Comix Talk

Tom Spurgeon reports that Dark Horse may or may not be pulling a book version of Planet Beer from cartoonist Brian Sendelbach.  Sendelbach apparently sent out an email asking for pre-orders to avert a pull of the book (scheduled for March) by Dark Horse.  Dark Horse in its response doesn’t seem to agree exactly. 

Sendelbach’s comic is called Smell of Steve and appears online and in some weeklies.  I have no idea about Dark Horse pulling books or whatnot but whatever email Sendelbach wrote was brilliant P.R. — he’s got mentions of the coming book in The Comics Reporter and other sites — plus a solid plug from Internet Jesus himself.

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Another webcomic creator hits the Googleplex – I finally got to watch through this and it was interesting to hear Chris Onstad talk about his work and the flexibility of the web.

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ADVERTS
Let's stick with the advertising theme this week.  I may have been too harsh on BlogAds yesterday – I lowered the prices and had a new ad submitted within hours.  Hmm…   Anyhow, new features for the Project Wonderful advertising platoform — categories for publishers ad boxes and infinite bids for advertisers.

MILESTONES
The Reboot webcomic is over.  I know nothing about any incarnation of Reboot so someone else will have to tell us if the webcomic did justice to the cartoon or whether there's a big screen remake with Eddie Murphy coming out next year.

NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT
Lyle Masaki has an overview of webcomics with gay themes and characters.  It's a good article which covers a number of really good comics out there. (h/t El Journalista!)

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Shelly from Scary Go Round meets Dr McNinja as drawn by SGR boy genius creator John Allison.

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I suspect it’s going to be a lousy time for ads in the near term.  Less money spent on them; less readers clicking on them (on the idea everyone is spending less).

I saw a decent thread on various ad systems over at webcomics.com — I’m really curious about how January shakes out for creators running ads.  I’m currently using Joey Manley’s new advertising platform – Webcomics World – but it’s too soon to provide any feedback on it yet.  Previously I used a combination of Blog Ads, Project Wonderful and Google Ads.  Google ads have never worked for me, PW has always been a small amount (but consistent) and Blog Ads used to be pretty good but declined severely over 2008.

NOTE: I grabbed this link from the webcomics.com thread – Tony Piro wrote up an overview of many ad networks – a little out of date but still, a pretty useful overview.  One other new network you might also investigate is from Six Apart (they own typepad and moveable type) – I have not used it but did consider it last year.

ADVERT: Thinking about blogads I just lowered slashed the price on the blogad spot here at ComixTALK (it appears at the top of the left hand column).

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Does anyone want to do some cover art for ComixTalk for January (like this month)?  Email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com.

INTERVIEWS

Newsarama has an interview with Raina Telgemeier who is working on a graphic novel version of her webcomic-in-progress Smile.  Raina and her husband Dave Roman are two of the nicest (and talentest) folks in comics. (h/t Journalista!)

The Washington Post has an interview with Tom Rickard, the creator of the comic strip Brewster Rockit.  I didn’t realize this started back in 2004, it is a better than average strip in terms of what’s in the Post’s comic pages.

Achewood creator Chris Onstad visits the Googleplex – click for a video of an interview with him there for Google’s Authors At Lunch series.  (h/t Journalista!)

Following up on FLEEN’s mention of the NPR story on Penny Arcade, a commenter lists several other webcomic stories NPR has covered: Achewood, Sluggy Freelance, Erfworld, Questionable Content, Megatokyo, Cyanide & Happiness.

TOOLS

Brian Fies, the creator of the web/comic Mom’s Cancer has REALLY good advice on dpi requirements (72, 300, 600, 1200, etc) when scanning. (h/t Journalista!)

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

In their weekly podcast, the Halfpixel crew talks about 2008 and looks ahead to 2009.

Scott Kurtz announced some changes to his other webcomic Ding! — he took back the art chores from Paul Southworth and is now soliciting stories from players of the game World Of Warcraft to tell in the comic.  I think the format change is interesting, but I’ll miss Southworth’s take on the art.

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Wow – lots of awesome MC Frontalot news (links lifted from FLEEN.com) including this Matt Boyd conducted interview with the MC himself.  But the main deal being winners of the video contest Frontalot ran for his new song Wallflowers (which is a heck of a catchy song).  Amongst the fan-submitted videos the winner was a stop-motion one which looks like it took a lot of work and really how much can you complain about toys dancing on top of a Merlin-game style floor.  But as far as concepts go I loved the one from fuzzy gerdes that took last runner-up.  I kind of think you could do a lot more visual funny with it then these guys did but I loved the low key style.  Quoting the MC himself, “Honorable Mention goes to: fuzzy gerdes who took the central idea of the song and did not let go of it.”

MC Frontalot – Wallflowers from Fuzzy Gerdes on Vimeo.

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I can't recall if I posted to this at the time or not but it's still a good refresher for anyone wanting to make a go at it in webcomics this year.  Last August, Howard Tayler gave a great talk about his webcomic Schlock Mercenary and how he's made it into a full time business.  It's a good talk – not just about Howard himself, but going through how the Internet has disrupted the existing newspaper comic strip model.

Slightly related update: Jeff Jarvis accumulates the depressing statistics of 2008 for the newspaper bidniz here – which only serves to reinforce Howard's point that chasing newspaper syndication is like catching a ride on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.

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NPR does a story on Penny Arcade (this is a couple days old but I just listened to it this morning) which does a decent job of capturing the comic although interesting it doesn't mention Robert Khoo's role in their business success.  Contrary to other reports though NPR did cover a webcomic before – it had an interview with Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance way back in 1998.

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New Webcomic Hosting Site?

Webcomic Planet is still in beta but it is up and worth checking out.  Free hosting with wordpress plus the comicpress theme is a great idea plus its owners include Tyler Martin the creator of the comicpress theme as well as Philip Hofer of Frumph.net and John Bintz.

BEST OF 2008

Derik Badman had a short list of recommended best of 2008 webcomics.

El Santo notes that voting for the 2008 Weblog Awards starts this Monday — there is a comic strip category that includes several webcomics (well they're all "web" comics but several are independent comics on the web)

And Happy Birthday To Me!

Sadly I've been sick all week and missed out on most of my plans for celebrating holidays and such but this past Friday was my birthday.   Apparently I'm semi-prominent enough to get a mention on The Comics Reporter (of course I did send in my birthdate to Tom, but regardless, thanks!) — it's all downhill in comics for me now! 🙂

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