Month: October 2009

A whole bunch of talented comics creators nominated for this year’s Friends of Lulu awards. 

Look at these lists!  Just looking at those with whom I’m familiar with the work: New Talent includes Kate Beaton, Hark, A Vagrant; Kathryn Immonen, Hellcat; and Tracy White, Traced; and Lulu of The Year includes Shaenon K. Garrity, Skin Horse; Lynda Barry, What It Is; Danielle Corsetto, Girls With Slingshots; and Jessica Abel, Life Sucks. 

Also a special woohoo for Eleanor Davis’ nomination for Stinky in the Kids comics category.  Davis is currently the favorite author of the X girls right now for Stinky and The Secret Science Alliance.

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INTERVIEW

• Daily Cross Hatch has a wonderful interview with Harvey Pekar – 70 years old and in the middle of his first webcomic project.
• An interview with Jeffrey Rowland, comics creator and T-shirt-shippin’ mogul.
• An interview with Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury.  Given the long presence of Doonesbury on the web, I was surprised the Trudeau is hoping for newspapers to create some sort of news monopoly on the web as the answer to how he will make money is a post paper world.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

• Another outstanding update from the subtlely stupid Hulk Vs. Bizarro.
• Another landing strip joke in QC right after last night’s Daily Show Rio de Janeiro gag? Coincidence or COINCIDENCE!!!??!  More importantly just why is Faye grabbing Martin’s butt (in panel 3)?

DEAD TREES
Volumes 3 and 4 of Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots are now available for pre-orderin’.

SWAG O’ THE MONTH
Chris Onstad is selling a picture of himself from 1986.  Really!

CRAFT
Cameron Stewart has a couple of videos showing him working in Manga Studio.

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So sad but necessary.  It’s spring cleaning two seasons too late.  My little corner of the universe where ComixTalk HQ exists is overwhelmed with stuff.  STUFF!  Here’s some of that stuff I’ve found from freebies, cards, etc from shows that I don’t want to forget about:

• Fridge-mag.net:  cool little mini comics.
• Wondersmitten:  weird, interesting.  Cool little train riding across the website.
• Benjamin Birdie: The Rack right now; previously Genre City and Kings Of Pop.
• Kelli Nelson: Aha! I saw your stuff this year at SPX and had a huge Deja Vu moment.  Turns out I just have memory problems.
• Aaron Gonzalez: He has a comic called Broken Chain for sale at Lulu.
• David Yoder: Is awesome!
• Alec Longstreth: Also awesome.

Also while I’m cleaning out things here’s a silly airbrush I did in college.

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Ah ha – it was a two part interview with Howard Tayler – sneaky Gary! — here’s part one and part two of FLEEN’s interview with Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary – lots of good insight into being an independent artist and businessman here.

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WOWIO
New Wowio owner Brian Altounian pledged to pay creators the money Wowio has owed for about a year now. (ht/ Tom Spurgeon)

BUSINESS
Karen Montagus-Reyes writes about her now-not-syndicated, formerly syndicated comic, Clear Blue Water.  She started off with around 30 papers and didn’t add any for about four years until she was dropped by her syndicate.  No mention of a web strategy at all so I assume she is describing a pretty typical old-school syndication effort which not surprisingly is a really tough (read: impossible) road in the 21st century.  (Her strips appear to be posted at her website but without proper archives and navigation — someone get her a copy of Comicpress stat!)

INTERVIEWS
Sequential Tart has two good interviews: one with Shaenon Garrity of Skin Horse, and one with Ethan Young of Tails.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
New Ryan Estrada webcomic starting: Chillin’ Like Villains.

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A couple of things I wanted to post up – one of course being this weekend (October 3rd and 4th) is 24 Hour Comics Day.  On your mark, get set – go comic!  Also FLEEN has an interview with Howard Tayler about his recent keynote at the Comics Success Seminar.

And so long as I'm here — a little JUSTIFY MY HYPE linkin'

• Chris Jones is back with more adventures of that historical detective type – Byron Pinkleton! 
• Kevin Churck and TJ Kirsch with mystery webcomic She Died In Terrebonne.
• Virtual Shackles – do we need another video game webcomic?  No, but this one has had some funny ones in its short run.

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Hey – Google Wave invites are out and mine apparently got misplaced in the email.  So if you’ve got one to spare set me up (xerexes at gmail DOT com).  Thanks!

BUSINESS
PBS does one of those "look people are making a living making webcomics" stories.  They did interview interesting people for it — from Randall Munroe (xkcd) to Howard Tayler (Shlock) to R Stevens (Diesel).

INTERVIEW
Nice interview with Gordon McAlpin of Multiplex touching on movies and Chicago.

Newsarama has an interview with Emma Caulfield, actress and now webcomic auteur.  How very interesting that Newsarama has the scoop on the new webcomic Contropussy which has a creative team consisting of Emma Caulfield, Camilla Outzen Rantsen, Christian Meesey, Thomas Mauer, and Blog@Newsarama columnist Christian Beranek.

REVIEW
Johanna Draper Carlson reviews High Moon, the second book from Zuda. 

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Chris Yates connects the dots on Colleen’s tattoo but really Jon‘s disco solo sold it for me.

FLEEN flagged that Christopher Baldwin has a work-in-progress site up for Spacetrawler, a webcomic he seems to be working towards launching next year.

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First off – cool new cover coming today from Charles Snow of Sordid City Blues.  Click on it to see larger versions.

Today’s going to be a rolling update kind of day…

REVIEW
Derik Badman has a review of Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen.  (Badman’s own webcomic Things Change posted its monthly update this week.)

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