Author: Xaviar Xerexes

 AJAX 222

Continue Reading →

It is in fact snowing in the greater Washington DC area this morning which will inevitably paralyze the entire town by sometime in the late morning.  A few links worth following this morning:

MILESTONES
Forbidden Planet notes the ending of David Rees’ Get Your War On and has the last comic (h/t Journalista!)  Back in 2003, Michael Whitney reviewed Get Your War On for ComixTalk and we had a community interview with David Rees.

SMALL SCREENS
CBR reports that Last Kiss will be distributed to mobile phones via GoComics.com.  Wednesday White reviewed Last Kiss for ComixTalk in 2004.

REVIEWS
Damn God Comics reviews the recent revival of Ryan Estrada’s Aki Alliance.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
The webcomic Curvy does in fact live up to its own tagline: A sexy sci-fi adventure comic for adults.  I stumbled onto this from it’s ad on another comic’s site — the art is kind of loopy and has nice use of contrasting black and white — it’s a very stylized approach to the visuals.  (it reminded me a touch of Tracy White’s TRACED).  Definitely NSFW even with the somewhat cartoony artwork.

Continue Reading →

Reading about the wrenching changes in the music industry always reminds me of comics.  Not all of it is completely applicable to new ways to make a living making comics but I think a lot of it should inspire productive thinking.  So I offer some links accumulated this month:

• Monty Python’s new official Youtube channel increases DVD sales (okay this one isn’t music but still…)
• Corey Smith goes from highschool teacher to 4.2 million-in-revenue-musician this year
• The band Umphrey McGee rewards fans for promoting album by adding extras to it as the pre-orders came in
• Musician Andy Singer finds new audience after he gives his music away and licenses under Creative Commons

Continue Reading →

TechDirt has a post on a band that got into Wikipedia on the strength of newspaper articles about the fact that the band was not notable enough to have an article in Wikipedia.  Circular logic… GO!!!

Continue Reading →

Techdirt has a post up on HBO’s efforts to scour the internets of footage of the Inaugural concert.  There are more details on all things legal over at this Talking Points Memo post – which is the Inaugural committee owns the copyright and HBO has a 6 month license to it (an exclusive license I suppose). Continue Reading →

I nominate Spike Jonez’ video for Buddy Holly by Weezer.

Continue Reading →

Damn if it wasn’t overplayed to death when it was released but hearing it again after several years absence… yep Cannonball is a great song (and one of Spike Jonez earlier videos)

Continue Reading →

Last year I posted a couple times (Previous posts on this "research" project were here and here) about a possible article on "ComixTALK’s 100 Greatest Webcomics" which would be something like the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest movies of the last 100 years.

A recurring comment to the previous two posts was what is the criteria for this.  I’m always a little hesitant to give too much guidance when part of the point of asking this kind of thing out loud is to listen to the resulting discussion of what everyone else thinks the criteria should be.  For the AFI list judges picked films based on criteria such as Critical Recognition, Major Award Winner, Popularity Over Time, Historical Significance, and Cultural Impact.

That sounds about right to me.  We’ve got a round decade plus a year or two of webcomics to look at it.  Critical reception (both from peers and critics), and popularity are both relevant to thinking about the impact of a webcomic.  WCCA awards are somewhat indicative of what peers were impressed with in a given year and more recently awards like the Eisners and Ignatzs have recoginized webcomics.  Historical significance and cultural impact are a little harder to pin down but various "firsts" in webcomics are important and comics like Penny Arcade have had a much wider impact on popular culture than most comics do these days (put aside the legacy superheros of comics — what other "new" comic, let alone webcomic, in the last decade has had a wide cultural impact?)

Another thing AFI did that might be useful here to help sort through the vast numbers of webcomics one could talk about is to also think about categories or genres of work.  Just as a simple matter of numbers if a webcomic isn’t one of the best of a larger type of story — or frankly, so startlingly unique it’s hard to categorize — then it’s hard to imagine it’s one of the 100 Greatest…

So to move things along I’m listing another "draft" of titles submitted by the crowds but this time I’ve tried to break them up into drama and comedy so as to help avoid complete apples to oranges comparisons.  In doing that I’ve realized (1) it’s hard in many cases to decide; and (2) there are probably more comedic than drama on the list so far.  I think it would make sense to whittle down the two lists to 75 each so as the final list is no more than 3/4 of one type or the other.  Of course we could further do genre type lists but for now this was enough work on my part.

So — your assignment (if you choose to play):

1. Name the comic you’re talking about (you’re also welcome to nominate ones not on the list — I KNOW there are many I haven’t even thought about yet — it takes time to review all of the corners of the web)
2. Tell me where on one the two lists (comedy and drama) it should be (you could give a range of slots if you’re not sure). (If you think I’ve got a drama on the comedy list or vice-versa let me know!  I’m not "done" – this is fairly dashed off still at this point)
3. Tell me why!  Referencing awards, critics, historical achievements, strengths and weaknesses of the works are all really helpful!
   
   

Continue Reading →