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WHY DO ONLINE COMICS

Xaviar Xerexes Leave a Comment

Issue #1 – Why Do Online Comics?

This is the introduction paragraph. My name, so you don’t confuse me with anyone else, is Iain D. Hamp. You are quite welcome to call me Iain, “E,” the Hampster, or Ishmael if you like. I may not answer to some of those, but you are welcome to call me them.

At any rate, Joey Manley has asked me to do a column for his site talkaboutcomics.com*. He said it should be about the digital comics industry, which is reasonable, as his site is not called talkaboutmonkeys.com. Actually, truth be told, I wouldn’t mind writing an article for that site either if it existed. However, that is not the task at hand, so I will just get on with what is. Continue Reading →

WHY DO ONLINE COMICS?

Xaviar Xerexes Leave a Comment

Issue #0: And That’s the Way It Was

In December of 1999 I started doing my first online strip, Modern Evil. My inspirations for starting it came mostly from listening to Scott McCloud speak about the subject of online comics at the 1999 San Diego Comic Con International, and then going home to see what others in the field were doing.

I had already researched the costs of getting a print book made and sent out to the masses, which are just ridiculous for a one-man shop to bear. Putting a comic on the internet, however, was quite cheap, relatively. My first website, http://www.modernevil.com (which I went into with a partner and ultimately handed control over to him), cost about $300 to set up and keep running for two years.

Advertising adds some to the cost, of course, but it’s the same for print comics. Most website hosting services will charge you more if you become very popular (thousands or tens of thousands of visitors, depending on the service and how big your comics are in file size), but it is still nothing compared to the costs of getting that many people into comic book stores to buy your print comic. Continue Reading →

Leah Fitzgerald Versus The World?

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I was surrounded by people who succcumbed to that so-called Yellow Fever in university. Sometimes I felt like the minority, not being obsessed with getting to Japan, or with scoring bootleg Anime and Manga in the original Japanese. I didn’t take Japanese, despite having the opportunity. I didn’t even try sushi until third year, despite the trendiness of sushi bars in Halifax (when I left, there were at least 7 within walking distance of the university). It wasn’t until after I’d left university that I tried watching bootlegged VCDs of Asian movies, despite my friends all having seen Ringu before they’d even started talking about making The Ring. Continue Reading →

Cafe Press: TOS is POS

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Recently, Cafepress made some changes to their Terms of Service (TOS or member agreement) – a move that has prompted a slew of angry messages, emails, and even anti-Cafepress sites. This has also prompted many folks to look for alternatives for Cafepress. In the following article (originally a rant on my site), I offer my own Cafepress experience, reasons for leaving Cafepress and some of the math involved in the "do-it-yourself" approach that I will most likely be perusing.

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Stop Drawing Bad Manga! by Shaenon K. Garrity

Shaenon Garrity 48 Comments

Here’s the deal. I work for a manga publisher, Viz LLC, purveyors of such titles as Phoenix, Inu-Yasha, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and Shonen Jump. I’m surrounded by manga and the attendant detritus of Japanese pop culture for eight hours a day, five days a week.

I like it. A lot.

And yet I don’t like most manga-style American comics.

On this side of the Pacific, manga-style seems to mean one of two things:

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The Blue View by Boxjam

2 Comments

I like wit, perhaps to a fault.

Everyone knows that ninety percent of everything is garbage. So I should have known, when I offered It's not Country. It's Johnny Cash, as a way of saving this great man's canon, that my friend would call me on it. I did it, of course, because Country has come to be sluggish bland pop with a twang, nothing at all like what Cash does. Continue Reading →

Paying for It: Webcomics Are Still Cheap Thrills

Xaviar Xerexes 3 Comments

There are plenty of webcomics you can read for free, but a growing number of sites are beginning to charge for some or all of the webcomics they publish. Now that you may have to hand over your hard-earned cash to read your favorite webcomics, it’s important that you know what you’re getting so you can decide where to hand over your hard-earned cash. This article is part one in a series that will review sites where you pay for webcomics. We will tell you the costs of joining such sites. Continue Reading →

Open Soapbox: Webcartoonists Are Communists

Howard 8 Comments

Webcartoonists are communists.

That’s right… they’re all commies. Or maybe socialists, but that’s as close as should make no difference to someone who is merely ‘left-wing,’ let alone decently ‘conservative.’ See, a REAL cartoonist is paid by a large, properly-capitalist organization called, in true Republican fashion, a Syndicate. He or she pours creative energy into work that is edited, collated, marketed, and pushed to the Free Press, where it can be shared with millions of humor-hungry people in exchange for newspaper subscriptions. It is The American Way (in America, and even in countries that claim to hate America… it’s still the American Way.)

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