Comix Talk

BUSINESS
Brigid Alverson reviews the new eManga site which "rents" webcomics.  It’s in beta right now, starting off with six yaoi titles and four “Let’s Draw Manga” books.  Johanna comments further about the business model which will be $4 to read a yaoi volume for 72 hours.

AWARDS
FLEEN has news that Nickelodeon Magazine will hold a new “Best Kids’ Graphic Novel” Awards, taking place in spring 2009. The Awards will honor the best comic books and animated novels for kids published across the U.S. The submission process is open through Sept. 30, 2008, and voting will take place in December.  (Good Comics For Kids has the full press release)

EVERYONE GETS A FREE CAR!
Good Comics For Kids blog has a discussion around Oprah Winfrey including Sarah Varon’s Robot Dreams in her recommended reading list for six-to-nine-year-olds.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Have you been reading Next Door Neighbor?  It’s Smith Magazine’s new webcomic anthology, edited by Dean Haspiel.

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We had a bit of downtime with the site after the upgrade to the newest version of PHP5 went a bit off.  All seems okay now (although please email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com if you notice problems).  Along with some site stuff I’m working on you’ll notice that the center aisle of the site is now a daily feed of new stuff — news from staff, staff-selected talk posts and feature articles from the magazine.  On the right hand side you can get the most recent magazine articles, or click the tab for the most recent talk posts from Comixtalk members.  Two more tabs — webcomics and creators — are not active yet so stayed tuned.

Also please check out our new sponsor the art exhibition The Great Great Grand Show featuring artists Graham Annable, Scott Campbell, Jon Klassen, and Israel Sanchez.  The OPENING RECEPTION is this Saturday, August 16 from 7 to 11 pm and it’s Free!

Criteria for Criticism Continued
Scott Kurtz wrote a bit about critics (here’s the ComixTalk post on it).  El Santo wrote a pretty good post on the ideas percolating through the discussion Kurtz kicked off.  One more thought occurs after reading some of this — I’m sure Kurtz has encountered plenty of people who do live up to his stereotype of the self-important, uneducated, and/or otherwise useless critic but even if there are a lot of such creatures it doesn’t mean every person writing about comics fits that stereotype.  (Just like every webcomic creator isn’t craptastic despite the existence of a lot of not-yet-or-never-will-be-decent webcomics).  There is a bit of a disconnect going on here though — Kurtz is absolutely right that an artist should be looking to get constructive feedback to improve and grow and Kurtz gets that from his friends and colleagues in comics.  I think that’s a perfectly valid way to do that.  On the other hand I made some of the biggest leaps in my basic drawing skills in college under an absolute ass of a teacher.  But the times when he didn’t blast me in front of the class, I knew I had made real progress.

Comics Curation
FLEEN has a bit more on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show featuring comics creatorsin October (lots of webcomic creators in the show catalog).  FLEEN also has a link to DIY magazine show creator Oliver Brackenbury recent show on webcomics in general (which has a nice conversation with creator Ryan North).

MILESTONES
Congrats to Derik Badman on the 2nd year anniversary of his webcomic Things Change.

AROUND the WORLD in 80 BLOGS
Buzzcomix is back open for public business.  If anyone has reactions to their new reader/bookmark function please let us know.

Theater Hopper has a donation drive to help creator Tom Brazelton out with the bills for data recovery of his webcomic files.  If you can chip in a bit and than make sure it doesn’t happen to you and your files!

David Malki!’s wedding is the must-see movie of 2009! More like 2007 I think.  Still a pretty cool trailer. 🙂

An interview with uber-blogger, Dirk Deppey of TCJ’s Journalista!

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The Beat writes: if you’re an self-employed freelancer with no health insurance, you will probably want to read Colleen Doran’s run down of resources to get insurance.

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Heck, just one more post (wafer thin!):

Danny O’Brien, writing about copyright makes the really good, probably hugely obvious point that copying as the "point" for payment to an artist may just not make the kind of sense it did when society came up with copyright.  I hesitate to summarize his post and it is rather short — definitely worth reading if you’re interested in puzzling out how copyright should work in the Internet age.

