Wow – Ryan Estrada posted a clip from his "animate-a-movie-in-one-month-project" and it's pretty funny (is that Scott Kurtz doing the alien's voice?)! Let me echo Fleen's congrats with best wishes for finishing it up Ryan!
2011? Yep it's another year, another decade. Another Monday…
ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG AT HEART: I don't think I realized Zach "SMBC" Weiner had a personal blog before (THE WEINERWORKS) – his posts on becoming a webcartoonist are pretty interesting. Zach has a level of self-awareness and criticial self-assessment that is enviable. The most recent post in the series covers his decision to go back to school to study SCIENCE! (part one, part two, part three). It kind of stings me a bit as while I've learned a LOT from reading comics and writing about comics, I haven't actually consistently made comics in awhile now. Here's something from Zach that I will print out and tape to the wall, "Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but lack of hard work almost certainly guarantees failure."
INTERVIEW: Tom Spurgeon interviews Andrew Farago, webcomics creator, manager of the the Cartoon Art Museum, and husband of Shaenon Garrity.
iWEBCOMICS: Comics for the Kindle? – Tom Mason has some suggestions.
Random Plug for 2010: The crossover storyline of last year I'm going to call for this one between GWS and SP.
KICK START MY ART: Michael Gianfrancesco just launched a Kickstarter project to fund a new comic anthology called Show and Tell, a Comic Anthology about Learning and Teaching. This anthology is part of a larger project — the New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference, which will be held March 26th in Providence, RI. Guests at the con will include Raina Telgemeier and Tracy White. The editorial board for the anthology includes Michael Gianfrancesco, Dr. Jennifer Cook, Heather Bryant, Dan Mazur, Caitlin Plovnick, and Alexander Danner.
MAILBAG: Ben Haugen writes, "If you get a second, check out saggynutbag.com It's only a couple years old, but it's starting to get some momentum all on its own… I don't do any advertising for it other than word of mouth and with possibly the worst domain name on the internet, most people wouldn't come across it (unless they found it while searching for something else)." Okay — a quick review of the most recent comics. It's stick figure art so it's all on the writing of the jokes and they are (a) all offensive and (b) some are kind of brutally funny, but also I thought some really missed. It's no Crying Macho Man but it's sense of humor is in the same general place. Worth checking out if you like that kind of humor.
Happy Birthday to me — a rainy day reading webcomics and breaking in a new sketchbook with sketches while looking @ webcomics. Still trying to figure out where and how to focus on Comix Talk in 2011 but I promise I won't turn it into my personal sketch blog…
It's been a heck of a fun 2010 at ComixTALK for me, but also exhausting. Soloing a blog isn't easy — it's not my job (I have a whole 'nother life as a lawyer from 9 to 6 PM, at least, and being a husband and dad (and starting and stopping every other project offline and on that caught my short attention span this year). So I'm not sure what's in store for the site next year. I'm brainstorming and contemplating — if you have any bright ideas to add to the mix feel free to say hello (xerexes@gmail.com or tweet xerexes).
NOT WEBCOMICS: Derik said this went well when he swapped in some CDs for stuff. Anyone have a bad experience with iPODmeister?
INTERVIEW: Tom Spurgeon with an indepth interview with Dylan Horrocks.
CODE: I'm not sure why someone would want to run a comic off of VBulletin software but this looks like a project trying to do just that.
LOCAL: Mike Rhode links to everything he wrote about comics in DC for the Washington City Paper this year.
SOME RANDOM WEBCOMICS TO BE THANKFUL FOR
A little holiday cheer from Reality Amuck (click here if you don't get the reference)
BEST OF 2010: The MTV Geek blog posts its best digital comics and webcomics of 2010. Wired's ALT TEXT posts the Best Webcomics of 2010.
INTERVIEW: Tom Spurgeon interviews journal comicker Dustin Harbin.
MAILBAG: Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre writes that he is crowdsourcing which storyline to focus on in 2011. More details here — he's posted sample chapters from three different projects (the three samples are relatively short- 5 pages, 19 pages, and 9 pages).
AROUND THE BLOGS: Sophia Wiedeman draws a webcomic for The Daily Cross Hatch. I've reviewed a couple of Sophia's mini comics — both of which were very interesting reads.
Happy Holidays everyone! This comic above is by Ape Lad (for Boing Boing)
COMICS PRESS: Today's the last day of Journalista 2.0 and Dirk Deppey posted a long list of great news sources (something he also did when Journalista 1.0 ended). No real details on why Fantagraphics/TCJ laid him off other than comments that they couldn't afford a full-time blogger. If so that's a shame as TCJ's embrace of the web in recent years has certainly made it more accessible — I guess the question remains if its made it more sustainable.
MERRY HOLIDAYUS!: The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas is probably the funniest new Christmas thing you'll experience this year (h/t Lauren Davis)
I will be looking for guest bloggers in January — if blogging about comics and computers (or just comics) sounds interesting, drop me an email (xerexes AT gmail) or a tweet (xerexes).
MILESTONE: Dean Haspiel has a great tribute comic to Harvey Pekar who passed away this year. (h/t Mike Rhode).
AWARDS: MTV Splashpage posts its best of 2010 including Best Webcomic, Best New Webcomic and Best Webcomic Book.
COMICS PRESS: TCJ, the cranky old hipster uncle of comics criticism announces a couple of changes: Dirk Deppey is leaving and presumably the all-encompassing comics link blog Journalista! will end tomorrow. That is sad although Deppey's tweetstream is pretty upbeat about it all. I really appreciated Deppey's work. Journalista! in both of its incarnations was one of the first blogs from old-school comics journalism to take webcomics seriously. And it was complete as hell – there was very little he missed.
Also I saw news that TCJ will be launching a new blog called The Panelists which will feature among others, former ComixTalk contributor Derik Badman. I'm really excited for Derik – from almost the get-go of reading and posting his contributions here, I've thought TCJ would be lucky to have him writing for them. Despite my little dig at TCJ above it is the place to go for rigorous, in-depth writing on comic – academic but still accessible.
ComixTalk will have a couple of quiet weeks to end the year. Posting will be sporadic while I hibernate (and possibly plan for new things to try on this site next year). In the meantime, read the ComixTalk 2010 Roundtable article; vote on how you read and track webcomics; and write up a post about how your decade (around 2000-2010) in webcomics and let me know so I can add it to this post.
Also it's been awhile since we've had a useful discussion on webhosting for webcomics. I really lucked out this year finding Orange Fort — it's been a pretty uneventful year for me hosting-wise (which is what you want!) (I don't know if OF is taking on new clients but I would highly recommend them if they are). I also still have a Dreamhost account which actually works just fine (although I've had issues with Drupal on Dreamhost in the past) but I use it really more for backup and experimenting. So what recommendations would you give for webhosting? Has your host been awesome? Awesomely bad?
Jon "Calamity Jones" Morris blogs about Stuart Immonen's amazing work from the nineties — presenting superhero and villain origin stories in the style of a Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip.
People should turn this into a thing — I would love to see more work in this style.
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