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Reuben Bolling

Whole Lotta Webcomic Stuff Goin' On

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 8, 2008 - 11:06

MILESTONES
Berke Breathed is bailing on the funny pages again.  NPR reports on Opus leaving the newspapers right around this year's election.  Breathed says he will focus on children's books.  I loved Bloom County growing up but to be honest haven't been that enraptured by the two sequel strips.

BOO!
Sean Kleefeld talks up the horror-themed collective of webcomics, Split Lip.

TOOLS
The US Daily reports on two "comics" creation tools: "My Comic Book Creator" and "Comic Life".

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

BUSINESS
Sean Kleefeld muses about why one would buy the book after reading the webcomic?  He kind of stumbles onto Jon Rosenberg's greater theory of swag support: have a bunch of physical stuff  for a reader to buy...

MOVIE MAYHEM
Reuben Bolling on watching a preview of The Watchmen movie:

It seems that it was the success of director Snyder's "300" that gave him the clout to reject the studio's re-imagining of Watchmen as a War on Terror shoot-'em-up, and go back to the source material.  Based on what I saw, it's hard to imagine a fan of the comic book being angry or disappointed that the movie strayed from the comic.

AROUND THE BLOGS AND BACK
Chuck Rozakis has a column at ComicMix sprinkling a little bit of econo-speak over the fact that really good creators of webcomics get a disproportionate number of fans.  It is a nice way to put it -- in a world of access to all choices available most people will take the "best" option as opposed to a second or third-rate option and so if you're webcomic is the "best" you're going to collect all the potential fans (Hence the use of "superstar" in his column title).  But of course, "best" is going to be somewhat subjective and not all "fans" or "readers" are going to be interested in the same things so it's a bit more complicated.  We've also looked at this distribution as a power law (here, here for example) and had some discussion of how the "long tail" of it can still provide opportunities for creators to connect with readers by providing a smaller group of fans exactly what they're looking for.

History of Comics!!! In Three Comic Installments

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on September 22, 2008 - 12:04

Reuben Bolling does a very funny Forrest Gump-like take on the history of comics in a three part series in his comic Tom The Dancing Bug.  Behind the Salon wait-for-an-ad wall but worth the wait. Click here for part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the "history of Doug, an unremarkable cartoon character." 

I AM NOT WRITING ABOUT SKULLS, RED OR OTHERWISE

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on July 15, 2008 - 16:35

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Boom Studios is putting up more of its comics as webcomics on its site.

BUSINESS
Neil Gaiman has a writeup of the positive results of his recent free experiment putting his novel American Gods (quite good btw!) online for awhile -- sales of his books at independent bookseller were up considerably.  Techdirt also has a post on the wider trend of publishers trying out the free ebooks strategy.  Some of this is validation for the free model of webcomics but there are also wrinkles to be learned from the experiments of text publishers.  In part, I'm interested myself in seeing how publishers, as opposed to creators navigate free and for-sale.

POLITICS
I know there's some hubbub about a swing and a miss cover to the New Yorker (speaking of which Reuben Bolling did a much better take on that satirical idea); forget that, the real story is the New Yorker's interview with Chris Onstad of Achewood.

TOOLS
You can read comics on the iphone.  In Japan,  software company Celsys is pushing the iphone for reading manga.

D.C. or Bust

Submitted by August Pollak on July 6, 2007 - 07:43

Xavier was generous enough to let me guest-blog here for the week. That said, I demanded that if I did it I got to shamelessly promote my own event on the front page.  So here we go.

Cartoonists With Attitude - Live in DC!

Come meet

More Attitude From Ted Rall: A Review of Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists

September 28, 2006 - 23:10 | Xaviar Xerexes

Ted Rall talks up and talks to webcomics with attitude for Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists. It's a great addition to the ongoing Attitude anthology series that pays some well-deserved attention to webcomics.

Dueling Apologies

Submitted by pclips on May 1, 2006 - 12:04

The other shoe just dropped at last. Over at Whispered Apologies, Alexander Danner has written the canon version of the comic featuring the Deadmouse art I chose when I was writing a contribution there.

There was an odd mix-up. Normally, a pool of writers choose a piece of art from the submissions archive, and create a comic from it. Unbeknownst to me, Alexander had already made a comic with that art when I sent mine to Ryan, and Alexander's strip was queued to load next.

Small Press Expo Memories

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on October 2, 2005 - 00:12

The Small Press Expo is all about the art of the comics medium. Comics from every type of genre, style and format. It's the face of the comics medium without the distortion of the obsessive focus on the superhero genre most comic conventions would give you.

Plus, it's been well infiltrated by webcomics creators.

I spent all of Saturday at the convention this year and at times the floor was fairly crowded. Unfortunately since then I've been away in the Golden State and just didn't have a chance to write up a proper feature on it. So consider this a bit of a rambling remembrance of people, moments and most importantly, comics.

(And there's a lot of pictures after the jump so it'll take more than a second for the full page to load.)

Late Afternoon Update from Xaviar - News, Views and The Rambling

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 17, 2005 - 16:48

Week 2 of Comixpedia's January issue has a review of Diesel Sweeties, John Barber's interview with Justine Shaw, Eric Burns' latest Feeding Snarky column plus a guide to pimping uh, promoting your webcomic.

And now on to the news and views for Monday...

The Comixpedia Community Interview with Ted Rall

October 24, 2004 - 22:15

You asked some tough questions and Ted Rall provided the answers. Read on for an interesting dialogue with one of the most controversial editorial cartoonists working today.