May Cover Art from AP Furtado
I love the new cover art from AP. Furtado! How many characters can you name?
Author: Xaviar Xerexes
Color E-Ink Getting Closer?
Boing Boing has a link to a new color e-ink technology that looks interesting. One step closer to digital comics nerdvana?
What is Comic Feast?
What is Comic Feast?
Acording to founder and CEO Josh Elder’s Facebook page, it’s a "a digital comics distribution and retail platform."
Friday Funtacular
EVENTS
Tomorrow’s Free Comic Book Day and while digital comics are not officially invited to play, I’ve been seeing various webcomics making special offers anyway. UCLICK (btw is UCLICK really "the #1 distributor of comics on the web and on mobile phones" as they claim?) is offering the first issues of several of titles for free on the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch, beginning Friday afternoon, May 1, until Saturday, May 2, at 11:59 p.m. (PST).
REVIEWS
DIgital Strips reviews Frequently Asked Questions, the latest print collection from the comic Unshelved by writer Gene Ambaum and artist Bill Barnes.
Derik Badman reviews the print collection, Beanworld Book 1: Wahoolazuma.
INTERVIEWS
Daily Cross Hatch has the first half of an interview with Gene Yang up (and another part of its multipart interview with Box Brown.)
JUSTIFY SOMEONE ELSE’S HYPE
Eric Trauttman, Brandon Jerwa, David Messina, and Mirco Pierfederici are launching a webcomic called Wide Awake – a horror/adventure tale that got its proof-of-concept in the second “Popgun” anthology. They will have a six-page teaser available on Free Comic Book Day this Saturday.
AWARDS
Tom Spurgeon encourages you to "Vote Early, Vote Often, Vote Eisners" – voting on the nominees for the 2009 Eisner Awards lasts until June 15th. More information is here.
Around the World in Several Blogs
Comics Alliance notes the Penny Arcade comic on the recent "no gays in Star Wars" controversy…
Matthew Reidsma Interviews Marek Bennett
Nice interview between two talented cartoonists: Matthew Reidsma (High Maintenance Machine) and Marek Bennett (Mimi’s Doughnuts):
Piracy Vs. Obscurity
I think you have to be on Facebook to see Matthew Reidsma’s post on the benefits of online exposure so I’ll excerpt a key bit here:
Here is what that I have learned, even though I had already heard it repeated a thousand times since Tim O’Reilly first wrote it: the problem for any creative type isn’t piracy, it is obscurity. When I stopped posting comics online, my mini comic sales dropped about 60%. Let me repeat that: When I stopped giving away my comics for free online, 60% of the people who had previously given me money to read those same comics on paper stopped giving me money to read them on paper.
UPDATE: the whole post is also at Reidsma’s Livejournal and the whole thing is worth a read.
TUESDAY MAXI-TWEET
Coming to the end of April — there’s a great cover from AP Furtado coming up for May. The sponsorship slot (upper left hand corner of every page here) is open and cheap. I’m tweeting at twitter.com/xerexes and in my backyard. Remember anyone can post here at ComixTALK — just log-in to your account here and post a "talk post" — well-written and interesting posts will get promoted to the front page. If you’re already blogging somewhere else about comics it’s easy to set-up an auto-import of those posts to your account at ComixTalk (log-in and click on the "add a feed" link). And now the newsy stuff:
COLLECTIVE ‘LECTIVE WHAT’S YOUR… WHAT RHYMES WITH THAT ANYWAYS?
Over at webcomics.com Brad Guigar answers a question about artist collectives. I think the most critical thing to remember is that a group is no more than the sum of the people involved. Make sure you can work with everyone before you commit time to a group.
JUSTIFY SOMEONE ELSE’s HYPE
A comic from Maira Kalman covering a visit to the U.S. Supreme Court titled, May It Please the Court. (h/t to Journalista! and Scott McCloud.)
CRAFT
Journalista! linked to a recent video tutorial by Mark Crilley on "how to draw a manga-style eye" and Crilley’s series of video tutorials is a nice free resource.
UNDEAD TREES
Dylan Meconis’ BITE ME is now available in a single edition printed object you can purchase. Great, funny story about vampires in the French Revolution
COPYRIGHT
Copyright is a really interesting topic in these days as technology allows for more and more creative re-use of material that seems to be remain under perpetual copyright (see this Techdirt post for a discussion of some copyright holders view that copyright should last forever minus one day). While I’m sure many creators instinctively support copyright, I think many webcomic creators also now deeply understand how a more flexible approach to utilizing their copyright rights actually works to their benefit. And then of course there are those webcomics that are built on someone else’s copyrighted material, although in some cases the webcomic goes so far beyond the original work you wonder if they could make the argument that it’s transformative (which btw is the crux of the current copyright dispute between the A.P. and Shep Fairey over his iconic Obama/Hope poster.)
WIKIWATCH
This is weirdly interesting – Wikimedia (parent of Wikipedia) is suing a group of artists who were using Wikipedia for their art project. Maybe some webcomic should have thought of this!
NOT COMICS
GI JOE Resolute – scripted by Warren Ellis himself was pretty nifty for it’s less stupid take on G.I. Joe than the original 80’s-ish era saturday morning cartoon series. Ellis points to the finale on youtube.
Awesome FREE! Event on Maryland’s Eastern Shore
I can’t go but wow I wish I could – PEN is putting on an event featuring Emmanuel Guibert from France, Kate Beaton from Canada, and Robbi Behr, Chad Parmenter, and Matthew Swanson from the United States. The panel is titled "The New Literature of Graphic Narrative" and it is free and open to the public.
When: Saturday, April 25, 2009: 2–7 p.m.
Where: The Rose O’Neill Literary House: 407 Washington Avenue, Chestertown, MD
Professor Cohn Requests Your Assistance
Neil Cohn, creator, professor and Visual Language scholar (and ComixTalk contributor) has a small request to make of you, the ComixTalk reader:
I have a comics related experiment online and would be extremely grateful for your help. This experiment consists of making judgements about various created comic strips, and takes roughly 20 minutes. This project needs to be completed by next Tuesday (4/28), so help before then would be greatly appreciated.
Participation enters you into a drawing for a $50 Gift Certificate to Best Buy (either online or in store).
The study is online at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.
Cowbirds In Love
Justify some FRIDAY hype for me:
Cowbirds In Love by Sanjay Kulkarni is stick figure art with wacky funny writing. Definitely start at the current strips and work backwards through the archives – I’m much less sold on the early stuff than the more recent work (and there are almost 500 strips now). (h/t to twitterin’ Wednesday White)
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