Gisele Lagace is the creator of Cool Cat Studio and Penny & Aggie. On both webcomics, she currently shares the reins with T Campbell who scripts while Lagace handles the artwork. Lagace and Campbell recently announced the return of Cool Cat Studio, a webcomic I really liked during its initial year 2000-2001 run. And Lagace also recently quit her day job to do comics full-time. It seemed like a great time to find out more about Gisele Lagace so I caught up with her recently via email to talk about comics.

I’d like to take a little time to talk about creative ways to integrate text into comics. When I first started making webcomics, I didn’t give much thought to how the text would become part of my images. I drew the art, scanned it and typed in the words in the last stage of the production. This led to some very awkward passages in my webcomics.

Usually, text is used in speech balloons; sound effects; narration boxes and in very rare cases, the words become part of the image themselves. But sometimes artists stretch these standards to make something truly innovative in their work.

A friend of mine, reading my last article for ComixTalk ("A World of Fantasy"), wondered how I could write a whole piece on fantasy webcomics without mentioning Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

So I had to admit that it was only the artwork and some of the dialogue that got me through the very slow opening section of that comic. And just as I was finally gleaning enough information to get a feel for the character and the setting, they tear the character out of the setting and throw her down some place new. I've tried, but Girl Genius just isn't for me.

Thinking about it, though, and with this summer's Comic Con International still on my mind, I realized that several webcomics that I do read were also once published on paper. So here I am, writing about Girl Genius without actually writing about it so I can focus instead on Finder by Carla Speed MacNeil, Xeno's Arrow by Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Miller, and Galaxion by Tara Tallan.

Shayna Marchese is the creator of Voids, a webcomic about Sara, a young woman in New York City.  I like Voids a lot -- it's a quiet comic that casts a careful eye on its main character as well as the city she lives in. I caught up with Marchese via email earlier this month to find out a little more about her and Voids.

Krishna Sadasivam is the creator of the long-running tech-focused humor comic, PC Weenies. Sadasivam has been publishing his comic to the web for almost nine years and I caught up with him recently via email to talk about PC Weenies and his new comic Uncubed.

Whitney June Robinson is the creator of a wonderfully charming comic about an all girls school called Alma Mater.  The comic is written and published to reflect the school calendar with Robinson finishing up the first year of the story this past Spring.  With real schools opening their doors this month, Robinson recently kicked off the second year of Alma Mater.  It's a visually distinctive comic and Robinson does a fine job of drawing on her own life experience in crafting realistic characters and storylines for the middle school years.  I caught up with her recently over emails and asked about the upcoming year of her comic.

In this month's Panels & Pictures, Derik A Badman makes a list of questions to consider when creating a comic: panel layouts? colors? composition? word balloons? Comics aren't simple when you start taking them apart.