Comix Talk

Cover by Krishna M. Sadasivam.

Hey all I’m bloggin a bit today – mostly to say thanks to Logan DeAngelis for guest-blogging this week, but also to all of our guest bloggers so far. I also wanted to thank Krishna M. Sadasivam, creator of PC Weenies for doing this month’s super cover art. (Be sure to check out the posters from his webcomic that he’s selling!) Next week’s scheduled guest blogger is Corey Marie, creator of the webcomic Scene Language and part of the Young American Comics group.

Also I’ve been loopy most of the week due to getting my wisdom teeth extracted (drilled and yanked is probably more accurate) on Wednesday morning. So I missed promoting tons of cool reader blog posts this week including: this bit about the webcomic Asylumantics getting a reboot – I’ve read Chris’ comics off and on for years now so I’m excited for him to take everything he’s learned and try to take his work to another level.

Multiplex creator Gordin McAlpin got interviewed in BOXOFFICE magazine which is pretty great press for a webcomic about a movie theater.

And I’m always a sucker for new webcomic website codin’ – here’s a simple archive script from Fabricari creator Steve Harrison.

And of course lots more interesting blogs here as well as elsewhere. I missed Comicon this year but I saw FLEEN did a great job of covering the webcomic side of that immense event.

Continue Reading →

As PV Comics hit the midpoint of its debut year and the immediate woes of our first print anthology, PV Comics Volume 1, passed – I as the publisher of PV was faced with a bit of a dilemma: we wanted to do more print collections and a number of new books, but we weren’t happy about our print options. The printer we had just used was a shyster, and we weren’t prepared to start shelling out the cash necessary for big offset print runs. This problem was as old as the small press comic industry itself: indie creators had always been faced with some seriously limited options regarding printing their work, and none of them particularly attractive. But I had an ace up my sleeve: more than a decade of working outside of comics in various aspects of the print industry, and I knew it was time for someone to help change the odds against new comic creators entering the print world.

Continue Reading →

Part 2 of 3 in the “Who the hell is Logan DeAngelis?” series

 

It was March of 2001. The pixel-based land rush which was the early days of the webcomics scene were a’bornin,  and a funky little comic called KU-2 made its online debut. A heartwarming tale of a foul-mouthed punker from New Jersey (based none too loosely upon myself in the 90s, down to the idiotic haircut) and his adventures in Hawaii with an alien android combined elements of sci-fi, horror and Polynesian mythology which was, at the heart of it all, really just a heartfelt slice-of-life tale with some pretty weird trappings.

Continue Reading →

Hi, my name is …

My name is Logan DeAngelis, and I’d like to thank Xaviar for inviting me to be guest Blogger here on Comixtalk this week! Now cue the deafening chorus of comic creators and readers booming across The Internets – millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror, as it were – asking … just who the hell is this guy?

Let’s skim over the basics. I’m a Jersey guy, born and bred and I suppose I have more than my fair share of all that dubious honor would imply. An avid game geek and self admitted nerd, I’d rather eat glass than spend 10 minutes at a baseball game, and I love comic books. I grew up as a kid reading Silver Age DC (memorized Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern Oath as soon as I could read) then did my stint as a Marvel zombie in high school devouring Walt Simonson Thors and Frank Miller Daredevils.

But it wasn’t till I got a job in a comic book store in college that I was exposed to the beautiful underbelly of the indie comic scene and my life was changed forever. Cerebus. Grendel. Love & Rockets. With words that cut you like a rust-flecked razor, and stark black and white imagery that hit you between the eyes like a zip-a-tone sledgehammer, I was in love suddenly with a whole different kind of comic book.

Smartass kid from Jersey, oh what a bitch of a mistress you picked.

This story is like so many others, and maybe very similar to many of you readers’ stories. So I’ll wrap up this brief intro now, and continue tomorrow when things started getting a bit more interesting and my first comics came to life online.

Until then,

Logan

Continue Reading →

Kit KaleidoscopeNick Mullins has two webcomics (also available in print) featuring Kit Kaleidoscope, a gravedigger who also draws. In "Kit Kaleidoscope and the Mermaid in the Jar" she meets a sculptor whose brother, a taxidermist, has died. In "Carnivale", still being serialized, Kit meets a young musician, while her coworker meets an old woman mourning her husband. Not a lot to say for a plot precis, but these are great comics. Mullins has beautiful linework that ise reproduced way too small to be really appreciated.

Both stories are completely wordless. He uses images in word balloons to create dialogue, mixing imagery and symbols to great effect. It is only occasionally difficult to follow the conversations. In one amazing scene the word balloons of Kit and the musician take on a life of their own as two bodies dancing together.

Both are worth reading, though Carnivale is serialized in extremely small segments (one tier of panels), which makes ongoing reading very fragmented. Continue Reading →

Simply SarahI don’t even know how I discovered this webcomic, but it fascinates me for some reason. It has this weird combination of amateurishness and skill, naivety and insight.

Simply Sarah by Sarah Skye is a story about a young lesbian falling in love with another girl whose feelings she is not sure is shared. The art has the look of an old romance comic (except in black and white), and the story itself falls squarely into that genre, except with lesbians (or at least one lesbian) and a more overt sexuality. We even see the classic fear of rejection ("oh, does she really like me?") as well as being a social outcast (more often a class issue in the old romance comics). Even the layouts are reminiscent of those old comics, which is extra strange as I would think a story like this would hold heavy manga influence in it and be much more shojo-esque. Heavy use of narrative captions and thought balloons (which seem to be really out of style these days). The story has such a feel of being autobiographical that I wonder if the author is a teenager, yet something about it makes me think she is older, or it is a fictional persona created for the story. Or maybe not. Either way, Simply Sarah is so weirdly retro that it stands out, regardless of its flaws.

Continue Reading →

I didn’t think I would like Nothing Better by Tyler Page when I first looked at it. Freshman at college featuring the overdone and usually uninteresting "coming of age" story? Plus it’s got a art style that is vaguely animation, vaguely manga that I’m not generally fond of. So what won me over and got me to read 9 chapters of archives (he has since started Chapter 10)? Continue Reading →

Sin Tutulo by Cameron Stewart is a recent webcomic (only 8 pages so far) by an artist better known for his print comics (such as working with Grant Morrison). A "professional" doing a webcomic is something we see more and more of as time passes. A chance to write own’s on story? Freedom? Continue Reading →