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Comics Alliance reports that Dark Horse will publish later this year a hardcover collection of Cameron Stewart’s self-published webcomic Sin Titulo.

I previously blogged about Sin Titulo here and here.

Great episode and probably the most intense “draw-off” competition yet.  I did not agree with the judges decision this time but I kind of get why they went the way they did.

Interestingly enough it looks like the average for the Strip Show episodes right now is somewhere just south of 50,000 views (I’m assuming each one is posted once to YouTube) although the first episode is at 80,000.  I wonder what the expectation was going in and whether it’s doing better or worse than that.

What Birds Know is a creepy, coming-of-age webcomic that’s updated for something like 7 years or so now.  I reviewed it enthusiastically for ComixTalk many years ago and just started catching back up on it on Comic Rocket. Starting over, I remember why I liked it, it starts off in a fantasy, medieval village where three young friends have been assigned a field trip to collect 100 mushrooms for their school.  The opening scene of them collecting their stuff, saying goodbye to family shows so much about the three main characters without the need for clumsy telling. It’s quite good – a textbook example of how to open a story well.

As they make their way out into the countryside, some odd but still normal things happen. That is until this scene about 100 or so comic into the archives when Vandi appears to lay an egg.  Literally she vomits up an egg, but the point remains.  That’s weird!  And yet, still part of the building, gradual descent into this world that the webcomic takes the reader on.

Really cool speech from Dave Grohl at this year’s SXSW – check it out at the NPR website (doesn’t seem to be a way to embed the video).  Grohl has been busy – working on a new Foo Fighters album, and the documentary he did on the Sound City recording studio where Nirvana’s Nevermind album was recorded.

I just drove by this which is the title of a song on the Foo Fighters first album:

Episode Eight is called Drawing Blind and involved a contest where the contestants paired up and then each had to draw a picture they couldn’t see but that their partner described with words. Is this at all relevant to making webcomics? I guess a little — working with a writer or just two or more creators collaborating would need to share ideas. Words do help but I imagine most creators do like to share thumbnail sketches.  The results of this contest are pretty good evidence that words alone are not enough for a good working webcomic collaboration.

Nevertheless per the Strip Search format, someone has to win this contest!  

Lots more spoilers for this episode and the next episode with Scott Kurtz after clicking “read more”!

The winners of this contest are Erika and Amy and far and away they definitely deserved. As Erika says in the episode they have a “connection” — they certainly did.

The next episode is entitled “You Are Your Brand” and features Scott Kurtz of PvP.

Remember spoilers throughout — the contest is pretty well set up. The contestants have to come up with responses to some fake tweets ranging from promotion to fan-ish to hater.  Point being if you do get your fifteen seconds of Internet fame as a webcomic creator your relationship to the public does change a bit and you should be able to deal with it.

Man I wish we’d had twitter and FB back in the nineties.  Let me tell you something about shoveling through forums to deal with the above… Well maybe not, let’s not go to Camelot today.

It is hilarious to have Scott Kurtz judge this. He’s kind of grown up in public to a certain extent and some of his public actions over the years was clearly him tweaking the audience for attention. His judging of the tweets submitted (including speculating on why the contestants answered some of the tweets and not others) was a lot of do as I say not as I’ve done but still, Kurtz is a pretty successful promoter so you have to listen to what he says with an open mind.

I felt bad for Lexxy – she spent a lot of time explaining her nice girl approach to the Internet. I would have agreed with her too, before the most intense years of Comixpedia/TALK, but there are people who whether for their own personal personality issues or their deep investment in LOLs over genuine human interaction who cannot be niced around. Her interaction with Scott Kurtz was also clearly the reason why winner Nick Trujillo picked her along with Tavis Maiden for the loser-off contest on the next episode.

HEADING INTO APRIL UNOFFICIAL POWRR LIST:

1. Erika Moen: webcomic badass and co-winner of the Blind Draw contest
2. Katie Rice: winner of the first two elimination contests
3. Nick Trujillo: Winner of the last two choose the losers contests
4. Amy Falcone: co-winner of the Blind Draw contest winner of the first choose the losers contest
5. Maki Naro: holder of the REDRAW pass
6. Abby Howard
7. Monica Ray
8. Mac Shubert
9. Tavis Maiden: up for elimination
10. Lexxy Douglass: up for elimination

Seriously I wonder if Ryan Estrada is secretly identical triplets?  Another effort he’s undertaken is a gameshow conducted via Google Hangouts called Asking For Trouble.  One of his very latest featured a couple of webcomic creators I have known online for a long time – Brandon Carr and Tom Brazelton

Comic Riffs blog has an interview up with Warren Bernard, director of Small Press Expo (SPX), on the recent table registration-online crash SNAFU that SPX went through.  To recap – SPX has (d?) Bluehost as a hosting provider and during the crush of demand to register for details the site went down hard. The good news for SPX is it sold out its tables super quickly.

