Comix Talk for Thursday, April 8, 2010

Fleen reported yesterday that Phil Foglio caught that Merriam Webster had "webcomic" up as a new word for April 2010.  I've always liked webcomic because (1) it's self-explanatory and (2) no one calls comedians doing something online "webcomics".

CONVENTIONS: MoCCA is this weekend.  Sam Costello the creator of the horror webcomic Split Lip will be debuting a special limited edition of its Volume 2 trade paperback with a new, previously unpublished story and a new cover by Shane Oakley.  The 10 stories in the collection offer 160 pages of disturbing, intellectual horror stories with art by Sami Makkonen (Hatter M vol. 2), Anthony Perruzo (Zuda), John Bivens (Comic book Tattoo), and Jason Ho (Agnes Quill). 

And Brigid Alverson has a round-up of lots more great books that will be available at MoCCA.

INTERVIEWS: The Beat has an interview with Hope Larson and Raina Telgemeier.  Together they're hosting the "Drink & Draw Like A Lady" event.

AWARDS: You can make nominations for the Eagle awards now.  Go Intertubes go…

FROM THE MAILBAG

So The Boy with Nails for Eyes by Shaun Gardiner is pretty interesting.  It's a webcomic with music, and a kind of delayed, cinematic presentation of the panels on a "page" that pushes — but in my mind mostly doesn't break — the boundary of comicness.  Really in terms of experimenting with the notion of a comic embedded in the web, this is fantastic stuff.  And the interface used to navigate within the "page" and to go from page to page is pretty easy.  So far there is only one chapter up of what is supposed to be a much longer story.  The art is fantastic, the brief text so far interesting, hard to guess if the work as a whole will be satisfying but certainly Gardiner's setting a high bar for himself.  I heartily recommend checking this out.

Nate Wunderman wrote to mention his webcomics E.I. and Time Corps.  Talk about extremes – I went from being immersed in the webbiness of The Boy with Nails for Eyes to Wunderman's comics which are all presented in pdf format.  I can't repeat this enough — use an image format that's native to browsers.  You want to offer a .pdf as an alternate version, great, but start with something from the holy trinity of image formats; gif, jpg and png.