Does motion comic=bad animation? Someone in the webcomics panel at the ICv2 conference that opened NYCC said words to that effect, and now here’s Blog@Newsarama’s David Pepose arguing in the other direction, saying that the choppy animation of BET’s Black Panther series made it more like a good motion comic than a bad cartoon. And here’s a comic about motion comics, which pretty effectively explains what you will lose when you add animation.

Ignoring all this, Marvel Comics announced at NYCC that they will be doing a motion comic of Astonishing X-Men for digital release via iTunes and the web.

Writer Christopher Irving seems to be quite taken with Dean Haspiel’s coolness in this article at NYC Graphic Novelists, but it’s an interesting read anyway, and the site itself looks like it’s worth bookmarking. Also, Seth Kushner’s lovely photos are worth a click, although I don’t remember Brooklyn being quite that gray. Dean also talks to The New York Times about webcomics, living in Brooklyn, and … stuff.

Brian Warmoth interviews Brendan McGinley, creator of Hannibal Goes to Rome, which debuted on Zuda and now sits on the Shadowline Web Comics site.

Here’s a cute little comics-theory webcomic that stays still while you use arrows to scroll through it. (Via Journalista.)

The Independent, a UK newspaper, discovers webcomics. The article covers well-trodden ground. but the patient reader will be rewarded by an interview with Gary Tyrrell and some interesting tidbits.

High Moon creator David Gallaher lists 20 webcomics worth checking out at Blog@Newsarama. It’s a good selection, but it’s too bad no one thought to include links to the comics. Fortunately, Gallaher follows up and providest the links here.

Meanwhile, at The Webcomic Overlook, El Santo lists the worst webcomic titles—it’s not that the comics are so bad, it’s that the titles make you not want to read them. And he treats us to reviews of Sam and Lilah, Loviathan, and SPQR Blues.

If the theme of NYCC was “Recession? What Recession?” then the subtitle was “webcomics are the new floppies.” Digital distribution of comics is clearly going to be a hot topic in 2009.

For a quick overview, take a look at Kiel Phegley’s writeup of the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, which includes sound bites from all the participants in the webcomics and social media panels. Thanks to poor planning and a late train, I arrived late for the webcomics panel, alas, but my impression was that aside from the presence of the very impressive Dave Roman, both these panels consisted entirely of people from large and medium-size publishers, and the panels could have benefitted from having more of an actual webcomics presence. Dave posted about his panel at his LJ.

But how will people read these comics? No one seemed too sold on the Kindle, and while Tokyopop makes comics for the Sony e-Reader, it seems like folks are still waiting for that killer app. The tech blog io9 took in a UClick panel and was mighty impressed with their comics for the iPhone, but the thing that jumped out at me was an almost offhand comment made by DC’s John Cunningham in the State of the Publishing Industry panel:

Amazon has been able to have their way with Sony by emulating Apple’s model: I have the software and hardware combined, I am going to deliver somebody else’s IP. Do you think Apple is going to let Amazon have hegemony over that? One of big rumors is that Apple is looking at in fall 2009 a 7 x 9-inch iPod touch. That is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Here’s Ron Hogan’s writeup of the panel, which mentions digital media but not the iPod rumor; I’ll try to do my own report later in the week.

The Zuda panel was impressive, with over 15 creators packed onto the stage and SuperTron creator Sheldon Vella participating from Melbourne, Australia, through the magic of computers. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sean Kleefeld noted on his blog yesterday that things don’t seem to be going to well at Wowio—one of their creators still hasn’t been paid for content that ran in the second quarter of last year (before Platinum acquired the site), and their staff is making minimum wage. Then he takes a look at the Alexa numbers, which suggest traffic to the site is way, way down.

Click on the comments to get to the good stuff, though. That’s where Brian Altounian, president and COO of Wowio’s parent company, Platinum, posts a spirited response to Sean’s comments. He starts by pointing out that the entire economy is down, and therefore no one should be surprised that the numbers are down at Wowio as well. And then he reveals something interesting: You remember the big bucks that folks were making on Wowio? Altounian says that money came from investors, not revenues:

Who do you think was paying publisher royalties during the two years prior to Platinum’s purchase? Advertisers? Sponsors? NO! They came from Wowio founders and initial investors who, after two years, decided they didn’t want to shell out royalties without an income stream… Our change in the business model has been to pay the publishers when a book is paid for, either by a reader or a corporate sponsor.

