Origin of Rocktacular!
The latest installment of Dark Horse Online (still at MySpace…) is rocktacular! Comics from Kate Beaton, Chris Onstad, David Malki! and Kristian Donaldson & Ann Romano.
COMIXTALK SELLS OUT!
Thanks to our newest sponsor an online exhibit by Scott C called "Home Slice". (The sponsor slot is the top ad on the left hand column of the site – we have one at a time and it helps make sure I can pay the server bills! Click here if you’re interested in sponsoring ComixTALK next.)
INTERVIEWS
An interview with the historically enthusiastic Kate Beaton (h/t JOURNALISTA!)
The Washington Post has a good interview with Jeff Kinney the creator of the wildly successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (which are online at Funbrain.com)
BUSINESS?
Indy Comic News linked to a press release from comicsXP which appears to be a site for organzing comics and possibly reading digital scans of them too. I haven’t heard anything else about them so no vouchsafe from me yet. Still it’s a spiffy web2.0ish site so I’ll poke around some more this week to see what I think.
WATCHMEN WATCH
Scott Kurtz takes a crack at mixing up The Watchmen and the current decline of newspaper comics.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
I missed this but Kevin Pease drew up denominations of "bullshit artistic credibility dollars" (taking an idea from Jeph Jacques’s post on webcomic versus newspaper comic business models) which are great!
Frosty the Webcomic Man
DEAD TREES DYING
Matt Groening muses about moving Life In Hell to the web after LA Weekly drops it.
AVON Calling
Comics Worth Reading points to what may be the first multi-level marketing webcomic scheme.
MILESTONES
Last week was the eighth anniversary of Mitch Clem’s Nothing Nice to Say. Comixtalk had an interview with Mitch back in 2006.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Tozzers is doing a strange Terminator/Anti-Ben Affleck storyline (I thought bashing Affleck was Theater Hopper‘s gig) Despite the heavy outlining I like the artwork on this strip, I’m less sold on the comic as a whole but still worth checking out.
Ian Jones-Quartey’s NOCKFORCE
Ian Jones-Quartey did the very funny RPG World back in the day. Since then he’s gone on to animation fame and fortune (currently working on the Venture Bros.). He also does a funny series of short animations with Jim Gisriel called nockFORCE Quickies. If you like one you’ll crack up at all of them. The latest one is on The Watchmen movie:
March March March
Well shoot I wrote a post and the server hiccupped on me and BOOM! it’s gone. Oh well. Hey it’s March. BIG thanks to Ali Graham for doing this month’s cover art – be sure to check out his site next week as he has a new comic debuting.
UPDATE: Ali’s new comic is called Nobody’s Business and can be found here.
Scottmccloud.com Reboot
Scott McCloud gave his website a refresh and has started blogging again. Check it out already!
Comicbrush goes Rogue
Rogue Trooper, the genetically engineered super soldier from the pages of the sci-fi comic 2000 AD, has invaded Comicbrush.com.
Rogue’s dominance of Comicbrush coincides with the launch of ‘Rogue Trooper: Quartz Zone Massacre’ videogame on the Nintendo Wii, and together with the videogames publisher Ubisoft and 2000 AD, Comicbrush has announced a ‘create your own Rogue Trooper comic’ competition, with some fantastic prizes* up for grabs.
Anyone Want to do the March Cover For ComixTalk
If anyone is interested in doing the cover art for ComixTalk for March shoot me an email at xerexes AT gmail DOT com (or post a comment to this post). It’s the artwork that appears at the top of every page of the site (look up there!).
Two Non-Reviews: French Milk and The Arcade of Cruelty
I get books in the mail from time to time and I always make an effort to review them. Sometimes though I just can’t find a hook to the review or something I really want to say about the book which makes it hard to write a proper review. And then the books just sit there on my desk asking me "why!?" "why?!" until I either write the review or not. Hence the "non-review" (or maybe I"ll call them "unreviews").
The first book is French Milk by Lucy Knisley which is basically a diary of her six week stay in Paris. Knisley is clearly pretty talented, but I just didn’t connect with the book – I found it often disjointed and I didn’t feel like I got a handle on Knisley (as a character in the book) or her mother (who was also there during the stay in Paris). Maybe I was put off by the almost panel-less style of comic Knisley employs in the book. That plus the inclusion of photos of the trip made me feel more like I was reading her actual journal rather than a book about the trip (slim difference in the journal comic tradition perhaps but a difference I think worth noting).
I’m probably wrong – others loved the book – Whitney Matheson (who has pretty good pop comic tastes) called it "Wonderful". Other reviews include Andrew Wheeler at ComicMix; Laura Lutz at Pinot and Prose; and Marie at the Boston Biliophile.
The second book is The Arcade of Cruelty: A Tender Cry For Help In Words & Pictures, created by Joseph J.P. Larkin. This one is not really a comic (there are some comics in it though) so much as a scrapbook of various materials compiled together in one volume. It’s hard to describe — it’s either a huge goof (something Andy Kaufman would approve of) on any of its readers or if not maybe someone should be taking that cry for help part of the title seriously. Either way it’s an unusual take on autobiography (so there’s the parallel with journal comic French Milk — see I didn’t just match up these two books randomly!).
The book itself is extremely well put together in terms of production values but the contents inside feel like Larkin put in anything he could find in his files. Of course maybe he just wants us to think that he put in anything he could find in his files… As far as the comics part of it goes there are some funny riffs, albeit mean-spirited, on Chris Ware and some other famous cartoonists. Then there’s lots of other stuff…
Want another opinion? Some liked it, others didn’t — check out reviews by Rod Lott at Bookgasm, Kevin Bramer at Optical Sloth, and Paul Constant in The Stranger.
Help Ryan Estrada Get His Dream Job
You may have read about this job on the intertubes — Australia is looking for a "Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef" which is mostly a job that involves exploring the area and writing (and taping) a weekly blog about it. It’s a tourism promotion job in an area where the tourism is pretty adventurous (I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s book on Austrailia – who knew that continent had so many interesting, and novel!, ways to die) so if you know anything about Ryan Estrada you know he’s just perfect for the job.
Plus Ryan’s a pretty kick-ass cartoonist and an all-around nicest guy on the planet so he’s got that going for him too.
Go check out Ryan’s application here or watch his video below:
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