Last November, Hard, author of Sexy Losers, asked in his comic’s Livejournal why women read his comic. He was asking because he had so many women writing to him, and as he put it: "…sometimes they will add ‘Yes, there are females that read your comic’ as if I am suddenly shocked that there would actually be females that would find sex humour at all interesting…" Continue Reading
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Over the last twenty years, the Western world's attitude toward nudity in forms of pop culture has shifted toward a more liberal attitude at an unprecedented rate. Images of nude bodies and sexual themes that used to be confined to either underground or exploitive – i.e., pornographic – venues have today become a mainstay of most primetime programming and blockbuster cinema.
A recent Comixpedia.com discussion attempted to gauge whether the same trend can be detected in webcomics. With the advent of the Internet and its infamous gray legal waters, the passive bystander might have expected a proliferation of nude comic strip scenarios. Continue Reading
Perception Is Reality Is The Difference Between Angry And Paying Readers
When I went to Scott McCloud’s panel on experimental comics at San Diego Comic Con International 1999, he planted the idea of webcomics in my mind, and set me on a wonderful journey of discovery and experimentation. I listened to all of the ideas and reasons he had for the Internet as a great new place for comics to flourish. In my mind, one of the most obvious advantages was the ability to maintain an open comic archive so that new readers – rather than jumping into the middle and having to somehow hunt down the rest of the story in other comics, collections of strips, etc. – would instead be able to just click the Back button to read the previous strip, or go back to the very start and read it the whole way through.
This seemed like such a great idea at the time, and over the years it has by and large become standard practice in webcomics – a “no-brainer”, really. It is a great convenience to be sure, though perhaps a little too convenient for our own good. Continue Reading
It depresses the hell outta me that when I first learned that the May issue of Comixpedia would revolve around the topic of "sex and violence", I thought that it might transcend some of the old punch-drunk tits n' blood bullshit cliches and instead tackle the issue from both ends of the creative spectrum – perhaps some mock comics about "Mr. No Pants Stabbing the Mailman With His Penis" mixed with a few frank and earnest dialogues regarding the rift between the lightest of psychological violence to stark-raving sadism in comics. Instead this month’s cover seems to suggest that the content within the site may serve to propagate every goofy sex-and-violence-related comic book cliché imaginable, and that’s a shame. Continue Reading
The business of syndication as we know it today began in the nineteenth century when many newspapers, especially in smaller cities and towns, found it tantamount to impossible to maintain a large enough staff to do anything other than gather and report the local news. Therefore national organizations sprang up that sold national articles, columns, and anything of interest to the smaller papers. These syndicates allowed a small paper to carry high-quality national content and a highly varied selection of features, in spite of the small staffs they maintained.
The last couple of columns I’ve written have been more like pep talks then How-To material. I must be working through some inner demons of my own or something while I write these, trying to type out things I do or want to do as some sort of record of what I’m thinking. In turn, that got me thinking…
Dear Mr. or Mrs. Reader,
I would like to cancel my subscription to your opinions.
I have been a longtime loyal subscriber for almost two years, having originally been won over by your public action’s ideals, integrity, and overall quality of judgement. When you first popped up as a small start-up, with a few comments peppered here and there on my newsmagazine articles, you made a profound impact, and quickly won my heart.
We like happy endings because we know in our hearts that there are almost no happy ends. Continue Reading
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