Comix Talk

MILESTONE: Little Gamers hits 10 years.  Also Krishna Sadasivam looks back on 10 years of his webcomic PC Weenies.  I'd still love to see more recollections on your experience this decade in webcomics.

REVIEW: El Santo gives Hanna is Not a Boy's Name 4 stars. Despite the name, the comic sounds like the offspring of Quentin Tarantino and Twilight.  And Sean Kleefeld reviews Havoc, the sequel to Chris Wooding's text-comic hybrid novel Malice.

HYPE: Critic Sean T. Collins is writing the new webcomic Destructor.  Check out Sean's work with collaborator Matt Wiegle here.

TOOLS COPYRIGHT: The online tech series Tekzilla hypes the Comical program for reading webcomics.  Unfortunately this is another one of those grab-only-the-image file type of programs. I was kind of surprised that Tekzilla co-host Veronica Belmont made no mention of any possibility of copyright issues at all.  

MAILBAG: Luke writes that his older brother Adam Whitely has recently launched a website for his comic adaptation of the ancient text The Ramayana. Adam has posted a lengthy preview of the work which he intends to publish as a full length graphic novel.  He is still unpublished and unsigned.  Check it out – what do people think of the preview?  From a quick perusal, there's a lot of interesting artwork in there, but my familiarity with the story is limited to Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues (and resulting conversations with folks more knowledgeable about the saga).

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Ryan Estrada returns with another inconceivable comic-endurance challenge — this time he's announced he will complete an animated film in one month:

It's always been my dream to make an animated feature, but I've never been able to get the time and resources I need. Well, I'm sick of waiting. This December, I'm sitting down at my desk in the Costa Rican jungle to work. And on January 1st, I'm releasing the finished movie online, free to all. 

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Looking like a tough week for me to deliver the news so don't be alarmed if things get quiet around here.

BUSINESS IS GOOD: FLEEN links to George Rohac's thesis, Copyright and the Economy of Webcomics [PDF], and his data set [Microsoft Excel] to which Tony Piro adds a chart. (FLEEN linked to an old ComixTalk post about this too but go right to the source – Steve Crowley's blog post on webcomic audience sizes.)  Also TechDirt comments on Scott Kurtz's comments on Garry Trudeau's offhand dismissal of webcomics as a viable economic model.

MILESTONES: Adam Huber, creator of Bug, writes about his first year as a webcomics creator.

INTERVIEWS: Brian Heater wraps up his four part interview with Jamie Hernandez.

iWEBCOMICS: Comics Alliance has an overview of the digital comics landscape.

DIARY OF A MAD WEBCOMIC CREATOR: The Drawn blog links to John Allison's advice on having a career in comics. Although John Allison cautions against doing a diary comic, it appears to have worked out well for Emi Lenox who has a new book, Emitown, coming out from Image.

WANT ADS: The fantastic artist Erica Henderson is leaving the fun fantasy webcomic Guilded Age and writers T Campbell and Phil Kahn are looking for a new artist as well as some guest comics for this month.  Go check it out – good comic and surely a potentially fun gig for someone.

DECADE OF WEBCOMICS: I asked for more stories of the decade that was and D. J. Coffman delivered.  D.J. has experienced a lot of the decade's big stories first-hand and he includes some details from his time with Keenspot and Platinum Comics.  

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A couple of posts this fall from Brad Guigar and Kris Straub on their 10 years in webcomics struck me an pretty interesting and a reminder we're all still on the ground floor of this new era of comics.  Here's my thought — as we wrap up the first decade of the 21st Century I'd love to publish here folks recollections on their experience with comics and the web.  Take a few minutes to take stock of it.  Feel free to post a blog or forum post here, email me, tweet me, whatever — I'll look to collect some of these memories into an article for the site for December.

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Styled a manifesto for UK Indie comics in 2010 it's should be read by anyone making or wanting to make comics.  John Allison speaks from experience folks – 

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Thursday! Days of thurs!? What is a "thur" anyhow…

COPYFIGHT: Journalista posted links to a number of copyright-related articles this morning of interest. Colleen Doran writes about her bad experiences with pirates and her good experiences with have a webcomic the last year. Sean Kleefeld writes about a Chrome Browser extension that makes reading manga scanlations easier – his point that many of these are unauthorized derivative works is what drags it into copyrightland.

