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Open Soapbox: The Immediacy of the Web

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I’ll admit it. When Paul Daly, my creative partner on Athena Voltaire, suggested that I contact Joey Manley and Chris Mills about pitching our feature to the Modern Tales family, I viewed it as a stepping stone to getting Athena in print.

Somewhere along the way, my thinking began to change. Don’t get me wrong; I would dearly love to see our heroine in print, but now I look at the two delivery systems (print and web) as synergistic rather than mutually exclusive.

There’s something about the immediacy of the web.

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Satan and Webcomics by Bill Roundy

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The Devil.

How scary is he, really?

Okay: war, death, disease, famine, telemarketers – they’re all bad… but Satan himself? He doesn’t seem to be doing much recently. Watching The Exorcist these days, the 70s fashions inspire more terror than the pea-soup-vomit or the little-girl-blasphemy. In the face of real-life monsters like terrorists and serial killers, the cackling flames of the Devil can seem downright quaint. Bottom line is that, in this secular age, we just don’t think much about Lucifer anymore.

But he’s all over the webcomics. Continue Reading →

Juxtapose This: While Visions of Pumpkin Guts Danc’d In My Head

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I’ve always been a Hallowe’en kind of kid. Christmas, yes, fine, but Christmas doesn’t give you the opportunity to coat yourself to the elbows with pumpkin gore. Nor, in anticipation of 12/25, does one feel authorized to spend large amounts of money on cosmetics that aren’t used in a normal social context anywhere excepting the better geisha bars, and maybe some parts of Dixieland. Yes, Hallowe’en is a green light for every morbid-minded, artsy, exhibitionist kook to inflict their aesthetic on a world that otherwise has very little place for people whose favorite movies universally involve some combination of Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, and Johnny Depp 1. Continue Reading →

Dorothy Gambrell’s New Adventures of Death, reviewed by Matt Trepal

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Is Death a popular guy? Does he have lots of friends? Does he enjoy his job of collecting the souls of the newly deceased and ushering them to their final reward, or does he secretly yearn for something that makes him feel better about himself? These might be, and sometimes are, the issues covered in Dorothy Gambrell’s Modern Tales strip, The New Adventures of Death.
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Why Do Online Comics by Iain Hamp

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As I sat back looking at some of my work recently, trying to figure out how to spontaneously get remarkably better at writing believable, effective dialogue, I glanced over and noticed a journal where I keep some of my poetry. My mind strayed back to my community college creative writing classes, where I read those poems in front of twenty or thirty people and then got critiqued by each person individually.

The most amazing thing to me about poetry is that thirty people can read a poem and have thirty completely different reactions to it. Everyone goes into a poem with different backgrounds and emotions, and draws whatever they need from it at the time. Looking back at the various panels of artwork I’d drawn, devoid of any word balloons, I realized that comics have at least as much potential as poems to fulfill those basic emotional and psychological desires. Continue Reading →

A Profile of Filler: The Webcomic At Suck.com (The History Of Online Comics: Part 2.5)

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1999.

I was sitting in front of a monitor, 9 to 5, at an Internet company I profoundly hated to pay for art classes I was finding useless. My dreams of print comic books were crumpling to ash, and I saw the Internet as just one more reason they failed. They were stealing eyeballs from the comic book store. Bastards.

And every day– every day– I had to listen to my boss, the Jeff Bezos of Savannah, Georgia, feed his clients the same old hype-lines that pumped everyone's expectations for the Internet to the ceiling: "Oh, yeah. We can do that. If you can dream it, we can do it. This is the future." Continue Reading →