Check out the latest and greatest webcomic critic! The HAT LOBSTER reviews FANS with the same technology that lets President-elect Obama beam his radio address straight to your computer screen! Set phasers to "totally"!
Check out the Hat Lobster’s review of T Campbell’s FANS — on video! — part 1 and part 2.
Nicole Chartrand is the creator of Fey Winds. Chartrand describes the comic as "a sword & sorcery spoof comedy". It's a good read (start here – the comic's navigation seems to lack a "first" link) and everything in it has gotten better over its (so far) more than 300 pages. I got a chance to interview Chartrand by email this month.
Sean McGuinness is the creator of the website Neo Monster Island and the webcomic Twisted Kaiju Theater it hosts. Kaiju is apparently a Japanese term for monster. McGuinness makes TKT with his own collection of Godzilla toys so you know it's a labor of love… of love and smashing Tokyo to bits. I got a chance to interview McGuinness about his long-running webcomic (since August 2000!) via email last month.
So – is anyone interested in taking over Frightnight.org? Fright Night began as a big cross-promotional webcomic effort in 1999 and continued in that vein for a couple of years (I took over the organization of it in 2000). Later on, I used the site for "events" sponsored by ComixTalk. More recently it’s been fairly dormant.
I am never going to have time to properly use the URL and I’d love to see someone else use it. I have put out a couple of emails to folks but would be open to pitches from others. The only hitch is I want to see the existing archives of past events stay up at the URL but otherwise I’m open to ideas on its future use. Post a comment here or email me at xerexes @ gmail DOT com. I’ll probably start making a decision on December so best if you pitch me your idea(s) before the end of this month.
Michael May is the creator of Eros Inc., a webcomic about a young woman, Mot Fleishman living a normal life until fate picks her to be Cupid giving her the power of fate of lovers living in Los Angeles. (May first came to my attention with his now on hiatus comic about movies called Stock Footage). Eros Inc. is a very funny comic and young, twenty-something Mot is a great character to follow along with. I would guess fans of Octopus Pie could really like this too. It's very funny but it's not always tightly wound around jokes per se and May handles the story pretty well so far. His art is a bit on the rough side but for me it works very well.
May did our cover art at ComixTalk this month and I interviewed him very recently via email.
Brion Foulke is the creator of Flipside, a webcomic he describes as, "[A] story about relationships, sex, and compromise. It's a romantic fantasy adventure with a lot of action, and a small dose of horror." I got a chance to interview Brion via email this month.
This is an update to a previous post here, thanks for the cumulative suggestions on that thread. JUST so we're clear – this is open-sourced to everyone research for a possible article to appear next month at ComixTalk. I don't endorse the list or the order at all; at this point I've tried to include all of the suggestions I've gotten and I also went through all of the comics ComixTalk has ever reviewed and pulled quite a few titles.
We're at the point where it'll be most helpful if you tell me comics you think should go on the list, where (what number approximately) and which comic should get bumped. If you just want to change the order you can do that to but there'll be another post before the month's through asking for help with that.
I guess we’ll start seeing year-end type lists now (still feels a mite bit early though…). Here’s a link to Comixology’s Top Five webcomics for 2008 by Tucker Stone. Apparently he limited consideration to comics first appearing on the Internet and he came up with Get Your War On, Achewood, Dinosaur Comics, Bodyworld and "anything" by Kate Beaton. I’m pretty much going to quibble with any list because… well, I can. Any list is going to leave off a lot of good stuff so it’s not much harder than catching fish in a barrel (I don’t know how to shoot so shooting fish in a barrel would be kind of hard for me. Besides I don’t think I’d like cold steel served up with the fish for dinner).
So… I’ve always been a fan of Get Your War On and wrote about it very early in its meteoric rise but it’s a far, far ways from its creative peak. I don’t see how the output in 2008 alone gets it on this kind of list. Maybe a Hall of Fame forever list but not a 2008 list.
Kate Beaton definitely deserves a nod. Someone ought to publish her stuff on paper pronto. Achewood is going to wind up being one of the most important comics of this decade (did we decide on "naughts" or did we just decide not to decide…). It’s hard to question Dinosaur Comics either.
Surprisingly, I’d missed Bodyworld before. Interesting comic — really the only one of the five on the list not aimed at humor to some significant degree. It’s a pretty intensely strange comic. The art really conveys the trippy feel of the comic — it’s very well done. I’m a little less convinced of the actual characters and the plot and pacing but it’s certainly a comic that grabs you.
Gianna Masetti is the creator of The Noob, which started back in 2004. It both presents and parodies the MMORPG genre of video games. I got a chance to interview Gianna via email between her travels to Italy last month.
Alex Kolesar and Joseph Kovell are the creators behind the historical action comedy webcomic No Need for Bushido. I got a chance to interview them via email last month.
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