Comix Talk

Tom Spurgeon reports on a letter The Comics Journal sent to its current subscribers outlining its plan to move to the web.  TCJ will still publish two semi-annual editions of the magazine on paper but for a promised price of at least $20 per edition that doesn’t sound at all like the current paper version of TCJ.

It’s a smart, probably inevitable, move for TCJ although adjusting the business plan to the web will take serious work.  No word yet on whether Dirk Deppey’s role there changes at all with these moves.

UPDATE: Dirk provides more detail this morning, including that it will be a "free" model (no subscriber wall).

correction: changed the headline from "The Comic Reporter" to "The Comics Journal".  The Comic Reporter is Tom Spurgeon’s online blog and has been online for most of the past decade.

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Logan DeAngelis wrote to let me know that his print-on-demand company, ComiXpress, has launched a major upgrade of its service:

Happy Monday, and welcome to the all new ComiXpress! Pardon our dust as we continue to roll out all of the new features.  We’re very excited about this fresh new day in Indie Comics, and thank  each and every one of you for being a part of it with us. You can now follow us on Twitter, become a Fan on Facebook, subscribe to our RSS Feed, and you’ll soon be able to Friend us on MySpace.

More details from Logan here at the website.

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Ryan Dunlavey’s mashup of superheroes and other pop culture characters and comic strip settings is pretty awesome.  Most of the ones on this page are pretty funny, my favorites being X-Nuts and Phantom The Menace.

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I’ve started up a Google Calendar for comic events: things like conventions, book signings, local meet-ups of comics folks.  I’m looking for co-maintainers to help me add events (also feel free to tweet or email me suggestions and I’ll add them if they’re appropriate).  Are you interested?  Beyond the (hopefully) collaborative effort of updating this thing, it’s also available for anyone and everyone to use – you can add it to your own gmail/calendar account, can subscribe to its RSS feed, read it here, embed it in your own site. 

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Bicycle Cop starts October 28th.

Also, you can now download the entirety of Book Two of Derik Badman’s Things Change at his Books and Download page.

And last but not least — a pretty cool fan-animation for xkcd:

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If you didn’t realize I am an awful headline writer by now….  A lot of interesting technical type articles today…. Webcomics being in the middle of the VENN diagram of comics and DIGITS…  I am apparently tweeting this article?

Anyhow in bigger than a phone, smaller than a laptop news, Barnes and Noble is going to sell NOOK, their answer to Amazon’s KINDLE. The buzz is also getting louder about Apple’s alleged iTablet.  We’ll see I guess.  And the Chicago Sun Times has an article/interview on LongBox, a digital comics reader. I’m withholding judgment until I find time to try it out.

The Graphic Novel Reporter has a roundtable on PIRACY and comics…. it is an AGE OF DIGITAL PIRACY!!!

Last but not least is this article from SEED magazine on the rise of authorship in the world.  Not comics-specific but given the high rate of creative participation in webcomics, I thought you might find it interesting.

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Doctorow is already a consistent advocate for Creative Commons licensing of his work so this isn’t as big of a stretch for him as it might be for many other authors, but he’s going to pursue a multi-tier approach to self-publishing his next book (which will be a collection of short stories).  All of this sounds pretty applicable to comics and Doctorow is committed to writing about the experience in a monthly column so it should be an interesting project to follow.

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This is journalism in webcomics form: The Honduras Coup: A Graphic History.  Well worth checking out.

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