Comix Talk

Comic Book Resources is holding another edition of Comic Book Idol – this one to be hosted by writer J. Torres (Wonder Girl, Alison Dare). From the press release:

COMIC BOOK IDOL seeks to find the next great artistic talent in comics. After a one-month submissions process, ten finalists will be selected to compete in a five-week contest. Each week, the contestants are given an assignment, which will be critiqued by some of comics’ top creative talents. Additionally, the submissions are judged by the public, who vote to determine which contestants will move on to the next round. Once the votes are in, two contestants will be voted off COMIC BOOK IDOL, and the process begins again until after five weeks, when there will be just two finalists remaining.

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In this A.V. Club interview with Achewood creator Chris Onstad, there is mention of expanding on and putting into book form the very popular "Great Outdoor Fight" storyline. Onstad says:

Since then, I’ve got all this content I’m talking about with kind of a major publisher. You know the "Great Outdoor Fight" story arc? I’m putting together… not quite a graphic novel, but I’m laying it all out as a linear story and adding new content and a ton of writing and background on what The Great Outdoor Fight is, and I’m hoping to publish that as some sort of perfect-bound, color-cover, proper edition. I’m just finishing the writing up for that. I think that will go over really well. Critically, I think, that was our finest hour. It really had a good response from people, which surprised me, because it was the first time I’ve really asked the audience to have patience, because they weren’t one-offs every day or gag strips every day. It was a three-month narrative that really paid off, and I was really pleased, because I was afraid to do it at first.

This would be an exceptionally cool book – I hope it comes together.

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Blind Ferret is working on a feature-length movie based on the webcomic Looking For Group scheduled for completion in 2008. Ryan Sohmer gave me a heads-up that they’ve put out a short to announce the project. It’s a 4 minute parody of a song from the Little Mermaid (can’t remember right now) with the undead character Richard from LFG singing "Slaughter Your World."

Blind Ferret is the shop that’s done both the PVP animated series and the Ctrl-Alt-Del animation. This is a pretty bold step forward for them. Once I get out of vacation mode I hope to get more inside scoop on it.

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Warren Ellis just announced on his email list that he would be closing down his ENGINE site this August 31st. Possibly to remain up in archived form or maybe just to go away completely. Ellis isn’t leaving online activity and indicated he’d have another community-oriented site coming later in the year.

While we’re on Ellis I wonder what’s going on with Rocket Pirates? While the long-delayed webcomic anthology site is still not here, Ellis did announce Freak Angels – an open-ended steam-punkish webcomic he’s writing along with artist Paul Duffield.

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It was 1999 and I had just uploaded my first comic strip on the web. Before I had even put together a website layout, and well before I had purchased a domain name, I posted the strips on a message board I frequented to get a response from some friends. It was their enthusiasm that encouraged me to keep going, and not much later I was "officially" a webcomic-er. Continue Reading →

You ever have that one love affair that haunts you for years? You get together, have some great times together, everything’s going great, and then BAM! you lose your heart when they suddenly break up with you without warning. "It’s not you, it’s me." So you go your separate ways, swearing you’ll never fall for that routine again, but a year or so later, BAM! they’re back, and you’re head-over-heels and bound for heartache. Well, Tauhid Bondia‘s back on the scene with a new webcomic, the Good Ship Chronicles, and here I am like a fool, head over heels again.

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So many webcomics into print nowadays it got me to wondering how some of them are doing sales-wise. One metric that is easy to pull is a book’s ranking on Amazon.com’s sales list. This website actually makes it extremely easy to find out a ranking based on author, title, publisher or ISBN number.

Plug in Howard Tayler’s name, for example, and you’ll see his Schlock Mercenary books (currently 194,385 and 195,437) are doing much better than his Administering Groupwise tome.

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Welcome to this week’s guest blogger Corey Marie, the creator of Scene Language – a webcomic billed as "Sex Drugs & Indie Rock". And so far it’s delivering! 🙂 (Also check out nice things FLEEN said recently about SL)

Post Comicon there’s not an awful lot of earth-shattering webcomic news going on but here’s what I noticed recently:

• PvP is doing some webcomics in conjunction with the release of an expansion pack for Civilization IV. Nice to see someone other than Penny Arcade getting into the videogame promotional webcomic biz. Actually it looks like the folks behind Civ hired 8-Bit Theater, Control-Alt-Delete, Dueling Analogs, GUComics, MyExtraLife and PvPOnline to do promotional webcomics for this release. (Completely unnecessary personal note: I used to love playing Civ but Civ III was the perfect version of it for me and I could never get into Civ IV in the same way.) Gaming blog Joystiq has a poll on which webcomic handled it’s Civ IV challenge the best.

NOT WEBCOMICS

• This short animated film, A Gentleman’s Duel has a true steam-punk mecha warriror battle in it.  It reminded me a lot of the machines in Girl Genius.  Very funny in a looney-tunes sort of way.
• Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast a regular cartoonist in the New Yorker Magazine.
• SexTV interviewed Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, the creators of the graphic novel Lost Girls.  NSFW folks.

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San Diego ComicCon may have come and gone but voting for Platiunum Studio’s 2007 Comic Book Challenge is still underway! Voters can go to their website to view the entries, watch the contestants’ pitches, and then pick their own favourites. The narrowing of the 10 will end on August 12th and from there, another public vote will be held to determine who the winner will be.

The winner of the Comic Book Challenge will be formally announced in late August and will have their pitch published and premiered at a Wizard World convention in 2008. The top 50 contestants will also receive prizes such as wacom tablets and comic software.

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