Not a webcomic, but pretty cool
I did watch the Penny Arcade teevee episode that focused entirely on Scott and Kris. It was funny and I guess others thought so too. This Kickstarter effort is to produce a whole season of shows about the duo – check out the video below. (I was going to make a crack about the donation level rewards: only $5000 for dinner in Seattle! but the basic level of $25 gets you the entire series which seems like a pretty good deal actually.)
Man I missed the whole Old Spice Dude you-tubey thing but webcomic creator Michael Moss wrote in that he and Jace Mills and Jack Shen created their own Old Spice commercial starring Cthulhu. Moss actually uses Cthulhu as a character in his webcomic Gods Playing Poker.
We've heard some good news about comic book movies recently, with Joss Whedon adapting The Avengers and the Scott Pilgrim movie not sucking at all and such. Me, I won't be able to watch Scott Pilgrim for quite a while because it opens pretty late in Germany (January! What's the excuse for that?!), so let me take a look at another new comic book adaptation I haven't seen.
A couple of days ago, a trailer for the upcoming Dylan Dog movie, Dead of Night, hit the nets. The movie is supposed to open around Halloween, but I've heard that they've postponed it until 2011, so don't hold your breath. I originally meant to share the trailer here, but as it turns out, it wasn't an official release, just something they cranked out for "the International sales folks". That's good news, because the trailer sucked big time. I'm not getting into the lousy special effects here because a) they've fixed them since, and b) I like them trashy. What irritated me was that the movie didn't resemble the comics at all. (Now that isn't exactly newsworthy either – anybody who's seen, say, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Constantine will have noticed a pattern long ago.)
Let's take a look at the comic instead. Unless you're Italian, you may not be too familiar with it. In Italy, it's one of the best-selling comic books ever. In the United States, Dark Horse issued seven stories, recently collected into a 700-page collection.
Dylan Dog is a paranormal investigator who claims he doesn't believe in the supernatural, but is open to anything. He lives with his sidekick Groucho who may or may not be the resurrected Groucho Marx, though he surely behaves that way, testing everybody's patience by constantly cracking jokes. Dylan has a sense of humor, too, but he is more of a darker, moody nature. His fascination with the supernatural seems to stem from his conviction that the natural world doesn't make much sense either. He's an ex-cop, a recovered alcoholic, and he constantly falls in love with his female clients, which is usually doomed from the beginning.
[Note: The following interview was conducted in July 2009, but has not previously been published.]
Since the 1997 release of his first graphic novel, Two-Fisted Science, writer, librarian, and one-time nuclear engineer Jim Ottaviani, has been telling compelling stories about the lives and work of scientists. He’s written about everything from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic bomb (Fallout, 2001), to Hedy Lamarr’s invention of an early “frequency hopping” communication sytem (Dignifying Science, 2003), to Harry Harlow’s investigations into the necessity of love (Wire Mothers, 2007). Along the way, he’s worked with more than two dozen artists, including Donna Barr, Roberta Gregory, Roger Langridge, Steve Lieber, Dylan Meconis, Linda Medley, and many others.
His eighth and most recent book, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, relates the dual stories of the US and Soviet space programs through the late 1950s and 1960s, as they competed to be first to the lunar surface. But true to form, Ottaviani’s telling of the story focuses less on the astronauts who made the journey than on the engineers and rocket scientists who made the journey possible.
Welcome to Monday! May I direct your attention to a review of several mini comics posted late Friday? If you enjoyed John Allison's COMIX REMIX of the above photo, you might want to check out the entire series he posted to FLICKR.
REVIEWS: Delos reviews Odori Park by Chris Watkins and El Santo reviews the Xeric Grant-winning Haunted by Joshua Smeaton.
INTERVIEWS: Growly Beast has an interview with Alice Hunt and Tracy Williams of Goodbye Chains.
REMIX: The Webcomic Builder has a lengthy essay on fan-comics; something maybe we ought to relabel "remix comics"?
NOT WEBCOMICS: Kickstarter fund drive for an American Elf videogame? I'd buy that for a dollar!
INTERNATIONAL:
OMFGUIHAJB!!!! It is snowing again in Washington DC. IT IS SNOWING… AGAIN. I have a review of Smile up today. In addition, be sure to check out the bonus comic Raina Telgemeier did. I saw this funny comic about one of the downsides of the Internet today (see above) – Gemma Correll has lots more great illustrations on her Flickr page.
Congratulations: 1Up names Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik to their five most influential people in videogames for the last decade.
Weird, but something I suspect many readers here might be interested in checking out — MyWebWill purports to be a service for managing your digital identity after death. Think about it — you're going to create a ton of stuff online in your life, some of it at least as important as any physical stuff you'll leave behind.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE: Jamie Noguchi has a new webcomic called Yellow Peril. Jamie was the original artist for Erfworld, is a heck of an artist and part of the Super Art Fight crew. Jamie also runs Monster Cutie which is a great source of tips and craft for illustrators.
Last, not comics but this Oscar nominated short, Logorama, is all kinds of weird-cool. Language is very NSFW btw.
It's probably never going to happen, but it could be a pretty cool little movie. There's something about the Wes Anderson vibe that would be such a total warping of what everyone's come to expect in a superhero movie. (h/t The Beat)
SKIP THE BORING SITE NEWS IF YOU WANT: My work to fix my hosting and design and angst issues continues apace (well not the angst issues) and I'll be trying out another host for ComixTalk starting sometime this week (just need a block of time to do the move). The two other things I'm angsting about are (1) new design/functionality decisions and (2) whether to switch from Drupal to Wordpress.
MILESTONES: Happy Birthday to my littlest's x-girls current favorite cartoonist Frank Cammuso. She's a big fan of the two Knights of the Lunch Table books. She has a couple of signed sketches from him as well.
NOT COMICS: Did you know they had a Terry Pratchett convention in Arizona last year? They're currently trying to figure out what city to hold the next one in. I'd go to that — I just got through a year of reading the Discworld series.
So there was this video playing at the Cartoon Art Museum during my visit last week where a woman was drawing a comic by painting on panels. The gimmick was that she had four panels on the wall where she'd draw the next scenes of the comic and then after finishing she's repaint the same four panels with the next scenes. The story was a cute one about monsters rampaging through the countryside. Anyone know the name? Is it on the web? Thanks to Ben Gamboa for identifying it as Lark Pien's Small Destructions, something she actually created at the Museum in 2007. And here it is:
JUSTIFY THE WORLD's HYPE
Just finished reading the first volume of Scott Pilgrim – I hadn't been avoiding it so much as just never got around to it. Cute story, kind of funny but I was a bit underwhelmed given the love this comic has gotten. Maybe my expectations were too high or does it get better as the series goes on?
JUSTIFY MY FORTHCOMING HYPE
I am working on a review/overview of Evan Dahm's Overside comics: Rice Boy and Order of Tales. There's a reason why comic legend Jeff Smith picked Rice Boy as one of his comics of the decade.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Cool – Websnark is back. While Wednesday is working on an overhaul of the site, Eric writes about the return of T Campbell's Faans.
Webcomics.com new members-only approach evolves again. The old forums are now available for free to read but only members can start new threads or post replies to existing threads.
TOOLS
Anyone familiar with ComicFury? It's advertised as "a free, easy to use and advertisement-free tool that will help you set up and host a website for your webcomic, which you can elegantly manage without any technical knowledge. All you will have to worry about when using ComicFury is actually making the comics, the rest is provided by us. It also offers you free exposure on the site and excellent support on the forums."
Finally, a videogame where I can pretend to work at Kinko’s a copy store and annoy customers to score points. (link via Waxy) Continue Reading
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