Author: Xaviar Xerexes

Anyone else a fan of Merlin Mann’s video series (Most Days)?  He’s entertaining in a short attention span kind of way.  Anyhow I have to shake my head and sigh at yet another not-that-funny attempt to belittle Malcolm “New Yorker” Gladwell — this one kind of shows that Mann didn’t really get the last book.  And to compare Gladwell to Thomas “Suck On This” Friedman… well that’s almost fightin’ words man.  Anyhow – here’s the video:

Most Days (2009-01-30) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

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I’ve fallen far behind on ComixTalk tasks since the start of the new year – plan to catch up, but in the meantime I thought I’d post a list of the books I’ve gotten from publishers and authors that are in my to-do box on my desk:

• Pax Avalon by Steven "Reece" Friesen has an interesting looking cover (and included poster).  I’m +1 predisposed to any comic with a strong female lead in it (which this appears to be), in part because I have two daughters and they should not have to always identify with a guy protagonist.  Plus the press release from Herald Press says this is the "first graphic novel from a Mennonite publisher.  Well alrighty then…
   
• Planet Saturday Comics by Monty Kane which is on the web but has a book out (Volume One) collecting several stories.  It is a great comic, somewhere between Calvin and Hobbes and The Wonder Years but still very much it’s own thing.  Another one my daughers liked part of very much.
   
• Soul Chaser Betty by Brain "BMan" Babendererde which is a solid story of dream warriors with manga-flavored visuals.  We should have an interview with the BMan this month on the site.
   
• Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan which is really an illustrated kids (young adult?) book.  My daughters have read some of the stories and liked so I hope to get through all of it soon.  Visually it’s stunning and kind of makes me wish it was a true comic.
   
• French Milk by Lucy Knisley which is a journal comic about Lucy’s stay in Paris France for a month.

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Webcomics VS Dead Trees, Round XXXII
Since I’m fully in agreement that comics are comics (let’s all get beyond "webcomics" and comic books" etc) — a few interesting dust-ups between cartoonists who GET the web and those who resent and fear change.  FLEEN calls out alt-cartoonist Neil Swabb on some ill-advised words and Neil apologizes.  Interesting comments to the FLEEN post too.  Questionable Content creator Jeph Jacques has the final word for now as far as I’m concerned — read his smart and funny response to Neil here.

REMEMBER PLATINUM STUDIOS?
Sean Kleefeld has an update on the Platinumized Wowio.  Wow – hard to believe it’s been a year since Platinum took over Wowio… but it has been.  Sean has a back and forth with Brian Altounian of Platinum in the comments.

WEBCOMICS DAD
Brad Guigar has a "to-do list" up at webcomics.com with lots of ideas for the new year as well as some needed nags for most cartoonists (like "Start gathering receipts, invoices, records and other information for tax prep….")

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Jacob Alvarez sent me a copy of his comic book Hypnospiral in the mail the other week and I wanted to give it a mention.  It’s a black and white book printed by Comixpress – the website has a few previews but otherwise is just a place to find out how to order the comic book.  Alvarez is a competent artist and surely can continue to improve with more work.  The book is full of short gag stories — ideally suited to the webcomic first, books later model (as in build the fan base and than sell them books) so I strongly advise Alvarez to go the webcomic route.  He’s already got the website URL and it’s a no-brainer today to get going online.  All of the material in the book can easily be put online and surely would get much more exposure than the much, much fewer people who will buy or borrow the book at this point without having any idea if they’ll like Hypnospiral or not.

As to the book itself, it shows promise although it was definitely a mixed bag in terms of its appeal to my sense of humor.  My favorite of the book was the two-pager, "My Kingdom For A Theme Restaurant" and there was something funny about the monkey-staffed Civil War enactment at the end of the story "Ugly Pete: King of the Chimps".  Maybe just seeing the simian charge on "Fort Sumner"?  The only other thing to mention is that the cover makes the book seem like it’s a horror comic — it doesn’t really telegraph that it’s a gag comic.

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Oingo Boingo – my favorite band for a loong time.  I always liked the Mexican folk art influenced design around the Dead Man’s Party album and this video has bits of it too.  Oingo Boingo was pretty big in California — I was always unclear on why the rest of the world didn’t fully appreciate the genius of the Elfman.  In fact I guess to many people, I suppose Oingo Boingo is associated mainly with the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to Class (or maybe the song they wrote for the Anthony Michael Hall movie Weird Science). 

Very young Robert Downey Jr in this video (clipped from the Back to Class movie) – I just saw Iron Man on Vudu this week.  That guy is always interesting – what a good actor.  It’s kind of cool he didn’t kill himself with all of the drugs he took and we get to see some more work from him.

And hell might as well link to the Gong Show with an appearance by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo – the precursor to the actual band Oingo Boingo.  The Mystic Knights were more of a cabaret think, led by Danny Elfman’s brother Richard.

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Holy crap – the video for RUN DMC’s It’s Tricky has Penn and Teller.  I don’t think I saw this at the time.

I liked RUN DMC a lot for awhile.  I’m not sure if it was the first rap I really heard and liked — I was 15 when their first album came out and that seems late to me but memory is a funny thing…  I’ll have to scan the memory cells a bit more..

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Funny I just saw in the site logs a link to the story noting the launch of Brad Guigar’s Phables comic about true stories from the residents of Philadelphia and now comes news that he’s decide to end it.  But it did earn him an Eisner nomination and he’s planning to bring out a print collection of it so it’s not all bad news.

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Joey Manley posts at his Talkaboutcomics blog on updates to the new Comicspace portal and other webcomic services his company is rolling out.

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Tom Tommorrow has a post with commentary from Max Cannon about the increasing number of alternative weekly papers simply dropping all of their comics.  I emphasize with Cannon as to not at all getting why papers are dropping one of the most popular parts of their paper but still grimace when I see that Cannon isn’t making anything from or via his web presence. 

I have no idea what Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon have tried to do (well I do know Tom Tomorrow has used his site as a decent political blog for awhile and has sometimes pushed a book of his through it but I think that’s it…) but I’m sort of shocked that a popular cartoonist isn’t trying harder to push up the percentage of their revenue from new sources like a web strategy.  Even the sharply declining newspapers themselves now have a decent chunk of their revenue from online publication efforts (not enough to repleace what they’re losing but not 0% either).

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