Whole Lotta Webcomic Stuff Goin’ On

MILESTONES
Berke Breathed is bailing on the funny pages again.  NPR reports on Opus leaving the newspapers right around this year’s election.  Breathed says he will focus on children’s books.  I loved Bloom County growing up but to be honest haven’t been that enraptured by the two sequel strips.

BOO!
Sean Kleefeld talks up the horror-themed collective of webcomics, Split Lip.

TOOLS
The US Daily reports on two "comics" creation tools: "My Comic Book Creator" and "Comic Life".

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

BUSINESS
Sean Kleefeld muses about why one would buy the book after reading the webcomic?  He kind of stumbles onto Jon Rosenberg’s greater theory of swag support: have a bunch of physical stuff  for a reader to buy…

MOVIE MAYHEM
Reuben Bolling on watching a preview of The Watchmen movie:

It seems that it was the success of director Snyder’s "300" that gave him the clout to reject the studio’s re-imagining of Watchmen as a War on Terror shoot-’em-up, and go back to the source material.  Based on what I saw, it’s hard to imagine a fan of the comic book being angry or disappointed that the movie strayed from the comic.

AROUND THE BLOGS AND BACK
Chuck Rozakis has a column at ComicMix sprinkling a little bit of econo-speak over the fact that really good creators of webcomics get a disproportionate number of fans.  It is a nice way to put it — in a world of access to all choices available most people will take the "best" option as opposed to a second or third-rate option and so if you’re webcomic is the "best" you’re going to collect all the potential fans (Hence the use of "superstar" in his column title).  But of course, "best" is going to be somewhat subjective and not all "fans" or "readers" are going to be interested in the same things so it’s a bit more complicated.  We’ve also looked at this distribution as a power law (here, here for example) and had some discussion of how the "long tail" of it can still provide opportunities for creators to connect with readers by providing a smaller group of fans exactly what they’re looking for.

 

Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.