This year SPX will be Sept. 14-15 at the (usual) Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in North Bethesda. The special guests include Gary Panter, Lisa Hanawalt, Seth, Gene Yang and Frank Santoro.

Nerds have written Homeric epic-length essays on the nature of secret identities in the super hero genre. But I think from now on I’m going with R. Steven’s succinct meditation on the question:

Lots of spoiler-y titles I could have used but on the assumption someone might read this, I’ll keep spoilers below the break.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!

So another elimination show. Katie is back again, this time pitted against Ty.  Art is fundamentally conflicted about competition. I have met just as many artists who hate competition with a furious passion that borders on religiosity as I have met artists who are indifferent to it. I guess i have met some who actually are very competitive too.  Basically there’s all kinds. It is a bit weird to put “making comics” into the same format that we put NCAA March Madness into — which is a ninety minute contest where someone wins and someone else goes home.

I’m interested in the judging here.  Mike and Jerry are obviously really good at what they do but it’s also clear that Penny Arcade is a particular thing — viewpoint, style, subject matter.  How much credit are Mike and Jerry going to give to people who come at comics outside of the Penny Arcade zone?  I’m not sure this episode really tests that question too much except that I was a bit surprised at how little credit they gave Katie for her comic, outside of her artwork.

Personally I thought Katie’s comic was effective enough. It did lack the unexpected left turn that makes something really zing, but it was a clear cause and effect line and the last panel in and of itself had a kind of Ren & Stimpy appeal to it.  Ty’s comic would have been awesome, if the joke had actually been any good. As it was, it’s the kind of labored effort at a joke that shows all of the rough edges of construction without actually giving you the pretty facade.

I have to wonder what the next contest will be? What other aspects of webcomic, inc., can be turned into a contest?  We’ve done merch (t-shirts), press (interviews) — there’s also books, conventions and crazy collaborative efforts (although I don’t think the Penny Arcade guys were ever much a part of that). Realistically there’s guest comics for more established comics — I still think that can be an effective way to get quality exposure.  That would certainly work as a contest (with a guest webcomic judge to boot).

We will see! There’s not much to go on to update the unofficial list of contestants except that Katie is pretty good at comiking under pressure.  So let’s move her up to #2, followed by Maki, holder of the mysterious REDRAW pass (which I’m guessing is a get out of the elimination contest card or some other way of avoiding your first “go home” result).  I just don’t see much else to separate the rest.  Yes, Amy and Nick, our two “winners” are at least notable for that but both picked contestants for the elimination contest in a conservative, try not to offend anyone approach. That just doesn’t give you a lot of insight into how effective they will be at the rest of the game.

And Erika is still the only one there I’m aware of who is a fairly successful webcomic creator and she’s done nothing wrong yet so I’m still keeping her at the top of the list.

LIST OF LIKELY NOT LOSERS:

1. Erika Moen: webcomic badass
2. Katie Rice: winner of the first two elimination contests
3. Maki Naro: holder of the REDRAW pass
4. Everybody else

Who else reads Guilded Age?  I do.  Phil “KAAAAAHN” Kahn and T “U” Campbell have put out a pretty amusing buddy/group action comedy for a a bunch of years now. Yes it’s set in a medieval, slightly Dungeons & Dragons-ish setting but it’s basically the Wild Bunch (or maybe the Dirty Dozen) stretched out into an AMC length teevee series. It’s a fun webcomic.

There’s also a meta-story that intrudes on things now and then — something about the whole of the Guilded Age being part of an online game gone amuck or something. No offense to Phil or T but I don’t really get what that’s supposed to be about, so for now I’m basically, mostly, ignoring it.  Maybe at some point it will come into focus?

The archives are deep at this point (21 chapters in the book) but it’s broken up into fairly self-contained chapters so an archive binge can be set up as a number of large chunks to read.

