Above all, I love good stories.

Artful narrative.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

It’s been nearly a year since Comixpedia began its remarkable transformation from the rough concept that Xaviar Xerexes pitched to me, to the webcomics magazine that it is now, and I think we’ve accomplished a lot for a group of loosely-affiliated webcomics creators, living in our own far-flung corners of the world.

One of the interesting offshoots of the webcomic model has been its propensity for sharing.

Because very few people are actually making a living at this, ownership of a particular imaginary world or character has not become the political minefield that it is in print and animation. It is still possible for webcomics creators to ape one another, use someone else's characters (with their permission, of course) and do the occasional cross-over. It is a luxury of not being in "business" that many webcomics creators have taken advantage of, and it's a luxury, I believe, which takes comics places that print can only rarely go.

Join us for where the wild things are...

"The Monitor Has Two Faces"

Carl Jung called it the Shadow, though it's most commonly referred to as the Alter-Ego these days – a way of understanding how the different, and occasionally disparate parts of our personality relate to one another. The alter ego is that reflection of our inner-selves that we project into the outer world.

Mirror Mirror On The Web

It happens a lot. We don't spend a lot of time talking about it, or analyzing what went wrong. We don't sit down and articulate areas for improvement. Generally, the readership for a webcomic gone wrong takes its time and attention elsewhere, and the creator is left to toil away in obscurity and isolation until the fateful day they have to pull an "Old Yeller" and put their comic down.

Everything I Needed to Know About Comics I Learned in 24 Hours

When my friend Matt first suggested it, I thought it sounded a little crazy. I'd read Scott McCloud's dare, and I knew that plenty of people had already done it. But could I do it? I'd never drawn so much as a three-panel comic in my life.

Then again, I'd never tried.

Mommy, Why Are My Eyes So Big?

One of the most interesting stylistic elements of most manga or anime, for me, has always been the character design. In most Western comics and animation, character design has as much to do with personal expression as it does with story. The fact that most of the characters in the Peanuts strips have large heads and dots for eyes probably has more to do with how Charles Shultz decided to draw them than the stories he told. There's no denying that narrative can influence character design to some extent, but for the most part, Western cartoonists have worked very hard to stand out from other works through their stylistic choices. They are individuals, and their comics are often an expression of that individuality.

A Regular Eisenstein, Or Something…

That comics and film have much in common is pretty much a given. The bond they share as mediums of visual communication is strong, and over the years there has been a great deal of cross-pollination between the two artforms. I’m not talking about comic adaptations of films or films based on comic books – although there certainly are a lot of those these days – but rather the nuts and bolts that hold the two mediums together.

If at First You Fail, Write a Column About It

If you're reading closely you will probably have noticed that much of this month's Comixpedia content is related to diary comics. It was an interesting choice, and one that appealed to me right away, being a regular reader of American Elf and The Journal Comic. At the same time, I didn't know what to say about the current trend towards autobiography and introspection in webcomics - so I tried drawing one of my own.

However, my journal comic experiment, "Drawing A Blank", lasted little more than a week and a half. On top of that, when I was recently revising content on my site I (rather conveniently) "lost" the episodes. Fortunately, the actual experience of drawing and posting them is what I want to talk about this month, because it raised some interesting questions.