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Joey Manley

Friday

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 2, 2007 - 10:17

NOVEMBER ISSUE OF COMIXTALK

CONTEST

  • I've got another Karas the Revelation DVD to give away...

REVIEWS

JOURNALISM

ADVERTS

  • Joey Manley writes that as an experiment for the month of November, you can now buy via Project Wonderful the top banner spot for all of the major user-generated content sites on the new ComicSpace Network (TalkAboutComics.com, OnlineComics.net, the WebcomicsNation.com, and ComicSpace.com). It looks like Eric Milikin (Fetus X) had the spot this morning for about $45 per day (Project Wonderful works on a real time auction basis).

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Josh Roberts - Joey Manley Joint Venture

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 30, 2007 - 01:38

This is a big deal and should lead to an even bigger and better platform for independent webcomic creators - more details (of course) at Talk About Comics here.

The full "press release" is after the jump...

Monday Update

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 21, 2007 - 21:51

COMIXTALK

LEGAL BEAGLES

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

  • I thought David McGuire's Webcomics Are Awesome is pretty funny as a parody of webcomics community (not sure if he's going to update it further) on the level of "lots of this absurd stuff happens and it's always healthy to make fun of yourself" since McGuire is a comic creator himself and as part of the now defunct Bag of Chips collective has certainly been "in" the webcomics community as much as anyone. On the otherhand I don't really know David (met him once at SPX) so I'm not sure how he views this comic.
  • Everyone's making comics about the latest videogame Portal. This one's from Hijinks Ensue (whose creator Joel Watson also makes comics that appear on the website Apple Insider)
  • Tough Guys is a pretty good concept for a comic (or probably more likely an Adult Swim animated series) but the execution of this webcomic by Zac Marshall and Nuno Teixeira is all wrong. The art is strange and largely looks cut and pasted. Maybe a chibi style would have worked better here. It's also largely not funny nor interesting yet. You're aiming at a huge chunk of American pop culture over the last 30 to 40 years (the "action movie") -- that's a big fat softball across the plate, if you're doing jokes you ought to be hitting multiple base hits everytime out.
  • The Tower by Saki Miyamoto and Brendon Bennets is a textless comic about a princess who escapes her intended role in search of adventure.
  • David Wright (creator of Todd and Penguin) has a new webcomic out called The Best Kids Show Ever - sort of if Fox News decided to get into the children's television business.
  • Butternut Squash versus Mahna mahna. (Original muppet song here!)

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

I Don't Like Mondays

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 15, 2007 - 09:17

AWARDS 

  • In a bit of a surprise (to me at least) Papercutter #6 edited by Alec Longstreth won Outstanding Debut in the Ignatz Awards (A surprise not because Longstreth's book didn't deserve to win but because very famous cartoonist Bill Griffith had a book nominated in this category: Zippy: Walk a Mile in My Mu-Mu). Chris Onstad won the Outstanding Online Comic for Achewood.  The full list of awards are available here in simple text form, all on one page (please someone at the WCCAs use this format for releasing your list of winners next time).

INTERVIEWS

TECHNOLOGY

  • Joey Manley has a big post on questions and comments on tailoring stats for webcomic creators in the next generation of his hosting service WebcomicsNation. I still need to read it a bit more carefully but if you're interested in stats or WCN you should probably give it a look.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

C'mon On Feel The Friday!

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 5, 2007 - 00:19

Ahoy! Weekend in sight... Today's the last day to enter our Blade DVD giveaway. Easy to enter - and (depending on how many people show up today...) could be easy to win...

HEADLINES

CONVENTIONS

ENCYCLOPEDIA WEBCOMICA

  • The new Comixpedia looks to be rolling along - they have a new logo designed by the talented Chris Moujaes. They're looking for additional folks to be admins on the site as well.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

Zuda Contracts Now Available

Submitted by Keith Quinn on September 24, 2007 - 08:54

Zuda Comics, a website service of DC Comics, has finally posted their contracts. There are three of them:

  • the Submission Agreement (for anyone whose art appears at Zuda),
  • the Rights Agreement (which details the rights of creators who have "won" the Zuda contest and will be having their work published),
  • and the Services Agreement (also for winning creators, except this covers the "consideration" that a creator will receive for their efforts).

