Pandora: End of Days is a digital comic from Real Interface Studio available for download to your computer and also for most mobile e-reader devices, tablets, and smart phones with the barnesandnoble.com's NOOK App or on Amazon.com’s Kindle. There's a short promotional website for the comic but unfortunately it plays music without asking (you can turn it off by clicking on "off" at the bottom of the page).
It's a zombie manga.
Indigo Kelleigh has launched a Kickstarter campaign for 124 page graphic novel version of his Victorian adventure comic Ellie Connelly and the Eye of the Vortex. Ellie Connelly, her friend Henry Button, and her Uncle Everett must race to discover the location of a legendary vortex of mystical energy, before the dark and mysterious Mystic Legion can take control of it for their own malevolent purposes! An adventure in the mold of Indiana Jones and Tintin, the first 32 pages have been published online.
Kelleigh's Kickstarter goal is to raise money to cover his living expenses for an entire year to complete Eye of the Vortex. He will continue posting the newly completed pages on the website for free (in both English and French), and will also release the ebook issues when they're completed.
Box Brown has a kickstarter campaign going to fund Retrofit Comics launch plans to publish 17 32-page floppy-style comics by 17 of the best comic artists in the business. It's specifically aimed at getting indie comics back into the floppy format and giving artists a chance to do smaller stories and experiment. The list of creators is awesome and includes folks such as Retrofit plans to release books monthly from September 2011 to January 2013. James Kochalka; Colleen Frakes; Joe Decie; Tom Hart; Liz Baillie; Noah Van Sciver; Jason Turner among others.
The Harvey Award nominees have been released and in the category of BEST ONLINE COMICS WORK, the nominees are:
Final ballots are due to the Harvey Awards by Saturday, August 6, 2011. Voting is open to anyone professionally involved in a creative capacity within the comics field. The ceremony and banquet for the 2011 Harvey Awards will be held Saturday night, August 20th at the Baltimore Comic-Con.
As long as I am an American citizen and American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write and to publish whatever I please on any subject.
– Elijay Lovejoy
Elijay Lovejoy was a real life abolistionist and newspaper editor who died in Alton, Illinois at the hands of a mob intent on squelching his right to a free press. Lovejoy was in Illinois because a mob had attacked and destroyed three press during his tenure as an editor in St Louis, Missouri. The Death of Elijay Lovejoy by Noah Van Sciver seemed a good book to tackle for a review on the day we celebrate the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights that ultimately flows from the establishment of the United States of America.
If you like the comic SMBC you are probably already a fan of the comedy troupe SMBC Theatre (both share Zach Weiner). SMBC Theatre is now running a kickstarter campaign to raise some scratch for some higher production value web series. Just think what kind of explosions these guys could come up with if they had a few bucks to spend!
Did I mention I have a fairly active tumblr blog too? Right now I'm enjoying messing around with that. Follow me and let me know if you have a tumblr blog I should be following. Did anyone get an invite to Google+? I guess Randall Monroe sums up my sense of Google Wave Buzz Plus pretty well.
INTERVIEWS
Moonlighting Syndrome: Eric has a post up at Websnark about the romantic(?) comedy comic Treading Ground and it's dangerous flirtations with a Romantic Comedy Tension Resolution Point.
COMICS IS NOT CORRELATION: Google commissioned a comic from Manu Cornet to explain it's new Google Correlation tool.
MILESTONES: The Drawn Blog notes Pat Grant has completed his webcomic Blue.
HYPE: Check out lots new good stuff on the web including Emily Carroll’s The Prince & The Sea and Dov Torbin’s The Revolution Will Be Televised. For more hype check out The Beat's open thread on webcomics to read.
CRAFT: The Drawn blog points to the Animation Archive's free resources section on their site and Tracy J Butler's (Lackadaisy Cats) tips on character drawing.
Summer vacation! This is the one day of the year when I really really wish I was still a kid getting out of school… So while my posting on ComixTalk the first half of 2011 has been a touch irregular (compared to the last decade!) I picked up my tumblr blog again (inspired by the return of Websnark) and have been posting there. It's a bit different focus than just comics (but still comics heavy) but still you might want to check it out (my tumblr blog tweets too so you can also just follow me there).
OPINION IS JUST ONION + PI: OMFG – Brian McFadden will be making comics for the NY Times. The first one is up online here and he’s onboard for the gig for a couple of months. I met Brian like a decade ago — an extremely nice guy with buckets of talent. I'm looking forward to reading his work for the NY Times.
