Bellen! Is A Peculiar Kind of Comic: An Interview with Brian Brown

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BELLEN! by Brian "Box" Brown is a journal comic about a fictional couple (really!) named Ben and Ellen (hence, "Bellen").  It's one of those comics that has shown great strides as its creator improves over time.  Brown has really come into his own in the last year and Bellen! is a real treat.  It has a lot of the wistfulness of Peanuts in it (there's often something Charlie Brown like about main character Ben) but it's not really similar and the artwork continues to go in interesting directions. Very recently Brown won a Xeric grant for and then self-published a collection of Bellen! based on work he originally did for the Top Shelf 2.0 webcomic portal.  I got a chance to interview him last month over email.

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Nobody’s Business But Ali Graham’s

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Ali Graham is the creator of Nobody's Business, Afterstrife and HOUSD.  I first discovered Graham reading Afterstrife, which follows two characters through their afterlife.   It's kind of like Moonlighting meets Dante.  The more recent Nobody's Business is based on a film Graham worked on over last fall and into this year.  Graham is one of a small but growing group of webcomics creators in the UK.  I got a chance to interview him via email over the last month about his current projects.

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Spring Break at Fort Webcomic-Dale News Roundup

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TECHNOLOGY
Plastic Logic is a company reportedly working on an e-reader with a big size — 8.5 x 11 inches – a piece of paper but still thinner than a pad of paper with "a high-quality reading experience".  It looks like the earliest we’ll see an actual product is the second half of this year.  The first version looks like it will be grey-scale but the FAQ does say the company is working on a color version for the future.

INTERVIEWS
Newsarama has an interview with Daniel Govar of recent Zuda winner Azure.

TOOLS
Smashing Magazine has some tips on how to replace Photoshop with the open source GIMP.

COLLECTIVES
The Noir Project is looking for new members.

Webcomic Planet is having a contest — find the eggs on the websites of members of the Webcomic Planet collective and win a cameo in one of their comics.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
The Bad Chemicals is single panel mayhem.  Often sick AND wrong it is nevertheless funny (say about 4/5ths of the time).

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A Survey of Digital Comics Readers

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This article was originally published on webcomics.com in 2008.

Every few years, a traditional comics publisher makes a renewed plunge into the webcomics market. And each time they do, they feel the need to introduce some “revolutionary” new piece of comics presentation software, as if this is what some purely hypothetical online comics industry has been waiting for. “Finally,” we are meant to exclaim, “we can actually read comics online!”

Given how the vast majority of webcomics do just fine as a succession of image files on web pages, it is a curious phenomenon.

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A Stray Thought on Digital Comics Hardware

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This article was originally published on webcomics.com in 2008.

When reviewing reader applications for online comics, I was struck by just how much effort Marvel put into solving the problem of presenting vertically oriented comics on a horizontal screen. With multiple layout options, including full page, double page, various zooms, and their elaborate Smart Panels solution, Marvel’s designers might be a bit overly concerned with this problem; after all, most readers don’t get up in arms over vertical scrolls these days. But I do have to admit, it really would be nicer to be able to see a full page of art at a readable size, rather than having to choose between full pages with illegibly small text, or readable text on incomplete pages.

Still, after reviewing five different comics readers, all of which attempt to address this issue to one extent or another, none entirely satisfactorily, I can’t help thinking that the final answer to this issue won’t be new software, but rather new hardware.

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New Comic from Zach Weiner and Chris Jones and James Ashby

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Snowflakes is a new comic with art by Jones and word-stuff by Weiner and Ashby.  I had meant to post about this earlier this week but I haven’t had time for writing much this week.  Anyhow, the comic is pitched as a PG-rated affair and is set in an orphanage where we’ve met the current cast of orphans.  So far so good – I’m curious to see what PG-rated stuff these guys can come up with over time.

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Eisner Nominees for 2009

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This year’s Best Digital Comic category nominees for the Eisners is an interesting mix:

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Mind of Freeman

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Okay I am so late to finding this but it is pretty funny.  Ross Scott’s series of videos called Freeman’s Mind are simply Scott riffing over the action in the original Half Life game as if he was the main character.  It is not at all what I’d think of as Freeman’s personality (although in a remarkably McCloudian trick, Half Life gives no personality to Freeman so that every person playing the games gets to fill in whatever they imagine).  It isn’t 100% awesome but I had to watch through all 10 of them and probably will keep up with it now that I’m thru the archives.  Wow, I am a geek 🙂

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Strange Situation: Old URL Revived (With Old Comics Without Permission)

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cat garza writes about a strange situation.  He used to have a URL called whimville.com that he let go at some point.  Some third party picked it up (that’s what happens when you let a domain name expire) but the strange thing being that this third party put some of cat’s comics back up on the whimville.com domain.  There’s no question that’s lame and cat is asking for help to figure out what to do about it.

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