Then there’s some back and forth, as Kleefeld and Altounian discuss the wisdom of investing in a company with significant debt, and it all ends more nicely than it started.

All this made me curious to see what was going on at Wowio, so I clicked over and took a look. Continue reading →

Brandon Thomas hates reading comics on his computer screen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not inevitable. This column sounds like it would be flamebait, but it’s really not; he takes a good hard look at the industry as a whole and concludes that while digital distribution is part of the solution, it’s only a part. The bigger issue is that people are reading the same old comics with the same old licensed characters, and one way to get them to read something new is to lower the price barrier.

On the other hand, digital comics are not immune from the recession: The Beat reports that layoffs at MySpace include Sam Humphries, who ran the comics features. We here at Digital Strips have been quick to criticize MySpace as a webcomics interface, but the fact is that it brought more eyeballs to comics, and that’s a good thing. Best of luck to Mr. Humphries, and we hope that MySpace Comics sticks with us for a while. EDIT: And it looks like it will!

The biggest publisher in Japan, Kodansha, is launching a new manga simultaneously online and in print; they are even allowing bloggers to republish the comic Misako-San under a Creative Commons license.

Related: This post at Oz and Ends discusses why people don’t enjoy reading from a screen, and there are links for those who want to dig deeper. If nothing else, this seems like an excellent argument against blinking banner ads.

Continue reading →

Rob Staeger interviews Shayna Marchese about her webcomic, Voids, at Blog@Newsarama.

Also at Blog@, Troy Brownfield has a few quick questions for David Gallaher, whose High Moon Zuda comic will be released in print form in October.

Larry Cruz talks to Neil Kleid about his erstwhile Zuda comic, Action, Ohio, and the experience of having a webcomic at Zuda versus Shadowline, Action’s current home.

Joamette Gil interviews Dava Butler, the creator of the My Little Pony fumetti Kimono’s Townhouse, at Manga Punk.

At Talk About Comics, Shaenon Garrity interviews Alexander Danner and Edward J. Grug III about Gingerbread Comics.

Brad Guigar rounds up the webcomics panels at NYCC at Webcomics.com. Brad also addresses an issue that is likely to become more prominent in the near future: Long-form webcomics. His post brings out an interesting issue, actually: Coming from the gag-a-day context, he recommends that each page of a comic be “satisfying,” with some sort of hook or cliffhanger on each page. That seems like it would change the pacing in a way that might not work so well if one reads a big chunk of the comic at once—a clear case of the medium affecting the message.

The notion of an online exhibition of webcomics makes Johanna Draper Carlson scratch her head at Comics Worth Reading, but there is an explanation in the comments section.

If you’re curious about what the world might be like if chickens demanded equal rights, you can download a free copy of issue 1 of Elmer, by Gery Alanguilan, at his website. You’ll need the CBR comics reader to read it, but you can get that there as well. The dead-tree version of the first issue is sold out, which is actually a pretty good reason to put it on the web.

At Manga Xanadu, Lori Henderson writes about Tokyopop’s foray into e-book formats, particularly the e-reader. One big problem: They only have one volume of most series available.

Reviews

Larry Cruz on Femmegasm (The Webcomic Overlook)
Greg McElhatton on the print version of Never As Bad As You Think (Read About Comics)
Ren C. Henry on Sorcery 101 (Manga Punk)

The news that Diamond, the sole distributor for print comics to comics stores, has raised its minimums has prompted some serious examination of the whole comic marketing system, and there’s no doubt that webcomics and other electronic media are suddenly looking better and better. Sean Kleefeld’s post about rethinking your comics habits seems eerily prescient, even though it was only written two weeks ago.

Kleefeld has more to say after the fact, of course, and he points out that Dwight MacPherson has been taking a nuts-and-bolts look at a lot of alternate distribution options, including Wowio and IndyPlanet, a print-on-demand site, webcomics, and a handful of other sites, including e-books and Eagle One Media, which runs an online store where readers can purchase PDFs of comics from a variety of publishers for as little as 99 cents. Along the way, MacPherson asks creators and publishers to rethink what they want.

