Comix Talk for Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Posted January 26, 2010 - 11:25 by xerexes
Short post today -- I recommend the following three things:
CRAFT: Wow, John K has an excellent and extensive tutorial on facial expressions, well worth reading.
REVIEW: El Santo praises Evan Dahm's epic fantasy webcomic Order of Tales.
Comix Talk for Monday, January 25, 2010
Posted January 25, 2010 - 09:50 by xerexes
For what it's worth, I've got a fresh install of DRUPAL on the dev server at home, working up a streamlined version of ComixTALK. Laid out the basic theme (moving to a 2 column layout) and now tackling cleaning up the horror that the tag and category system at ComixTALK has mutated into.... Right now I'm debating whether to port ComixTALK as is to the new server or wait until I get the redo... done.
One story that caught my eye this morning was this rant by blogger-czar Jason Calacanis about comScore. Worth reading to think about. Another interesting story from Tom Spurgeon, who has an essay up at the Comics Reporter which I think one could summarize as "wow, there are a lot more good comics than when I was younger..." I guess I would add, "wow, there are a lot more good webcomics than 10 years ago..." And if you need a recap of recent webcomic news, Delos has a whole bunch of interesting links covering last week at Art Patient.
NEW BOOK: John Allison posted the cover art from the forthcoming 8th book collection of Scary Go Round: "Recklessly Yours."
Cory Likes Corndogs: Goats scores a favorable review from Boing Boing Blogger Cory Doctorow for the second book in the new series: The Corndog Imperative.
ZUDA IDOL SCANDAL? Digital Strips reports on the departure of one of the ten finalists from this month's Zuda popularity contest. Apparently The Thunderchickens had a good shot of winning it too, so the undisclosed reasons for its departure must be something non-trivial.
POLLS: Over at the Washington Post's comics blog, Schlock Mercenary is leading their Best Webcomic of the Decade poll, followed by Girl Genius.
INTERVIEW: Inkstuds has an (audio) interview with Bryan Lee O'Malley.
Non-ZUDA CONTESTS: El Santo reports that John Lustig of Last Kiss is having a contest -- write the best dialogue for a comic captioned by Orson Scott Card.
ALL AGES: Comics For Kids has a list of recommended comics for the classroom.
Comix Talk for Friday, January 22, 2010
Posted January 22, 2010 - 10:00 by xerexes
Psst. Super art fight this weekend..
I think I've mentioned it before but whatever compulsion I might have once had to share with you every scrap of webcomic-related stuff... well I ain't feeling it. So it's great that others are taking care of it and this week you can't go wrong with this round up of webcomic reviews, interviews and stories from Brigid Alverson's Paperless Comics.
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE NEW NEW ECONOMY: Tom Spurgeon writes about Julie Larson's decision to move from a deal with Creator's Syndicate to self-syndication. You really can't extrapolate much from a story that includes one newspaper comic (Larson's) and one webcomic (Apokalips) as the basis for discussion. I feel bad for folks like Larson who are stuggling with the double whammy of tectonic shifts in technology and a bum economy. But I also think it's annoying and self-defeating to write about how the Internet is killing everything. The Internet is part of the environment now. It's the least-cost, most effective publishing tool ever invented -- when before in history has ANYONE been able to potentially reach EVERYONE on the planet at the minimal costs needed to put up a website? That fact is AWESOME and no one in their right mind would trade it away for preservation of past pratices.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there used to be certain channels of content that we consumed because it was there in a format that required us to read/watch/listen to it on the format's terms. That's going, going, gone. Watch teevee when it's scheduled? Nope, TIVO. Listen to radio live? Nope, not if you don't want to - podcast, iTunes, etc. Read the daily comics in the morning at breakfast? Nope, even newspaper comics are ARCHIVED and available on the web. I can see it in my kids' habits. I used to come to the content in a lot of cases... for my kids all content is a library. They watch/listen/read their favorites -- it's RARE that they ever engage with content because it's there. What does that mean? I'd bet a lot of things, but one thing that seems obvious is that FAVORITES will win an even bigger share of whatever new business models sustain creators. If in the past it made sense to appeal to the largest audience possible (which often meant a softening and blanding up of material) to get into the newspaper, I think creators have to understand that's probably a really BAD strategy now.
PODCAST: The long-running webcomics podcast, the Webcomic Beacon, has two more episodes up: Fan Fiction and Black & White versus Color.
