Author: Joey Manley

The price of James Kochalka’s American Elf will go up on January 1, 2004 for ModernTales.com subscribers. This price change does not affect current subscribers (or anyone who subscribes before January 1).

Before January 1, any current Modern Tales subscriber who adds American Elf to his/her subscription is able to do so for only $1/month. After January 1, any MT subscriber who chooses to add American Elf will pay full price ($1.95/month). Continue Reading →

The new webcomics-specific hosting service from Joey Manley (publisher of Modern Tales, serializer, Graphic Smash and girlamatic.com) will launch in mid to late January, 2004. Late last night/early this morning, bleary-eyed from coding, but feeling victorious and smug after finally tracking down bug number 12,038,999, Manley posted the pricing and service package levels. Continue Reading →

The Modern Tales syndication service allows webmasters to place a constantly-updating version of their favorite comics in the Modern Tales family on their own websites. At any given moment, the latest episode of the syndicated comic will appear within your own web page. Your readers will be drawn back to your website to follow the comic (which is, of course, the same reason that newspapers and magazines carry comics). Some percentage of those readers will follow the link back to Modern Tales or one of its sister sites, and eventually choose to subscribe, to gain access to the archives (which is, in turn, analogous to buying a Dilbert paperback). So: your site gets more repeat visits, and our site gets a stream of new readers who would never have found us before. Everybody wins.

Not every Modern Tales family comic is available for syndication. In some cases, the format of a particular series might make it technically inappropriate for plopping into the middle of another website. In other cases, the cartoonists themselves have not chosen to put their work on the syndication cart (the artists own all the rights to their work, and have full power to decide what happens to it). In other cases, a comic may be cancelled or completed (rendering syndication meaningless, since there will be no updates for your site).

A complete list of Modern Tales family comics currently available for syndication, as well as a little snippet of code for each comic, can be found here:

http://www.moderntales.com/tooncast_list.php

All you have to do is copy the code snippet, and then paste it into your own web page’s HTML code. Note that Modern Tales syndication will not work in environments where Javascript is disallowed.

While we don’t require registration or prior approval for use of this feature, our artists do appreciate knowing where and when their comics will appear. Be sure to pop us a note and let us know! We might just link to your site in our newsletter (um, no promises)!

Joey
www.moderntales.com Continue Reading →

Charles Brownstein, comics journalist and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Director, has agreed to create a series of interviews with Modern Tales/serializer/etc. cartoonists for the Modern Tales Family newsletter. Charles owns the rights to the interviews, so you might see these pop up, in longer form, elsewhere.

The first one, an interview with Tom Hart, about the transition he has made to webcomics, his feelings about how the minicomics scene and the webcomics scene compare, and his aesthetic agenda for serializer.net, the anthology website he edits for Modern Tales, is available for free here:

http://www.moderntales.com/series.php?name=newsletter&view=current

Joey
www.moderntales.com Continue Reading →

Modern Tales, the leading commercial webcomics service, announced today the launch of its seventh subscription-based anthology publication, Graphic Smash — featuring “action-oriented comics”.

Modern Tales publisher Joey Manley said, “People assume that comics will be centered around action. You think of comics, you think of Superman, or the Hulk. That’s because comics — the marriage of words and sequential drawings — does action very, very well. Graphic Smash is here to prove that the best action comics don’t necessarily rely on decades-old franchises, and that it’s time to put away your father’s and grandfather’s comics, and step into the new century. Unlike most printed comic books, the features on Graphic Smash range widely, in terms of genre, art style, character types, and story possibilities. This isn’t just a bunch of seventy-year-old superheroes … though there are superheroes in the mix. This is something completely different.” Continue Reading →

Ignatz and two-time Eisner Award nominee Roger Langridge (“Fred the Clown”, “Legends of the Dark Knight”) has posted an original, world-premiere graphic novel, The Thirteenth Floor, on Modern Tales. Subscribers can read all of it.

To read The Thirteenth Floor, whether you’re at work or not:

http://www.moderntales.com/longplay

To read an interview with Roger Langridge about The Thirteenth Floor, conducted by Joe Zabel:

http://www.moderntales.com/series.php?name=newsletter&view=current

The interview, of course, is free.

Click the “read more” link to see a sample page of “The Thirteenth Floor.” Continue Reading →

GraphicSmash, the new action/adventure-themed webcomics site from Modern Tales, edited by T Campbell of Fans fame, is now available in pre-launch mode, with daily previews of strips from the official line-up (including a few that have been kept secret up until now). The site launches fully on September 15 — until then, stop by every day to get a sense of what you’ll be getting when you subscribe!

www.graphicsmash.com

Continue Reading →

The Comics Journal board is pretty well-known for being a raucous place, home of both the genuine elite thinkers in comics (who are few and far between, there as anywhere) and the snotty art-brat. They hardly ever take note of webcomics. When they do, the results are always interesting.

Here’s a thread about Drew Weing’s serializer.net series Pup.

http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubb/Forum1/HTML/005617.html

Joey
www.moderntales.com Continue Reading →