Skip to main content

Joey Manley

O Web Comic, O Web Comic, Your Panels Infinite Delight Us (UPDATED)

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on December 12, 2006 - 10:27

YEAR IN REVIEW

There are a few end of the year lists I thought would be interesting that I'm not going to be able to get done on my own. But we might be able to do it together:

INTERVIEWS

CONVENTIONS

EVENTS

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

NOT WEBCOMICS

I'm Mr. Webcomic-Meister, I'm Mr. One Hundred and Two!!! (UPDATED)

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on December 11, 2006 - 10:37

MAGAZINE

Be sure to check out the first installment of a new column from Alexander Danner and Tim Tyler spotlighting completed webcomics.

INTERVIEWS

AWARDS

  • The 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize is accepting submissions until January 15, 2007. The winner of the Comics Blooker Prize receives $2,500 and if selected as the overall winner (there are two additional categories) the prize is $10,000. Last year's winner was Zack Miller for Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection. This year's judges are Paul Jones; Arianna Huffington; Julie Powell; Rohit Gupta; and Nick Cohen.

DEAD TREES

POLLS

I'm going to shut down our "Que Es Mas Offensive" poll of potentially offensive webcomics on Christmas Eve (12/24). So be sure to vote before we crown the winner on Christmas morning.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Narbonic Enters Final Month

Submitted by Shaenon Garrity on December 4, 2006 - 05:19

Narbonic -- Shaenon K. Garrity's long-running daily webstrip, has just entered its final month of publication. The strip will complete its six-and-a-half-year run in December, with the last strip appearing on December 31, 2006.

Gianna vs. Wikipedia

Submitted by WizToast on November 30, 2006 - 16:02

Although it isn't news anymore that self-righteous pricks enjoy removing useful information from Wikipedia, I thought [the discussion on Wikipedia on whether to delete the article for The Noob] was interesting for a few reasons.

First of all, one of the guys targeting her for deletion actually wrote articles on other webcomics, including such strips as Fetus-X, which (despite being universally recognized among cartoonists as Fine Art) definitely doesn't have anything like the readership of The Noob. [XEREXES: Although there is no question The Noob has a substantial readership it really isn't appropriate to compare it to Fetus-X since I have seen no evidence to confirm or deny the readership numbers for either comic.]

Second, if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that Gianna is trying to debate him by offering a well-reasoned argument. Go check it out, read the stances and maybe offer some support.

[UPDATE from XEREXES: Within the span of a couple weeks about 3 or 4 people (hard to tell from the now closed discussion page but it appears to me that wikipedians Seraphimblade, Sandstein, Satori Son, and Dragonfiend actually voted for "deletion") deleted the entry for Comixpedia from the Wikipedia. This seems like a perfect example of how the current process makes it almost impossible for rational, well-informed debate to occur. Now I get to personally feel what everyone else subject to this ludicrous process has gone through. I'll be the first to admit the entry for Comixpedia sucked, but by their own standards, a more comprehensive entry for Comixpedia should qualify. It's just that the former entry didn't reflect any of that. It's incredibly easy for a wikipedian trying to delete things to say something's not notable. The wikipedia doesn't have to show that the entry doesn't reflect any of the given notability standards - that onus is on keeping it I guess. Worthless until proven notable, even if the Comixpedia entry has existed for 3+ years and countless other entries in the Wikipedia cite to the Wikipedia entry for Comixpedia or directly to a link on Comixpedia itself.

I plan to petition for undeletion, but I suppose I need to do the research to demonstrate notability. Any advice on petitioning for undeletion or helping me with evidence supporting Comixpedia's notability would be most welcome. If there are any experienced wikipedians willing to actively help me with this - That means you Kiba! :) please email me at xerexes AT comixpedia DOT com.]

On the positive side it appears that Girly's deletion was overturned and the entry for it is back in the Wikipedia. Some comments from the "Talk Page" for Girly at Wikipedia:

Dragonfiend...

