Features

The Stone Age (The History of Online Comics: Part 3)

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After the first online comic and the first webcomic, the early pioneers of webcomics included Bill Holbrook, Peter Zale and Charley Parker. Each of these three pioneers faced their own obstacles and found success in their own way. Bill Holbrook was already a syndicated newspaper cartoonist when he launched the webcomic Kevin & Kell, Peter Zale's Helen: Sweetheart of the Internet featured a tech-savvy female at the lead character and Charley Parker's Argon Zark began to take advantage of both digital art tools and the "web" part of webcomics in ways that no online comic had previously. Continue Reading →

Open Soapbox: The Immediacy of the Web

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I’ll admit it. When Paul Daly, my creative partner on Athena Voltaire, suggested that I contact Joey Manley and Chris Mills about pitching our feature to the Modern Tales family, I viewed it as a stepping stone to getting Athena in print.

Somewhere along the way, my thinking began to change. Don’t get me wrong; I would dearly love to see our heroine in print, but now I look at the two delivery systems (print and web) as synergistic rather than mutually exclusive.

There’s something about the immediacy of the web.

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Really Simple Syndication for WebComics

Xaviar Xerexes 1 Comment

Publishing a webcomic is simple, right? Set up a website and post webcomics via FTP, and readers come to said website to read said webcomics? Well, yes… and no.

In a world of too many webcomics to count, getting a webcomic in front of as many potential readers as possible is a good strategy for building its audience. As the Internet evolves, so do the various methods to "syndicate" webcomics – creators and publishers are finding new ways for readers to follow a webcomic without having to visit the actual webcomic’s website. Continue Reading →

Art & Narrative: An Opportunity For Comics Discourse

BIll Duncan Leave a Comment

One of the interesting offshoots of the webcomic model has been its propensity for sharing. Because very few people are actually making a living at this, ownership of a particular imaginary world or character has not become the political minefield that it is in print and animation. It is still possible for webcomics creators to ape one another, use someone else’s characters (with their permission, of course) and do the occasional cross-over. Continue Reading →

Measuring the Webcomic Audience Version 0.4

Xaviar Xerexes 20 Comments

Time once again for another edition of Measuring the Webcomic Audience. Last month our list relied on visits, page views, and links data derived from Ranking.com and Alexa.com. This month we drop links data from our methodology, and instead rank webcomics based on Ranking.com data for visits and page views and for Alexa.com rankings.

Once again Penny Arcade topped our chart and also dominated all categories of data we reviewed in our methodology. Overall, however, there was a much greater number of webcomics moving on and off the Most Read List this month. Continue Reading →

Satan and Webcomics by Bill Roundy

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The Devil.

How scary is he, really?

Okay: war, death, disease, famine, telemarketers – they’re all bad… but Satan himself? He doesn’t seem to be doing much recently. Watching The Exorcist these days, the 70s fashions inspire more terror than the pea-soup-vomit or the little-girl-blasphemy. In the face of real-life monsters like terrorists and serial killers, the cackling flames of the Devil can seem downright quaint. Bottom line is that, in this secular age, we just don’t think much about Lucifer anymore.

But he’s all over the webcomics. Continue Reading →

Juxtapose This: While Visions of Pumpkin Guts Danc’d In My Head

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I’ve always been a Hallowe’en kind of kid. Christmas, yes, fine, but Christmas doesn’t give you the opportunity to coat yourself to the elbows with pumpkin gore. Nor, in anticipation of 12/25, does one feel authorized to spend large amounts of money on cosmetics that aren’t used in a normal social context anywhere excepting the better geisha bars, and maybe some parts of Dixieland. Yes, Hallowe’en is a green light for every morbid-minded, artsy, exhibitionist kook to inflict their aesthetic on a world that otherwise has very little place for people whose favorite movies universally involve some combination of Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, and Johnny Depp 1. Continue Reading →

Why Do Online Comics by Iain Hamp

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As I sat back looking at some of my work recently, trying to figure out how to spontaneously get remarkably better at writing believable, effective dialogue, I glanced over and noticed a journal where I keep some of my poetry. My mind strayed back to my community college creative writing classes, where I read those poems in front of twenty or thirty people and then got critiqued by each person individually.

The most amazing thing to me about poetry is that thirty people can read a poem and have thirty completely different reactions to it. Everyone goes into a poem with different backgrounds and emotions, and draws whatever they need from it at the time. Looking back at the various panels of artwork I’d drawn, devoid of any word balloons, I realized that comics have at least as much potential as poems to fulfill those basic emotional and psychological desires. Continue Reading →