Comix Talk

NEWSPAPERS: An interview with Lincoln Peirce (his family notoriously rebelling against the i before e except after c rule) the creator of the long-running Big Nate.

GRAPHIC NOVELS: An interview with Shaun Tan, creator of various excellent graphic novels, including Tales From Outer Suburbia (reviewed at Comixtalk here).

WEBCOMICS: An interview with Josh Neufeld, creator of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge and an interview with Marty Nozzarella, creator of Mere Mortal.

ANTHOLOGIES: An interview with Diana McQueen, the new editor of the anthology comics site Girlamatic.

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Our normal defense shields against spam seemed to have failed over the last 24 hours and I spent too much time cleaning spam out of the database this morning.  For now I’ve locked down new user registrations and new talk posts until I get a chance to investigate the causes of the breakdown.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a hot tip on a webcomic story email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com and I’ll post it for you.

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Fleen reported on and confirmed via Keenspot CEO Chris Crosby that John Troutman is no longer on Keenspot:

John Troutman’s Keenspot membership has been terminated, but we have no comment on the matter otherwise and wish John the best of luck.

I have no information on this at all although I’ve asked John for comment and will report that if he is willing to do so.  I guess I’m a little surprised by the story as I can’t recall a time when Keenspot has essentially fired someone. 

Background on John can be found at Wikipedia and Comicspace.

UPDATE
A reply from John Troutman:

Though I believe my membership was terminated unjustly and through no fault of my own, I suspect I’ll be much better off without Keenspot, whose management I never really saw eye-to-eye with.  All my friends have had great success as indie webcomics, so I can only hope to follow in their footsteps.

Disclosure! I have known John online at least (I don’t think we’ve ever met in person) for many years now.

In addition to his initial statement to FLEEN, Chris Crosby added the following in a comment over there:

OK, I’ll admit, the only reason we fired John Troutman was so we would be mentioned on Fleen. It’s the same reason Fox fired the cast of FUTURAMA.

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TOOLS
Webcomics.com has a post on a webcomics new plug-in for Wordpress.  In the comments is a link to a comparison of this new approach to the more well-known Comicpress theme and other tools for using Wordpress for webcomics.

COPYRIGHT
I forgot to post about David Rees’ run-in with Jamba Juice which produced some ads with comics that look almost 100% like Rees’ Get Your War On.  So check out these two Boing Boing posts (Cory’s not (c) violation but evil; and Xeni’s Rees’ calls for boycott) for the story.

DEAD TREES
Daily Cartoonist reports on a  group of cartoonists is working on a newspaper style comics page that will be sold online.

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A few stories from the corner of copyright and catastrophe:

Amazon is getting a lot of grief over its ability to mess with content on your Kindle – the recent deletion of 1984 books being the main flash point.  I would think comics, with its history of hysteria and censorship from the government, would think carefully about this kind of blowback from DRM (digital rights management) schemes.

The A.P. is planning to try and charge for "illegal use" of its articles.  Other people call this "fair use" so I’m a bit dubious as to A.P.’s plans.  Also following the A.P.’s logic they may owes all of the subjects of their articles money for appropriating their news…

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, has a new book out called Free about new business models involving free stuff.  Definitely of interest to webcomic business-minded folks.  And not so surprisingly — you can read Free for free.

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Carla Speed McNeil won in the Best Webcomic category for Finder.  The rest of the winners are at the official site here.

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Nina Paley is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license a comic strip called The Hots that she and Stephen Hersh did for King Features Syndicate in 2002 – 2003.  She also is enlisting fans to help her load all of them to the Wikimedia Commons. Read her blog post for more details. 

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Vice magazine has an Achewood-worthy interview with creator Chris Onstad.

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MTV has a report that the webcomic Wide Awake has been optioned for the movies.  The webcomic was created by Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwawith art by Micro Pierfederici and art direction by David Messina.

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The NYTimes.com has a report on Plastic Logic‘s E-Reader with more details – the product is planned for sale for next year.  It looks like it’ll be pitched as a more expensive product then the Kindle, but the specs on this are promising and like everything it would certainly come down in price if adoption took off. 

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