Author: Xaviar Xerexes

January is going to be like one of those "this ol' haus" shows on PBS or TLC  all month long as I patch, prod and pull apart things at the site.  I didn't get a lot of feedback to my blegs from you lot on what you like or dislike here at ComixTalk so I'm left to my own devices which is…usually a mixed bag in terms of results.  But let's have fun with this, shall we?  I'll be putting up notes on site status to keep everyone on their toes updated on developments.

THESE RIDES ARE CURRENTLY NOT OPERATIONAL: auto-importing of blogs ; new user sign-ups

WEBCOMICS.COM
A surprisingly big story – Brad Guigar's sudden move of webcomics.com to a pay wall has been chattered about all week.  Brigid Alverson does another good job of rounding up all of the talking.  FLEEN interviewed the Guigarster where Brad describes the number of subscriptions purchased so far as “For a non-porn site, encouraging."

One wrinkle to this story is that there were third-party articles published at Webcomics.com — for those authors who want a non-pay wall home for those articles, give me a buzz (tweet xerexes or xerexes AT gmail) – ComixTalk would probably be a good home for them.

BUSINESS
Webcomic Marketing looks like a decent site that's been updating for a bit now.  The most recent post provides a Convention checklist from the creators of Steam Crow.

DIGITS
Drawn! points to this video demonstrating the "theoretical" Mag+ e-reader; Gizmodo covers the Skiff e-reader.

NEW WEBCOMIC
Dan Goldman launches a new webcomic, called Red Light Properties at Tor.com. Robot6 describes Red Light Properties is a "tropical-horror series" about a real estate firm in Miami Beach that cleans and sells "previously-haunted homes" to people who've lost their houses to foreclosure.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Brilliant twist on Calvin & Hobbes all this week from Scott Kurtz at PVP.  What a great start to webcomics this year.

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Brad Guigar's Webcomics.com adopts a $30 per year fee for access to (all?) new content and all of the archives.  Brigid Alverson has a good write-up of it here.  Webcomics.com has been an incredible resource and growing community over the last 12+ months.  It'll be interesting to see if this changes works.  I certainly wish Guigar luck — if this allows him to put more into the site and keep it growing than of course it's a success.

For what it's worth I'll have more to say about this and ComixTalk and all things webcomics in the days to come.

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So the X-clan is in the midst of its not-quite-annual West Coast swing. Spending a lovely day in Silicon Valley doing not much.  I’ll be at the Cartoon Art Museum in SF on Saturday afternoon.

UPDATE: Happy New Years to all.  Had a great day at the California National Academy of Science! Museum.

UPDATE2: Hey it’s mah birthday today tomorrow!  I’ll get back to real posts here sometime next week.

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Fleen got ahold of an internal Keenspot email laying out plans to change Keenspot’s business model and radically reduce the number of artists on its roster.  It raises as many questions as it answers about the future of Keenspot.

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Not a ton happening today so far; hope everyone is having a good week.  If you like the cover art for ComixTalk this month, The Guilded Age crew has got several wallpaper versions of it up for download.  I really love Erica's art on this comic.

DEAD TREES
Kazu Kibuishi reports that his book Copper has been spotted in stores now.

MILESTONES
Something Positive hit 8 years old this week.  Congrats to R.K. Milholland!

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Wapsi Square looks like they're reaching the battle with the big boss at the end of the game.

