Platinum

Dirk Deppey catches all the Platinum news this morning.  Deppey describes a now-deleted post on the Investors Hub website (here’s the Platinum discussion forum there if you’re interested) by Platinum COO Brian Altounian that was a pretty inflamatory comment on Platinum’s "relationship" with creator D.J. Coffman.  Coffman responded here and later here.

Deppey also links to a Publisher’s Weekly story that focuses in on how book publishers are still happy with the new WOWIO site whereas comic publisher are not.  I think that actually speaks volumes to where the two types of publishers are in terms of adapting to the web and incorporating new media into their publishing strategies.

UPDATE: FLEEN gets an anonymous tip that WOWIO still doesn’t know when it will get around to writing checks to publishers to pay them what it owes them.

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Return to Camelot: An Interview with Daniel Merlin Goodbrey

Daniel "Merlin" Goodbrey is one of the artists I know both myself and Frank "Damonk" Cormier were pretty into when ComixTalk launched in 2003.  So it’s a bit surprising to me that we’ve had a 5 year lapse in interviewing him.  These days Goodbrey has a day job teaching at in the School of Film, Music & Media at the University of Hertfordshire with a focus on Digital Animation.  And far from disappearing these past years, Goodbrey has continued to create memorable work on the web and in print as well as continue to experiment with hypercomics and other experimental notions in comics.  And not unlike the direction of "webcomics" as a whole, Goodbrey has increasingly blurred the lines between web and print in his creation of comics.

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Just What Is a WILF?

INTERVIEWS
CBR has a good interview with Aaron Diaz of Dreseden Codak. (Comixtalk interviewed Diaz in June of this year; and reviewed Dresden Codak in February.)

CONTESTS
Bomb Shelter notes that its Webcomic Idol contest will start taking submissions on October 1st.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
The LATIMES rounds-up the praise for Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a comic I also feel is one of the best of the year.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Journalista! points to this article on what journalists can learn from comics… specifically Scott McCloud’s comic about Google’s Chrome browser.

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Don’t Go Back to Cuba: Weekend News Update

MILESTONES
A shout-out to the conclusion of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge which was an amazing webcomic – telling the story of several different people in the midst of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.  There will be a book next year from Pantheon Books.  Congrats to creator Josh Neufeld – this is one of the best works of the year so far and I hope everyone has given it a read.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
D.J.Coffman is working on a (politically-minded band) Flobots-inspired comic called Rise of the Flobots: Architects of Change.  Simil;ar Coffman art but definitely a different vibe for him than previous work.

WEIRD
Desmond Seah’s webcomic Bigger Than Cheeses is often pretty funny.  Lately though he’s spent an inordinate amount of time mocking a particular scene and storyline from Tim Buckley’s Ctrl-Alt-Del.  I don’t think there’s much of a legal problem using the one bit of art from C-A-D in Seah’s comic (perhaps a taste problem but I’m not going there…), but when you do it over and over and over and over again… I don’t know what my point is, but it’s beginning to feel like an Andy Kaufman sketch or something.

WARREN ELLIS
Why not give Ellis his own category – he gives me a reason to write about him enough.  I forgot to mention this bit on Freak Angels from last month:

When we started FREAKANGELS, some webcomickers were heard to say “weekly webcomics suck.” Like there was only one way to do a webcomic, and that the daily newspaper strip was somehow inherently superior to six-pages-a-week. Even now, I’m not seeing a lot of weekly webcomics. If you know of any, stop by freakangels.com/whitechapel and tell me about them. Hell, maybe we could generate a weekly programme guide out of them.

Weekly comics don’t suck. You can read them anytime. You can wait for weeks and read several episodes at once. But it’s nice, I think, to have landmarks in the week. Friday is FREAKANGELS day. You don’t have to be there at 12noon UK time when Chief Mechanic Ariana pushes it live. But it turns out that tens of thousands of people like coming over here on the day a new episode goes live. FREAKANGELS Friday. And I like doing that for people.

Weekly webcomics are great when they give you a satisfying chunk of an update like Freak Angels‘ six pages does.  Update no more often then you can keep up with and design your update "chunk" plus frequency to both ensure you can keep up with the schedule but also so that you can break up your story into satisfying chunks.

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This Day in ComixTalk: September 5th

2007
Pete Abrams celebrated 10 years of Sluggy Freelance, and Ellie Deyneka wrote about finding an audience for her webcomic The Paranormals.