[XEREXES: T Campbell had a few thoughts on this at his blog. And Joey Manley makes the good point of getting legal advice before submitting to Zuda. He also links to the NY chapter of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts who do indeed provide cheap to free legal advice to artists. There are Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts chapters all over the country actually - here's a listing of many. Lastly, Gary Tyrrell links to the Zuda contracts and then offers some comments on the Submission Agreement.]

Monday

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on August 13, 2007 - 12:22

This week's guest blogger is Tim Demeter who does way too many cool things for me to list 'em. Needless to say I'm grateful for him to take sometime out of his busy schedule to guest blog for the site again (he helped out last summer as well).

BUSINESS

  • Gary Tyrell at FLEEN has a good post on DC Comics Zudacomics project. Zudacomics is DC's webcomic portal for new stuff from creators - not it's "putting DC comic books on the web" site, which oddly enough DC hasn't gotten around to creating yet. Apparently DC must think that the music industry's Internet strategy is awesome as it and Marvel appear to be following large parts of it - although not yet suing large numbers of their customers so good on them for that bit of common sense. Is it just me or is the huge rise in scanlation trading online (scanlation is the direct equivalent of ripping CDs into mp3s) at least somewhat the fault of DC and Marvel for failing to put their immense catalog of material online in any meaningful way for consumers? Sort of related here is Joey Manley's recent post spelling out his view that Modern Tales as a subscription site was a success, but one limited by the subscription site model. Manley links to a post about Zudacomics and cracks wise that:
    It’s interesting and illuminating to see the “mainstream” comics community try to get a grip on how the digital distribution of comics can be monetized. Sometimes, it literally feels like they’re repeating every business idea that took the webcomics community by storm over the past ten years, and in exactly the same order, only to discard each in turn (as did we, for the most part) and move on to the next.

    I'm interested of course in any comics publishers' projects involving digital distribution of comics. It's the future of all media, not just comics and the sooner comics sorts out how to survive the intertubes the better for comics. Anyhow back to Gary's post and zudamania. I think DC's insistence on a 4:3 format for comics isn't going to be a problem for people willing to get into bed with Zudacomics in the first place. The 4:3 ratio is probably equally useful to Zuda to make their site slicker and more consistent for readers as it is to any print spin-offs Zuda pursues. But I definitely think Gary's point that a successful Zuda might benefit some non-Zuda creators more than anyone actually on Zuda to be pretty insightful and likely correct.

INTERVIEWS

DEAD TREES

  • Journalista! points to this Publisher Weekly post on Amazon's new self-publishing program:
    Through Project Vine, readers with a history of posting accurate and helpful book reviews are being invited to receive advance copies for review purposes. And, through CreateSpace, a division of the company that already provides CD- and DVD-on-demand services, Amazon has added book publishing options.

REVIEWS

TRANSITIONS

  • Newsarama is reporting that Mike Wieringo passed away this Sunday of a sudden heart attack. Wieringo wasn't that much older than me (he was 44) and he's also one of the few names in comic book land I was familar with before I got into all this webcomics. By all accounts not only was he very talented but a tremendously nice guy. He had a blog and I imagine there will be some info on memorials there.

SWAG

NOT WEBCOMICS

  • Sometimes superhero movies are cool, sometimes they are ridiculous. Sometimes they're just a muddled mess where the director/writer/whatever can't figure out what kind of movie they're making. Time Nerd World blogger Lev Grossman posts about the planned Thor movie and I have to agree with his doubts about the direction Marvel supposedly is taking with it. The main reason I'm linking to this NerdWorld post though is to harp on the planned The Incredible Hulk movie which is being touted as a "re-do" of the Ang Lee movie (and not a sequel). I'm not sure how I'd script it because I don't think you'd want to make a movie too crowded with Marvel Universe characters but wouldn't you rather see a new Hulk movie along the lines of this "World War Hulk" comic book mini-series Grossman blogs about than another origin story? The Hulk is a big scary ambiguous bad guy (sort of like the Terminator character in T2) that blows stuff up. Make that movie without any pretense to being something else and you'd probably have the summer hit Marvel wants.

