Thursday News And Blues Round Up (UPDATED)

COMIXPEDIA

I want to throw out a thanks to current (and very recent) sponsors of Comixpedia including the movie The Abandoned and the webcomics Zortic, I See You and O''deer. We have three slots available right now on the side bar – cheap! – click here to get more details and order.

INTERVIEWS

McKenzee and Ursula Vernon got "namechecked" by the Indy Weekly in an article on the North Carolina comics scene. It's a well-done article.
An interview with Traci Spencer, creator of the the fantasy/adventure comic Compass published on Girl-A-Matic.
An interview with the Marvelous Patric at ComicBloc.
Thomas Nickel writes that he interviewed David Lloyd of V for Vendetta and Kickback-fame about his first very own graphic novel Kickback. The interview can be found here.
Belated link – but Brigid has a good interview up at Digital Strips with Wendy Pini, the creator of Elfquest, who announced at the New York Comicon, that in conjunction with publisher Go! Comi, Pini would be creating a three-volume, full color manga, The Masque of the Red Death, based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name. The comic will be published first as a webcomic before collection in print volumes.
Digital Strips also has an interview up with Gabe Strine, the creator of Brinkerhoff.

TOOLS

A new version of Balloonist is out – the Balloonist software creates cartoon speech bubbles. Some of the new features in version 2.0 are: Curved Stems, Ruffle Harmonics, Better Line Break Control, Zoom Control, and well more (click for details). I've never used this software but I've seen it and the creators seemed to have spent much of the effort behind the new version in responding to current users requests.

EVENTS

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

I've been meaning to plug the wonderful (relatively) new comic Voids by Shayna Marchese. Today, she posted a Flickr series of photos on how she creates the comic – that's as good a hook as any!
The juggernaut that is Richard Stevens III rolls on. He recently discovered a quote of his showing up in Google's quote-a-nator thingee. (more details on the Diesel Sweeties site below the comic) Also is it just me or does the mohawked character in the recent web-DS storyline look a lot like Comixpress proprietor Logan DeAngelis?
Frank Frisina, the writer of the poker-themed webcomic Life's A Bluff emailed me that artist Brandon Carr has returned to working on the project.
Kris Straub's new/old parody (meta-parody?) gamer comic Insert Cartridge isn't bad. It's just not that cutting as parody really. On the other hand a couple of the jokes, despite Kris' insistence that he's trying to mimic the mediocrity of many comics in the genre, are pretty funny. (UPDATE: I didn't mean and I doubt Kris meant to say that the entire gamer comic genre is mediocre. More that there are many mediocre comics in that genre that are merely aping the tropes of it)

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS