Month: February 2012

All the news that generates the page views!

STOP COLLABORATE AND LISTEN: The Webcomic Beacon matched some creators up for Webcomic Blind Date 2012 — five pairs came through with a webcomic.

HYPE: Exactly what happened in A Wrinkle in Time — a webcomic valentine from Faith Erin Hicks to the famous book.

TOOLS: Robot6 notes that Ben Towle has moved his webcomic Oyster War from Tumblr to its own website.  He is using WordPress with the Webcomic plug-in. I suspect Comicpress is still more widely in use but I see Webcomic a whole lot too.  I wonder what the actually numbers for both are.

MAILBAG: Colin P. Delaney writes in about The Amazing Adventures of Cat Prentis — a seven-chapter, serialized graphic novel written by himself and with art from Tony Gazso. It's about teenager Catherine “Cat” Prentis, burdened by magical powers she can barely control, she must hide away her true nature as she muddles through high school, equally desperate to avoid both social stigmatization and the all-too frequent demon attack.  

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So far 2012 has been a great year but it hasn't left me much time to spend on comics.

MILESTONES:  Bucko, the very funny hipster mystery webcomic is finished. Comics Alliance has an interview with the creators Erica Moen and Jeff Parker. This was a really enjoyable strip and successfully translated a lot of Erica Moen's sensibilities from her diary webcomic to a fictionalized setting.

KICKSTART MY ART: In addition to posting about Christopher Baldwin's Kickstarter campaing for Spacetrawler Volume 2 yesterday, I wanted to write about Rich Stevens' now full-funded kickstarter drive. Stevens is going to put out an ebook compiling his entire run of 3000 Diesel Sweeties comics.  Stevens has been busy experimenting with different approaches to digital comics — he re-releasing his first book as a free ebook (downloaded over 140,000 times);  he's been putting out a month's worth of comics at a time in magazine format for the iPad (10,000 downloads in three days); and for some time now he's offered PDFs of older comics for download. Stevens asked for $3000, he's north of $20,000 as I write this.  If you're a fan, it's got a great set of rewards for supporters — go check it out.

HYPE: Lauren Davis writes glowingly about The Wormwood Saga which has two long updates in its archive, with the third one expected in April.

MAILBAG: Marcus Muller writes about his webcomic King of the Unknown – a rock-powered webcomic that’s equal parts supernatural horror, raunchy comedy, action epic, and all-you-can-eat conspiracy theory buffet:

Stygian horrors, alien invasions, covert ops…all just another day at the office for the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  Ever since a supernatural mishap transformed the King and forced him to fake his own death (and perhaps forced some of his sanity into early retirement), he has dedicated his new secret life to a shadowy government organization known as the Institute for Research and Study of the Unknown (IRSU).  Their mission: to keep our world safe – and blissfully ignorant – from the unknown forces that constantly threaten our very existence.

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Two interesting comics events for kids coming up in March: 

First, publisher Scholastic is putting on a webinar featuring graphic novelists Jeff Smith (Bone), Raina Telgemeier (Smile), and Kazu Kibushi (Amulet). The announcement is aimed at teachers (it is during school hours) for their students to learn about " using words and pictures together to create a narrative" and the publisher has put together a graphic novels teaching guide, webcast lesson plans around the authors' books, and webcast tips for the classroom.  You can register now for the webcast on March 7th at 1PM ET/10AM PT.  I think it's pretty cool — I don't know how flexible teacher lesson plans are these days with all of the testing and teaching to the test that goes on but I know my kids would love to get to see this.

Also —  Scholastic Book Clubs is hosting a contest to win a special Bone comics prize package! Click here to enter.

Second, Google is holding a Doodle contest for students of Kindergarden through Highschool age (K-12). This year's theme is "If I could travel in time, I'd visit…" One winning student artist will see their artwork appear on the Google homepage and take home some cool prizes. Submissions are due on March 23, 2012 — more information on rules, forms and dates for the contest are here.

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