The Daily Grind’s Iron Man Challenge, an online competition for web cartoonists meant to foster a more strict adherence to stated update schedules for web comics, has lost another contestant. Only four days after the first cartoonist bowed out Richard Guidry became the second. Rather than miss an update and get tossed out of the competition Richard voluntarily left citing personal life issues that were getting in the way of his daily updates. He explains this further in a forum post.
It seems every week there is more news how this or that newspaper is losing readers and profits in everything except their online division. The Editor and Publisher has a couple recent articles which highlight this trend greatly. One is the New York Times’ ongoing dilemma to start charging for access to its online content as revealed by Katharine Q. Seelye:
Executives at The Times have suggested that the paper, which already charges for its crossword puzzle, news alerts and archives online, may start charging for other portions of its content.
With our ongoing coverage and prediction of a fall out once one person loses The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge has its first loser. Donald Noffsinger’s Demon Dorm Days has dropped out leaving only 55. Demon Dorm Days was a comic blog about Donald’s life in his dorm. The art work is simplistic but was beginning to show promise. Typically he used almost no words and he combined that with a short blurb following the strip explaining it to the readers.
American political cartoonist Ted Rall travels extensively throughout Central Asia and writes his comic based on his personal experiences during his travels and the political atmosphere he encounters. His comics are published to the web via EurasiaNet.org and are archived there back through 2002.
In a posted interview with Rall, he talks about some of his recent experiences. A quote from the interview, “Rall said Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan provide a treasure trove of news that is of interest to an American audience: Turkmenistan because of its eccentric president, and Uzbekistan because of its role on the war on terror.”
The online review journal for comics on the web, The Web Comics Examiner, has made it’s quarterly update recently, but the content update comes with an announcement that it is going on hiatus. The Examiner is the first online publication to have treated web comics as a viable source of creative expression and legitimacy. It sought to explore the most experimental and creatively forward thinking comics available on the web.
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The more web comics you read the more you notice some similar features being posted by web comic artists. If your comic becomes popular it seems almost inevitable that you start to receive fan art. Some of your readers will draw your characters in various styles as an homage and a show of gratitude for entertaining them. Many web comic artists will also post the fan art to their sites like on the Dandy and Company site and over at Ctl+Alt+Del.
Jin Wicked is a young studio artist out of Houston, Texas. She is one of the few talented people able to make a full time living out of her artwork. I get the feeling that the commission work she does leaves a little wanting sometimes, which is probably why she created the excellent web comic ‘Crap I Drew on my Lunch Break‘ (crap.jinwicked.com).
The comic is very much like a journal comic that we’ve discussed before. It’s a four panel, 2 X 2 layout and features Jin, Continue reading
Comixpedia has pointed me to a web comic group Teh Gewd Guys. This group has exploded onto the scene with 6 new strips: Star Cross’d Destiny, This Comic Sucks, Clone Manga, Bigger Than Cheeses, Alien Loves Predator, and Beaver and Steve. If it wasn’t big enough with Order of The Stick and Chugworth Academy the addition of these six should bump it’s web traffic up quite a bit.
One of the easiest ways to promote your own web comic is to join groups like this which allow big name strips to help carry Continue reading
The syndicated strip Funky Winkerbean has been running a series of strips since March 6 about a comic book shop owner who gets arrested for selling an adult magazine to an adult. I’m always a fan of artists who create strips from headlines and this story line is starting off well. Censorship of comic books has been going on for a long time and is usually so common that we’ve grown numb to hearing about it. With the emergence of web comics and the decline of print there will be a point where those people with nothing better to do try to apply the same rules now on print to web content. Continue reading