Smile by Raina Telgemeier

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Smile by Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier has worked on Smile for a long time.  First posting parts of it online, she eventually inked a deal to publish it as a book with the Scholastic, the publisher of the Babysitters Club graphic novels Raina worked on.  As she explains in this interview, she had about half of it done online when the book deal came about:

I’d posted about 120 pages of Smile online, on a page-a-week basis, before Scholastic picked up the publishing rights. The pages were drawn over a four-year period and were written as I went along. So there were things I wanted to fix, a few continuities that needed to be straightened out…and I was suddenly working with editors! What I did was sit down and write out the entire rest of the book, and then we figured out what, if anything, from the first half needed revising.

The finished book is really good.  It should fit right in with other favorite young adult novels of the middle school set. 

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WebcomicsPress: Comparing Webcomic Tools for WordPress

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ComicPressSo a lot of you probably read about the hack attack on Karl Kerschl's site last week as reported by FLEEN.  Wordpress has come to take a fairly dominant position in webcomics publishing in recent years with good reason.  Wordpress is a fantastic blogging solution with an active development team and it's not a tremendous stretch to leverage it for comics.  So which comics-specific solution should you use for turning Wordpress into Webcomicpress? 

First let's see what is out there.  If there are other projects out there to include beyond what I list below, contact me.

1.  Comicpress.  Tyler Martin's Comicpress wasn't the first Wordpress effort. but it was the one that caught fire and is now in wide use in webcomics.  It's gone through several versions and now has a few add-on plug-ins for additional features.  Version 2.8 is stable and in wide use.

2.  stripShow.  I think Brad Hawkins' stripShow might have been the first working hack I can recall.  Currently, it looks like Hawkins is working on version 2.5, so it's probably a safe bet to wait until that next version is released to try it out.

3.  Manga+Press.  I know the least about this one, having not had a chance to try it out.  It also looks like the most recent version is in beta and the creator still working to finish a final release of what will be version 2.6.

4. Webcomic 2.1.  This project has been around for a bit, it seems to have been inspired in part by the creator's criticisms of Comicpress.

5. Comic Reef.  The very most recent effort I'm aware of seems to be a project born in the Webcomics Community forums.

What I think would be the most useful approach to comparing them is to create a list of features and see each package implements them.  Some obvious issues are how it handles comic images, navigation, themes… again, let me know if you have any suggestions for key criteria.  I'll be working on setting up each one of these packages in order to write up a comparison of them for later this month.

UPDATE: An email exchange with Tyler Martin clarifies that ComicPress was actually the first WordPress solution and that stripShow was a "fork" of ComicPress.

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Comix Talk for Tuesday, February 9, 2010

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Freak Angels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield

It's day 4 of Snowapalooza in Washington DC.  I consider this a trial run for if I ever decided to move to Canada and so far… I don't think I'd make it.  But being snow-bound has been great for catching up on comics.  I also wanted to flag a few features at ComixTalk — the calendar of comic events is available here, but you can also add it a number of other calendar programs and I'm always interested in co-maintainers.  In fact I'd be very happy to see other blogs and sites join me in maintaining it and embedding it on their sites too. I also set up a hub page for the four webcomic titles that have run at ComixTalk over its 8 year history – click to discover work from Ryan Estrada, Kris Straub and Bryant Paul Johnson.

Awards:  The Webcomics List, a hybrid tracking, popularity and news site for webcomics had a forum-organized awards program this year.  It felt a lot like the old WCCAs. This Week in Webcomics covers the results.  Gunnerkrigg Court won the nod for Best Comic and Moon Town won for Best New Comic.  Coyote has a review of Moon Town here.

iWebcomics: So I'm kind of already burnt out on the iPad hype.  I want to wait until the thing is available to think more about it.  Others are though: Erik Larsen has an essay about it and Gizmodo salivated over how comics will look on the tablet device.