Lee Adam Herold drew this for me probably back in 2000ish on the anniversary of the webcomic I was drawing at the time: Burnt Dog Radio. Lee’s sense of humor ran pretty dark but it almost always made me laugh. I always appreciated his bravery in pursuing jokes in somewhat dangerous territory. I’d like to see Josh Whedon build a show around a psychotic mama’s boy.

Anyhow Lee had this amazing sponge and ink technique for his comic. He showed me how he did it once — it’s extremely clever but not necessarily easy to get as much nuance out of it as he consistently was able to do.  He hasn’t updated in a bit but I’d still recommend checking out Chopping Block.

Early Sluggy Freelance was mind-blowing in a way, particularly because it was RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING of comics on the web and Pete Abrams was way ahead of EVERYONE else at the beginning in terms of ambition, consistency and an actual audience.  And a lot of the chaotic pop culture borrowing and remixing was really fun — in a way that corporate owned comic strips in the newspaper would never do.

Somewhere around the early part of the 00′s though it seemed like Pete got bogged down in longer plots, and an indecision over how seriously he wanted to take his characters and their world.  My initial enthusiasm for Sluggy kept me reading but eventually I lost the thread and it fell off my regular trawl.  I thought about rereading it but the archives are daunting. I decided instead to start with a story arc that I remembered from the period where I started to wonder about where the comic was going. Maybe a fresh reread would give me a different perspective on the strip; maybe I’d care enough about Torg and friends to catch up all the way to the present day.

By the time you get to the “Fire and Rain” story there are literally hundreds of characters in the Sluggy-verse. Fan favorite Oasis, bad girl with a confused crush on Torg, is back. The Hereti Corporation, employer of mad scientist buddy Riff, and potential instigator of world wide destruction, is trying to keep an eye on Oasis.  But Oasis is determined to find and kill Zoe, who has the kind of off again, off again relationship with Torg that got fairly sitcom-level in its unrequitedness.  Somehow, someway Zoe survives her encounter with world class assassin Oasis, but then hearing a special word (“shupid”) Zoe turns into a camel (in an earlier story Zoe was cursed).  Torg shows up, undoes the curse, tells Zoe goodbye and then promises Oasis (now in the looney bin) that he loves her and she should come live with him when she gets out (which won’t be for a very long time).

Than lots of filler. Hey no creator owes the reader anything but I do remember getting bored finding lots of filler at times at the Sluggy site.  But eventually we’re back to another stretch of “serious” story with Hereti corp capturing Alyee, an alien that showed up in one of the very first Sluggy stories that included a parody of Aliens.

It turns out Riff has been working for Hereti Corporation all the time! I had kind of forgotten about that. But somehow true love conquers all and Riff and Torg seem to be working on the same side against Hereti Corporation.

This last one is a bit closer to what I remember as Sluggy’s strengths, efficient story-telling, quick pop culture jokes and puns.

It’s FRIDAY, FRIDAY, gotta get down on FRIDAY.  GET YOURSELF DOWN TO THE STRIP SHOW store. Yeah!

Spoilers, such as they are, BELOWWWWW!

Today’s show includes the remaining contestants taking a tour of Seattle and then a quiz about the city. Nothing really significant affecting the competition overall but man is there a sweet, unexpected prize for the winner of the quiz.

It looks like the next challenge for the contestants in the next episode will be something to do with sitting for interviews. Should be interesting stuff.

Wow – very entertaining episode. Jerry and Mike strike a nice balance as judges between honesty and encouragement.  As usual – spoilers after the break.

Really not much in the way of spoilers — Katie stays; Alex goes home.  The elimination contest was to create a comic based on two words drawn from “the trash can of lost ideas” or well something like that.  Katie’s take on it was funny; Alex’s was an unfinished concept. Katie definitely deserved to stay.

The guys were nice to Alex afterwards – telling him they reminded them of themselves when they started Penny Arcade. Probably some truth to that development wise, but times are very different now than the late nineties. In the late nineties I could get away with being a crappy artist with often unpolished ideas in my comics (heck I even got a link out from Jerry for a Half Life homage comic); now not so much.  The web has been explored, farmed, plowed, etc. I do think it’s great to give folks encouragement but an artist starting out now is really not ever going to be in the same place as Mike was; that ship has sailed on.

