Comix Talk

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is proud to announce its upcoming exhibit: Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics, set to open on Sept. 13.

"Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics” brings comics from the web page to the MoCCA stage. The exhibit explores three aspects of online comics: the unique format and design of webcomics, their appeal to niche audiences, and the transitions between web and print comics.

Curator Jennifer Babcock, who also draws the syndicated webcomic C’est La Vie, explains that webcomics are free of the space constraints and editorial censorship to which printed comics are often subjected. Webcomics also provide an outlet for a greater diversity of creators and audiences, she says, resulting in numerous niche-specific features.

This exhibit incorporates original artwork, prints of finished art, and digital displays. Featured in the exhibit will be the immensely popular Penny Arcade, PhD, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Diesel Sweeties, Mom’s Cancer, Finder, Supernatural Law, Something Positive, Scary Go Round, Young Bottoms in Love, Narbonic, Goats, and “My Obsession with Chess” by Scott McCloud, among many others.

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10 Zen Monkeys has a good interview with Nick Gurewitch, the creator of one of the funniest comics going right now, The Perry Bible Fellowship. The first book collection of the comic, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, is out and includes comics from the web as well as comics that are not online.

The Bygone Bureau blog also has a very recent interview with Gurewitch. Continue Reading →

According to this NYTimes article, this October Amazon.com is going to debut the Kindle, an electronic book reader that will wirelessly connect to Amazon’s site (Engadget has a picture and more speculation on it here). (The article also predicts that Google will charge for online access to the digital copies of some books in its database). Interestingly the article suggests that Sony’s ebook reader (released last year) is doing well.

It’s another platform that could be used to distribute/publish comics if it actually takes off. One potential issue for indie comic makers though will be how Amazon deals with distributing books to the Kindle and whether it charges publishers for that.

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Given the downtime experienced by comixtalk, Xaviar was kind enough to let me post stories a little bit more, so, for the four of you who missed me, here it is:

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I had a good summer – hope you all did too. I tend to leave open a lot of windows in Firefox thinking I’ll get to writing a snappy comment about them and often never do. Let’s see what I can come up with while I close out my summer readings….

THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNLOADS 

• WOWIO is a site that offers a lot of comics (and ebooks too) for download, some of them free.  There’s a good post by T Campbell here on his experience working with the site to offer his comics and over here is some skepticism from FLEEN.  Campbell reveals that he gets 50 cents per unique download of his comic.  I signed up myself earlier this year with a "non-anonymous" email (I think I used a comixpedia.com one) and don’t remember being bothered by the information requested.  If the information requested did bother me well here’s a tip.  For a lot of sites I use a set of information I’ve created to give to sites I think anonyingly ask for too much information.  That way they know nothing about me and yet I can remember the "information" if I need it later for some reason (like recovering a password).  I don’t think of it as all that different than giving physical stores made up zip codes when they ask for one (which I do all the time too).  (There’s some regional group of newspapers websites – including this one – that asks everytime you read a story for your birthdate, gender and zip code.  That is damn annoying!)

JUSTIFY MY HIP HYPE YOU DON’T STOP

• xkcd on commitment and… well why commitments can unravel? Randall Munroe (to me at least) gets better and better. It’s early success I chalk up as much to individual comics (like the maps) that caught the web-o-sphere’s attention but I think he’s gotten more consistently funny and insightful. xkcd also got a nice plug recently on Drawn!
• Big Fat Whale is one of my favorite comics… this is a great example of when Brian McFadden really nails something well. (Speaking of good opinion comics T Campbell notes that August J. Pollak’s Some Guy With A Website is now featured on the Huffington Post. Wow congrats to August! (August guest blogged here earlier this summer if you want to catch some of his comic-related thoughts.)
  
• The Ferrett highlights the long-running Full Frontal Nerdity and links to some classic good stuff from it.

