Will Japanese readers embrace manga from other countries?

Brigid Alverson interviews the winner of Kodansha's first international manga competition and the editor of the Japanese magazine that hosted it.

I've gotten a few dead-tree books in still sitting on my desk which in a bit of New Year's optimism I'm determined to get reviewed, plugged and just generally, processed, one way or another. One I definitely wanted to get to is Rob Hanes Adventures, a comic book serial from Randy Reynaldo.

I like the (mostly) all ages tales of detective/adventurer Rob Hanes. But I don't understand why it's a comic book and not a webcomic. It's the 21st century already!

With the Eighth Annual edition of the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards (WCCAs) coming up I wanted to get an interview on the state of the awards with current WCCA Chairman Frank "Damonk" Cormier. Frank worked with me on ComixTalk in the first two years of its existence and I know from experience that he is quite passionate about comics and isn't one to shy from stating his opinion. So I put a range of questions to him regarding this year's awards, changes from last year and how to improve things in years to come.

We took the best of the readers' questions and mixed in some of our own to conduct this interview with the six current members of Blank Label Comics: Howard Tayler (Schlock Mercenary), Steve Troop (Melonpool), Paul Southworth (Ugly Hill), Paul Taylor (Wapsi Square), David Willis (Shortpacked) and Greg Dean (Real Life).

Ryan Estrada is a prolific creator with several webcomic titles to his credit as well as the ongoing video short series, Expeditions. He is currently handling the art duties on the poker-themed webcomic Life's A Bluff.

As to where he is, well, either at his new home base in Mexico or literally anywhere else on Earth.

As the new year brushes away the crumbs left from devouring the old one, I find myself thinking of vanished webcomics: those that've come to the end of their storylines, those that've just stopped, and those that've disappeared altogether.

As the new year brushes away the crumbs left from devouring the old one, I find myself thinking of vanished webcomics: those that've come to the end of their storylines, those that've just stopped, and those that've disappeared altogether.

So, now that you have: a completed novel, a killer query letter and a short but riveting synopsis, who do you send these things to first: a publisher or an agent?

If you're like me, you ask people who have more experience in these kinds of things. And that's what I did: I contacted several published mystery writers on what they'd do if they could do it all over again.

If you think there's a consensus out there, you might be surprised.

In the first installment of a series of articles examing the definition of "comic", Patric Lewandowski looked at existing efforts to define the nature of comics and proposed that another approach is needed. In the second installment Lewandowski set out the four criteria that he proposed to use in his examination of a new definition for comics.

In this article, Lewandowski focuses in on the first of his four criteria: the intent of the creator. What does this criteria mean? How is it defined? Why do we need it?

In this month's Panels & Pictures, Derik A Badman takes a close look at "Murder Dreams", a short comic from 1954 drawn by B. Krigstein.