I was on vacation last week in the large state of Texas and then spent the weekend in Ohiopyle Park in EXTREME southwestern Pennsylvania. Good times! Hope everyone is geared up for NERDAPOOLZA in San Diego… I, once again, will not be there. One day perhaps. In the meantime here’s some interesting comic and pop culture debris for your web-surfing today:
EVENT
The Cartoon Art Museum is having an exhibit titled "Monsters of Webcomics" which looks very cool. I live on the wrong coast to make a trip to San Francisco to see it but all of you who can should go.
INTERVIEW
- Newsarama interviews Jon Rosenberg on the latest Goats book.
- CBR talks to Neil Kleid of Action Ohio.
- CBR talks to this month’s ZUDA contestants.
- Pop Culture Zoo talks to Daniel Davis of Monster Commute.
- Fandomania interviews Grant Gould of The Wolves of Odin.
- Nice interview with Cameron Stewart of Sin Titulo.
- Interview with Ethan Young of the comic Tails.
CRAFT
In case I forgot to blog about earlier, Freak Angels artist Paul Duffield put up a great tutorial on his process.
BUSINESS
Trent Razor (NIN and goth bad ass generally) on how new music artists should navigate the new mediascape of today. Lots of stuff in there for webcomic creators to think about.
Scott Saavedra is publicly documenting how much money he makes this year from his webcomic Java Town. Good gimmick worth some publicity. He’s got a timer counting down the year and a counter for the profits (or lack of — he’s in the red right now).
Sean Kleefeld offers some ideas for promotion — he’s aiming at targeting comic book store owners but they’re tactics one could adapt to any group. I’ve seen several webcomic pursue the same ideas with their fans to try and spread the word locally ("street teams"). Sean offers up another idea supposedly in tandem — giving access to all of a publisher’s comics online — in pursuit of the first post’s promotional efforts but I don’t think he’s fully thought that through. Not that I disagree with the result, it just feels a bit half-baked in his rational. If I was going to jump into the comics publishing business and since I’m not industry giants Marvel and DC (and I’d have to count on their continuing slow-to-adapt strategy) of course I’d give EVERYTHING away online for free. I might borrow Sean’s idea of having people register at a portal so I could build some intelligence on my readership but I wouldn’t make that the mandatory way to get the comics. New publishers — heck even existing not-DC-or-Marvel publishers — suffer more from neglect and lack of attention then from anything else. The new publisher’s role has got to be a hybrid — build a brand(s), build attention, promote talented individuals (much like Hollywood — build good relationships with real talent), pay for good work consistently released — then put it out EVERYWHERE in every electronic format possible. Sell the stuff in print in a premium format that the fans demand and work with the creators to sell ancilliary products based on the work… Okay off that soapbox… for now.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Questionable Content kills the webserver for Bunny with a link today. You can still see Bunny’s guest comic for QC today. What to call this? My comic got "Fayed"?
NOT WEBCOMICS
Does anyone use Google Sketchup in their work? It’s a great tool for what it does. This music video for Roche Limit incorporates a lot of it.
Link to a gallery of photos of parkour, the jumping around buildings and railings sport, which beyond being pretty cool might be instructive for someone drawing action scenes, no?
Johanna’s post should really be titled… "why Digital Rights Management sucks" as that’s the source of her complaints, more so than a comic being in print or digital format.
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