Versus

Cross-overs, cameos and guest art.

Congrats to Angela Melick and Trevor

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Angela Melick, creator of the great webcomic Wasted Talent, just got married. Congrats!  Wasted Talent is a very funny auto-bio journal comic about a woman engineer — I think it's only gotten better as Melick got out of school and into a job; and despite a full-time job, her cartooning chops have continued to improve.

I've been meaning to try and get an interview with Angela and her now husband.  In addition, to being a great comic, Trevor moved Wasted Talent over to the CMS Drupal — a great implementation and I'm hoping to get some more insight into how he and she planned and implemented the move over to a CMS that still is pretty foreign to webcomic sites (it is the CMS that ComixTalk runs on).

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Guest Art Golazzo!

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James Turner picked a guest artist for his webcomic Beaver & Steve today.  It was fun to see all of the various interpretations of Turner's script.  There were a lot of good entries — some of my favorites didn't even merit runner-up status for Turner, including entries from Danny Burleson, Dave Wright, Jean Thebe, and Scott Wright.  If it had been up to me I would have picked Drew Mokris' entry as the winner but Turner's choice from Dan Woodhouse is pretty cool too.  (Pictured at right is my entry which, deservedly, DID not win.)

The other guest art event going on is Scary Go Round's Feats Of Strength.  Creator John Allison wrote earlier this week that he "had some very creative and inventive entries but don't feel that this thing has been won yet by any means."  I did a comic for this, but I felt like I rushed parts of it.  

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Forget It Jake, That’s Webcomic Town…

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THE OPINIONATER

The Daily Cartoonist reports that syndicated editorial cartoonist Matt Bors is creating a bi-weekly comic called Civil Discourse for the ACLU website.  I have no idea how many editorial cartoonists are running comics (original or re-purposed) on non-traditional sites but it seems like it might have potential.  A lot of groups (whether partisan or non-partisan) should have the budget to pay a reasonable fee for such comics — the benefit to them being promotion of their message or increased recruitment (via more traffic to their website).  Of course unlike a "neutral" newspaper I imagine fitting the comic to the organization is a more subjective proposition, but there are organizations of all persuasions out there. 

GUEST ARTIST MAYHEM

Mike Rouse-Deane has created a webcomic project/fundraiser for Make-A-Wish called the Guest Strip Project.  It’s sort of a "always guest comics" comic.  Should be interesting to check out and of course, it’s for a good cause.

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Wikipedia-Free News & Views For Wednesday, March 7, 2007

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Before I get to today's news & views — don't forget we had three new articles published in the magazine this week:

  • Terrence Marks interviews married creators, Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier. This is actually the first in a series of five such interviews we'll be publishing this month.
  • New columnist Brigid Alverson covers five short story web manga this month in Small Packages.
  • Bryant Paul Johnson returns with another installment of his historically accurate series at Comixpedia: The Antecedent.
  • And of course a big thanks to Meghan Murphy of Kawaii Not for doing this month's cover art.

HEADLINES

INTERVIEWS

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

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Monday News

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John Allison drops that he’s working on the fourth SGR book.  It’s also guest week at Scary Go Round.

URL Fan is kind of a cool site.  You can ego-surf it, check out related sites, and compare competitors.

I don’t know if Jeph Jacques is cool with this or not, but these are nifty little QC icons. 

And I hope I’m not interpreting this post out of context (I don’t read Ironychan’s LJ) but just all by itself it’s a pretty funny (yet sadly true) comment on the webcomic experience.

Speaking of Live Journals, blogs, etc., the primary way I keep up with webcomic news (other than a few search engines) is through RSS feeds.  If you’re writing about webcomics (even just hyping your own) and you have an RSS feed I’d be happy to add it to my morning list.  Post it here if you want and I’ll check it out. 

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Late Night News Update

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Another milestone: Kris Straub’s guest comic is the 500 installment of Zach Miller’s Joe and Monkey webcomic.  Straub also mentions that Miller’s book Totally Boned is up for one of Lulu’s Blooker prizes. (Erik wrote about the Blookers last October.)

Not a webcomic but kind of internet-y funny: Subservient Donald.  I’d like to see Subservient Skull or Subservient Clango or something.

The Great Outdoor Fight – wow, that’s really hard to describe.  But I always have a hard time describing Achewood.  It’s just… Achewood.  Tim Tylor blogged earlier about the wiki a fan set up for this storyline.

Fleen also has more questions with Dave Kellett (Sheldon) on syndication and newspaper comics.

And Fleen also catches that Sylvan Migdal wrapped up Ascent today.

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Pent Up Pin-up Events

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There are special events and there are special events.

I just noticed that the Comic Genesis folks held a KeenLace event this past February, resurrecting it from its last installment in 2003. 

I was never much of a fan of these type of "pin-up"  events (which also include Bikini-Keen or whatever it was called) simply because there’s so little to it really.  There’s no creative challenge to meet, nor any unusual collaboration between creators or characters, and there’s nothing particularly inventive about the "pin-up" topic itself (the recent Batgirl LJ meme was a notch higher on that scale although not much).

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