So what about our unofficial Power LIST? Well let’s move Katie up a whole bunch and really after that everyone else is probably in a six-way tie for now.

1. Erika Moen: webcomic badass
2. Maki Naro: holder of the REDRAW pass
3. Amy Falcone: winner of the T-SHIRT design contest
4. Katie Rice: won the first elimination contest
5. Everybody else

Dave Kellett’s documentary on comics is in the final push and they have a second Kickstarter underway to raise some money for additional footage they think will make their movie that much better.  Take a look at it – especially if you didn’t donate the first go-round give it another look, this is going to be AMAZING and it’s definitely almost done.

So the first episode of the webcomic reality show where there is a contest with not only a winner but a loser.  Today’s contest, as teased last time, is designing a t-shirt. First prize is getting the t-shirt produced and placed in the Penny Arcade store; winner keeps the profits.  Seriously — nice prize and you could tell the contestant were happily surprised to hear it.

I have to say; the producers of the show made watching 12 people sketch a t-shirt way more exciting than I would have predicted.  The show is well done.  The staff from Penny Arcade judging the t-shirt designs were interesting, personable — I like the fact that Penny Arcade, inc. is essentially offering up everyone in the organization a role on this show.

So spoilers?  Yeah spoilers ahead.  Don’t wander too far below the video of this episode if you don’t want to read the spoilers.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

So definitely fun to watch but a surprisingly not great batch of designs out of it.  I was not shocked that Amy won this episode though.  It was probably the only idea that wasn’t just a straight ahead riff on the logo or a cliched use of a four panel comic strip.  Not that it could have been easy to gin up an amazing idea in an hour. This was probably a really hard challenge.

I was shocked by the format of the show though.  Winner Amy was told she had to choose the two losers who will be judged by Jerry and Mike before one of them goes home.  That contest — between Katie and Alex — is teased as some kind of creative exercise before the Penny Arcade twins on next week’s episode.  And it seemed like Amy did pick two other contestants that she thought did poorly on the t-shirt design.

But strategically she didn’t have too. She could have picked anyone. She could have picked her strongest competitors to go before Jerry and Mike.  This is a pretty gutsy Survivor-like twist to the show that is both a little frustrating but also pretty interesting. Some of these contestants might be a lot more Machiavellian than Amy was and that will probably amp up the Real World potential of this show.

So let’s update the not at all official and completely superflous Power List:

1. Erika Moen: webcomic badass
2. Maki Naro: holder of the REDRAW pass
3. Amy Falcone: winner of the T-SHIRT design contest
4. Monica Ray: did nothing bad this week
5. Lexxy Douglas: did nothing bad this week
6. Ty Halley: nobody said anything but I kind of liked his t-shirt design
7. Tavis Maiden: didn’t like his t-shirt design but did okay last week
8. Nick Trujillo: no opinion yet
9. Abby Howard: didn’t like her t-shirt design at all
10. Mac Shubert: also did not like the overly busy t-shirt design
11. Katie Rice: Sent to the Loser-off
12. Alex Hobbs: Sent to the Loser-off

I am still on many mailing lists for publishers even though I have cut back on reviewing comics in the last year. I just found the First Second Book catalogue that I probably got from them earlier in the year. They’ve got a lot of good stuff dropping this year.

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong – which I’m reading online comes out in print in May. Faith Erin Hicks working with author Prudence Shen

Tune Volume 2 from Derek Kirk Kim – comes out in November of this year. I’m pretty excited about that one.  I really enjoyed the first volume – it’s a great premise and the characters are well crafted.

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. I read the online preview — I may pick this up! Very well done, exciting adventure story. Due in August.

Boxers / Saints by Gene Luen Yang. Yang is a great artist — this looks like an ambitious project encompassing two parallel stories set in China’s Boxer Rebellion. Due in September.

And books from Lucy Knisley, Sara Varon, Paul Pope, Jim Ottaviani,  MK Reed, Nick Bertozzi and more. I wish books like these was what everyone first thought of when they think of “comics” – entertaining, authentic, well-crafted original stories from talented and inspired creators of the medium.

I am a fairly big fan of Faith Erin Hicks’ comics. She got her start in pure webcomics but has since migrated to the webcomic collected into graphic novel approach. That approach is favored by several publishers now, including  her most recent publisher First Second Books.   She was recently interviewed on a Boing Boing podcast which is worth listening to.

