Comix Talk

MILESTONES
One year of Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie.  No… LOLs…’Til BROOKLYN!!!

TOOLS
Diva Lea throws down some Cintiq tips.  Scott Kurtz offers his impressions after just getting a Cintiq.
 

BUSINESS
Washington Post has an article on Marvel’s re-rise, business-wise.  A much more interesting Marvel-related article is a retrospective on the contributions of Jack "King" Kirby in the Independent. (h/t Journalista!)

BEST CHARACTERS?
Apparently Wizard is posting a list of its "top 200" comics characters of all time .  And Tom Spurgeon makes a pitch for why J. Wellington Wimpy is the greatest character of all time.  Wizard’s not done posting its list yet, but so they’re far all superhero story characters (except for one from Stangers In Paradise).  Sigh…  This would be a fun list to create for webcomics-based characters.  And probably a good way to crystalize how not-superhero the landscape of comics is online.

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T Campbell wrote up the history of the emoticon for the first issue of ComixTalk back in February 2003.  It’s an interesting article tracing the origins of those little sideways faces (plus it has some wonderful illustrations by Bill Duncan):

They look freakish. The noses are askew, the nostrils invisible. The eyes are beady little pinpricks, and the mouths have no lips, just parabolic cracks. They exist independent of anything else; they’re just a few bits of black on endless white space. Yet without the “emoticons,” the webcomics of today would be slower to recognize a fundamental human truth. We all recognize them – they look like typographic versions of the first faces any of us ever drew. And to understand their use, we have to go back in time to discover their prototype: the smiley-face.

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Dirk Deppey over at Journalista! in his top of the post essay picks up on the "whither comic books" meme kicked off by Tom Spurgeon’s post on prices.  I took Spurgeon’s post as a jumping off point to think about how much more freedom creators have today to tell stories: serialized daily, weekly, whatever or not serialized at all.  Deppey goes in another direction to refute a point Spurgeon made that online comics don’t replace the "sampling" aspect of monthly comic books:

Spurgeon seems to operate from the assumption that any online system should replace the system that we have now under terms that preserve whatever comfort provided by the present system. It’s a nice idea and I hope that things work out that way, but I’m not at all convinced that anyone is going to get a choice in the matter. I think it far more likely that publishers and creators are going to wind up reacting to the online world as it sets the agenda — that the environment will to shape its inhabitants, rather than the other way around.

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The best of the rest I found today:

Chris "Awesome" Arrant interviews Rich "Rocket Man" Stevens (creator of Diesel Sweeties).

The "SCIENCE!" Scienteers interview Josh "JAM ON IT" Lesnick (creator of Girly).

Tom "Sputnik" Spurgeon reviews the all-ages Flight Explorer, edited by Kazu "King Kong" Kibuishi.

Susie C. links to 8 great comics by college students or college graduates (wait… that’s really not narrowing it down, is it?)

And this is pretty funny – today’s Fanboys features the cast of Seinfeld playing D&D.

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The Eagles are out — this year’s awards are for last year’s work (which results in them being called the 2007 Eagles despite being held in 2008).  These are truly the People’s Choice comic awards as they are based on Internet voting (actually I guess they are truly the People’s And Bot’s Choice…)

This year’s Favourite Web-Based Comic is The Order of the Stick (or TOOTS for you hepsters) by Rich Burlew.  Congrats Rich!

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We’ve got a May cover a’ coming but circumstances have delayed it’s arrival.  Still since it’s almost the middle of May I’m throwing up a temporary cover until the "real" cover arrives.

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For completists out there I have made sure all of the cover art for ComixTalk is up and I’ve reformatted all of the back issue pages to fit into the new site design.  All that plus all past articles sorted by contributor and department of the magazine.

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