Author: Xaviar Xerexes

A big thanks to Chris Watkins for coming up with beautiful cover art for ComixTalk (and on short notice!).  Be sure to click on the "view the entire cover" button – this is one of the covers that best takes advantage of that part of the cover art.

Chris is the creator of the absolutely charming Odori Park, a webcomic about "Japanese Arisa Nishimori, from snowy Hokkaido, Japan, and American Colin Easton, from Suburbia, U.S.A., navigating the culture shocks of romance, parenthood, family, friends, and making a living in an ever shrinking world. Colin and Arisa run the used bookstore A Book By Its Cover, and live in an apartment above the shop along with "Sprout," their multi-lingual toddler son."

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Tyler Martin’s released the latest version of ComicPress, his webcomic theme for Wordpress. There’s a full list of the new features in this release at the ComicPress website.  They include (among others) things such as: 

• Customizable Menubar
• Post Heading Icons
• Author/User Pages
• Buy This Print Feature
• Members Only Content
• Numbered Pagination
• Graphic Comic Hovertext
• Calendar Wallpaper
• SWF (Flash) File Format Support

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Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues is an amazing animated movie that almost never got released due to copyright issues.  Paley has embraced a business strategy for it not unlike the typical webcomic approach.  To paraphrase Paley: "the content is free; fans buy containers." (h/t to TechDirt)

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Walt Disney Company is buying Marvel.  I think this won’t change much — just a consolidation of Marvel’s focus on exploiting its roster of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko/Chris Claremont/Etc created characters.

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Derek Kirk Kim, the creator of Same Difference and Other Stories, returns to the web by serializing – one panel a day – his new comic Tune at his website Lowbright.

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I hope everyone had a good week – I was mostly offline, enjoying the beach.  I got back to discover a new Jellaby comic from Kean Soo.  One of the best kid-friendly comics out there and always a pleasure to see a new one online.

It was also fun to see ComixTalk included in Ataraxi Theater’s "webcomic merit badges" it posted this week — one of them is the "Eye of Xerexes" — awarded for drawing a cover to ComixTalk.  And there were a lot of other good links you might want to catch up on:

INTERVIEWS
CBR had a good interview with Jon Rosenberg of Goats.
An interview with Brian McFadden of the topical webcomic Big Fat Whale.
The Daily Cross Hatch has the first part of its interview with Jordan Crane.

MILESTONES
Andrew Farago finishes the first huge arc of his webcomic William Bazillion.

BUSINESS
Former syndicated newspaper comic creator Michael Jantze announced he was starting up a new webcomic titled Rave On.  Why is this interesting in an era of many former print comic folks launching webcomics?  One, Jantze was an early defector from print, taking his comic The Norm to a pay-to-read model online.  I have not kept up with how that has gone for Jantze after some initial reporting, but perhaps it has gone well enough because he is using another pay-to-read model for this new webcomic Rave On.  Should be worth following up on.

DEAD TREES
A preview of the upcoming Act-I-Vate print collection.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Webcomic — Sixteen Miles to Merricks by Barnaby Ward.
Art — Robbi Rodriguez.

DESIGN
Brigid Alverson offers her thoughts on webcomic website design.

TOOLS
Comicrank looks like it might be an interesting twist on the comic ranking site model.

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You can find a list of all the Ignatz award nominees here at the SPX site.  The nominees for Outstanding Online Comic are:

• Bodyworld, Dash Shaw
• Danny Dutch, David King
• Thingpart, Joey Alison Sayers
• Vanessa Davis’s comics for Tablet
• Year of the Rat, Cayetano Garza

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BUSINESS
News that WOWIO has been bought from Platinum by Platinum CEO, Brian Altounian.  Um wow.  Someone not on vacation like myself should ask both Altounian and Platinum for comment on the following questions: Did the Platinum Board approve this purchase by Altounian in his individual capacity (and what’s the make-up of the Platinum Board – how many "outside" directors are there); What are the terms of the deal and was there any third-party evaluation of that deal (just how arms-length was this transaction) and finally, when is WOWIO and/or Platinum going to pay off its debt owed to content creators?

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Wow – great round up of online comic news from Tom Spurgeon here.  Not even going to excerpt, just hit the link.

Tom Spurgeon also announced that he was going to try and compile a list of the 100 greatest comics for this decade.  File your suggestions with him here.

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