Ralph Bakshi on Surviving Tough Times
Boing Boing links to a panel where famed animator Ralph Bakshi talks about surviving tough times taking art by the hands and making your own fate:
Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day and um… Webcomics!
It's a holiday in the U.S. and the kind of day that I would hope the rest of the world can, if not celebrate, acknowledge happily. (Which puts it in a different category than celebrating more nationalistic – George Washington – or controversial – Cristos Columbus – figures from history). I wonder if India has a Mahatma Gandhi day? Apparently they do – one for his birth and one for his death.
Haiti. Wow, it's a good thing I don't play a pretend-actual-news journalist on the Internet because I don't think I could find the words to write adequately about the situation there. It's an immense tragedy. If you can afford to donate something Doctors Without Borders is a group that was one of the first in and does a tremendous amount of good.
Hosting and Coding Geekery. If you're not just a webcomics geek but have educated opinions on webhosting, wordpress or drupal I would really like to talk to you. My current hosting at media temple is not working for ComixTALK. I have been trying to sort out plans for the new year for hosting and whether to switch CMSs but I feel overwhelmed. I had some good conversations on twitter and im last night but what I really need is just more advice — the Internet is CONFUSING when you ask what is best on these questions. Email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com or twitter to xerexes or gchat to xerexes or just add a comment to this post here. Once I get all this squared away I have some ideas about redoing the theme here at ComixTALK.
Webcomics. Oh you probably came here this morning to read about comics presented in pixelated form, didn't you? First things first – the switch to using RSS feeds in Google Reader for my daily webcomics "page" is a success. It's much more convenient. If you want me to check out YOUR webcomic send it to me (see above) somehow and I will! I can't write about it if I haven't read it 🙂
But this approach still leaves me thinking about how to find the "good" webcomics. And let's be honest — when I say "good" I mean good in terms of what I want to read. Your "good" may be completely different. Either way there's a LOT of comics now and 99% of them seem to be on the Internet in some form or another. Over at Savage Critics, Abhay Khosla has a surprisingly good (surprising because I thought it was going to be just a snarkfest and it turned out to be quite thoughtful) essay on what it's like to live in a world of almost infinite comic choices. I also loved his take on ComixTALK's 2009 Roundtable:
Comixtalk did a year-end roundtable in December 2009, in which they spoke to not less than eight people. Between the eight of them, roughly five billion webcomics are mentioned over the course of the round-table. So: be sure to check those out…
Joystiq's weekly webcomic roundup seems to be a bit of an institution now for gaming comics. Is there anything like it for other subjects Movie comics? Celebrity comics? New and opinion sites? I don't offer a practical plan for convincing a successful site in a subject area to add a webcomic roundup but I think it would be worth working on. (If you're a smaller site linked to by Joystiq — how much of a bump are you getting from the exposure?)
At the end of this month, Ryan North's Project Wonderful is going to add geotargeting to it's service – here Ryan explains more about the benefits of this feature. I used a mix of PW, Blog Ads and ComicSpace's Ad service Webcomics World over the last year and if I had to keep one I'd stick with PW right now.
El Santo reviews Dead Winter, a zombie webcomic. 4 Stars and he compares it favorably to Jenny Romanchuk’s Zombie Hunters and Bobby Crosby's Last Blood.
Delos writes about Sandra De Haan, a Netherlands artist, who has translated some of her journal webcomics into English. I like the crispy cartoony artwork here.
Also via Delos is a link to The Blueprint Database – a vast collection of blueprints from cars to the Millenium Falcon.
Has everyone seen The Fantastic Mr Fox? I want to but haven't yet. Did see a wonderful exhibit on it at the Cartoon Museum and spotted this acceptance speech at the National Board of Review ceremony (via Drawn!)
Speaking of movies the news that Ryan Estrada is making a movie version of his webcomic The Kind You Don't Take Home to Mother has bounced around the web. All I can say is I am really looking forward to this and I hope Ryan succeeds in getting it done.
Last not least, ComixTALK friend for life Jon Morris has a funny essay up at Heavy.com on the Strange Life and Times of Richie Rich.
It’s Just Wednesday and Boy… Are My Gills Tired!
