A little late but better than never? The third edition of the solid-to-really-good anthology Inbound: Comics From Boston from the Boston Comics Roundtable group is all about the romance, the love, the heartache and pain and that's worth reading about now just as much as when I first read through this book back in the Spring.
I’m a big fan of Jeff Smith and really enjoyed the Bone series, even more so with the color version put out by Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. Now Smith collaborated with artist Charles Vess to produce a prequel to the series titled Rose that chronicles the adventure of Rose and her sister Briar before the saga in the Bone series. Originally published as a mini-series of comic books (you know… pamphlets!) it’s coming out this August as single volume from Scholastic (it looks very much like all of the other Scholastic Bone books).
Sophia Wiedeman's The Deformitory is a small, black and white, graphic novel that adds just a touch of realism to its magical realism style. The comic was also her masters thesis for her MFA in Illustration from The School of Visual Arts. Last year, Wiedeman won a Xeric Foundation grant which she used for publication of The Deformitory. Diamond will feature it in its August Previews issue and it will be available in comic shops this fall.
It is a very interesting work, a thoughtful literary comic that I read several times, each time finding new angles to think about. It's hard not to give away the entire plot in discussing the work, but I am going to try. So a partial "spoiler" warning perhaps…
It's Wednesday and that means it's July. We'll have new art from Isabel Marks up top of the site there for July sometime this evening. Also you all already read webcomics.com, right? Well one more reason to add it to your daily feed – that site just got a website design refresh, plus it now bills Brad Guigar as "editor-in-chief". Good stuff!
AWARDS: There was a lot of hubbub yesterday about the nominees for the Harveys, including this story on how Gemstone publishing provided pre-filled in ballots for its employees in past years. The Harveys, like the WCCAs, rely on counting up nominations for comics to determine the list of nominees for each category. How many people participate is really important to the strength of the award. I don't think the Harvey's released that information – but if anyone knows the number of votes for nominees please forward it on to me. On this note Johanna Draper Carlson offers her tips for fixing the Harveys. UPDATE: Tom Spurgeon pens an essay on why The Harvey awards should pack it in.
Also just in – Reuben Bolling just won just won the 2009 AAN Award for the Best Cartoon in Alternative Newsweeklies for his comic Tom the Dancing Bug.
INTERVIEWS: Newsarama has an interview with another Zuda cartoonist – this time it's Andy Belanger. His comic strip Bottle of Awesome started this week.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE: James Duncan's adaptation of The Decemberists' "The Mariner's Revenge Song" is all kinds of creepy awesome.
The nominees for the 2009 Harvey Awards are out — all comics creators (those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field) are eligible to vote for the award winners from now through August 8th. Ballots for voting are available online here. There are a lot of webcomic angles to the list of nominees this year, including the seven nominations for Jeff Kinney’s Diary of A Wimpy Kid (a comic with a webcomic origin) and 10 noninations for John Gallagher’s Buzzboy which also has it origins in an online version.
In the online category, the nominees include three comics on DC’s Zuda website: BLACK CHERRY BOMBSHELLS, HIGH MOON, NIGHT OWLS, plus PVP, and LEAST I COULD DO. Interestingly enough three webcomics from Zuda also received nominations for Best New Series: HIGH MOON, NIGHT OWLS, and SUPERTRON. (Check out CBR’s recent interview with High Moon artist Steve Ellis)
Least I Could Do artist Lar deSouza also snagged nominations for Best Cartoonist and in the Special Award for Humor in Comics. David Malki! of Wondermark also got a nod in the Special Award for Humor category and another one in the SPECIAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PRESENTATION category for his book WONDERMARK, VOL. 1: BEARDS OF OUR FOREFATHERS (which I own a copy of and agree is absolutely deserving of this recognition).
In the BEST BIOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL OR JOURNALISTIC PRESENTATION category HOW TO MAKE WEBCOMICS, by Brad Guigar, Dave Kellett, Scott Kurtz, and Kris Straub received a nomination. In the Best Anthology category, FLIGHT VOLUME 5, edited by Kazu Kibuishi received a nomination.
Got to see the talk by Richard Thompson (Cul De Sac) at the Arlington County library tonight. He’s an amiable fellow who, while not the most dynamic of speakers, did go through a nice overview of his work (which goes way beyond his more recent syndicated comic) up on the screen. A few interesting items from his talk and from the Q and A afterwards: he’s in about 250 papers, which he contrasted to Zits and a few others in 1000+ papers. Continue Reading
Some quick updates for today — probably no more posts from me until next week though (check out the talk posts for more from the ComixTalk community). Here’s an idea that caught my eye this AM — a graphic novel reading group. Sponsored by the DC area bookstore Politics and Prose it will meet the fourth Wednesday of each month. There are a lot of book reading clubs — how many include, let alone focus on graphic novels? Do any publishers include book club guides for their graphic novels? (I’ve seen similar stuff for books).
iComics?
Another article on Longbox – the announced "itunes for comics" service/software. Not a bad overview of the possibilities here, although a key difference between music and comics is that it seems iTunes rode the success of the iPod. I can’t imagine iTunes becoming as dominant as it is without the tight linkage Apple created to the iPod. Longbox isn’t going to have that advantage. On the other hand if Longbox can do deal with many, many major publishers of comics than it still might have a fighting chance (assuming it’s a great piece of software with a really good customer experience). (h/t Scott McCloud)
Justify My Hype
Daily Cross Hatch has a great comic from Raina Telgemeier — the first in a series called Subway Stories.
