Attention, webcomickers: Irish blogger Purity Brown looks at the standard webcomics interface and finds it good; and she asks that if you deviate from it, please have a good reason for doing so. And she comes up with some user-unfriendly examples of dead tree media, too. Let me add my own: the MySpace comics page, which is sort of like Scans_Daily only not divided into, you know, individual posts.
Brian McTavish pens a nice story on Zuda for the Kansas City Star. It starts out a bit breathless at the notion of comics that aren’t about superheroes (get the smelling salts, Martha!) and people having dialogues in the comments, but it gets better once he starts talking to the creators. Meanwhile, DC’s Ron Perazza has asked folks how they think the site can be improved, and the discussion is hot and heavy. (Hat tip: High Moon writer David Gallaher.)
Mitch Clem is going to kill some trees! Yes, his indy music comic Nothing Nice To Say has been picked up by none other than Dark Horse for print publication. Also, Mitch has a new comic, My Stupid Life, that is quite funny and worth a click on its own merits.
Perry Bible Fellowship artist Nicholas Gurewitch is slowing the pace of his comic, but not putting it on the shelf altogether. This interview contains some interesting tidbits, including the fact that the print version of PBF pre-sold 27,000 copies before its release date, and for some reason Dark Horse is anxious to publish more of his work. (Via The Comics Reporter, where writer Tom Spurgeon sees this as a positive move.)
Also found via The Comics Reporter: Andy Khouri talks to Chip Mosher of BOOM! Studios about that company’s controversial decision to release their books online on the day they went on sale. (North Wind #1 is somewhere on that MySpace Comics Page I mentioned earlier.)
UPDATE: Ero-manga publisher Simon Jones has an interesting challenge (link is NSFW):
What I’d like to see, assuming the upward trend for North Wind continues a few more issues down the road, is a second survey of retailers who have remained steadfast in their opposition, especially those who have gone so far as to pledge not to stock any Boom comics ever again. While many saw Boom’s failure to announce their intentions beforehand to be an ethical matter, at its core it’s still based around the belief that online distribution would hurt their bottom lines. What if (and that’s still a big if) this is false, at least in Boom’s specific case? At what point does stubborn principle yield to pragmatism and profit, and prudent self-preservation by shop owners become market-shaping by retaliatory gatekeepers?
Manga expert Jason Thompson takes a two–part look at Guilstein, a manga that is only available in English on a cell phone. In the process, he examines the phenomenon of cell-phone manga in Japan and discusses the experience of reading a comic on a cell phone screen.
Theater Hopper is now a regular feature at the movie site FirstShowing.net, which strikes me as a nice bit of synergy.
I guess he waited a while to make sure he could really pull it off, but Derrick Fish informs us that Dandy & Company is now updating daily. This is a nice all-ages comic featuring a dog with attitude, drawn in a professional style that reminds me of Warner Brothers cartons.
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I’m a LOLCats hater, usually, but this is cute: the first ever LOLCats proposal, published on Valentine’s Day, no less. Scroll down to see how it comes out.
