Monday News Carousel

NEWS & VIEWS

• This is very interesting to me: Yahoo has inked a partnership with 176 newspapers across the country. Yet another sign that the business of putting daily content on dead tree pulp is in dire need of reinvention.
• Over the weekend, Joey Manley put up a long post about open standards for webcomics software. (Manley posted the same thing at The Engine and the comments there are also interesting) Don't be intimidated by the length of it – a key takeaway from it is that webcomics creators would be well served by a real effort for coders working on webcomics software to agree to some standardized data elements for webcomics. The immediate benefit Manley focuses on is that this would ensure "portability" for creators to easily move between services and/or software (for example moving a comic from Webcomics Nation to Keenspot) – something that is not easy when a comic's archive approach four digits.
• Neil Cohn responds to recent posts on transitions by Derik Badman (Derik's posts are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

BOMB SHELTER IDOL

• I'm doing the guest judge gig for Bomb Shelter Idol (ahem… Yo dawgs!) which just finished the voting for the first round (The voting is the flip of the American Idol method as people are voting to boot a webcomic each week). The first webcomic to leave the island is One Liners. You can vote in the second round here. The judges are posting feedback each week on the contestants here. I put in a plug for Zed Reckoning which shouldn't have gotten as many votes for the boot as it did last week.

REVIEWS

• The Webcomics Examiner returns with a review of three webcomics: Jeepers by Andre Richard, The World of Mr. Toast Gags by Dan Goodsell, and If Nobody Likes Me, Why Am I So Popular? by Edward J. Grug III.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Make Krishna Sadasivam draw outrageous things! 🙂 (Krishna has even graciously offered to do sketches of other webcomic characters)
• Webcomics In Print rounds up the latest in webcomics on dead trees (so I don't have to)!
• From Drawn! comes this link to a lesson plan from the 1960s called Composition: How to Make Pictures. This is a wonderful resource for anyone creating imagery, whether it be illustration, comics, animation, or even photography.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

• Sam Costello posted the second story in his horror webcomic anthology, Split Lip. The story "An Old Man, Looking" was written by Costello and drawn by Uruguayan artist Diego Candia.