Comix Talk

I don't know much about the Weblog awards for blogs, but this [edit:] is the second year they've included a "comic strip" category. The nominees are:

• Girl Genius – Phil and Kaja Foglio
• Day By Day – Chris Muir
• Extra Life – Scott Johnson
• PvP – Scott Kurtz
• Penny Arcade – Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins
• Attack – John Bergstrom
• Least I Could Do – Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza
• Sluggy Freelance – Pete Abrams
• xkcd – Randall Munroe
• Basic Instructions – Scott Meyer
  

And here's a link to the full list of award nominees if you're interested.

UPDATE: I've gone ahead and fixed the list of nominees here to add the creators' names and webcomic URLs. I have no idea about "Attack" though – please post a comment here if you know which comic the nomination is for. As noted in the comments below it appears that the "final nominees" are selected subjectively by someone(s) at the Weblog Awards (from a list of nominations by the public). Last year's winner – Least I Could Do plus Day by Day and Sluggy Freelance are all repeat nominees (they were on the 2006 list of final nominees).  [I guess it's also somewhat interesting that both years two conservatively-slanted opinion comics have been included in the nomination list, but no progressively-slanted comics have been picked for inclusion.]

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Welcome to November. We have a cover this month from Debbie Ridpath Ohi who creates a great webcomic on writing called Will Write For Chocolate. No particular theme this month but a lot of good interesting articles are on tap. In December, we will venture into "wrapping up the year that was" territory – stay tuned for more details on that later this month.

HEADLINES

• Halfpixel increases by two and changes name to Quarterpixel.. wait I mean Bipixel — actually just read the interview with Scott, Kris, Brad and Dave here to find out about their new working partnership under the Halfpixel banner.
• Slashdot picks up on Wikinews’ story on Webcomics and Wikipedia. I know this is old news to most readers of ComixTalk but it’s in the news again for at least a portion of the intertubes-reading public.

BUSINESS

• Steven Grant tries to apply lessons of the music industry to the comics biz. It’s a good think piece and points out the way comics creators can bypass the "labels" like musicisians are doing, but annoyingly Grant knows more about examples of this "new entrepreneurship" in the music industry then he does in his own industry. Grant should at least be aware of the comics equivalents of unsigned new bands – webcomics – and how they use merchandise and other ancilliary activities (sketches, guest shots, downloads) to make money while giving away the comic for free. He could have also pointed to some established professionals ditching their labels to go indy – like Phil and Kaja Foglio or Michael Jantze.

INTERVIEWS

• The U. of Alberta paper has an interview with Faith Erin Hicks on her soon-to-be-released graphic novel Zombies Calling.

MILESTONES

• Congrats to Thomas K Dye who is celebrating the tenth anniversary of his comic tale of canine journalism: Newshounds.

TECHNOLOGY

• An early look from a blog at the comics on Zuda and what’s attracting the most votes from the readers. A different blog has a bit more of a focus on the user interface.
• Looks like the Amazon e-reader isn’t coming out anytime soon despite earlier announcements to the contrary.

CONTESTS

• I need to start handing these Karas the Revelation DVDs out faster! Gimme (in the comments) the phrase that pays to be the next winner.

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The site fell down a couple times yesterday, but it wasn’t until this evening that I realized it was probably due to a Slashdotting today. All due to Slashdot running a story on the recent Wikinews story on the neverending webcomics versus wikipedia discussion (Part of that post pointed back to Comixtalk). 

I guess I’ll take some comfort in the fact that the Liquidweb VPS the site runs on managed to get back up. 

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INTERVIEWS

• FLEEN scores an interview with Aaron Diaz, creator of Dresden Codak creator on his decision to quit his job and become a full-time webcomicker, merchandise, and what it’s like leaping into the unknown.

ZUDAMANIA

• Zuda said it was going "live" today but so far… no webcomics to be found on the site.
• Webware profiles Zuda. (Not much "new" in this piece but if you’ve missed the recent hype about it’s launch today…)

Justify My Hype

• Check out the wordless comic Washed Ashore by Kid Nemo. Cute.
• Also been meaning to plug the students n’ sorcery webcomic AEther. Good stuff – check it out.
• In your mind’s browser… clear your cache. Funny bit from The Joy Of Tech.
• Wonderella usually cracks me up but this one goes out of its way to go one more unexpected left turn to hilarity…
• From the archives: Teaching Baby Paranoia explains how government jobs are made…
• So I married a werewolf… Ryan Estrada has a funny one-shot comic up.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Hey, play Team Fortress 2 at the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal server (80smachine.homeip.net port 27015).
• Top 87 "bad predictions" about the future. The humor potential is enormous…
• The blog Webcomics Asylum wants you to draw their mascot "Chimpy".
• Tom Spurgeon has 5 good stories about comics – a nice essay from Tom on appreciating some of what the current era of comics does have.

CONTEST

• Karas the Revelation – come on who wants to be winner #3? Continue Reading →
  

Well we have the five contestants who survived to the second round of BSC Webcomic Idol:

• Templar, Arizona
• Lucid TV
• Grumps
• Bear and Kitten
• Simulated Comic Product

Voting goes all week – only one of these entrants will get eliminated in this round. I’ll try to have some comments up on them during the week (I may be channeling my inner-Simon Cowell or my inner-Paula Abdul, we’ll have to see…) Continue Reading →

This is a big deal and should lead to an even bigger and better platform for independent webcomic creators – more details (of course) at Talk About Comics here.

The full "press release" is after the jump…

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