Derik Badman, comics creator and comics essayist, notes the fifth anniversary of his blog this week. Derik is one of the smarter writers about comics I’ve read and it has been great to publish some of his work here at ComixTalk. Go check out his blog if you haven’t before and read his current comic project, Things Change: The Metamorphoses Comics.
MANGA MANGA MANGA!
The Comics Reporter has an interview with Viz’s Senior Editorial Director, Elizabeth Kawasaki on the recently announced webcomic strategy for TheRumicWorld.
NO LONGER QUITE SO PRECIOUS METAL
is anyone still interested in Platinum? Apparently so – The Beat points to somebody who read through that company’s latest corporate report and it looks like they’re 20 million in the red. Did they ever actually have a profitable quarter? And no shocker, Wowio is pretty much dead too. With today’s economy — call me back when your company can blow at least a couple billion.
AWARDS
Digital Strips reports that Spike won a bunch of the Stumptown Awards (including for webcomic) for Templar, Arizona, and Ellie Connelly creator Indigo Kelleigh got a mystery award. Okay!
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Yay – new Hate Song. Also secret project from KC and Fred no longer secret – it’s available at IndyPlanet here.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 YOUTUBE VIDEOS
James Kochalka linked to a 3D mockup of his own cartoon alter ego.
The sponsorship for ComixTalk is EMPTY! Fill it up (cheaply) here.
WRITING
Writing Excuses Watches the Watchmen — a good 15 minute podcast discussing the strength and weakness in the writing of The Watchmen comic.
ART
Jim Zubkavich has a tutorial on how he gets a soft line effect.
REVIEWS
Mr. Myth reviews Erfworld.
Comicsmix reviews Least I Could Do.
INTERVIEW
Daily Cross Hatch interviews Brian Brown of Bellen!.
Excerpted from Newsarama coverage of the Avatar Press panel at the FX International Show:
[Editor-in-Chief William] Christensen indicated that Avatar is planning to follow-up FreakAngels with other web projects. He couldn’t leak it yet, saying that they wanted to make sure they had enough inventory so they can debut it with a lot of issues in the can. They handle web comics differently, as they actually pay all the talent involve. So they aren’t going to switch over to doing all the comics as webcomics, since finances would never permit it. Freak Angels has obviously worked well, but they aren’t going to flood the webcomic market. Avatar will launch something later this year. Christensen said that they do have tens of thousands of fans reading the webcomic every week, but the finances behind it are still a little untested.
There are a few interesting details in this NYTimes article on how Randall Monroe teamed up with the founder of Reddit to publish his upcoming xkcd book. The article also makes too much of the "a book? based on web stuff?" angle that probably wouldn't occur to anyone under 50, but at least it follows that with some succint coverage of some of the reasons why people might want books based on web content.
Musicslu is a website that provides a handy solution for pre-selling an album of music. It’s nothing magic — get a bunch of fans to pre-commit to a certain amount of cash and once that number is reached everyone pays in. Artist makes some income, fans get new stuff, nasty pirate type issues avoided.
At first it struck me that this site might provide a model to make it easier for more comic creators to pre-sell books based on their comics but as I noodled over it I wonder if this kind of approach might be a way to make it more feasible to sell webcomics over the web. Here’s how it could work. First – this doesn’t replace the values of free webcomics — you couldn’t pursue this approach without already having webcomics out there for free (with the possible exception for those artists already famous). But if you wanted to start a second project online this might be the way to see if there’s sufficient interest from your fans to devote the time to it.
This sounds like it might be interesting — in this episode, the hosts of Writing Excuses tackle the writing in The Watchmen.
Rumiko (Inuyasha, Ranma 1/2) Takahashi’s new manga series will be released in weekly installments simultaneously in the US and Japan. And the US version? It will be available as a free webcomic.
Instantaneous release of the manga in both English and Japanese is all by itself pretty big news.
Johnanna Draper Carlson asks "When did Girlamatic die?" — and creator Tara Tallan replies "Girlamatic isn’t quite dead… there are several comics that still update (mostly) weekly, such as Gypsy!, Faery Underground, Five Star, and also mine, Galaxion."
It does seem fairly clear though that Joey Manley (aka ComicSpace Inc) has largely given up on the original webcomics anthology model, even though four such sites remain in various stages of operation: Modern Tales, girlamatic.com, Graphic Smash and serializer.net.
The Comics Reporter has a list of the nominees for the Stumptown Comic Fest Trophy Award nominees. Nominees comes from artists exhibitiing at the event (and are being run this year by Shannon Wheeler):
Outstanding Webcomic
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