INTERVIEWS: GraphicNYC has an interview with Art Spiegelman.

iWEBCOMIC: Rich Barrett writes to announce that his webcomic Nathan Sorry has officially made the move into the digital comics space. Issue number 1 is now available through Graphic.ly for 99¢ and can be read on the iPhone, iPad, Windows 7 and soon Android – not to mention Graphic.ly’s Adobe Air powered Desktop application.

MILESTONES: Gavin Hignight and Jettila Lewis hit the one year mark with their webcomic The Concrete World.  They also announced that they are giving away 50 free copies of their graphic novel MOTOR CITY to the first 50 new subscribers to join their email list starting at 9:00 AM (PST) on November 19th 2010. 

MAILBAG

Juan Mejias writes in about his webcomic The Pigeons' Rule about an office clerk unremarkable for everything other than his unrelenting nervousness and his rooftop neighbors, which range from a Roc bird to an antropomorphic cat-fishing mouse.  Nice website, the webcomic is definitely getting better — it's a first sustained effort, much like a first novel. I'm not sure I'm sold on this comic, but I do think Mejias shows potential.

Mark Maultby writes in about his brand new webcomic MoonPuppy. Well so far it feels like the opening to a Swedish auteur film from the 70's.  Not sure if that's what Maultby's going for or not.  In any event please grab Comicpress or an equivalent for Wordpress – don't make readers work hard simply to peruse your archives.

Nate Wunderman writes in that he's changed from downloadable pdfs to pop-up jpgs for viewing his online comic E.I. – I don't know if Nate really wants advice or not but this is the kind of half-step that really isn't worth the trouble.  His website isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't efficient in its function. It should either have the latest update to the comic on the home page or it should be really easy to click once to get there.  I think there's lots to debate about online publishing but I do think that advice is pretty much a truism at this point. PDFs are useful to download things – a plausible approach to packing an issue of something.  Not a good approach for something in the middle of being serialized.  I don't see much benefit to going with a pop-up image approach over just embedding the image into the website like Comicpress/Wordpress does so well.  Pop-ups just require extra clicking.

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Time for me to start thinking about end of the year articles and the inevitable tweaking of Comix Talk for next year…. But for now here's some things I thought were interesting for today:

iWEBCOMICS: Comixology announced a beta test opportunity for independent comic creators to get their comics into the Comixology marketplace.  CWR notes that the program won't actually start until next year but publishers and creators can sign up for it now here.

INTERVIEW: Brian Heater has the first part of an interview with Roger Lanridge.

REVIEW: CWR has a review of The Art of Failing Buddhism, the print collection of Ryan Dow's webcomic Introspective Comics.

MILESTONES: Tony Murphy announces he's ending his syndicated newspaper comic It's All About You.  DailyCartoonist reports that he cited the "lack of client papers" as the reason. You may remember Murphy for his successful Kickstarter drive this summer to fund his weekly comic paper for coffee shops called Coffee Talk.

AWARDS: Kirkus released its Best of 2010 with lists of best graphic novels for teens and for children.

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I was all set to write this zombie parody post this morning and well… I didn't.  But that title stays dang-it!

iWebcomics: An interesting survey of 500 iPad users indicates that the browser is still the most popular app and that they continue to use it heavily even after the first few months.

BUSINESS: Boing Boing profiles The Indie Band Survival Guide: The Complete Manual for the Do-It-Yourself Musician — a soup-to-nuts guide to musical survival in the 21st century, written by two of the members of Beatnik Turtle.  Certainly there must be some useful information in there applicable to any DIY artist, including webcomics.

REVIEW: El Santo reviews Party Bear.

INTERVIEW: The second half of Brian Heater's interview with Tracy White.

HYPE: Some amazing art from Emily Carroll including a Fallout New Vegas character. (h/t someone – most likely Journalista!)

NOT WEBCOMICS: An interview with David Malki!, Ryan North and Matt Bernnardo on the rise of their anthology of short stories, Machines of Death, to #1 for a day.

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