Comix Talk

Fleen reported yesterday that Phil Foglio caught that Merriam Webster had "webcomic" up as a new word for April 2010.  I've always liked webcomic because (1) it's self-explanatory and (2) no one calls comedians doing something online "webcomics".

CONVENTIONS: MoCCA is this weekend.  Sam Costello the creator of the horror webcomic Split Lip will be debuting a special limited edition of its Volume 2 trade paperback with a new, previously unpublished story and a new cover by Shane Oakley.  The 10 stories in the collection offer 160 pages of disturbing, intellectual horror stories with art by Sami Makkonen (Hatter M vol. 2), Anthony Perruzo (Zuda), John Bivens (Comic book Tattoo), and Jason Ho (Agnes Quill). 

And Brigid Alverson has a round-up of lots more great books that will be available at MoCCA.

INTERVIEWS: The Beat has an interview with Hope Larson and Raina Telgemeier.  Together they're hosting the "Drink & Draw Like A Lady" event.

AWARDS: You can make nominations for the Eagle awards now.  Go Intertubes go…

FROM THE MAILBAG

So The Boy with Nails for Eyes by Shaun Gardiner is pretty interesting.  It's a webcomic with music, and a kind of delayed, cinematic presentation of the panels on a "page" that pushes — but in my mind mostly doesn't break — the boundary of comicness.  Really in terms of experimenting with the notion of a comic embedded in the web, this is fantastic stuff.  And the interface used to navigate within the "page" and to go from page to page is pretty easy.  So far there is only one chapter up of what is supposed to be a much longer story.  The art is fantastic, the brief text so far interesting, hard to guess if the work as a whole will be satisfying but certainly Gardiner's setting a high bar for himself.  I heartily recommend checking this out.

Nate Wunderman wrote to mention his webcomics E.I. and Time Corps.  Talk about extremes – I went from being immersed in the webbiness of The Boy with Nails for Eyes to Wunderman's comics which are all presented in pdf format.  I can't repeat this enough — use an image format that's native to browsers.  You want to offer a .pdf as an alternate version, great, but start with something from the holy trinity of image formats; gif, jpg and png.

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Another day that got away!

REVIEWS: El Santo has a review of Moon Town by Steve Ogden.

INTERVIEWS: Robot6 has an interview with Jarrett Williams who does the webcomic Lunar Boy, and this July will see the release of Super Pro K.O.!, a graphic novel.

AROUND THE BLOGS: A brief update on Nemu*Nemu plans for the year including conventions and print volumes of the popular webcomic.

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Tom Spurgeon is the blogger at The Comics Reporter and he recently posted his Best Comics of 2009.  It's an interesting mix and he's certainly become more webcomic savvy over this past decade — this list includes work from names such as Kate Beaton, Dash Shaw and Eleanor Davis.  Worth reading…

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AWARDS: The Hugos now include a regular Best Graphic Novel category — which is really pretty fantastic.  This year's nominees include two webcomic entries: Girl Genius, Vol. 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm — Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment); and Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse — Written and illustrated by Howard Tayler. (h/t Robot6)

REVIEWS: Hecklr has a nice review of John Allison's three webcomic series: Bobbins, Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery

CONVENTIONS: Pete Abrams, creator of Sluggy Freelance, is going to be at Intervention. Jamie Noguchi, creator of Yellow Peril, former artist on Erfworld is going to be at SPX.

INTERVIEWS: I missed this in my mailbag last month, but Public Radio Kitchen interviewed Franklin Einspruch about his painted comics which he posts online at The Moon Fell On Me.  Einspruch is creating a kind of comic tone poem with his work; I found myself liking it more than I would have expected.  It's largely a very peaceful experience reading through his comics.

FROM THE MAILBAG:  I got a nice email about a comic called Indestructible Will which is about a character who doesn't feel pain (apparently a real medical condition).  Unfortunately the comic is only available in pdf format, so you have to download each chapter before you can read it.  There's just no reason to do that.  Most readers aren't going to go to the extra step of downloading your unknown work when they could just as easily read a jpg, png or gif in their browser.

I got an email about FR33, self-described as "a webcomic about a drug abusing self-proclaimed artist, seeking his place in a near-future world of free culture" which is another photo comic.  Since I'm giving out practical website advice today, I'd redo the "about" page to tell readers a bit more about the comic, maybe even try to pitch the longer-term arc of it to try and sell the comic.

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Time is running its online poll on the world's most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts and this year one of the candidates you can vote for are the "Penny Arcade guys."  Currently Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik are 11th on the list. (h/t 1UP)

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Xeni's full review is here; below is a video walk through of the app she filmed.

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Terrence and Isabel Marks have some special comics for April Fool's Day up at Namir Deiter and You Say it First, along with some thoughts on the first webcomic swap.  Any other worthy April Fool's pranks to pass along?  (Digital Strips has a list of a few here)

In hopefully not-fooling news, I'm very interested in the new Bento Comics site which offers "mix-n-match" anthologies through Lulu with a pretty impressive roster of creators on-board.  Brigid Alverson has a short write-up of the project at Robot6.

KICKSTART MY ART: Another very worthwhile Kickstarter project, this one from Steve Bryant, the creator of Athena Voltaire.  Robot6 reports that Bryant is seeking to raise money to focus again on the comic. And I'm not going to mention Kickstarter without plugging Patrick Farley's drive to revive Electric Sheep.

MILESTONES: Christopher Wright's Help Desk turned 14 years old this week.  Jon Rosenberg's Goats turned 13 years old.  Congrats to both!

DEAD TREE DELIVERY: The creators of Monster Commute write about the advantages and disadvantages of self-distribution.

AROUND THE BLOGS:  From ComixTalk reader blogs, Mariana Paletta writes about her recently completed first webcomic, Alphie and Sophie Venustar and Super Comix King writes that the second issue of Action Teenz is up.

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