I had a good summer – hope you all did too. I tend to leave open a lot of windows in Firefox thinking I’ll get to writing a snappy comment about them and often never do. Let’s see what I can come up with while I close out my summer readings….
THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNLOADSÂ
- WOWIO is a site that offers a lot of comics (and ebooks too) for download, some of them free. There’s a good post by T Campbell here on his experience working with the site to offer his comics and over here is some skepticism from FLEEN. Campbell reveals that he gets 50 cents per unique download of his comic. I signed up myself earlier this year with a "non-anonymous" email (I think I used a comixpedia.com one) and don’t remember being bothered by the information requested. If the information requested did bother me well here’s a tip. For a lot of sites I use a set of information I’ve created to give to sites I think anonyingly ask for too much information. That way they know nothing about me and yet I can remember the "information" if I need it later for some reason (like recovering a password). I don’t think of it as all that different than giving physical stores made up zip codes when they ask for one (which I do all the time too). (There’s some regional group of newspapers websites – including this one – that asks everytime you read a story for your birthdate, gender and zip code. That is damn annoying!)
JUSTIFY MY HIP HYPE YOU DON’T STOP
- xkcd on commitment and… well why commitments can unravel? Randall Munroe (to me at least) gets better and better. It’s early success I chalk up as much to individual comics (like the maps) that caught the web-o-sphere’s attention but I think he’s gotten more consistently funny and insightful. xkcd also got a nice plug recently on Drawn!
- Big Fat Whale is one of my favorite comics… this is a great example of when Brian McFadden really nails something well. (Speaking of good opinion comics T Campbell notes that August J. Pollak’s Some Guy With A Website is now featured on the Huffington Post. Wow congrats to August! (August guest blogged here earlier this summer if you want to catch some of his comic-related thoughts.)
- The Ferrett highlights the long-running Full Frontal Nerdity and links to some classic good stuff from it.
INTERVIEWS
- Wired Magazine had a great feature on the Penny Arcade boys – online here (and MSNBC.com had one with them here). These guys haven’t reached the end of their success yet – they’re going to start getting into the mainstream pop culture in even more prominent ways in the next 2-3 years. PC World has a writeup of a new website home for their forthcoming PA videogame.
- Slice of Sci-Fi interviews Bobby Crosby and Owen Gieni. Crosby is the brother of Keenspot co-CEO Chris Crosby and the creator of Last Blood. Gieni is the artist on Blood as well as Chris Crosby’s Sore Thumbs.
MILESTONES
DEAD TREES
- Daily Crosshatch has a review of the new Perry Bible Fellowship book. Titled The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, it’s published by Dark Horse and collects published comics as well as some unpublished ones.
PIXTIONARY
- If you missed it – a great set of pictures of the recent Toronto convension (TCAF) and another set from the massive Penny Arcade gamers convention (PAX).
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
- A funny post on the over-use of the speech bubble in Web 2.0 company logos.
- Hey Oscar Wilde! is a blog that posts sketches of literary authors and characters. Fun lit-nerd stuff!
- Galaxiki is billed as a "fictional galaxy anyone can edit!" I haven’t really checked it out much but it sounds like it could be an interesting idea. All depends on the details I think…
- Harknell takes a look at a webcomic using WordPress to run it site. The comic is Dead of Summer and they’re using the the ComicPress 2.0 theme for WordPress.
- I can’t remember where I stole this link from but damn I am down for The Comic Curmudgeon’s Dogma 95 manifesto for "editorial" comics. I hate most traditional one-panel "editorial" comics and it’s rare that I get anything out of them. For a long time it’s been the weekly strips like This Modern World that have taken the gauntlet of insightful sequential art opinion and moved it far far down field.
- Jorge Vega won the 2nd Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge with his Gunplay comic. (T Campbell links to the pitch and some early fragments).
- T Campbell links to image optimization tips for search engines. Seems like a good page to check out – the better Google et al can find your images the better people can find your comic.
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