Comix Talk

A nice writeup of Randall Monroe and his webcomic xkcd in the NYTimes Media & Advertising section:

Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.

“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.

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The Penny Arcade video game — Penny Arcade Adventures Epsiode One: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness — was released this week and I felt it was my duty to purchase said game.  Until I hear otherwise I’m going to assume this is the first videogame to be based on a webcomic (as opposed to a webcomic based on a videogame, a la Sam & Max).

I played it for a couple of hours last night and really enjoyed it.  If you like Jerry’s writing and Mike’s art then you’ll more than likely get a huge kick out of experiencing them in this new interactive environment.  The game itself is a retro-but-updated version of those older point and click adventure games that used to dominate the PC.  And while I have no idea if the game is a good value for $20 it is chock full of content with very funny bits tucked into all kinds of objects in the environment.  The game has two modes – the 3d interactive environment part and then the 2d choose your words mode where you interact with characters (which cleverly invokes the comic origins of Penny Arcade).

I’ve read that the "fighting" system emulates Final Fantasy but since I’ve skipped the whole FF thing I wouldn’t know.  The fighting is okay and for someone who isn’t at all into twitch-anything like myself I liked that it wasn’t incredibly difficult to master.  I also appreciated the ridiculousness of the "fighting moves" you see from various characters.

For other reviews check out metacritic and joystiq.  Joystiq also has an interview with Jerry Holkins.

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Michael May’s Stock Footage is a pretty entertaining comic.  May takes suggestions for movie titles and turns them into comics:

[Y]you email me with your favorite movie or movie character and I’ll make a comic. I don’t care if it’s art house, obscure or not even made yet. Popular, unpopular, unwatchable – I’ll still make the comic and put it up here.

This is a great concept and May is often able to come up with some very funny spins on the selected movies.

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Well for me at least — I am already loving the Malcolm Gladwell/New Yorker storyline in Scary Go Round that starts here.

While I’m pointing out cool comics from today — David Willis adds another notch to his belt-of-comic-parodies with this scary hard-to-tell-it’s-a-parody Mallard Fillmore.

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Journalista! alerted me to the fact that the ComicShout script has SQL injection vulnerabilities that are unpatched.  The script author has also made it clear that he isn’t going to fix them so for anyone using ComicShout — better move to another script. 

One suggestion is to move to Wordpress + Comicpress.

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Moovak’s Guest Strip Project is rolling along featuring entries from several well-known and some should-be-known artists.  For a collaborative project, the story is hanging together pretty well so far too.

The project is set up to raise money for the Make-A-Wish International Foundation, but right now it looks like the "donation" links aren’t working — hope to see that fixed soon.

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SECRETS & LIES is an anthology of comics edited by veteran web cartoonist Cayetano Garza Jr. which will make its debut at the 2008 MoCCA Art Festival in New York, NY (June 7-8, table C27).

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