Author: Xaviar Xerexes

CONVENTIONS
Later in March of this year be sure to make it to WEBCOMICSTOCK — okay they’re calling it Webcomic Weekend but really it’s gonna be like WEBCOMICSTOCK.  Actually I don’t think any of us are old enough to appreciate that lame pun so maybe Webcomic Weekend was a better choice after all.  Go check out Gary’s post for the most currentest-y details to date on this soon-to-be an oh-yeah-I-was-there kind of event.

HALF PIXEL (minus Scott Kurtz) hits Katsucon in Arlington VA this weekend.

Scott Kurtz writes about his experiences at the recent New York Comicon.

Tom Spurgeon reports that the exhibitor information for the next MOCCAfest is up on the web.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Many folks are linking to the now-finished long form webcomic Bodyworld.  With good reason – great read.

INTERVIEWS
CBR has an interview with Brendan McGinley who created Hannibal Goes to Rome which was on ZUDA.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Heather Massey has a good post titled "Dear Publishers, Girls Read Comics Too." 

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Ryan Sohmer, creator of Least I Could Do and businessman-Canadian style is in the news, taking a stand against the Writers’ Guild of Canada (of which he’s a member) because of its proposal for ISPs to pay content creators for new content produced in Canada. Techdirt has more about it here.

Walter Issacson (who used to be the managing editor of Newsweek) has been making the media rounds suggesting that newspapers should charge for their online content and voila! newspaper industry woes are solved.  Techdirt has a breakdown of why this micropayments-pie-in-the-sky is just not going to work for newspapers either. 

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the AP’s claim that Shepard Fairey’s iconic portrait of Barack Obama is a copyright infringement of an AP photographer’s work is going to fail.  (here’s a link to Lawrence Lessig’s post on it  – he’s likely to be representing or advising Fairey in the matter.)  It just seems pretty obvious that it’s a transformative work.  In any event Fairey has preemptively sued the AP.  How does this relate to comics?  Not by much but given the rampant repurposing of copyrighted material in some webcomics (I’m looking at you Super-Sprite-Pixel-Party!*) this is the kind of case that’s a real world example of trying to draw lines between infringement and truly transformative work.

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Journalista! points to a comic that uses some kind of slideshow application.  It’s basically a demonstration comic making the point that despite the "slideshow" aspect it’s still a comic.  While I’m sure this has been done before with other code/applications underneath — to the extent this approach is a non-techie-friendly thing to use, maybe we’ll see some interesting comics based on it soon.

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Thanks to our cover artist for February – Leroy Brown, creator of Ice Cubes. Also thanks to this week's sponsor, the webcomic title Charliehorse.  The sponsor slot is still open for next week – going cheap! 🙂

Two new interviews up this week – one with the creators of Erfworld and one with Bryant Paul Johnson of Teaching Baby Paranoia.

LETTERING
Nate Piekos has a post up on typographic conventions in comic lettering.  Very informative! (h/t Boing Boing).

INTERVIEWS
Comix 411 has an interview with Norm Feuti creator of Retail, which is syndicated by King Features and a webcomic, Gill, which debuted toward the end of last year.

Como Se Webcomic?
Olaf Moriarty Solstrand has an interesting article considering the costs and benefits for creators in non-english speaking countries to use english in their comics.

Motion Comics
Todd Allen has an article on the history of "motion comics" (yeah they've been around longer than that recent Watchman effort).

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Dark Horse is debuting a webcomic in the Star Wars universe containing a prequel storyline to an upcoming videogame, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

RANDOM CATCHUP COMIC READING
Just finished Jessica Abel's Life Sucks graphic novel (published last year by First Second) – I cannot rave about it enough.  A great, novel twist on vampires (Dracula meets Clerks) with great pacing and really sharp art.  I was a little disappointed with the ending but not that much.

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I drew this a couple of years ago – part of an abandoned idea about a webcomic about a talkshow about webcomics.  Seemed a shame not to use it somehow though so I cleaned up some of the inking and re-colored it.  A famous ComixTALK no-prize to the first person to name all of the characters in it — I’ll even give you one:  the goof in the red and white striped shirt is Xaviar Xerexes.

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Scott McCloud announced this week that he’d inked a deal with First Second Books to publish his new original graphic novel, The Sculptor, with a publication date planned for Spring 2013.  Wow – well mark your calendars, I guess! 🙂  The only hint about the comic from McCloud is a mention that it "takes place in Manhattan".

It’s actually a two book deal with the publisher both for The Sculptor and after a non-fiction book.  Click "read more" to see the full press release.

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Last year drawing this random adventure storyline for my lets-make-comics comic I decided to try and fit the characters into the FISHBONE EP album cover pose/scene.  So below is the cover of the Fishbone EP:

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It’s an interesting post from the creator of This Modern World covering the history of comics in those weekly alternative newspapers.  It’s in the context of those papers killing off cartoons left and right and the creators, like Tom Tomorrow, who made their living from that particular business model lamenting the loss.

It’s a good read — on one level simply a fond and emotional tribute to some great cartoonists but on another level it really highlights how hard it is too shift gears in mid-life and after figuring out "success" in one particular way.  Could Tom Tomorrow make a go of it with This Modern World on the Internet and probably with books and other swag?  With Rick Marshall-like link-fu getting his comics embedded in every opinion and comic site on the Internet?  You know – probably. But not necessarily in a day and possibly not to the same level of success as today (really – who knows ahead of time?).

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I assume you're all reading up on FLEEN.com, Webcomics.com and Journalista!?  Good.  I'm happy to front page other efforts to link roll up ALL of the interesting FUTURE OF COMICS IS NOW type stories and then some (hint hint) but I won't be doing nearly as much of that kind of blogging myself this year.  

Webcomics Booyah!

Tim Broderick responds to an email from a COMIC BOOK executive posted at Tom Spurgeon's COMICS REPORTER site.  You know where my bias are, but by the end of 2009 "comics" as a business is going to be so deep into the throes of change… well really deep I guess.  No new demographic is going to replace the aging males buying the soft comic "book" monthly thing and even a lot of those this year are going to have to cut back in order to, you know, eat.

Writing

What's this — another missive from Tim Broderick this morning 🙂  Yep, Tim has a short piece on strategy for the long-form webcomic over at Webcomics.com.

COMICSPACE

Joey Manley posted an update on Comicspace initiatives.  It doesn't sound like there's a firm date anymore for the launch of the "new" comicspace.com site for creators.  They are also having an open house February 5 and 6 nearby the New York Comic Convention this weekend.  I have been using their new advertising network Webcomics World for a few months now — too early for me to have any opinion on it though.

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