INTERVIEWS

• Wired Magazine had a great feature on the Penny Arcade boys – online here (and MSNBC.com had one with them here). These guys haven’t reached the end of their success yet – they’re going to start getting into the mainstream pop culture in even more prominent ways in the next 2-3 years. PC World has a writeup of a new website home for their forthcoming PA videogame.
• Slice of Sci-Fi interviews Bobby Crosby and Owen Gieni. Crosby is the brother of Keenspot co-CEO Chris Crosby and the creator of Last Blood. Gieni is the artist on Blood as well as Chris Crosby’s Sore Thumbs.

MILESTONES

• 1000 episodes for The Joy of Tech.

DEAD TREES

• Daily Crosshatch has a review of the new Perry Bible Fellowship book. Titled The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, it’s published by Dark Horse and collects published comics as well as some unpublished ones.

PIXTIONARY

• If you missed it – a great set of pictures of the recent Toronto convension (TCAF) and another set from the massive Penny Arcade gamers convention (PAX).

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• A funny post on the over-use of the speech bubble in Web 2.0 company logos.
• Hey Oscar Wilde! is a blog that posts sketches of literary authors and characters. Fun lit-nerd stuff!
• Galaxiki is billed as a "fictional galaxy anyone can edit!" I haven’t really checked it out much but it sounds like it could be an interesting idea. All depends on the details I think…
• Harknell takes a look at a webcomic using Wordpress to run it site. The comic is Dead of Summer and they’re using the the ComicPress 2.0 theme for Wordpress.
• I can’t remember where I stole this link from but damn I am down for The Comic Curmudgeon’s Dogma 95 manifesto for "editorial" comics. I hate most traditional one-panel "editorial" comics and it’s rare that I get anything out of them. For a long time it’s been the weekly strips like This Modern World that have taken the gauntlet of insightful sequential art opinion and moved it far far down field.
• Jorge Vega won the 2nd Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge with his Gunplay comic. (T Campbell links to the pitch and some early fragments).
• T Campbell links to image optimization tips for search engines. Seems like a good page to check out – the better Google et al can find your images the better people can find your comic.

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This is an utterly great article in the NYTimes Magazine about the chaos in the music industry and superstar producer Rick Rubin’s new gig as co-CEO of Columbia Records. Rubin has made great albums with unknowns (Beastie Boys, RHCP) and so-well-knowns (Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond) and now he’s trying to reinvent Columbia Records. It’s not an easy project and it’s not clear there’s any easy path to success.

Like all content industries comics is going through big changes. I’m not sure who the equivalent of Rick Rubin would be for comics. Could you imagine handing over the reins of Marvel to Warren Ellis? I’d like to see that future actually…

UPDATE: While we’re here let’s throw in a link to a recent on-webomics post from our wandering Websnark, Eric Burns. The first half is nice review of how wrong Berke Breathed was about the path of the comics industry when he introduced his newspaper strip Opus. Breathed tried to draw a newspaper-only line in the sand and the sand has shifted so much that he’s now on Salon and the web with everyone else. (The other half of Burns’ post is musing about conspiracies between the Washington Post newspaper and the Washington Post Comic Syndicate to gin up controversery over a recent series of Opus strips on religon. Note to Eric: The paper Washington Post doesn’t even play that nice with the website Washington Post (they are two different divisions actually) so I’d say odds are pretty good that the paper and the syndicate don’t talk much either.)

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I’m back – more soon. A huge thank you to all of the guest bloggers this summer. It was really interesting stuff and if you missed it you ought to skim the archives a bit.

Also – we could still use your responses to this reader survery over at the Blog Reader Project. Thanks!

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Every once in a while, I feel like punching someone in the face. A crazy person with a chicken intheir hands will approach me on the subway and demand I give up my seat for her, because it’s their “special” seat. Other times, the nice people at my cable company’s tech support will keep asking me to wait another week before sending the signal, which doesn’t come a week later, which prompts me to call, which leads the nice people to ask me to wait another week, in a never ending cycle.

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Webcomics Anonymous has been swimming around quietly in the facebook group bay for quite some time now but finally it’s launched its very first webcomic magazine, available to read, sit at home with and ponder at.

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