JUSTIFY TOM'S HYPE: Tom Spurgeon also linked to Smoke Signals, a free all comics newspaper based in Brooklyn. The first two editions are available for a free download at their website.
Oh... It's ON! Super Art Fight 6
Posted January 22, 2010 - 09:22 by xerexes
This weekend, it's the 6th edition of the live art smackdown show: Super Art Fight 6 (read that in Kermit the Frog's excited announcer voice). There's always been a webcomic presence at these events and no exception this time:
- Main Event: Michael Bracco (Champion) vs. Jamie Baldwin (Challenger)
-
#1 Contenders Match: Nick “Ghostfreehood” Borkowicz vs. Garth Graham
- Generational Warfare – Rookie vs. Veteran: Kelsey Wailes vs. Jami “Angry Zen Master” Noguchi
- 4-Way Battle Royale: Chris “Impact” Impink vs. Joe Dunn vs. Bryan Prindiville vs. Chelsea Grose
And if you've been checking out the Comic Events calendar at ComixTALK you'd already know about this :)
Comix Talk for Thursday, January 21, 2010
Posted January 21, 2010 - 10:26 by xerexes
I think I've officially run out of stupid headlines for daily blog posts... thank you to everyone who gave me advice about webhosts and website software this week.
INTERVIEW: The New Yorker has an interview with comics writer Neil Gaiman. Congrats to Neil on his recent engagement.
REVIEWS: El Santo reviews Lily of the Valley, a webcomic about a serial killer. A mixed review - I noticed however, that the artwork reminded me a bit of Faith Erin Hick's work. There's also a glowing review by The Trades of Kazu Kibuishi's Copper book.
THE PROBLEMS WITH DEAD TREES: Comics Worth Reading writes about Disney's decision to let the first volume of Jellaby go out of print. The downsides to getting involved with multinational corporations...
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS: Drawn! blog links to Jake Parker, creator of Missile Mouse, writing about fixing inking mistakes old school style (i.e. without Photoshop). I haven't read it yet but both of my kids have read the new Missile Mouse graphic novel and loved it.
A Rock and Rolling Update About Webcomics and Stuff
Posted January 19, 2010 - 09:43 by xerexes
SKIP THE BORING SITE NEWS IF YOU WANT: My work to fix my hosting and design and angst issues continues apace (well not the angst issues) and I'll be trying out another host for ComixTalk starting sometime this week (just need a block of time to do the move). The two other things I'm angsting about are (1) new design/functionality decisions and (2) whether to switch from Drupal to Wordpress.
MILESTONES: Happy Birthday to my littlest's x-girls current favorite cartoonist Frank Cammuso. She's a big fan of the two Knights of the Lunch Table books. She has a couple of signed sketches from him as well.
NOT COMICS: Did you know they had a Terry Pratchett convention in Arizona last year? They're currently trying to figure out what city to hold the next one in. I'd go to that -- I just got through a year of reading the Discworld series.
Ralph Bakshi on Surviving Tough Times
Posted January 19, 2010 - 00:39 by xerexes
Boing Boing links to a panel where famed animator Ralph Bakshi talks about surviving tough times taking art by the hands and making your own fate:
Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day and um... Webcomics!
Posted January 18, 2010 - 11:52 by xerexes
It's a holiday in the U.S. and the kind of day that I would hope the rest of the world can, if not celebrate, acknowledge happily. (Which puts it in a different category than celebrating more nationalistic - George Washington - or controversial - Cristos Columbus - figures from history). I wonder if India has a Mahatma Gandhi day? Apparently they do - one for his birth and one for his death.
Haiti. Wow, it's a good thing I don't play a pretend-actual-news journalist on the Internet because I don't think I could find the words to write adequately about the situation there. It's an immense tragedy. If you can afford to donate something Doctors Without Borders is a group that was one of the first in and does a tremendous amount of good.
Hosting and Coding Geekery. If you're not just a webcomics geek but have educated opinions on webhosting, wordpress or drupal I would really like to talk to you. My current hosting at media temple is not working for ComixTALK. I have been trying to sort out plans for the new year for hosting and whether to switch CMSs but I feel overwhelmed. I had some good conversations on twitter and im last night but what I really need is just more advice -- the Internet is CONFUSING when you ask what is best on these questions. Email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com or twitter to xerexes or gchat to xerexes or just add a comment to this post here. Once I get all this squared away I have some ideas about redoing the theme here at ComixTALK.
