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.”

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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 →

This week only, Tokyopop is posting the entire first volume of the manhwa (Korean comic) Priest online. Priest is an older title that has built a devoted following, so this is a nice opportunity to sample it for free.

Priest editor Tim Beedle takes this opportunity to post an interesting question on his blog. He admits that he has been skeptical of the online manga previews from the beginning, so he asks his readers: Do you read the previews, and if so, how does that affect your buying habits?

We have dealt with this question before, and I actually have an interesting followup. Last February, I linked to an item about Phil Foglio switching Girl Genius from pamphlet comics to strictly webcomics, Continue reading →

My teenage daughter is a voracious reader. We have literally hundreds of volumes of manga in the house, and we get more every week, but she reads books like some people eat potato chips, and she’s getting to the bottom of the bowl.

So we started looking at scanlations, bootleg translations of unlicensed manga. I have long avoided scanlations for several reasons, partly because they violate copyright but mainly because I don’t like downloading stuff from a source I know nothing about.

What I want is scanlations that I can look at on websites, no downloading involved. And I have found a handful. These sites offer manga that is unlikely to be licensed in English, so I’m not really taking a dollar out of anyone’s pocket, and they’re easy to use.

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Comics are huge in Japan, but webcomics are not: People read manga on paper or on their cell phones, but so far, webcomics don’t seem to be a big part of the mix. That may be changing, however, as the publisher Gentosha recently announced that it would distribute its manga online in seven different languages. Depending on how the releases are structured, that could mean that fans no longer have to wait for their manga fix.

Gentosha isn’t some little start-up, either; their properties include Rozen Maiden, the favorite manga of Japanese foreign minister Taro Aso, and the popular boys-love manga Gravitation. With creators like Peach-Pit and Kei Toume in their inventory, they are positioned to do quite well if they can make this online distribution work.

But can they? Continue reading →

I picked up a print copy of ‘Til Death Do Us Part at NYCC but I didn’t realize it was a webcomic until I saw it mentioned on the blog Progressive Ruin. It’s a 12-page teaser for the Court TV show of the same name, and the comic won’t be winning any Eisner awards, but it’s worth a quick peek if only because the narrator is the filmmaker John Waters. You can see him looming evilly over the newlyweds on the front cover; inside, he plays sort of a Rod Serling role, introducing the story at the beginning and appearing at the end to tease the show.

The story is a good example of why I don’t watch Court TV: It’s about an undertaker who is jealous of his saleswoman wife, with good reason. Although it starts cute, with him doing her makeup on the slab before she goes to work, Continue reading →

Go! Comi is well known to manga fans as publisher of a handful of carefully selected, beautifully printed manga from Japan. Wendy Pini is known as the creator of Elfquest, one of the first manga-influenced comics by a non-Japanese creator.

At the New York Comic-Con, Go! Comi announced that Pini would be creating a three-volume, full color manga, The Masque of the Red Death, based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name—but only loosely. Pini has set the story in the future and created new characters while keeping the spirit of the Poe's original idea.

So why is this on Digital Strips? Because Go! Comi will be releasing The Masque of the Red Death as a webcomic, updating with three pages a week, before publishing the print volumes. Daku and I talked to Pini and to Go! Comi CEO David Wise and Creative Director Audry Taylor about the story and why they decided to take it to the web.

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