2006
Rich Stevens strikes a deal to syndicate Diesel Sweeties to the newspapers (he ended that arrangement in 2008), musician Thomas Dolby wrote about the use of his lyrics in a Wapsi Square comic, and Bryant Paul Johnson was one of the finalists for the Science Idol comic competition.

2005
The Comixpedia.org encyclopedia site was just getting started, and Brad Guigar was organizing a webcomics telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief.

2004
We were in the midst of the first big site overhaul at ComixTalk

2003
The manga anthology site Wirepop added Eversummer Eve to its lineup, and we recommended readers check out Warren Ellis’ Artbomb comic site.

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Movin’ On Up: From Mayor of Webcomictown to Guv’nor of Webcomica!

BUSINESS
Blogger/superhero Cory Doctorow writes about his dandelion theory of distributing his stories and why he doesn’t like micropayments.

The Beat reports that Elephantman is now available on iPod comic site Clickwheel (full press release after the jump)

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Comics Worth Reading likes Dennis West’s Backyard Frontier: the story of a boy and his alien.

REVIEWS
Chris Mauter posts a review of the Penny Arcade collection: Attack of the Bacon Robots! that originally ran in TCJ.  Interesting but a few quibbles – I’m not much of a videogame player and I don’t think it’s true such knowledge is needed for every PA strip (a few yes, but far from most) and clearly this book was intended for the PA fan (i.e, the completist), not to attract new readers. (I almost forgot that Modern Humor Authority ran the definite review of this book – check it out here.)

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I May Be the Mayor of Webcomicton

DARK HORSE PRESENTS
Wow – The Dark Horse presents on MySpace this month kicks all kinds of sass: Nothing Nice to Say by Mitch Clem, Achewood by Chris Onstand, Beanworld by Larry Marder, and new stuff from Liz Greenfield: Steak and Kidney Punch.

INTERVIEWS
Jennifer Contino interviews Jessica Hickman the artist on Otis Frampton’s Oddly Normal.

Rick Marshall interviews Bernie Hou of Alien Loves Predator — now working on a new webcomic If You See Something.

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I’m LOLCAT, Dammit!

How about a Wednesday round-up of webcomic-related stories you might be curious to peruse? Yes?  Good…

AHOY THERE BE PIRATES!
Tucker Stones tucks into the issues surrounding online piracy of comic books.

SCHOOLS IS IN

Lea Hernandez dishes up lettering lessons at Panel and Pixel.  (And Mark Evanier offers a tip on how to use the letter "I" in most computer fonts.)

INTERVIEWS
ComicNewsi interviews the Philadelphia Phablist, Evil Inc.’s Brad Guigar; and Eliza Feliz of Alice in Nightmareland.

Jennifer Contino interviews Daniel Merlin Goodbrey on his comic Necessary Monsters.

Chris Arrant interviews Roger Langridge about his new webcomic Mugwhump The Great which debuts this month on ACT-I-VATE (h/t Journalista!).

Mark Mason has an interview with Jennie Breedon of Devil’s Panties (h/t Journalista!).

MILESTONES
Missed it but Andy Weir’s Casey and Andy wrapped up at comic # 666 last month.

AWARDS
Meet your panel of judges for Frumph.net’s Webcomic Readers Choice AwardsPhilip M. Hofer, JT Shea, Kurt Sasso, Tony Camper, and Steve Hamaker.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

The Scienteers round-up the world of Drunk Duck comics.

Scott Kurtz and Mike Krahulik paint

This new art for Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis is indeed bad ass, Bill.

Shortpackedblowschunks.com!  David Willis strikes again.

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Platinum/Wowio Payment Delays

Yesterday, another good round-up on the latest Wowio payment issues from Comic Book Resources.  There doesn’t seem to be any new news though; publishers (which in some cases is the creators themselves) were supposed to get paid on August 15th.

Platinum/WOWIO is blaming the delay on the merger and makes it sounds like at least some of the publishers are getting their checks.  CBR quotes a Platinum representative as saying, "Payments are going out as quickly as we can get them sent."

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Gimmicky

This announcement by Oni and 60Frames of linking some new comics to some web videos just scream "gimmick" to me.  Or am I supposed to believe that the artists involved got together and said "This story just demands to be told in both comic and video form!!!"

Also, Jennifer de Guzman thinks people writing about comics should write better and broader.  I can see that.  Although you’re never going to get people who are hardcore into superhero comic books and its culture to write (or read) about anything else.  Luckily there’s lots more to comics these days though…

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