason it just hasn’t felt or seemed imminent – and with good reason as the technology is still not all the way there yet.  But this year?  I’m starting to get used to the idea that it’s going to happen.

Sink into my big sofa-chair with a full season of Erfworld or Goats or Paradigm Shift? (just to throw out a few titles) – yeah, that would work.

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AWARDS
Brigid Alverson has an article on whether the Eisner’s Digital Comics category is really considering the ‘web-iness" of the comics in selecting it’s nominees.  I agree with the sense that web or digital categories seems to group nominees that have little else to do with each other (and given the increasing scope of web publishing of comics we’re almost to the day when every comic in theory will be eligible for a "webcomic" category) and people ought to be thinking more about refining these things.  I don’t have a specific bit of advice to throw out just yet but it’s worth chewing on.

MOCKERY
Dean’s Comic Booth is chock-full of abuse of — sometimes hilariously — copyright comic content.  I don’t want to pass judgement on whether it’s fair use or not but it is a heck of a funny concept — for the most part messing with just the last panel but sometimes a whole lot more.  Puts comics like Beatle Bailey and Blondie in a whole new light…

EMPLOYMENT
Penny Arcade, Inc. is looking for a Merchandise Manager: 

Do you like folding shirts? Excellent.

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Publishers Weekly’s Laura Hudson scores an interview with Tatsuya Ishida, the creator of Sinfest.  Ishida is a brilliant cartoonist and Sinfest has always been a shining example of quality comics on the web.  Hudson’s right about Ishida being a mystery — this is probably the only interview I’ve ever seen with him.

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Scott McCloud links to an interview with American Born Chinese creator, Gene Yang, on America.gov:

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Gisèle Lagacé, who past webcomic work includes Ménage à 3, Penny & Aggie, and Cool Cat Studio, has a new webcomic called Eerie Cuties:

What is EC? Well, it’s comedy horror meets cute. The cast consists of teenage monsters in high school. As strips go by, you’ll learn a bit more about what makes this school "different." The header image already gives you hints to the type of monsters you’ll see in EC. You’ll meet them, and the rest of the cast, slowly but surely. 🙂

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I hadn’t heard of this one before but Journalista! linked to tomorrow’s (June 6th) Drawing Day.  Charley Parker (creator of the pioneering webcomic Argon Zark and blogger at Lines and Colors) writes: 

Drawing Day is an event initiated last year by Mick Gow, creator of the Rate My Drawings site, with the simple intention of drawing attention (if you’ll excuse the expression) to art by encouraging artists worldwide to create 1 million drawings on a single day, and coordinate, cooperate and share the experience through a variety of social networking sites.

Participants can upload and share their drawings, or even draw directly online, through sites like deviantART, YouTube, Red Bubble, Drawspace, Rate My Drawings, Flickr and a number of others. (It’s worth investigating the list of participating sites just to see if some of them are new and of interest to you.)

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NEW BOOKS
Brian McFadden’s new collection of snarky-topical politics-to-pop culture comic Big Fat Whale in print is out — pick up your copy of Fun Stuff for Dum-Dums AND David Willis’ Roomies!: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Beer is now in stock – so get to clicking and buying!

FREE PREVIEW
Scott McCloud notes that the first 100 pages of his Zot! print collection is free to read online.

COMIC SOLICATION
The online magazine Narrative is interested in graphic art submissions (they mean comics!) for which they offer to pay in real money.  No experience with them — if anyone has had anything published with them please let us all know how it went.

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