Comix Talk

Publishers Weekly has a story on indie comics publisher Top Shelf Productions plans to  launch an all-new webcomics site on Friday, May 16.

The site will be spearheaded and edited by Top Shelf publisher Brett Warnock and his co-editor, Leigh Walton. Top Shelf, best known for publishing such inventive and literary graphic novels as Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and From Hell, has titled its new online initiative Top Shelf 2.0.   Although Top Shelf has featured webcomics on its website in the past, including Matt Kindt’s critically-acclaimed Superspy, the relaunch promises a leap forward in both artistic scope and ambition.

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Here’s the best of the rest I found today:

Broken Frontier has a story on Kevin Cannon and his 288 hour graphic novel Far Arden.

Jessica Smith has a story on Ryan North and Dinosaur Comics.

NPR has a story on Charlie Brown, the character from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

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One of the things that’s obvious that’s changed is how comics are published and sold.  For a long time we had daily serialization in newspapers and monthly serialization in comic books sold in stores.  Separate, fixed — this was it if you wanted to make comics.  That probably not only impacted the type of stories told but the type of creator attracted to making comics.

Now we’ve had the big growth of graphic novels over a decade-plus long period and the emergence of the web (and we’ll lump other digital screens in here as well).  Graphic novels showcase complete stories really well  — especially stories without the sort of episodic nature that lends itself to serialization.  The web definitely does daily and probably weekly serialization well — it’s not clear that folks like to read longer work on the web although it’s hard to say there’s something inherently wrong with presenting longer and/or non-serialized work on a digital screen.

I think this is going to lead to more informed choices by a greater range of creators in terms of crafting comics.  It’s also having a very disruptive effect on the still quite dominant monthly comic book and daily comic strip.  This post was prompted by Tom Spurgeon taking a long look at the monthly comic book — mainly in terms of its pricing structure but I think also touching obliquely on the point that a lot of monthly comic books are a good fit for serialization (or at least their authors aren’t doing a great job with the format).

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I just wanted to post that Tim Broderick’s The Road Less Traveled series about the entire process of bringing his webcomic Cash & Carry to print via a traditional publisher is coming to a close. 

While we may have one more Cash & Carry-related article later this year we’ve now published 7 articles detailing Tim’s work from pitching the book, to getting the contract, and selling it to the readers.  I really think this is a valuable series for any creator to read and it was a real service for Tim to write all of this down for other creators to learn from his experience.  Click here to see a listing of all of the articles.

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Well — lots more details on the new Comicspace venture owned in part by Josh Roberts and Joey Manley.  Complete with a cartoon of the dynamic duo, the Comicspace media kit has details on the ventures sites, their audience ("hipster geeks"), their technology partners such as Netomat for mobile phones and some surprising "options" such as custom ads from comicspace creators.  It also lists the overall audience for the network of sites as 4 million unique visitors. 

UPDATE: It does seem like the new Comicspace is getting closer – here’s a post from Joey Manley looking for a developer to finish up some Yahoo User Interface (YUI) related work for the site.

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COMIXTALK

I have no idea what that headline means.  I’m recuperating from knee surgery (!) right now which means extra-loopy posts for you.  We’re starting up our May issue which in part will include coverage of the Eisner-nominated comics in the Digital Comic category. First off check out our interview with Clay and Hampton Yount, the creators of Rob and Elliot.

And also a big thanks to our current advertisers: The Laugh Factory and the Learn to Draw the Human Figure anatomy course.  UPDATE – also thanks to new sponsor – the webcomic The Asylumantics.

Last – it’s still in beta but if you’d like to have your outside blog posts automatically appear at ComixTalk (the "no need to retype the hype" feature) post a comment here or email me with your comixtalk account and the URL of your outside blog.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

Oh nos! Trouble in Orneryland?

From Diesel Sweeties: a well-executed but unoriginal joke about the unoriginality of loads of gamer comics.

Least I Could Do takes a swipe at a few other predictable webcomic creator cliches – here, here and here (link from Journalista!)

I can’t remember now, but somehow I stumbled onto Spanish language comic Oseano which looks good but I’ll need a translation (or more practice on my spanish) to follow.

What COMICS JUST STARTED in 2008 would you HIGHLY recommend?  Let me know!

INTERVIEWS

The Scienteers have an interview with Nicholas Doan, writer and co-creator of Pray For Death.

REVIEWS

WordBalloons has a review of Alexis Fajardo’s Kid Beowulf.  Fajardo got his start in webcomics in the early years – it’s good to see his work is still out there.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

The Daily Cartoonist accidently links to Dave Kellett’s two year old interview with FLEEN but the comments are interesting including Kellett’s own update on his thoughts on syndicates.

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