State of the ComixTALK update
Working on a Wordpress-powered version of the site on a development server. Had out the MySQL book last night trying to write queries for moving over a few of the tables from Drupal to Wordpress.
THEORY
Patric Lewandowski gave a 20 minute talk on ideas about comic theory he first explained in a series of articles he wrote for ComixTALK in 2008. You can see the video of Patric's presentation at his website.
AWARDS
After the one webcomic (Girl Genuis) in ComicRiff's "Best Comic of the Decade" poll kicked serious tail, ComicRiff decides to hold a "Best Webcomic of the Decade" poll. They're looking for nominations if you're interested in helping them out.
Webcomics.com Update
I got a press release from Brad Guigar this morning announcing that subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago's Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators' discount of 15%. According to Brad that's a total savings of $60 – which is pretty nice (and more than the annual $30 subscription fee to the site btw). This is very smart — if Brad can leverage the new community he's building for partnerships and other promotions than that certainly adds a lot of value to joining that site.
And El Santo adds his two cents to the Webcomics.com subscriber model story.
THEN AND NOW
Jeph Jacques redraws Questionable Content #1.
John Allison is redrawing some of his SGR comics for the latest print volume.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Artpatient linked to a funny comic by Caldwell Tanner called "What Kind of Artist Are You?" I fit in there…. somewhere!
Rolling Update For Friday
Wow- the first full week of 2010 at ComixTalk and I'm still surprised how much folks are talking about webcomics.com's and keenspot's recent announcements. I think with the struggling ad market we may see another year of tremendous experimentation as folks try out old and new business ideas alike. I wonder about the "swag" market — a recent tweet about the amount of postage bought by Topatoco last year reminded me how little we know about trends in that area. Sure we hear from individual cartoonists when they do well or not but I don't think anyone has an idea of whether collective sales of comics-related t-shirts, stickets, etc is going up or down over time.
Also, I guess the 3-D hype from movies and teevee has come to comics — Comics Alliances writes up a recent effort at a 3-D webcomic.
Last another site note: I'm definitely going to a new site design, probably timed to moving to a new host; ideally within this month. In the meantime partially inspired by the video of Lark Pien's Small Destructions installation I saw, I'm using the "cover" art slot here and changing it often (call it not-quite-daily). I hope folks like some of them or at least don't mind. We had 83 cover artists (give or take – some were collaborations) over 7 years and I finally thought I'd like to take my own turn at it.
INTERVIEWS
Scott McCloud mentioned Dan Goldman's new webcomic Red Light Properties which has a panel at a time interface (Scott seems to approve) and pointed to an interview Goldman at the Graphic NYC blog.
An interview with Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North focusing on his many webcomic tools like the ad system Project Wonderful and the RSS site, RSSpect. Worth noting North recently added plans to add on January 30th geotargeting to the Project Wonderful platform.
TUTORIALS
ArtPatient has links to lots of free webcomic tutorial sites as well as Delos's usual amazingly complete round-up of interviews, reviews and other announcements.
AWARDS
The comic book website Broken Frontiers names Girl Genius the Best Webcomic of 2009.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Be sure to check out Christopher Baldwin's new webcomic Spacetrawler.
Boing Boing reports that the first two volumes of Wizzywig, Ed Piskor's graphic memoir of the early days of the BBS/hacking/phreaking scene, have been posted online.
CHASING THE TITANIC
Daily Cartoonist reports Bridgett Spicer’s webcomic Squid Row has landed a spot in The Monterey County Herald.
Evan Dahm’s Overside: Rice Boy and Order of Tales
Here's a fairly short review: Rice Boy is a good comic and you should read it. I actually think the book version might be preferrable to the webcomic as it's a hefty story that lends itself to sitting down for a long stretch with it.
Sometimes You Just Gotta Rampage!