There was a Deletion Review on this. The deletion was overturned. Let it go. --SuperHappy 19:41, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Expert undeletion

The AFD was clueless, an academic expert on comics has undeleted it as notable. It lives. - David Gerard 20:14, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank God. If this webcomic was not seen as notable enough for Wikipedia, I would have lost all faith in the project. There are way to many delete happy editors with their finger on the trigger.--Pyritefoolsgold 06:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm glad to see it back too. -- Ryuko 09:24, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

A pity I missed the fun. Glad to see this restored, since it's definitely notable. It's one of those "If you don't think this is notable, you aren't qualified to edit webcomic articles anymore" ones. :) Xuanwu 07:55, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

News For November 28, 2006

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 28, 2006 - 08:02

PvP The SeriesA recurring comment that popped up in discussions about the announcement of the new animated PvP series was whether or not Scott Kurtz was being hypocritical for embracing almost in total a project and business plan that he had criticized previously when rival videogame webcomic creator Tim Buckley had launched Ctrl-Alt-Del: The Animated Series.

I expected Buckley to post some kind of comment but blogger Gilead Pellaeon beat him to it:

Ok. Not to rag on Scott Kurtz or anything, but someone's got to say it. We've seen lots of announcement posts, some discussion, and a somewhat tangential piece by Eric Burns on voice acting, and people have been dancing around the topic, so I'm just going to come right out and say it:

Scott Kurtz is a hypocritical man and he's ripping Tim Buckley off.

It's a gross oversimplification of actual events, completely one-sided, and a half-truth at best, but someone had to say it.

Is Kurtz being hypocritical? Arguably yeah. Should anyone care? Probably not so much. People can change their minds, people can be inconsistent over time. Would it be better to acknowledge a change in opinion or if possible explain the differences between this PvP project and the CAD project that inspired so much criticism? Probably, but it's understandable why talking about CAD wouldn't be the first thing on Kurtz's mind yesterday.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Monday News Carousel

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 20, 2006 - 10:56

NEWS & VIEWS

  • This is very interesting to me: Yahoo has inked a partnership with 176 newspapers across the country. Yet another sign that the business of putting daily content on dead tree pulp is in dire need of reinvention.
  • Over the weekend, Joey Manley put up a long post about open standards for webcomics software. (Manley posted the same thing at The Engine and the comments there are also interesting) Don't be intimidated by the length of it - a key takeaway from it is that webcomics creators would be well served by a real effort for coders working on webcomics software to agree to some standardized data elements for webcomics. The immediate benefit Manley focuses on is that this would ensure "portability" for creators to easily move between services and/or software (for example moving a comic from Webcomics Nation to Keenspot) - something that is not easy when a comic's archive approach four digits.
  • Neil Cohn responds to recent posts on transitions by Derik Badman (Derik's posts are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

BOMB SHELTER IDOL

REVIEWS

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

My Life in Records moves to WCN

Submitted by grantcthomas on November 19, 2006 - 18:14

I've taken up Joey Manley's offer for a free WCN account and moved My Life in Records and Graphic Poems over to the new space. The MLIR archives are completely moved over and the Graphic Poems archives will follow shortly.

End of 2006 Coming Soon

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 17, 2006 - 12:39

December is traditionally a "year in review" kind of issue at Comixpedia and that's the goal this time around. As we get closer to the end of 2006 it's revealing to look at what folks were writing about webcomics at the end of 2005: The 2005 Webcomics Roundtable.

For the last two years we've also ran a special "25 People Of Webcomics" list article. Here's a link to the 2005 POW List article. Who do you think should be on this year's list? Post a comment with your nominations.

Rolling Thursday News

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 16, 2006 - 11:25

NEWS & VIEWS

REVIEWS

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Monday Monday...

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on November 13, 2006 - 11:20

Webcomics NationJoey Manley announced that WebcomicsNation now offers a free service offering the same core functionality as the pay service. Leaving business issues aside, I think this is a great thing as the WebcomicsNation tool set is very useful. Scanning reactions to this I noticed Journalista! today praised the move, but found this quote curious: "I mention all of this because of the potential for this initiative to create the one thing that webcomics have pretty much lacked up until now: a central gathering point." What Dirk is describing is Big Panda circa 1999, Keenspot/space circa 2001. They were the online gathering points. What happened? Webcomics got bigger.

Gabe posted the cover to the forthcoming Penny Arcade book, "Birds Are Weird" (along with some of the preliminary sketchwork).

Basic Instinct By Scott MeyerBasic Instructions by Scott Meyer is pretty funny (sort of a non-political Tom The Dancing Bug). There was a Digg entry for it recently. It only got 3 Diggs and so it didn't make the front page (most comics don't get "dugg" much from what I've seen) but Google picked up the Digg.com entry for it (presumably because Digg.com has a great page rank in the Google algorithm). So there might be a value to posting to Digg even without much hope of making the front page of Digg.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS