Author: GiantPanda

INTERVIEWS

• Newsarama interviews Kazu Kibuishi about Ballantine’s Flight spinoff, Flight Explorer. This anthology collects the Flight stories suitable for all-ages, aiming at a younger audience. What will this mean for the regular Flight anthology? Not even Kibuishi knows.
  

  NRAMA: Lastly, how does this affect Flight 5, if any? What plans do you have for the next volume? Is going the companion book approach the way to do future Flight anthologies?

  KK: Hmm… I’m wondering how this will affect Flight 5 as well. I suppose we’re about to find out! From its inception, the Flight project has been a series of leaps of faith, so I guess this is the next step. I’m just as curious as everyone else to know where it’s all going to take us.

BUSINESS

• Scott Ransoomair (VG catz) is creating the official Final Fantasy XI MMORPG comic Adventure Log. Seeing as how Square Enix is the copyright holder according to the published comic page, I’m guessing that he’s getting paid for it. We’ve seen similar arrangement before by Penny Arcade and PvP, I belive.

TODD GOLDMAN

• Dirk Deppey has a nice roundup of the recent developments in the Todd Goldman affair at Journalista. It covers the Cease-and-Desist campaign and the blogs that have removed their coverage (PWBeat, and Wired among other), the current livejournal meme and the effect of all this on Google search.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

• Technically this was the quote of April 24 I suppose and also found at Journalista. SLG Publishing’s Jennifer de Guzman blogs about APE.
  

  While there were a few people self-publishing their comics, there were fewer of them than in the past, and there seemed to be an even marked decrease in the charming photocopied, hand-stapled mini-comic. Last year, I either bought or was generously given several mini-comics or self-published comics (you can read about that here). This year — I bought two (one by Johnny Siu and another called “Fremont Girl”) and was given none. (Boohoo!) The assumption is that the do-it-yourselfers have moved to the web.

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TOOLS

• Tyler Martin has released a new version of ComicPress, a webcomics-friendly theme for WordPress. ComicPress 2.0 BE adds features like the ability to post comic and news posts separately, thumbnails of comics in the archive, support for multiple comic file formats and more.

INTERVIEWS

• The Pulse interviews DJ Coffman about his Hero by Night available now in comic stores.
• T Campbell promises to do a 100 podcasts for Broken Frontier and posts a list of those folks he's going to try and interview.

SYNDICATION

• Pink Raygun wants your comics.
  

  Pink Raygun is now accepting webcomic submissions. We are looking for six female created webcomics to run on a weekly basis.

  What exactly is Pink Raygun? Apparently "[…] a webzine for the modern fangirl" accoring to their faq.

EISNER AWARDS

• As noted yesterday by DJ Coffman, the nominations for the Eisner awards is out. Besides the Best Digital Comics category's strong lineup, there are a couple of familiar names sprinkled throughout the categories. Brian Fies, whose Mom's Cancer won the very first Best Digital Comics Eisner Award is nominated this year as well in the categories "Best Reality-based Work" and "Best Graphic Album – Reprint". Gene Yang's American Born Chinese is nominated in the "Best Graphic Album – New" category and Lark Pien's coloring in "Best Coloring". Svetlana Chmakova's Dramacon and Hope Larson's Gray Horses are nominated in the "Special Recognition" category.

ADVERTISING

• Reinder Dijkhuis finds that his revenues from Project Wonderful have increased after a recent dip. He also catches the appearance of a PW ad for Ron Paul for President on Clan of the Cats. Obscure third-party candidates for President are technically a new source of advertising for PW, I guess…

MILESTONES

• Kris Straub hits #500 of his sci-fi webcomic Starslip Crisis.

(Xaviar Xerexes contributed to this story)
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The Wikipedia entry for Purple Pussy was restored and relisted for deletion yesterday. The discussion about whether it should be deleted or not is going on here.

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WIKIWATCH

• Is Todd Goldman's plagiarism of Dave Kelly's Purple Pussy going to make it notable enough to have the comic's deletion from Wikipedia overturned? Follow the excitement in the Purple Pussy deletion review. (related note: Wired's Table Of Malcontents Blog picked up the Goldman story just this Monday, but adds a funny personal anecdote about Goldman to the mix.) (Second related note: Mike Tyndall catalogs all of the possible plagiarism in Todd Goldman's "work".)

TELEVISION

• Jason Kruse's The World of Quest which appeared as a webcomic on Komikwerks in 2003 and as a graphic novel in 2006, will be a Saturday morning cartoon series this fall on the CW television network.

INTERVIEWS

• Can't get enough K Thor Jensen? Here's part one of an interview with him at The Daily Crosshatch.
• The Believer interviews Scott Mccloud.

BOOKS

• Steven Withrow and Alexander Danner's new book Character Design for Graphic Novels is out.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Glych notes that a Comedy Central blog linked to one of Melonpool's video shorts.
• Cartoonist Brant Parker, who co-created the comic strip The Wizard of Id, has died. (link from Talkaboutcomics)

(Xaviar Xerexes contributed to this post)

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BUSINESS

• Related to last weeks post about the flurry of business related blogposts by Joey Manley, SLG publishing’s livejournal has a roundup of links in response to SLG president Dan Vado’s interview at Newsarama about their digital comics store Eyemelt.com.

INTERVIEWS

• The Daily Crosshatch has put up the second part of their interview with Raina Telgemeier.
• The Comics Reporter interviews K Thor Jensen about the completion of his autobiographical comic Red Eye, Black Eye, which was originally serialized at Serializer.net.

MISCELLANEA

• Blogpost by R Stevens entitled Thinking! Hard! About the How and Why of Making Webcomics.

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CORRECTION

• It has been brought to my attention that the Comics Reporter’s list of the Top 50 Comics of 2006 contained more webcomics than I’d noted. French superstar Lewis Trondheim’s Les Petits Riens and Mazen Kerbaj’s Kerblog, as well as potentially two entries published by The Guardian by Joe Sacco and Posy Simmonds.

LETTERING

• For Comixpedia readers who have been following Jon Morris’ Plea For Hand-Lettering there is an interesting thread on The Engine by Comicraft founder Rich Starkling which delves into a discussion on both classic lettering and the pitfalls of creative teams. Eddie Campbell also takes on the subject on his blog.

CON

• Kristoffer Straub, and a host of other notable creators, have attended the Emerald City Comicon. Straub was part of a webcomic business panel together with Brad Guigar (Evil Inc.), Robert Khoo (Penny Arcade), Scott Kurtz (PvP) and Bill Barnes (Unshelved. Unfortunately Straub found the panel somewhat disappointing.
  

  Emerald City was a great con, but the panel was a great… lame thing. The trouble was that we didn’t talk about much business, and the con-installed moderator was kinda like “so what’s a webcomic? What’s your favorite color?”

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Miscellaneous News

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Interviews

• Publishers’ Weekly interviews Nicholas Gurewitch of Perry Bible Fellowship fame. Dark Horse, who seem to be keeping a close eye on webcomics lately, is publishing a hardcover collection slated for August with an initial print run of 10 000.

BUSINESS

• PW:The Beat has the pressrelease from IGN about their new venture selling downloadable comics from publisher Top Cow.
  

  Pricing for Top Cow Comics on Direct2Drive will be similar to the volume pricing offered for Top Cow’s recent Compendium collections, as well as and other trade collections. Top Cow’s backlist will also be offered through Direct2Drive, with material up to a year old available for download.

REVELATION OF THE DAY

• I was rereading the Time’s article on webcomics when I realized that Penny Arcade is now up to a staff of eight people, last figure I heard was five but that was a while ago. Not bad for a company whose core business is a three times a week comic strip and blog.

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INTERVIEWS

• Newsarama interviews Kean Soo, creator of Jellaby which started out as a webcomics, but is scheduled to be published in print by Disney's "Hyperion for Kids" impring.
• Comicsnob interviews Michael Poe and Hilary Hatch of Caffeine Angels Studio and Errant Story.

BUSINESS

• Zach Miller's Joe and Monkey has been picked up for online syndication by GoComics according to a recent news post.
• Have you checked out the trailer for the Penny Arcade game yet? In a news post Gabe talks about the game, hinting that it will sell for less than $20 and be a RPG/Adventure.

AWARDS

• Gene Yang's American Born Chinese continues to garner critical acclaim with a nomination for a Reuben awards.

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