Last week Clickwheel had a relaunch and a website revamp. A big part of the new design is "the dashboard" which does seem to make it easier to read and create comics. It also looks like they’ve incorporated the comics-creation site ComicBrush into Clickwheel. I am charging up my iPod and I hope to look around the site more this week and maybe offer more detailed thoughts but for now it looks pretty slick.
The press release follows after the jump:
Good year so far for Kazu Kibuishi – his graphic novel Amulet got nominated for an Eisner award (very good book and tween-teen appropriate); Amulet 2 is apparently past the proofs stage now – not sure of its publication date though; Flight 6, the anthology series he edits is coming this year as well (and features a new Daisy Kutter story from Kibuishi); and best of all: a new Copper comic out this week.
One of my handy "Google Alerts" alerted me to the end of Filibuster, an editorial-style webcomic by J.J. McCullough that has been running since 2001. McCullough writes that largely due to the low readership (he writes that he has 2000 regular readers based on Google Analytics) he is putting the comic on indefinite hiatus. Filibuster was a largely traditional editorial style comic that took shots at all sides and tried to play off of current events. McCullough may not be as talented as the best practioners of this form but he surely was a competent creator who produced over 1000 comics on a regular weekly basis. In fact, back in 2003 ComixTalk ran a fairly positive review of even his earliest work.
I think this story is one more anecdote suggesting that editorial cartooning in the very traditional sense is simply not going to cross-over to the web in a successful way. (That may not be the case for the newer breed of opinionated cartoonists who largely come out of the alternative weekly newspaper tradition) There are probably lots of reasons for that – cartooning is a pretty inefficent way to deliver topical news and information amongst all the other mediums available today. These comics don’t typically have story or any of the other pleasures of narrative work. Many of them work in a tradition of taking shots at all political stripes — a tradition bred of the 20th century newspaper’s self-image of non-partisanship. That probably works against them in the medium of the web. Iin fact McCullough notes the greater success of the straight right-wing Cox & Forkum comic than his work, although I recall that Cox & Forkum went on hiatus even earlier – back in 2007 (we also reviewed Cox & Forkum back in 2003).
And perhaps most fundamentally this specific kind of comic that comes from the editorial pages of the newspaper isn’t smart enough for the Internet age. This is clearly my opinion and its dangerous to cast it so wide, but I can’t recall a comic of this type that really provided my with insight or struck an emotional chord in the way that many other types of comics can and often do. Since survival and success on the Internet seems to be dependent on building a passionate fan base I can’t see how comics of this sort can make the jump.
Lea is on my list of people I've been trying to interview — it's going to happen sometime this year, but for now life has kept her pretty busy (see her LJ for many details). Her latest news is the the re-boot/re-launch of Rumble Girls on a subscription basis. Since she's aiming for 300 fans to subscribe maybe it's best to look at this as more of a hybrid fundraising drive/subscription than the straight ahead sub models once employed by Modern Tales, etc.
Click here for more details – RUMBLE GIRLS: Runaway Lightning Ohmry Subscriptions & Re-Launch.
This topic comes up from time to time and maybe it’s as good an excuse as any to ponder it again. Unlike movies (OSCAR) or music (GRAMMY) there is no one clear-cut top award for the medium in the United States. It seems to be largely because of the fractured history of different distribution models for comics in the US. In any event the Eisners (largely thought of as awards for comic books) have included webcomics as a category in their program — should the Reubens (largely thought of as awards for comic strips in newspapers) do so as well? That and other drama-filled topics inhabit the latest long comment thread at DailyCartoonist (Odd side note: a recent regular participant over there – Scott Kurtz of PvP – claims to have been banned).
BELLEN! by Brian "Box" Brown is a journal comic about a fictional couple (really!) named Ben and Ellen (hence, "Bellen"). It's one of those comics that has shown great strides as its creator improves over time. Brown has really come into his own in the last year and Bellen! is a real treat. It has a lot of the wistfulness of Peanuts in it (there's often something Charlie Brown like about main character Ben) but it's not really similar and the artwork continues to go in interesting directions. Very recently Brown won a Xeric grant for and then self-published a collection of Bellen! based on work he originally did for the Top Shelf 2.0 webcomic portal. I got a chance to interview him last month over email.
Ali Graham is the creator of Nobody's Business, Afterstrife and HOUSD. I first discovered Graham reading Afterstrife, which follows two characters through their afterlife. It's kind of like Moonlighting meets Dante. The more recent Nobody's Business is based on a film Graham worked on over last fall and into this year. Graham is one of a small but growing group of webcomics creators in the UK. I got a chance to interview him via email over the last month about his current projects.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter is asymmetrical. Sometimes you follow someone else’s twits and they follow yours as well. Sometimes it’s just one way. This Friend or Follow site is a cool little thing that shows you who follow that follows you as well ("friend") and who you follow that doesn’t follow you back ("following") and finally who follows you that you don’t reciprocate with ("fan").
TECHNOLOGY
Plastic Logic is a company reportedly working on an e-reader with a big size — 8.5 x 11 inches – a piece of paper but still thinner than a pad of paper with "a high-quality reading experience". It looks like the earliest we’ll see an actual product is the second half of this year. The first version looks like it will be grey-scale but the FAQ does say the company is working on a color version for the future.
INTERVIEWS
Newsarama has an interview with Daniel Govar of recent Zuda winner Azure.
TOOLS
Smashing Magazine has some tips on how to replace Photoshop with the open source GIMP.
COLLECTIVES
The Noir Project is looking for new members.
Webcomic Planet is having a contest — find the eggs on the websites of members of the Webcomic Planet collective and win a cameo in one of their comics.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
The Bad Chemicals is single panel mayhem. Often sick AND wrong it is nevertheless funny (say about 4/5ths of the time).
Snowflakes is a new comic with art by Jones and word-stuff by Weiner and Ashby. I had meant to post about this earlier this week but I haven’t had time for writing much this week. Anyhow, the comic is pitched as a PG-rated affair and is set in an orphanage where we’ve met the current cast of orphans. So far so good – I’m curious to see what PG-rated stuff these guys can come up with over time.
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