BUSINESS
Longbox is a software program for download for computers that is intended to be an iTunes like system for comics. Comics is in a much different place than music was at the time of iTunes rise to dominance (plus iTunes rode the iPod and there doesn’t seem to be an iLongbox involved in this story) so I’m not sure there’s any reason to predict success for this effort without seeing a lot more of it. If they had an exceptionally well-done piece of software, easy purchase process and lined up ALL or MOST of the major publishers than maybe it would get some traction. Convenience at the right price point CAN beat inconvenient and free for a lot of folks.
REVIEWS
Comics Worth Reading has a review of Ethan Young’s ails.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Shaenon K. Garrity’s guide to comics message boards is very funny.
Sean T. Collins has links to a whole bunch of creators’ twitter feeds you might be interested in.
This Day in ComixTALK:
2008
Chuck Whelon posted the cover art for his new edition of the first collection of Pewfell Perfingles comics. He also posted a great page from that book. Neil Cohn noted the 30th anniversary of Jim Davis’ Garfield and covered some of the webcomic experimentalism incorporating that comic. Brad Guigar reported back from exhibiting at Wizard World Philadelphia. Kate Beaton? Before she became famous for historical comicking, she posted this take on the Anthony-Liz storyline from For Better or For Worse.
And the nominees for that year’s Online Comics category at the Harveys included Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney, EZ Street, Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley, Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, Perry Bible Fellowship, Nicholas Gurewitch and Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo, Dwight L. Macpherson, Thomas Boatwright and Thomas Mauer.
2007
I was in the midst of spinning off Comixpedia.org and rebranding this site as ComixTALK. While it all hasn’t worked out to "bigger and better" it has worked well enough for me. (Never did activate the so-called umbrella site "Comixmedia")
Todd Allen was covering the DC webcomics plans; another Platinum story was in the news and FLEEN speculated on the webcomic future for Elfquest creators Wendy and Richard Pini.
2006
Back when we did "Summer of Guest Bloggers" — we had Barry Gregory (01 Comics) and Clay Gardner (Wirepop) on tap for this week. Clay wrote a post on "the hidden style of manga". And Zach Lewis hyped Jack of All Blades — the "most popular adventure comic featuring a doppleganger, a penguin, and a horrid swordfighter".
2005
June 2005 was our "webcomics in print" issue. Ben Towles wrote about his experiences self-publishing a print collection of his webcomic Townies. Eric Burns wrote about some of the webcomics that had jumped to print and mused about what would be the future role of print in webcomics. Meanwhile in Kelly Cooper’s MoCCA report we have early photographic evidence of Gary "Magnum P.I." Tyrrell.
2004
Cartoonist Hard (aka Clay) who used to blog pretty often, wrote about various comics publications and objecting to the Webcomics Examiner approach to webcomics. It just reminds me of how overblown some of the discussions online became back then. And the fact that for a long time Comixpedia/Talk was largely alone in trying to provide coverage of webcomics which often meant we got swept up in whatever the drama of the moment was.
2003
I linked to this article in the NYTimes about building an audience for your blog. It’s a bit like driving a mustang while looking back on the Model Ts. How about this quote:
But Susan Mernit, a blogger in San Francisco, is actively trying to increase her readership from its current average of about 50 visitors a day. "I value hits highly," said Ms. Mernit, a consultant for nonprofit organizations and a former vice president for programming at America Online. "I’d like to see my traffic increase by 10 readers a month."
Sorry the posting has been more sparse this month — just had less time for writing about comics this year so far. I am always happy to frontpage good posts though — posts on projects (self-hype is okay!) with something interesting (not just a "hey, here’s my comic) that include an image are GOLD! and posts with news or a round-up of links to news are also always appreciated. And if you’re already posting to your own blog it’s easy to set up an automatic import of your feed to your ComixTalk account.
Also – I’m on twitter ("xerexes") and facebook (tweet or email me if you want to connect there) these days. My Twitter feed has updates from here plus assorted little things (sometimes non-comics) and Facebook is largely not-comics in terms of posts from me but I am using it to keep up on what others are doing comics-wise.
INTERVIEWS
GeekDad interviews Chris Hastings of Dr. McNinja. Which reminds me – I’ve seen a lot of ninja-ing and some fair amount of doctoring in the comic but what about the "Mc". Have we ever seen much exploration of the Doctor’s scottish roots?
The San Francisco Examiner interviews Julia Wertz of Fart Party. Wertz mentions that readers have told her the title has delayed their looking at the book (which suggests that there are probably a number of non-readers who never got past the title) and to be honest I don’t recall the comic really ever explaining why it had the title. (h/t Journalista!)
The ComicsCritics comic interviews itself in comic form (it’s today’s update there). (h/t Journalista!)
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Graphic NYC is a great blog with lots of good posts and great photos of talented cartoonists. Here’s a recent post on the status of their projects (book!) with links to many of their best posts.
ECONOLYPSE
MySpace Comics is shutting down according to this story on Comic Alliance. The article suggests that this means the end of Dark Horse Presents on MySpace? If so, I would hope that Dark Horse could find another home for this project.
CRAFT
Sean Kleefeld has a short post about using Second Life to create comics. Hadn’t thought of that yet although I have seen Sims-generated comics in the past.
Recent Comments