Comix Talk

2009: (above) Charles Snow, creator of Sordid City Blues contributed the ComixTalk cover art for the month of October.

2008: We covered the end of the long-running webcomic Cigarro and Cerveja Tony Esteves. The archived comic is still available here.

2007: Jerzy Drozd announced the launch of Sugary Serials – an all ages webcomic anthology site. I interviewed Jerzy at SPX this year — you can see the video here.  Also Tim Demeter wrapped up his webcomic Reckless Life; Cox & Forkum called it quits on their political webcomic; and Jennie Breeden hit the milestone #2000 with her webcomic The Devil's Panties.

2006: In 2006 we had a ComixTalk cover from Ben Bittner, the creator of the webcomics Space Pirate Apocalypse and Cooking With Anne.  Unfortunately his website appears to be gone — anyone reported a more recent online sighting of his work?

2005: Founding editor-in-chief Lea Hernandez handed over to Lisa Jonte the editorship of the webcomic anthology site Girlamatic.

2004: T Campbell organized the first meeting of the Washington Webtoonists group.  

2003: Chris Onstad's Achewood hit the two year milestone; and 21st Century Fox joined the webcomic collective The Nice.

Continue Reading →

Scott McCloud reminds you it's 24 HOUR COMICS DAY tomorrow. Good luck to all the crazy comicnauts launching tomorrow.

Forbidden Planet reminds you that there's less than a week to the deadline for this year’s Jonathan Cape/Observer/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize.  The winner gets £1000 and their four page short published in the Observer Review, while the runner up wins £250 and their work appearing on the Guardian and Vintage websites.

And FLEEN's mention of Alexander Danner's write-up of the recent MICE convention in Boston, MA reminds me I wanted to post a link to it.  So here it is!

Last but not least — this video should remind you of comics creator Jason Shiga's genius:

Continue Reading →

Jason Bane wrote in to tell us that he's the editor for Carpe Chaos, a webcomic site that launched on June 1st of this year:

Carpe Chaos is an independent science-fiction space opera about five alien races who learn to travel between stars, and it focuses on the ways their cultures collide and how they work to solve their problems. There's no one "hero story" that follows a single character throughout his or her transformative journey, but instead a series of short stories that all take place in the same galaxy (and the stories span thousands of years). There are six stories so far, and while the first five are only one chapter long, the latest comic, Rising Up will run for four chapters. 

The site publishes a new chapter each month.  I gave it a quick look, reading the story "Strength in Numbers" and it's promising.  Certainly the art is nice and I like the idea of short stories set in a shared universe without necessarily having to follow one long narrative.  It uses Flash for presentation and you get a "pages turning" effect with the "feel" of a comic book — which is a plus or minus depending on whether you like that kind of thing.  

UPDATE – in the comments someone posted a link to an non-flash html version of the comics.

Continue Reading →

Inkbot is an anthology site for webcomics that sent me a few press releases this month.  I like its mission statement – one new title a month and only creator-owned comics.  Inkbot says it does not retain any rights to the comic (other than presumably a license to display online).  Founder Christian Rubiano sent me a blurb on two webcomics: Odessa — historical fiction centered around the question "What if the Nazi's won WWII, and what if Americans helped them do it?" and self-described as an examination on race relations, propaganda, and geo-politics; and American Ambition — a comedy which features the last remnants of a once-great superhero team.

For the most part, and not to pick on Rubiano, standard press releases are kind of boring to a news site. Try to find something interesting about your comic project and RIGHT NOW that makes it especially interesting and compelling for someone to write about it instead of anything else that day.

Continue Reading →

I thought this post by Novil of Sandra and Woo was a pretty good overview of issues with hosting, particularly as a webcomic grows its readership.  There's also a pretty good forum on webhosts at the Comicpress site.

UPDATE: A long thread at ComixTalk from 2006 and renewed in 2008 actually shows up pretty high on the Googleplex results. No offense but the fact that Drunk Duck is still around isn't always on my mind — how has their performance as a webhost been this year?  I also set up a SmackJeeves account — that's been around awhile too but would love to hear updated views on its performance this year.

Continue Reading →

A SPECIAL MAILBAG EDITION:  Jordan Anderson wrote in to "bring to your attention some generosity by a few webcomics creators. Lar deSouza, Ryan Sohmer and Tim Buckley have brought some attention to a story of a father raising awareness of a rare disease that his daughter was born with. The father created a blog, Marissa’s Bunny, over two years ago with the idea of bringing the story of Infantile Spasms to the rest of the world. Through a set of rabbits that go by a shared name of Fairfax, people around the globe have been telling the tale of Marissa and her disease. The blog shares the highs and lows, the hope and frustration, but most importantly the love."

"More recently, the family has come to a difficult decision. As other treatments have come by with little to no results, a more invasive procedure was put on the table. A costly brain surgery was brought forth as a potential way to lessen seizure activity. Facing fewer and fewer options for treatment, they reluctantly agreed to go forward. Finally caving into pressure from the people around them, Mike decided to put up a chip-in to raise money for Marissa’s upcoming surgery. With an estimate of $28,500 of out of pocket expenses, the family is faced with quite a substantial burden on top of having paid out thousands, upon thousands of dollars already. These creators have rallied their fans to help out a family in need. In the three days since posting on their respective front pages, they have helped raise $6279.50 as of the time I write this."

Continue Reading →

I have a new review of The Unsinkable Walker Bean up today.  You might also want to check out a recent interview the Robot 6 blog had with creator Aaron Reiner.

SPX Hangover: Jess Fink writes and draws up the best and the almost as good from this year's SPX.

INTERVIEW: Mike Rhode has an interview with Jeff Smith who was in DC for the National Book Festival last weekend.

HYPE: Please check out John Allison's comic on "Whatever happened to Jive Bunny (of Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers)" — do it for the children.

CRAFT: Renderrxx Productions has a number of interviews with comic creators focused on their tools and techniques for making comics including Donna Barr and Peter Conrad.

MORE

• Indigo Kelleigh writes about being invited to the Portland Opera along with 20 or so other cartoonists for "Comics Night At the Opera."
• Kel highlights the art of Pierre Alery at Blank Label Comics.
• Trees & Hills is doing a Halloween mini-comic swap.  Make sure you mail in your comics to get there by October 13th.

Continue Reading →

Steve Lafler wrote us about his new comic El Vocho which offers a crackling urban romance pairing Rosa, a brilliant inventor, with laconic Eddie, geek artist. Can love blossom in this tense thriller, pitting big oil against budding genius Rosa?  Rosa and Eddie meet in a fender bender and tempers flare, but cupid shoots his arrow and the two fall for each other. It takes their combined smarts and intuition to create the perfect clean energy engine. The results? A flying VW Bug with an engine that runs on air, of course!

Continue Reading →