 Digital Strips Show 27 [10.6mb] |
This week we announce the winners of four categories of the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards (WCCA). It is our pleasure to be part of the WCCA and during this show we get to announce the winners of the categories Outstanding Newcomer, Outstanding Writer, Outstanding Artist, and Outstanding Comic.This week we talk about the following:
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Nine artists from Pixar have banded together, much like Blank Label Comics, to create comic book titles under one name: E-ville Press. Most of the artists are keeping blogs updated with current strips and the intermediate steps leading up their creation. It looks like some well know artists have accidentally stumble upon one of the potential business models for increasing web comic popularity, using it as a means of eye candy for merchandising. Visit some of these excellent web comics debuting at ComiCon: Continue reading
If you thought TokyoPop was making a bid to take over the US then you won’t be surprised by yet another mention of the Manga giant in the media. This time it’s in USA Today but at least it’s in conjunction with a web comic artist. Svetlana Chmakova has landed fantastic deal to draw a monthly strip for CosmoGIRL! called The Adventures of CG staring CG, a college sophomore who lives in Tokyo and is a spunky every-girl hipster heroine. From the article:
The new venture also helps boost the profile of the two-page strip’s creator, Svetlana Chmakova, 25. Her two manga-style online comics are ChasingRainbows (girlamatic.com) and Night Silver (wirepop.com). Her first full-length manga, Dramacon, will be published in October.
The popular web comic cartoonist Scott Kurtz, creator behind PVP Online, has announced that while he attends the San Diego Comic Con this week he will be running several guest strips in his absence. This effectively disqualifies him from the Daily Grind’s Iron Man Challenge, the online contest daring web comic creators to never miss a single 24 hour cycle of updates for their comic.
This makes Scott the 14th contender to drop out of the challenge. Judging by the post made by Scott on his own site this seems to be a conscious decision.
Cartoonists have always been a topical bunch. Comic strips, political cartoons, and comic books commonly make reference to what’s going on in the world and the media. However, the realities of print publication often leaves a gap between real world events and the cartoonists’ comments on them.
The web comic offers a unique ability to publish instantly, making topical information readily available and placed in front of eyeballs almost as soon as the cartoonist is finished with the work. Continue reading
Every once in awhile someone in the web comic community gets elevated to a status where off hand remarks can cause a bit of drama in the huge world that is webcomics. It appears this is something which Eric of Websnark has slowly come to realize over the past few months. He has had a little bit of a bad week (by saying a little I’m using litote to it’s fullest extent) and in the middle of it all he writes what he thinks is a puff piece and ends of starting a full drama.
He talks this over with Kurtz of PvP and ends of with a T-shirt idea that’s pure gold: Continue reading
Last week Howard Taylor lost the love he may have had for Google Ads as he has recently switched from them to using his own ad server. For the past week he has been a successful and has posted some results.
Comixpedia has some great links for those who would like to use Google Ads.
I hope this is not the first time someone has thought of this. The idea of creating a Firefox extension must have been done before. Besides the simplicity of the whole extension the concept can be expanded to something every web comic reader would love. Let’s take for example any site which likes to review web comics and say they create an extension which updates with new web comics every so often. This way not only can you keep track of your favorite strips from the menu bar but you could also be exposed to new ones without ever doing a search.
Now if only we could find someone to put this together…
This is the kind of coverage web comics have been dreaming about. Bryan Prindiville of the web comic Bassetville was recently covered by his local paper for his real life involvement with basset hound rescue. This in turn lead to him being contacted by the Today Show for a piece on mixed breeds of dogs which have developed a popular name, such as the star of Bassetville Frances which is a “bagel,” or basset/beagle mix.
There have been other web comics mentioned on radio or major newspapers but this will be first time Continue reading
Searching through Yahoo! Financial you can find this announcement from the New Enterprise Forum. The NEF meets once a month with this month’s topic being ‘Unusual Entrepreneurs Share Wild Success Stories’. The most notable appearance on the panel is Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo. You can find a quick summary of his success story in the article but I would love to be in Ann Arbor to hear Megatokyo presented as a Wild Success Story.