This year’s Best Digital Comic category nominees for the Eisners is an interesting mix:
Okay I am so late to finding this but it is pretty funny. Ross Scott’s series of videos called Freeman’s Mind are simply Scott riffing over the action in the original Half Life game as if he was the main character. It is not at all what I’d think of as Freeman’s personality (although in a remarkably McCloudian trick, Half Life gives no personality to Freeman so that every person playing the games gets to fill in whatever they imagine). It isn’t 100% awesome but I had to watch through all 10 of them and probably will keep up with it now that I’m thru the archives. Wow, I am a geek 🙂
cat garza writes about a strange situation. He used to have a URL called whimville.com that he let go at some point. Some third party picked it up (that’s what happens when you let a domain name expire) but the strange thing being that this third party put some of cat’s comics back up on the whimville.com domain. There’s no question that’s lame and cat is asking for help to figure out what to do about it.
Check out this week’s sponsor – Natasha Mostert’s new novel, Keeper of Light and Dust. Also check out this picture of the Least I Could Do van — there’s even a condom on the radio antenae! (okay I made that last part up)
THEORY
Scott McCloud writes about a new presentation tool (sort of power point-y) that Neal Von Flue and others are testing as a possible comics CMS. Interesting ideas.
BUSINESS
Fleen noted yesterday that Ben Heaton is having a fundraising drive to see if his fans will match his salary so he can do the webcomic, Request Comics, full-time. He’s currently unemployed though so matching his salary should be pretty easy. You can check on his donation page to see how he’s doing.
BUSINESS
Todd Allen writes about webcomics in a "post-Direct Market world".
TOOLS
Old but educational! John Allison’s tutorial for MangaStudio.
Justify My ZUDA Hype
Is that Ryan Estrada’s work at this month’s Zudathon? Why yes it is. (Also is Zuda using Drupal for its site?)
JUSTIFY MY OTHER HYPE
Urf is a funny panel comic about a planet sort of like Earth but really off in certain ways. Best new single panel comic (mostly) I’ve read in a while.
I’m checking out a comic called Intelligence Cleaner Agency.
ComicMix discovers the simple awesomeness of Meghan Murphy’s Kawaii Not.
Charlie Parker writes about the Freelancers Union which might be of interest to many independent cartoonists. I don’t know much about it, but there was a recent PBS story on the group (which Charlie’s post links to).
I've been posting some good stories Alexander Danner wrote for the prior version of webcomics.com. Another one today on whatever happenned to four (briefly) rock stars of webcomic.
Life Imitates Art Comics: James Kochalka wrote in a comic about a game in a dream he was having, somebody actually makes the game, now he makes a comic about it. Hmmm… That's a tempting power over the universe he seems to have developed.
AWARDS: The Canadian Joe Shuster Award nominations are out – the webcomics category is outstanding: Kate Beaton, Michael Cho, Lar De Souza & Ryan Sohmer, Kathryn & Stuart Immonen, Karl Kerschl, Gisele Lagace, Ramón K. Pérez, and Cameron Stewart.
INTERVIEWS: Newsarama has an interview with Bellen! creator Brian Brown about his new book and winning a Xeric grant.
SMALL SCREENS: Sean Kleefeld had a good post on some of the inherent challenges of smaller screens as a way to read/display comics.
NOT WEBCOMICS: The browser-based ZORK! game is out. Jim Zubkavich did gobs of great art for this.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE: Some comics I'm checking out: Rooby Moon and Schoolhouse Daze.
This takes the music mashup to infinity and beyond — Mother Of All Funk Chords — remixed by Kutiman from pre-existing YouTube clips.Â
Wes Molebash has started a new comic called Myron and Charlie. The creator of the now concluded You’ll Have That has been on hiatus since last November.
Thanks to Caleb Sevcik for this month’s cover art! Caleb is the first artist to do 2 covers for ComixTalk. Here’s more news for Tuesday:
CRAFT
From DRAWN! — Dave Gibbons, artist on the Watchmen, uses Manga Studio to digitally draw the character Rorschach.
Erfworld artist Jamie Noguchi demonstrates some techniques in "digital painting". Cool stuff!
INTERVIEWS
Part one and part two of Daily Cross Hatch’s interview with PBF creator Nick Gurewitch.
Pop Syndicate has an article on the threat to brick and mortar stores from digital comics publishing.
Scott "Dilbert" Adams writes a blog post on how hyper-localism might "save" newspapers (not really – Adams is really advising people in newspapers to start "hyper-local" community portals as a new business plan. Not sure Adams is offering anything new to the already vigorous discussion on how a focus on local community is a newspaper’s core function and it’s potential future). Not sure I would have linked to it except Scott Kurtz pops up in the comments chiding Adams for clinging to the newspaper model for Dilbert. I think Kurtz missed it there – Adams only seems to be offering an idea to provoke discussion, something he does quite often on his blog. I doubt Adams, personally is all that stressed about newspapers since Dilbert has already made it in the larger pop culture in a way very few comics ever do. Even if newspapers disappear tomorrow, Dilbert will do as well or better than almost any comic out there.
TECHNOLOGY
Anyone tried out the iPhone app for comics called ComicZeal? Thoughts? While I’m thinking of small screens, here’s a link to coverage of an SXSW panel covering comics on handhelds. (h/t Brigid who covers lots more handheld stories in this post)
JUSTIFY MY TOM’s HYPE
Tom Spurgeon – the Comics Reporter – writes about the webcomics he is currently reading.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
FROM DRAWN! — Justine Lai’s series of oil paintings depicting herself "in flagrante delicto" with each US president – NSFW
Another great link from DRAWN! – a video showing the evolution of the Batman logo.
Here's some interesting stuff from the many Firefox tabs still open on my screen this weekend:
BUSINESS
Comics Worth Reading reports that the first edition of the long-running British anthology 2000 AD is now downloadable for free at Drivethrucomics.com
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Tiny Kittens has this crazy collage-like style that reminds me of the art in classic Golden kids books. Some or all of its creators had a hand in the now-defunct webcomic Combustible Orange.
I "heart" Tapes looks interesting – I think I saw a link to it from Anders Loves Maria.
MILESTONES
Kris Straub hits 1000 episodes of Starslip. Congrats!
Dave Kellet, with the help of his readers, tries to nail down when Sheldon first went online.
LEFT A NICE CORPSE – UPDATED
A new "feature-ette" I'll repeat whenever I'm out of other ideas: webcomics that died too young. For now most of the ones I'm thinking about were really good comics that for whatever reason the creators abandoned before they found their audience (and most likely before webcomics as a whole began to really take off). The first one is an old favorite of mine titled Waiting For Bob which went on hiatus in 2002, seemingly to return but simply hasn't. No explanation of why the series completely stopped and yet someone seems to have taken care to keep the site up and running. I'm sure I'm missing something (and I suppose I really should do some "reporting" here.) on the why but I'm more interested in the "what if" — I think Waiting For Bob by Doug Shepard (current website? Talked with the real Doug via twitter and that website isn't him. My apologies Doug!) and Katrin Salyers, which probably had a decent audience for its time, was a bit ahead of its time in that I think today much more of its likely fanbase is online and comfortable with reading webcomics. It had three interesting characters, was not overly reliant on "tech" references and definitely had some drama mixed with the jokes. I really think it would do well today.
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