Webcomics. Oh you probably came here this morning to read about comics presented in pixelated form, didn't you? First things first - the switch to using RSS feeds in Google Reader for my daily webcomics "page" is a success. It's much more convenient. If you want me to check out YOUR webcomic send it to me (see above) somehow and I will! I can't write about it if I haven't read it :)
But this approach still leaves me thinking about how to find the "good" webcomics. And let's be honest -- when I say "good" I mean good in terms of what I want to read. Your "good" may be completely different. Either way there's a LOT of comics now and 99% of them seem to be on the Internet in some form or another. Over at Savage Critics, Abhay Khosla has a surprisingly good (surprising because I thought it was going to be just a snarkfest and it turned out to be quite thoughtful) essay on what it's like to live in a world of almost infinite comic choices. I also loved his take on ComixTALK's 2009 Roundtable:
Comixtalk did a year-end roundtable in December 2009, in which they spoke to not less than eight people. Between the eight of them, roughly five billion webcomics are mentioned over the course of the round-table. So: be sure to check those out...
Joystiq's weekly webcomic roundup seems to be a bit of an institution now for gaming comics. Is there anything like it for other subjects Movie comics? Celebrity comics? New and opinion sites? I don't offer a practical plan for convincing a successful site in a subject area to add a webcomic roundup but I think it would be worth working on. (If you're a smaller site linked to by Joystiq -- how much of a bump are you getting from the exposure?)
At the end of this month, Ryan North's Project Wonderful is going to add geotargeting to it's service - here Ryan explains more about the benefits of this feature. I used a mix of PW, Blog Ads and ComicSpace's Ad service Webcomics World over the last year and if I had to keep one I'd stick with PW right now.
El Santo reviews Dead Winter, a zombie webcomic. 4 Stars and he compares it favorably to Jenny Romanchuk’s Zombie Hunters and Bobby Crosby's Last Blood.
Delos writes about Sandra De Haan, a Netherlands artist, who has translated some of her journal webcomics into English. I like the crispy cartoony artwork here.
Also via Delos is a link to The Blueprint Database - a vast collection of blueprints from cars to the Millenium Falcon.
Has everyone seen The Fantastic Mr Fox? I want to but haven't yet. Did see a wonderful exhibit on it at the Cartoon Museum and spotted this acceptance speech at the National Board of Review ceremony (via Drawn!)
Speaking of movies the news that Ryan Estrada is making a movie version of his webcomic The Kind You Don't Take Home to Mother has bounced around the web. All I can say is I am really looking forward to this and I hope Ryan succeeds in getting it done.
Last not least, ComixTALK friend for life Jon Morris has a funny essay up at Heavy.com on the Strange Life and Times of Richie Rich.
It's Just Wednesday and Boy... Are My Gills Tired!
Posted January 13, 2010 - 10:15 by xerexes
State of the ComixTALK update
Working on a Wordpress-powered version of the site on a development server. Had out the MySQL book last night trying to write queries for moving over a few of the tables from Drupal to Wordpress.
THEORY
Patric Lewandowski gave a 20 minute talk on ideas about comic theory he first explained in a series of articles he wrote for ComixTALK in 2008. You can see the video of Patric's presentation at his website.
AWARDS
After the one webcomic (Girl Genuis) in ComicRiff's "Best Comic of the Decade" poll kicked serious tail, ComicRiff decides to hold a "Best Webcomic of the Decade" poll. They're looking for nominations if you're interested in helping them out.
Webcomics.com Update
I got a press release from Brad Guigar this morning announcing that subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago's Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators' discount of 15%. According to Brad that's a total savings of $60 - which is pretty nice (and more than the annual $30 subscription fee to the site btw). This is very smart -- if Brad can leverage the new community he's building for partnerships and other promotions than that certainly adds a lot of value to joining that site.
And El Santo adds his two cents to the Webcomics.com subscriber model story.
THEN AND NOW
Jeph Jacques redraws Questionable Content #1.
John Allison is redrawing some of his SGR comics for the latest print volume.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Artpatient linked to a funny comic by Caldwell Tanner called "What Kind of Artist Are You?" I fit in there.... somewhere!
Star Wars X - A Pretty Interesting Fancomic
Posted January 12, 2010 - 15:38 by DudeMifty
For all you Star Wars fans out there that are looking for a good star wars webcomic, you should check out Star Wars X. It is a star wars online comic created by two Star Wars fans. The art is pretty good and the story looks promissing. There are various interesting characters and it could become a really good comic book series.
