Rolling, Rolling, Rolling (Update) On a Thursday!

Welcome to November. We have a cover this month from Debbie Ridpath Ohi who creates a great webcomic on writing called Will Write For Chocolate. No particular theme this month but a lot of good interesting articles are on tap. In December, we will venture into "wrapping up the year that was" territory – stay tuned for more details on that later this month.

HEADLINES

• Halfpixel increases by two and changes name to Quarterpixel.. wait I mean Bipixel — actually just read the interview with Scott, Kris, Brad and Dave here to find out about their new working partnership under the Halfpixel banner.
• Slashdot picks up on Wikinews’ story on Webcomics and Wikipedia. I know this is old news to most readers of ComixTalk but it’s in the news again for at least a portion of the intertubes-reading public.

BUSINESS

• Steven Grant tries to apply lessons of the music industry to the comics biz. It’s a good think piece and points out the way comics creators can bypass the "labels" like musicisians are doing, but annoyingly Grant knows more about examples of this "new entrepreneurship" in the music industry then he does in his own industry. Grant should at least be aware of the comics equivalents of unsigned new bands – webcomics – and how they use merchandise and other ancilliary activities (sketches, guest shots, downloads) to make money while giving away the comic for free. He could have also pointed to some established professionals ditching their labels to go indy – like Phil and Kaja Foglio or Michael Jantze.

INTERVIEWS

• The U. of Alberta paper has an interview with Faith Erin Hicks on her soon-to-be-released graphic novel Zombies Calling.

MILESTONES

• Congrats to Thomas K Dye who is celebrating the tenth anniversary of his comic tale of canine journalism: Newshounds.

TECHNOLOGY

• An early look from a blog at the comics on Zuda and what’s attracting the most votes from the readers. A different blog has a bit more of a focus on the user interface.
• Looks like the Amazon e-reader isn’t coming out anytime soon despite earlier announcements to the contrary.

CONTESTS

• I need to start handing these Karas the Revelation DVDs out faster! Gimme (in the comments) the phrase that pays to be the next winner.