A lot of Hicks’ work is all from her but more recently she has collaborated with other creators on graphic novels, including Brain Camp, where she provided the art to a story by Susan Kim & Laurence Klavan; and the very recent Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, written by Prudence Shen.

My first exposure to Hicks’ work was Ice, which is still not finished, a victim of her increasingly in-demand status for publishers’ projects. I have never read her freshman effort, Demonology 101 but have it on the to-read list.

I loved Zombies Calling, and enjoyed The War at Ellsmere. I never finished Friends with Boys so I’m rereading it right now.  I’ve also been reading the web serialization of Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong which will ultimately be published on paper later this year.

Hicks’ also snuck in a charming low-key comic called Superhero Girl that she started for a local newspaper but has since put on hold. I hope she is able to do something more with it at some point.

FINISHED COMICS

• Demonology 101 (webcomic, August 1999 – June 2004)
• Zombies Calling (November 2007)
• The War at Ellsmere (December 2008)
• Friends with Boys (February 2012)

STILL IN SERIALIZATION 

• Ice
• Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong

The webcomic reality show, Strip Search, posted its second episode where its 12 contestants play “fax machine” a game where everyone writes a phrase in a notebook, passes it to the left, and then draws a picture based on the phrase and repeat.  ”Pictionary telephone” is what I think someone described it as.

After everyone plays the fax machine game, the episode shows up some of the results.  Which is good television (I doubt every drawing was funny or clever) but not good for evaluating the unofficial POWER LIST of Strip Search.

Ericka Moen did nothing this week to disabuse my sense last week that she comes in as the favorite, given her proven record of talent on display in webcomics such as DAR and Bucko. I also think Moen’s sense of humor has enough of an overlap with the Penny Arcade vibe that they will appreciate her comics.

So who else distinguished themselves? Well Maki did with both his clever scenarios and some of his drawings that were shown.  I also thought some of the women had some interesting, funny bits in their ideas and drawings, particularly Lexxy and Monica.  Tavis from the drawings they showed from him has a pretty slick style that I think should work really well in this competition.

To be honest — the format of the show made it tough to form an opinion about everyone given how much their work was interconnected with the work of the rest of the group.  No one seemed completely out of place in terms of their contributions in this episode. And the teaser about the first challenge in next week’s episode — designing a t-shirt, is something that not every webcomic artist is actually all that good at.  As just one example, I love John Allison’s and Gordon McAlpin’s comics but I don’t recall either of them has ever designed a world-beating t-shirt. So while I could speculate about who’s at the bottom right now it’s probably pointless until we learn more about the contestants.

UNOFFICIAL COMPLETELY SPECULATIVE POWRRRR LIST

1. Erika Moen
2. Maki Naro
3. Monica Ray and Lexxy Douglas
4. Tavis Maiden
5. Everyone Else

This is the true story… of seven twelve strangers… picked to live in a house…work on webcomics together and have their lives taped… to find out what happens… when people stop being polite… and start getting real…Strip Seach:

I honestly do not watch much reality television, but it’s impossible to not be aware of the genre.  I watched the first Survivor; I usually watch the latter half of American Idol seasons; what else? I guess I used to watch Iron Chef sometimes.  Anyhow the last thing I think I ever would have lived to see is a web series with all of the Reality Show cliches BUT about webcomics.  Strip Search may be good, it may be bad but it is in some real way, a validation of this reboot of comics I will always call webcomics.

Strip Search may be good, it may be bad, but it is in some real way, a validation of this reboot of comics I will always call webcomics.

The first episode is simply a drama’d up “meet the cast” montage.  I don’t recognize anyone except for Erika Moen who is already a fairly established artist in the webcomics medium (DAR, Bucko).  Erika looks (and talks) like what one would expect from a reality show teevee star. She also has the chops, including the sense of humor, to win a contest like this.  The first episode tells you a little bit about each of the contestants, but not enough to get a sense of who has talent, let alone who has the right kind of talent to win a show judged by the Penny Arcade creators.

So at the end of the first episode the not at all official POWER RANKINGS for STRIP SHOW are:

1. Erika Moen

2. Everyone else

I hope it does well — why not? It could be a good thing for the winner and even for those who don’t win they will still likely be better known by the public. Even better — it might be a splash of publicity for comics as a whole, which is always a good thing.