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I know I said I wasn’t going to do one of those "People of Webcomics" articles this year and I already called 2009 the year of Kate Beaton, but Meredith Gran would be right there on that list too.  Octopus Pie is a funny comic with fantastic characters and several great stories so far.  And that was all before the Holiday Special:

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Not sure how noticeable it was, but this was the first year ComixTalk was just me.  At the end of 2008, I decided to stop editing and "managing" contributors — not because it wasn’t interesting nor great for the site (the site had always had a group of contributors) but because I am overcommitted in life and was trying to rationalize my priorities to what I most wanted to spend time doing (I’m going through the same self-review end of this year too).  I’m lucky and unlucky — for me it’s almost all about choosing between lots of things I want to do – but some of them are "squeakier wheels" than others.  Soliciting, paying and working with materials from contributors was definitely a squeaky wheel.  It was a tough choice though — I really liked the range of voices and interests that we had with that "magazine" approach to  the site.  Still with the auto-import of outside blogging this year we still had a great mix of voices on the frontpage of ComixTalk.  (Thank you to everyone who agreed to that arrangement!).

Late in the year though I realized my hosting bills for 2008 were more than double (almost triple) what I thought I was paying so I have to figure out a better hosting arrangement for next year and think about what functions and content stays on the site and what goes. One immediate casuality until further notice is a lot of the auto-importing (because the way Media Temple charges, that was running up the bills).  But there are other "squeaky wheels" that I think have run their course at the site — for example, there won’t be "cover" art for the site anymore next year.

What, if anything about ComixTalk this year do think I ought to keep?  What do you care less if I ditch?  I think there’s plenty of other people doing a great job rounding up the webcomic and comics tech stories of the day now so I’ve made less and less of an effort to "link-blog" here; I think I will move even farther towards only writing about something if I really have something to add.  I may tinker with a blog or videocast (if I do, please be kind for at least while!); and I will push the calendar more next year.  I’m also interested in ways to find webcomics – there’s so much out there that it ain’t easy to find what you’d really like. I hope to try out some experiments in that area too.  If you can spare a few minutes to give me some feedback please do.  Thanks and happy holidays!

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One of the things that I was hoping someone would create for us is the perfect tool for reading webcomics — something where you easily could keep track of the webcomics you read, bookmark where you are in the archives, get notified of updates — all together in something really handy and easy to use.

I’ve used Piperka.net for a couple of years now for the bulk of my regular reading, but it’s far from perfect with its strange categorization scheme and a somewhat clunky interface.  Nevertheless I give a lot of credit to its creator Kari Pahula for building something useful and reliable.  I’d love a more rational way to tag comics, allow for organizing my reading around those tags, maybe add in the ability to rate comics so that I can prioritize my reading list by my own ratings.  Than maybe build in some social sharing tools?  If I could get recommendations froma community of readers based on what I’ve ranked highly I think it would help me find new stuff I’d really like.

I’m curious — do others see a need for something like this?  Am I missing some other obvious way to achieve my perfect reading/collecting tool with what already exists?

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Wow – almost the end of 2009 already?  Posting will be lightly lite like for the rest of the year here at ComixTalk.  

Can we just call it the year of Kate Beaton?  There’s almost zippy chance that I’ll be doing one of those "People of Webcomics" articles again this year, but if I did I can’t imagine not including her near the top.  Along those lines, Comics Alliance picked her book Never Learn Anything From History as its "Best Webcomic Collection" for 2009. 

SMALL SCREENS
The big news on small screens this week was the launch of a comics store for the Sony PSP handheld.  I don’t have a PSP myself, but here’s Gizmodo’s review of the Marvel comics reader for the PSP to give you an idea of it.

AWARDS
The Comics Riffs blog is asking its readers to pick the best comic of the decade.  This is the Washington Post’s "comics blog" so its readership is probably heavily skewed towards fans of newspaper comic strips and it shows in the nominations for a lot of newspaper comic "veterans" like BABY BLUES, BIZARRO, DILBERT, DOONESBURY and SHERMAN’S LAGOON.  But they also have the three best new(er) newspaper comic strips in there: GET FUZZY, PEARLS BEFORE SWINE, and CUL DE SAC.  Weirdly enough they also have one webcomic: GIRL GENIUS.  Weird not because GIRL GENIUS isn’t worthy (it’s a fantastic comic) but because I just can’t imagine how that is the one webcomic that most appealed to this crowd.

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