Month: April 2012

Whew – got one more post in before the beginning of May.  That brings my 2012 average up to — what? — one post every 2.5 weeks or so.  Thanks for bearing with me (well whomever is bearing out there in Internet-land).  New job, new projects, shifting priorities means less time for ComixTalk which isn't likely to change this year.  I do have some great ideas for building a couple of webcomic-focused sites that I really want to use on a regular basis.  I suspect others would find them useful too. Unfortunately not sure when any of it will happen. 

So COMICS!

iWEBCOMICS: Jerzy Drozd linked to this story on the new Marvel infinite comics format for the iPad.  I've always been a fan of the web part of webcomics.  But there's a way to stretch comics without breaking it and then there's motion comics…  This approach by Marvel looks interesting — it appears to leave control of the viewing/reading experience in the hands of the reader and it still maintains the panel as the atomic unit of storytelling.  I'll be curious to read the reactions from the blog-o-comicsphere.

FINDING NEMO — AND COMICS: I've checked out Just the First Frame a couple times — my big problem with it is that as a hand-crafted webcomic, it ain't scalable and that success will kill it.  Still I always suspect Lauren Davis is smarter about this stuff from me so let's all give it another look this week.

INTERVIEW: There was a good interview/feature on Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content at Bleeding Cool last week. Definitely worth reading if you missed it. (And if you missed Lauren Davis' review of the webcomic from earlier this year – also worth reading)

KICKSTART MY ART:  Charles Cutting has a Indiegogo campaign going to fund The Dream Quest of Randolph Carter – a print version of his graphic novel adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft story. You can read the comic online to check it out.

In Search of… SCIENCE!: PhD Comics has comic-fied an interview with physicist Daniel Whiteson who discusses the search for the Higgs Boson particle at CERN (PhD Comics also did a similar comic-fied take on dark matter).

MAILBAG: Richard Pulfer writes that his webcomic, Blue Yonder (illustrated by Diego Diaz and written by Richard Pulfer and Luke Perks) is starting its second storyline:

When readers last saw Jared Davenport, aka Blue Yonder, the young hero had flown the coop from Claremont Apartments after learning his new allies included an ex-cop convicted of stealing evidence and a black ops solider with an even more checkered past. Will his old friends, the police-themed N-Forcers, be any help in locating his missing family? What about Voltra, the young girl who befriended him at the run-down Claremont Apartments? The answers to these questions and more will be revealed when Blue Yonder continues its weekly updates on Wednesday. 

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A great overview/interview of Richard Thompson, creator of Cul De Sac over at BoingBoing.  I really love Cul De Sac — I wish it had a more organic webcomic presence because as great a newspaper comic strip as it is, newspapers just don't appreciate great comics like they used to.

AWARDS: I completely agree with Lauren Davis' reaction to this year's nominees for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Digital Comic.  My extremely quick reaction was pretty similar but Lauren is a real journalist and so actually constructed sentences and presented coherent thoughts.  Still I suspect she might agree with my final thought: 

This year's [EISNER Best Digital Comic] nominees in particular feel like a world where instead of the Emmy awards, the Motion Picture Academy had just added a "Best Television Movie" category to the Oscars.

RAMBLING RAMBLING RAMBLING MAN: I had just fallen out of following writer, cartoonist, van-traveling troubadoor, LORE SJÖBERG, so it was a bit of a surprise to see his blog turned into a travelogue as he and his amazing van travel the country.  Fun stuff – worth catching up on if you aren't already following him.

KICKSTART MY ART: Keith Knight just finished a successful kickstarter campaign and lived to tell about it.  Actually he posted some tips on what he learned from his effort that are pretty useful ideas.

FORMATTED FOR YOUR COMFORT: Boing Boing writes up the "Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF)" which is a free/open format for online comic books.

ACBF has a lot of cool features: support for creator metadata; per-panel/page definitions; multiple text-layers for multiple languages; text formatting and style data; auto-indexing and more. The format is CC-BY-SA, and can be found on Launchpad, along with GPL'ed viewers for GNU/Linux and Windows.

EVENTFUL:  I don't know why I'm stumbling on to Rare Words so late to the party but the Internet is a biiig place I guess.  Rare Words is a blog where Mark Burrier draws sketches based on phrases submitted through the website.  There will be an exhibition of his work this June at the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Maryland.

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Just a reminder that the former ComixTALK P.O. box is no more.  If you want to send us physical objects please email first to find out where to send it.

KICKSTART MY ART: Kickstarter has cemented itself into comics in a way I doubt anyone really expected when it first debuted.  Shaenon Garrity just launched a kickstarter campaing for book 3 of her webcomic Skin Horse.  No question it will make it's modest goal (although – get over there and pledge!) — in fact the interesting thing these days is seeing just how far past the goal these drives can go.

EXHIBTIONIST: The Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas (part of Lamar University) will be holding an exhibit of Ursula Vernon's work next month in April (begining April 4th) with a reception on April 6th. Make your travelin' plans now! The exhibit will featurie works from Digger, Dragonbreath (including a sneak preview of Dragonbreath 7), and several of Ursula's illustrations.  Ursula will also be doing a signing at the local Barnes & Noble.

MAILBAG

Richard Reynolds writes in about his webcomic, St. Shawshank's Infant School which he describes as "basically a re-telling of The Shawshank Redemption... only set in an infant school, and with all the added innocence that that implies."  That's an interesting twist alright!

Sasha Peric writes in to ask us to take a look at a new comic, Pustinja, hosted on Google+.  It's a wordless mini-comic, with artwork suggestive of wood-cuts. He's from Bosnia, and this new work looks like it's in a similar vein to previous examples of his comics.

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