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One more post I guess:

Scott Kurtz the person online has always had a somewhat dramatic relationship with what… the world?  At least with people who comment on his work, primarily PvP. Today he writes at length, apparently prompted by a passage in a review by Comics Worth Reading of the book  How To Make Webcomics (which Kurtz is a co-author of).  First off, it’s a hugely positive review of the book so it’s hardly the case that Johnana is slamming it.  She simply makes the point as a writer that there are a few simple tools available for publicizing work that aren’t mentioned in the book.  I really think Kurtz is reading way too much into her review. 

While I appreciate his frustration at the negative energy an artist can pick up from a negative review, the answer to that is probably simply to ignore the reviews.  Sometimes a review is useful, sometimes it’s not — there’s no obligation for an artist to read anything written about their work.  But some reviews are useful to some artists.  Some artists can deal with all reviews, some can’t deal well with any kinds of reviews (and all sorts in between). Maybe the best advice is to find out what kind of artist you are with regards to external commentary and try to stick to guidelines that work for yourself.  You can’t stop the world from commenting on what is public art.

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I’ve had to tackle some under-the-hood site maintenance and that’s delayed another feature articles update.  Hopefully tonight!

In sporadically researched news-for-today:

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
ComicsMix links to a funny parody/mashup called Calvin and Jobs.

Very cool guest week at Wapsi Square commencing now with stuff from Scott Sava; Ryan Sias; Gisèle Lagacé; Trudy Cooper; and David Reddick.

MILESTONES
Comics Reporters catches news of the exact date of the end of For Better or For Worse, sadly concluding with the just-doesn’t-work plot of the wedding of Anthony and Elizabeth… (well unless creator Lynn Johnston has secretly viewed FBOFW as a story of great tragedy all along…)

BUSINESS TIME!
DJ Coffman comments on WOWIO charging the same price for ebook versions of Hero By Night as the paper versions: ridiculous.

MINI-REVIEWS
Comics Worth Reading reviews the Zuda entries for August.

The Scienteers have a rundown of the week at DrunkDuck comics.

INTERVIEWS
Journalista! catches interviews with Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, Candorville creator Darrin Bell, The Araknid Kid creator Josh Alves, and Pictures for Sad Children cartoonist John Campbell.

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It’s the weekend… go outside already! 🙂

TOOLS
Take a tip from Tom: back dat data up!  I just got a HP Media Vault myself to back up the 3 different machines on the home network.  Over at FLEEN, Gary has some words of get-off-your-butt-and-protect-your-data.

DEAD TREES

Warren Ellis has a post on print following several posts he’s made about the low and dropping circulation figures for the existing Sci-Fi fiction magazines.  When Ellis muses about the market of comics and words and the web and printer’s ink, I read it.  He’s smart and he’s not dogmatic at all (either for priint, the web, the way it is or some fetish of the way it should be).  Things are changing and I hope better business/marketing/distribution models get sorted out for everyone’s sake.

AWARDS

Last week to vote for the Harvey Awards — ballots are due Friday, August 15, 2008.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Yakoff, yakon — in Soviet Union, Wondermark you!

Bernie Loves Predator’s new comic is a daily take on current events called If You See Something.

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This is the doggiest day of the doggiest month for me.  And almost all of the over-committed; under-performed threads of my life seem to be getting their equal short share of me.  Sigh…

I’ll be on vacation the month of August 17th.  If you’ve ever had an interest in playing a "world famous" webcomics blogger/cub reporter on the Intertubes for a week shoot me an email (xerexes AT gmail DOT com) and maybe we can arrange for me to hand you the keys to the site for the week.  (Note – those were super-pretentious, self-mocking air quotes around the words "world famous")

TOOLS
Comics Worth Reading has a nice review of How To Make Webcomics.  I still haven’t read this but the reviews seem to have all been positive.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Overcompensating meets Sweeney Todd = Jeffrey Todd.  Pretty cool.

CBR covers Gunnerkrigg Court, calling it the Harry Potter of webcomics.

MILESTONES
Congrats to Jeffbot on its first year anniversary.  I only found this comic recently but am enjoying it.

Congrats to the Chemistry Set collective on its second year anniversary.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Webcomics-savvy journalist Rick Marshall and ComicsMix are parting ways.  One, this apparently is part of the end of news at ComicsMix.   Two, I wish there was more money in comics journalism to keep good writers fully employed.

LA Times has an article up about Zuda — DC’s monthly webcomics contest.

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