Author: Xaviar Xerexes

Hey what do you know – there are still 10 contenders left in the Daily Grind contest. 

A look back at other things from the past:

2007

The Perry Bible Fellowship collection – The Trial of Colonel Sweeto – was publisher Dark Horse’s third webcomic-to-print success (following Megatokyo  and Penny Arcade ). Story here.

2006

A review of the well-received play based on the webcomic Get Your War On from the Washington Post. 

2005

ComixTALK had an interview with Mike Rojas, creator of Natch Evil; a review of Jack, created by David Hopkins; and T Campbell discussed how to make action move in webcomics (Part One and Part Two).

Erik Melander’s Through the Looking Back Glass column covered the recent events in webcomics:

September held a number of news items which are worth mentioning. First and foremost, the Webcomic Telethon collected an impressive amount of money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Penny Arcade Expo returned for its second year, this time bigger and with more media coverage. Keenspot is working towards fulfilling its plans announced at Comic-Con. Keen announced that they have signed with Fox Television to develop Owen Dunne’s webcomic You Damn Kid! for television. And both Keenspot and Modern Tales are looking for advertising sales representatives.

2004

Comixtalk had an interview with Eric Milikin, creator of Fetus X.

Continue Reading →

Reddickulous a single panel comic by David Reddick has moved to Keenspot.  I don’t see a press release up at Keenspot yet but Reddick has a post about it.

Reddick’s other projects include his new twice-weekly webcomic “Legend of Bill,” and two weekly webcomics for the official Roddenberry Web site, Roddenberry.com called “Gene’s Journal” and “Rod & Barry.”

Continue Reading →

Tom Spurgeon has a long post on how he, if he was "emperor of comics" would fix things.  It’s interesting and covers a range of topics from awards (Keep the Eisners, nix the Harveys) to direct market retailers to digital strategies.

I attended the Small Publishers panel at SPX this year and it was interesting — it included someone from Sparkplug, Buenaventure, Bodega, (and one more publisher I can’t remember this sec) but not encouraging.  It’s not surprising that it’s a barely profitable to profitless business (all four panelists were hoping that growing back catalogues would eventually sustain their business) but it was also revealing that there is a great deal of art and guesswork to making a go of it.  There were different approaches to selling through AMAZON, various levels of website-driven sales, different ideas on marketing.  All I think had a background in working for larger publishers and all said they were doing it for the love of comics.

I’ve sometimes given thought to getting into publishing but I would certainly do it from a web-heavy approach.  One of the publishers that seems very savvy so far is AVATAR which is handling Warren Ellis’ Freak Angels comic and I suspect will sell massive amounts of the print collection driven by the comic’s serialization on the web.

Continue Reading →

Derik Badman had a presentation called “Freedom within Boundaries: the Theory and Practice of Constraint in Comics” in Second Life at Met@Morph, the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference, on Friday October 3rd.

Continue Reading →

I moved frightnight.org onto the Drupal platform that ComixTALK uses although I’m not entirely sure I’ll have time to do a real "event" with it this year (for those who haven’t heard about it, Fright Night started in 1999 with a number of webcomic creators grouping up to tell collaborative stories, often featuring characters from their own strips.)  I will try to blog about Halloween-related comics there (might cross-post here too) and anyone else should feel free to post about scary things there too.  (The site does get a steady if not huge level of traffic in October…)

The archives of previous Fright Night events (and the two Blind Date events) are still there – just click the "archived events" link in the top menu.

Continue Reading →

A great day at SPX this Sunday.  Saw a whole bunch of familiar (web)comic artists (and bought some great stuff too) and met some new ones.  I get overwhelmed trying to check out everything at SPX — I don’t think I’d cut it at San Diego.  I guess it’s ’cause I do try to check out as much of the work as possible.  (I missed the Ignatz awards Satuday night but click here to find out about the winners.  Apparently there was another dude in a gorilla suit this year just like last year. UPDATE: Yep – there’s a moneky in THIS YEAR’s presentation.  h/t FLEEN).

Anyhow, I may have some reviews and interviews coming up leading out of today but for now I’m putting my new poster of the "Atheist’s Afterlife" strip from Aaron Diaz’s Dresden Codak up on the wall next to my A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible poster.  I also picked up some books from Dirk Tiede, Spike, Meredith Gran, Josh Lesnick, Joe Dunn… jeez, really too many to list in one post.  I’ll get to them this week!

Also ran into the elusive Joey Manley (well he was up in the wilds of Maine for awhile… now he’s apparently in the more hospitable land of Brooklyn) along with T Campbell.  I think the gist of that conversation was that the new Comicspace.com is coming soon AND YET in some ways is already here.  I should try harder to get an interview with him (although I have asked!), shouldn’t I?

I also talked briefly with Raina Telgemeier about her new book with Scholastic – which will be a print version of her webcomic Smile. Raina thought a press release had gone out but I can’t find it just now.  Raina had done four Babysitters Club books with Scholastic, but she said that was it for the graphic novel series.  I asked Raina about the experience and she was extremely positive on it, noting she had done about 800 pages on the series.  Best wishes for the Smile project and I’ll post more details when I get them.

Continue Reading →