So there was this video playing at the Cartoon Art Museum during my visit last week where a woman was drawing a comic by painting on panels. The gimmick was that she had four panels on the wall where she'd draw the next scenes of the comic and then after finishing she's repaint the same four panels with the next scenes. The story was a cute one about monsters rampaging through the countryside. Anyone know the name? Is it on the web? Thanks to Ben Gamboa for identifying it as Lark Pien's Small Destructions, something she actually created at the Museum in 2007. And here it is:
JUSTIFY THE WORLD's HYPE
Just finished reading the first volume of Scott Pilgrim – I hadn't been avoiding it so much as just never got around to it. Cute story, kind of funny but I was a bit underwhelmed given the love this comic has gotten. Maybe my expectations were too high or does it get better as the series goes on?
JUSTIFY MY FORTHCOMING HYPE
I am working on a review/overview of Evan Dahm's Overside comics: Rice Boy and Order of Tales. There's a reason why comic legend Jeff Smith picked Rice Boy as one of his comics of the decade.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Cool – Websnark is back. While Wednesday is working on an overhaul of the site, Eric writes about the return of T Campbell's Faans.
Webcomics.com new members-only approach evolves again. The old forums are now available for free to read but only members can start new threads or post replies to existing threads.
TOOLS
Anyone familiar with ComicFury? It's advertised as "a free, easy to use and advertisement-free tool that will help you set up and host a website for your webcomic, which you can elegantly manage without any technical knowledge. All you will have to worry about when using ComicFury is actually making the comics, the rest is provided by us. It also offers you free exposure on the site and excellent support on the forums."
Under Construction?!
January is going to be like one of those "this ol' haus" shows on PBS or TLC all month long as I patch, prod and pull apart things at the site. I didn't get a lot of feedback to my blegs from you lot on what you like or dislike here at ComixTalk so I'm left to my own devices which is…usually a mixed bag in terms of results. But let's have fun with this, shall we? I'll be putting up notes on site status to keep everyone on their toes updated on developments.
THESE RIDES ARE CURRENTLY NOT OPERATIONAL: auto-importing of blogs ; new user sign-ups
WEBCOMICS.COM
A surprisingly big story – Brad Guigar's sudden move of webcomics.com to a pay wall has been chattered about all week. Brigid Alverson does another good job of rounding up all of the talking. FLEEN interviewed the Guigarster where Brad describes the number of subscriptions purchased so far as “For a non-porn site, encouraging."
One wrinkle to this story is that there were third-party articles published at Webcomics.com — for those authors who want a non-pay wall home for those articles, give me a buzz (tweet xerexes or xerexes AT gmail) – ComixTalk would probably be a good home for them.
BUSINESS
Webcomic Marketing looks like a decent site that's been updating for a bit now. The most recent post provides a Convention checklist from the creators of Steam Crow.
DIGITS
Drawn! points to this video demonstrating the "theoretical" Mag+ e-reader; Gizmodo covers the Skiff e-reader.
NEW WEBCOMIC
Dan Goldman launches a new webcomic, called Red Light Properties at Tor.com. Robot6 describes Red Light Properties is a "tropical-horror series" about a real estate firm in Miami Beach that cleans and sells "previously-haunted homes" to people who've lost their houses to foreclosure.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Brilliant twist on Calvin & Hobbes all this week from Scott Kurtz at PVP. What a great start to webcomics this year.
Webcomics.com Adopts A Subscription Wall For Archives
Brad Guigar's Webcomics.com adopts a $30 per year fee for access to (all?) new content and all of the archives. Brigid Alverson has a good write-up of it here. Webcomics.com has been an incredible resource and growing community over the last 12+ months. It'll be interesting to see if this changes works. I certainly wish Guigar luck — if this allows him to put more into the site and keep it growing than of course it's a success.
For what it's worth I'll have more to say about this and ComixTalk and all things webcomics in the days to come.
So… Happy New Year’s Eve!
So the X-clan is in the midst of its not-quite-annual West Coast swing. Spending a lovely day in Silicon Valley doing not much. I’ll be at the Cartoon Art Museum in SF on Saturday afternoon.
UPDATE: Happy New Years to all. Had a great day at the California National Academy of Science! Museum.
UPDATE2: Hey it’s mah birthday today tomorrow! I’ll get back to real posts here sometime next week.
Leaked Keenspot Email
Fleen got ahold of an internal Keenspot email laying out plans to change Keenspot’s business model and radically reduce the number of artists on its roster. It raises as many questions as it answers about the future of Keenspot.
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