I managed to spend two whole days at Anime Boston without seeing any anime at all. In fact, they should really retitle it Anime and Webcomics Boston, as there was a strong webcomics presence in Artists Alley and I saw some really interesting work. One of the highlights was chatting with artists J. Dee Dupuy and Dan Hess about their webcomics.

Dee was promoting her new webcomic, Singularity, which just started this weekend. 'It's a flat-out, no holds barred, no apologies made romance,' she said. 'It is absolutely the sweetest story. It is so far from OniKimono,' her comic on Wirepop.

Singularity is a romance between men, but Dee insists 'It's not yaoi. It doesn't have a lot of violence and angst. Well, it has a bit of angst.' Continue reading →

It’s the end of the week and boy has there been a lot of webcomic news sticking to these here Interwebs! If you’ve made any comments, puns, or otherwise erstwhile thoughts known to the general Interpublic, there’s a good chance your week was interrupted with a rude cease-and-desist letter. We here at Digital Strips have thus far escaped punishment for our editorialized content, most likely because our EIC is MIA and fails to check his E-mail ASAP.

I’m sure we’ll catch up with this whole situation when he pops back into plain sight. Until then, I’ve got news bits to keep you happy. A new book from an old favorite, a manifesto from someone long overdue on such a topic, the Eisner award nominees for Best Digital Comic, and a strip I recently stumbled across and fell in love with before my head cracked against the pavement. Seriously, head over heels and it hurt like the dickens. On we go! Continue reading →

If you devour every issue of the New York Review of Books, have I got the webcomic for you!

Even if you don’t, you’ll probably recognize a lot of the characters in Art Imitating Lit, a handful of comic strips by Patricia Storms that skewer chick-lit-crit, big-box bookstores, Oprah’s book club, and pretentious writers named Jonathan.

Storms got some extra notice this week when GalleyCat came up with this arresting tidbit: Writer Jonathan Lethem told an interviewer for Wired magazine that this cartoon that paired him with Michael Chabon was the closest he had come to starring in slash fiction, adding that it was “just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock.”

Continue reading →

OK, this is seriously cool: Postmodern Haircut is a webcomic devoted entirely to the linguist/political activist/media critic Noam Chomsky.

While Chomsky fans will probably get bigger laughs out of this, Postmodern Haircut dips into a universal well for its humor: In the comic, Chomsky is portrayed as a clueless academic with a smart-alecky dog, Predicate, who sometimes serves as a reality check and sometimes just sells him out.

I could see Chomsky providing enough material for a single comic, or maybe two, but cartoonist Jeffrey Weston has managed to spin his subject matter out for 20 episodes, with more to come. His riffs include a Noam Chomsky doll that corrects your grammar, Continue reading →