Life In Links: Tuesday , July 10, 2007

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on July 10, 2007 - 09:14

BUSINESS

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Tuesday News & Blues

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on June 19, 2007 - 10:10

COMIXMEDIA UPDATE:  I'm still working on the site(s) upgrade. Current plan is to have this site rebranded as COMIXTALK by the beginning of July. I'll have another site called COMIXMEDIA as an umbrella site for comics-related projects I'm working on. The upgrade here went well except the current "theme" for the site is creating some problems so I need to get the site moved to a new theme pronto (current plan is to simply update the current theme to Drupal 5.1 specs)

Guest Bloggers Wanted: Interested in blogging about (web)comics on ComixTalk in July or August? Drop me a note at xerexes AT comixpedia DOT com

BUSINESS
Todd Allen breaks another piece of the story about DC Comics plans for the web. DC Comics' new online editor is Kwanza Johnson (who according to Allen had a similar job with Marvel back in 2000?!) Allen predicts a "big" 4th quarter roll-out of webcomics from DC.

Mike Strang posted about his unhappy experience working for Platinum on a work-for-hire contract and others (T Campbell) chimed in with comments. Joey Manley compared work-for-hire to sticking your hand in a meat grinder. My own personal opinion is that authors should keep their copyrights and that creativity and business are both better off under those circumstances. But in movies, television, music and especially comic books, work-for-hire arrangements have been used forever and are still being used. So long as you know what you're getting into I don't see anything inherently evil about it. Just be clear on the concept - work-for-hire means all of your creative work becomes someone else's property. (REMINDER: if you comment at ComixTalk please try to be civil and respectful of others.)

INTERVIEWS
T Campbell interviews Aaron Williams, creator of Nodwick, PS238, Full Frontal Nerdity, co-writer on Truth, Justin, and the American Way.

Jane Irwin interviewed Templar, AZ creator Spike about webcomics and "effectively whoring your way to higher pageviews." You can read the interview here.

Shaenon Garrity interviewed Rob Vollmar who writes the comic Inanna’s Tears (drawn by mpMann).

Lynn Lau interviewed Katie Shanahan creator of the off-the-wall journal comic Shrub Monkeys.

Finding Wonderland talks to American Born Chinese author Gene Yang. (link from Journalista!)

DEAD TREES: Life Meter Vol. 2 will debut at MOCCA. Life Meter is an anthology of video game- inspired comics, featuring stories and art by Bannister, Joel Carroll, Raina Telgemeier, Steve Hamaker, Jake Parker, Jeffrey Rowland, Queenie Chan, and many, many more.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE: I saw some plugs for Boxcar Astronaut and it is indeed a cute comic (it reminds me a bit of the syndicated Red Rover comic strip).

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
FLEEN speculates on whether Elfquest creators Wendy and Richard Pini will follow the path of Phil and Kaja Foglio to the web.

At the Webcomicker blog, Gilead writes about Dominic Deegan:

If there’s one thing I like about Dominic Deegan, it’s that the storylines move forward progressively. The comic tends to have storylines which are fairly self-contained, with a specific villian or villians wreaking havoc with a specific set of goals and a specific set of heroes undergoing a specific set of actions in order to thwart said villians. But instead of each storyline coming around the full circle and leaving the heroes in basically the same place as they were when they started in classic comic book “and so the world was saved once again, and John D and Suzy Q were able to return to their normal lives” fashion, the characters in Dominic Deegan mature and grow from their experiences, and with each storyline move progressively closer to the “happily ever after.”

Joystiq readers pick their favorite comic.

Odd factoid of the day - according to this blog post, VG Cats creator Scott Ramsoomair used to babysit this guy.

Panels and Pictures: Long Form Serialization

June 16, 2007 - 11:02 | Derik A. Badman

In this month's Panels & Pictures, Derik A Badman looks at a few long form webcomic narratives and how their serialization affects the reading experience.