HOW MANY PLATES CAN KRIS STRAUB SPIN: Kris Straub wrote a post about the long list of comics and webvideo projects he's working on. A lot of people may now think of Kris as Scott Kurtz's partner in (comedy) crime but this post will give you a good sense of the many projects he's put out to the public over the last decade. The post makes it sound like Straub will be putting F Chords back on hiatus again which is a bummer — it's the comic of his I've liked the most. I think that's because Kris has sometimes had a tendency towards meta humor and just more complicated stuff with somewhat higher-brow references and the two main characters in F Chords really balanced against that. These two dudes are well defined and for me at least, their emotions struck me as the most human Straub has done — I think they are identifiable in ways that Starslip just doesn't offer. Also I drew some fan art!
DC CONS – INTERVENTION and SPX: Intervention 2011 is getting more expensive after July 1 when the pre-registration rate jumps from $35 for the full 3 days to $40. And time is running out for you to submit your work to the Ignatz Awards which are presented at SPX. If your comic work was or will be released between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011, you’re eligible! More details here.
HYPE: I just ran across B. (Brian?) Patrick's Akimbo Comics which is often funny in a darkly cynical, blunt way. Definitely worth checking out (I'd start at the last one and work backwards).
LEGAL BEAGLE: This review of DC and the SIegel heirs competing claims to the character of Superboy is interesting. Author Jeff Trexler is a lawyer and does a good job of explaining things here.
HYPE2: Darryl Cunningham presents a comic explaining the theory of evolution. Cunningham is a good writer but I didn't think this was one of his better comic efforts. I thought the visuals were awfully static and not particularly inventive. Still if you need a handy reference guide to some of the basic arguments in favor of evolution, this does the trick nicely (print out and save for your next Thanksgiving dinner with that one opinionated uncle…)
So ICANN the folks who brought you such hits as .mobi and .name have changed the rules to let anyone pay for anything to be a top level domain name. Hello ipod.apple and burger.mcdonalds and… gabe.pennyarcade?
Prose and Poetry: A couple of stories of interest. The New York covers self-published author Amanda Hocking who has recently signed a deal with publisher St. Martins. Clement Vincent writes about his experience with folks pirating his new poetry volume. There are more serious comments to be made and possible parallels for webcomics but Hocking's books remind me of a certain series in Shannon Garrity's Skin Horse comic and are poets seriously worried about anything but obscurity?
KICKSTOP: John Gallagher's kickstarter effort for a boxed collection of four all ages comic books fell well short of its $10,000 goal for funding. Over at the ComicsDC blog, Gallagher asks several questions about ways to restructure the fundraising drive to be more successful a second go round.
WEBSNARKILY MARKILY DOO: Eric and Wednesday are back with a new Websnark blog and Eric is writing up a storm this week. I've always liked Eric's writing – kind of a long-distance geek Algonquin roundtable.
iWEBCOMICS: Sean Kleefeld covers an early digital comics effort from the 90's — Marvel's CyberComics. Douglass Wolk covers the much more recent iPad and asks if it will recolutionize or destroy the comic book biz.
ALOHA MEANS PENGUIN: CBR interviews Berke Breathed about the latest volume of the Bloom County collection and grills him about his role in the Mars Needs Moms movie. Look video below!:
I saw X-Men: First Class this weekend. It was a lot better than I expected and one of the few superhero movies with big casts to handle all of them fairly well. Hands-down funniest cameo of the decade (so far…). Still can someone explain to me why they need to muck around so much with the history of X-Men? Would the movie not have worked with actual first X-Men Scott Summers instead of brother-come-lately Alex Summers?
AWARDS: Emily Carroll wins this year's Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding webcomics creator for His Face All Red, Dream Journals, The Death of José Arcadio, Out the Door, The Hare’s Bride. The nominations were all top-notch.
AN END?: No secret that there's trouble in Webcomics Nation this year… from the awful conversion of Comicspace.com to a spam-clogged wordpress platform to the complete lack of new announcements (including the lack of any news on the longer rumored Duke Nukem Forever webcomicsnation 2.0 platform) you can now add almost losing the graphicsmash.com URL. Fleen took a snapshot of the not-renewed URL which along with this post on the upcoming expiration of other key webcomic URLs for that company may have led to a renewal of the graphicsmash.com URL.
AW YEAH!: Thanks Narbonic fans! — you've already met the Kickstarter goal for Shaenon Garrity to publish a two volume set of the ENTIRE run of Narbonic.
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