El Santo's blog
Wherever there’s trouble, Joy of Webcomics is there
Submitted by El Santo on August 13, 2009 - 21:15
One Punch Reviews #24: A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
Submitted by El Santo on August 11, 2009 - 19:39
It’s not often that webcomics tackle serious subject matter. It’s even rarer when creators take the time to interview people who lived through traumatic real world events, then captured their experiences through illustrations. Creator Josh Neufeld, though, a Xeric Award winner and a founding member of ACT-I-VATE, was up to the task. Neufeld interviewed six different people about what the trials and tribulations they faced on the worst storm that New Orleans ever experienced and made a comic out of it.
This month, the highly acclaimed webcomic A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge hits the bookshelves. (Amazon.com places the release date at August 18.) The “deluge” in the title is, of course, Hurricane Katrina. The comic was originally serialized online between 2007 and 2008 in Smith Magazine. It was recognized in several publications, including Rolling Stone, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. USA Today named it as one of 2007’s best comics.
Notices like these, by the way, can sometimes be detrimental. They can intimidate potential readers who see the attention the comic is getting from mainstream media reviewers and deduce that the work is difficult, given how praise is usually only bestowed to difficult works. Well, don’t be frightened. The voices of A.D. are those of everyday people, and the straight forward storytelling puts you in the shoes of those who witnessed it.
Girl Genius wins the Hugo Award
Submitted by El Santo on August 10, 2009 - 17:06
Congratulations to Phil and Kaja Foglio of Girl Genius (reviewed here) for winning sci-fi’s Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story! Gary Tyrrell of Fleen reports:
The Hugo Awards got awarded last night in Montreal, and two of webcomicdom’s finest were up for (I believe the first ever) award for Best Graphic Story: Phil and Kaja Foglio for Girl Genius (specifically book 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, starting online here), and Howard Tayler for Schlock Mercenary (specifically, The Body Politic story arc, starting online here). The Foglios won, and Fleen congratulates them; unfortunately that means Tayler lost, and we at Fleen extend our sympathies along with the comfort that at least he lost to some wonderful people with terrific work.
A very impressive accomplishment when you consider what Girl Genius was up against.
The Webcomic Overlook #94: Head Trip
Submitted by El Santo on August 7, 2009 - 05:00
Looking back at Scott McCloud’s ten webcomic tips
Submitted by El Santo on August 5, 2009 - 21:38
As a change of pace, I thought it would be nice to take a look at something written about webcomics but one of sequential art’s most influential voices: Scott McCloud.
The Joy of Webcomics is all about sharks and viruses
Submitted by El Santo on August 4, 2009 - 13:46
The Webcomic Overlook is back to provide you the weekly scrapbook of webcomic news. So grab your mint julep (or iced tea), saunter off the the patio, and open your laptop. Take care to put something in between your lap and the computer, by the way (a towel, perhaps), because the heat from the laptop can burn like the dickens.
- You know what week it is? Shark Week, of course! Every year, we jump in the water with the Discovery Channel to visit these toothy menaces of the sea. And every year, Hockey Zombie is there to oblige.
- Dash Shaw of the Eisner-nominated Bodyworld joins the Comics Comics blog. His first post? Commenting on the storyboards behind Evangelion 1.0. He’s pretty much the perfect guy to be commenting on it, since his comic also transitions to seemingly random scenes from panel to panel. (h/t The Beat)
- Sometimes, we forget that webcomics aren’t a unique product of the Western World. It seems that even manga is going digital. From the NY Times:
So while the explosion in cellphone manga is not a simple story of migration from print to digital, most experts agree that the future of manga lies more on the mobile than on paper.
“The idea of printing the magazine, loading them on the track and delivering them to distribution centers, that whole model is on the decline,” said Noboru Rokuda, professor at Kyoto Seika University, which has a manga faculty, and a longtime artist himself. “I like to keep the paper manga tradition going, but there is an inexorable transition away from paper and into the digital medium.”
- Speaking of digital manga, Johanna Draper Carlsson is running a poll at Comics Worth Reading as to which online manga is the best.
The Webcomic Overlook #93: Ulysses Seen
Submitted by El Santo on August 1, 2009 - 19:35
The Webcomic Overlook #92: Gastrophobia
Submitted by El Santo on July 30, 2009 - 20:17
Last spring, the wife and I booked a trip with another family on a cross-country flight to Virginia. “Visiting family?†our friends would ask. No, we were actually touring Civil War battle sites.
To which they would inevitably say, “Why in the world would you ever want to learn about history?!?â€
The Joy of Webcomics lies, cheats, and steals
Submitted by El Santo on July 29, 2009 - 12:53
There was apparently a big To Do down in SoCal this weekend. Various webcomic types are spending this week coming down from the high of San Diego Comic Con. The event has gotten so large that I swear I saw Stan Lee on CNBC last night doing a post-Con wrap-up. Surreal.
The Webcomic Overlook #91: Buttersafe
Submitted by El Santo on July 27, 2009 - 16:05
LOL! Humor on the internet is sooooo random!
In saying the above phrase, I understand that I’ve invited a modicum of invites backlash. Sexy Canadian librarians and urbane, well-dressed sequential art afficianados — who, in the deep recesses of my fertile imagination, make up the bulk of readers on this site — are no doubt glaring angrily from behind their pince-nez glasses and/or spitting out their Chamomile. This is an especially egrarious faux-pas since “random humor” almost always means that, at the end, someone’s head explodes, or the world blows up, or ninjas pop up out of nowhere.
So RANDOM! Even if it means everyone else is doing it.
In reality, it’s actually more of a shock cut than random. And if it were really, truly random, then there’s very little chance it would actually be funny, since you wouldn’t have established any expectations in the first place. Hell, John Allison made a shirt about it (which I would order, if the value of the dollar was much stronger against the British pound). As stated by the venerable Urban Dictionary (your indispensable resource on funky fresh lingo), you’re probably better off if you just say it’s unexpected humor … but then teenagers everywhere will dismiss you as an anal-retentive killjoy and there’s nothing I want more than the praise and adulation of today’s youth. That’s the secret to how a grandpa like Tony Hawk can keep rolling in that phat video game loot.
So without further ado, The Webcomic Overlook reviews the latest salvo in the world of random webcomic humor. Even its title looks like something straight out of a random word generator: Buttersafe, by Raynato Castro and Alex Culang.
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