Dead Trees: Tyler Page talks numbers, costs and quality for taking the Print-On-Demand route for volume 2 of his Nothing Better webcomic.  And starting this week, for a couple of months, Gordon McAlpin is working full time on Multiplex — and, the Multiplex: Book 1 print collection.  This is all due to the funding he raised for the book through a Kickstarter drive.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

  • The recent rock concert contest storyline at Ornery Boy has been great – both funny and Michael Lalonde has done an awesome job with animating key panels.  If you're going to do a flash comic than use it!  Ornery Boy makes great use of Flash's capabilities.
  • It's a been awhile since I've linked to Freak Angels.  Things are happening again in the storyline and although I'm a bit annoyed that after a few years we still don't really understand the full logic of the "package" of the freak angels and their world, it's a hell of a comic.  I'll also just flag again that what Avatar is doing here seems like a pretty good model for a publisher-creator relationship in the webcomic world.  I'm not sure I've seen anyone else quite match it yet.
  • The latest issue of Dark Horse Presents is out with webcomics from Graham Annable and others.

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Comix Talk for Monday, February 8, 2010

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Sci Fi Drive By by Ryan Estrada

Welcome to the new site design at ComixTalk.  We're on a new server so let me know if it feels a bit zippier (it seems to be faster all around to me).  Happy to hear about broken stuff — I'm not done with tweaking things (never done!) and I can add it to the list.  One thing I can warn you about is that a lot of the older URLs are still broken, but I hope to clear most of that up this week.

REVIEWS:  I had the pleasure of sitting down with Copper in print this weekend and reading and re-reading it.  Here's my glowing, gushing review. I also forgot to mention that we liked Kazu even before he was a star; here's the cover art he did for ComixpediaTALK back in 2004.  Also, I'll have a review of Smile, the new graphic novel from Raina Telgemeier up this week.  I did get a chance to read it this past weekend and it is an entertaining, moving story.  Sure, the tale of the teeth and all of the work Raina had to go through are interesting, but she's done so much more with filling out the emotions and just the in-between-ness of those middle school years that it would have made a good story even without that hook.

MILESTONES: Last week marked the end of Anders Loves Maria, the breakout webcomic from Rene Engström.  I'll second Gary's thoughts on the tale.  Perhaps the ending felt a bit abrupt, even forced, but you can't deny it's impact.  It's also worth noting that Engström's art continually improved throughout the comic and that in re-reading the archives of this comic, I'm even more impressed with where she is now as a creator.  I hope the next comic comes soon.

CONTESTS: Ryan Estrada is competing in this month's Zudalympics and he needs your vote.  His comic is called Sci-Fi Drive-By and you can vote by visiting his website.  In non-Zuda voting, Comic Riffs, the Washington Post's blog about comic strips is having a Best Webcomic of the Decade Popularity Contest — voting closes this Wednesday.  The seven contenders are: Girl Genius, Hark! A Vagrant, Least I Could Do, Penny Arcade, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Schlock Mercenary, and xkcd.

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Copper by Kazu Kibuishi

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Copper by Kazu Kibuishi

Copper is a beautiful comic.  Kazu Kibuishi takes such care in rendering landscapes both natural and fantastic, that one can't help but be drawn into the page to fully appreciate the environment of Copper. In particular, I think Kibuishi must love drawing moving water because it is almost a constant presence in the book (The comic "Waterfall" is both a great bit of illustration but also an insightful commentary on it).

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Comix Talk for February 2, 2010

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Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn by Meredith Gran

Quick update this morning – The Escapist website is having a contest — more like an audition — to pick a regular webcomic for the The Escapist.  I haven't read the fine print so you should before you enter, but go check it out.  Btw, SLG Publishing is going to have a workshop for "aspiring comic creators" this March in San Jose, CA.

DEAD TREES:  Robot6 previews a lot of comics on book publishers' schedule for this year, includes several webcomics such as Goats, Octopus Pie and Penny Arcade.

INTERVIEWS:  Lots of folks linking to this interview with Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes worship fame…  Be sure to check out Graphic Novel Reporter's interview with Kazu Kibuishi on his print collection of Copper.

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Transfuzion Publishing Signs The Continentals

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The Continentals by Darryl Hughes and Monique MacNaughton

Here's some good news for fans of the webcomic, The Continentals — Transfuzion Publishing will be putting it out as a series of graphic novels. 

Crisscrossing the literary genres of murder/mystery, action/adventure, historical drama, horror, science fiction, and  steampunk, The Continentals by writer/creator Darryl Hughes and artist Monique MacNaughton, — both nominated for the “Rising Star” category for the Glyph Comic Awards — is a modern re-imagining of the classic 19th century Sherlock Holmes "who done it" murder mystery created for the 21st century comic fan.

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