Kleefeld also links to Brian Clevinger, who explains why the shift to webcomics has been inevitable for some time now: Print comics expensive, webcomics cheap. He’s not the first to make that argument; here’s an older post from a superhero guy making that point and noting that digital also allows more freedom from the constraints of format.

In fact, digital comics are one of the factors making that whole comics culture of Previews and pull lists and dark little stores in out-of-the-way places increasingly irrelevant. Try explaining the Diamond system to a civilian: You have to go to a special store, and you pre-order the comics from a catalogue—yes, you are supposed to pay for the catalogue—and then you get them two months later, but of course they might change from the catalogue description in the meantime, and—hey, where are you going?

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This New York Times article about newspaper comic strips going on the web contains a lot of information of interest to webcomics folks, although it’s mostly about Comics.com and their move from a partial subscription to a totally free model. The article raises a lot of familiar issues such as subscription vs. free models, using ads as a revenue stream, and using the free comics to build a fan base for the paid model (in this case, newspaper syndication rather than print volumes). Uclick and their iPhone applications also get a mention. The article is curiously uncritical about content, though; it would seem that if you’re trying to bring in a younger audience, dropping outmoded strips like Hi and Lois or unfunny comics like Garfield and Marvin might be a good starting point.

Also at the Times: An article about The Original Johnson, a bio-comic about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. (Both NYT links are via The Beat.)

Kidjutsu is a new website that aggregates all-ages webcomics in a single site with a nice, simple interface. There are some old favorites there (Inverloch, Elf ‘n’ Troll) as well as a slew of new comics I had never heard of. It’s a nice place to go exploring if you get bored over the holidays. Although all the comics are kid-friendly, they aren’t all juvenile; we just gave Kitty Hawk a nice review here at DS without even thinking of it as a kids’ comic.

Sabrina Fritz has an interview up with Sarah Ellerton (Inverloch, The Phoenix Requiem) at Good Comics for Kids, the other blog I edit.

At Comic Book Resources, Shaun Manning talks to Jamaica Dyer about The Wine Hobo, her new comic at MySpace Dark Horse Presents, as well as her independent webcomic, Weird Fishes. Click for some lovely art!

The revamped Blog@Newsarama is sort of a mixed bag; I have to admit I miss the old gang not only because they were really good writers but also because they covered a broader range of material. But I’ll give Sarah Jaffe credit for trying; she admits she doesn’t know much about webcomics and asks the internet for suggestions. The internet, naturally, responded. A post like this is always a good way to find some new webcomics, so go, check out the comments thread, and maybe pimp your own comic (or your favorite) as well.

Webcomics.com continues to deliver a steady stream of interesting, practical content, including recent tutorials on coloring by Tony Piro, creator of Calamities of Nature, and Ed Ryzowski of Evil, Inc.

Johanna Draper Carlson reviews two print versions of popular webcomics, My Poorly Drawn Life and Templar, Arizona, at Comics Worth Reading, and concludes that both work better as webcomics.

One of the interesting things about the Internet is the way things sort of bubble up from the bottom and become genuine phenomena without anyone managing it or (until the last stage) making any money off of it, like I Can Has Cheezburger or Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Scanlation is like that. It’s a true grass-roots comics movement, in which people who were captivated by Japanese comics went to the trouble to find them, break them up and scan them in, translate the text (some people actually learned Japanese in order to do this), edit, retouch, and publish them on the web, just to be able to share them with others. Scanlations are free to read, but they also violate the original copyright, and no one makes money on them.

Manganovel was an attempt to create a Web 2.0 version of scanlations. A joint project of the MIT Media Lab and Toshiba, it allowed readers to download Japanese manga, translate it themselves, and upload the finished product. On the surface, it seemed like a neater, cleaner version of scanlation—no copyright violation, no cutting the books up or melting the glue off the spine, no downloading from dubious servers. Users earned points for uploading translations and could also purchase points, which they then used to read the premium comics; other comics were available for free.

Continue reading →

Webcomic Overlook looks back at the small moments of 2008, webcomics-wise, in a very entertaining post.

Mike Raub interviews the creators of Zuda winner The Black Cherry Bombshells in his latest podcast at ComicMix.

Araknid Kid, by Josh Alves, provoked some passionate discussion in one of our early Zudawatch podcasts. Josh didn’t win that month, but Araknid Kid has a new home at Sugary Serials and Josh has just announced his first dead-tree edition.

New webcomic alert! The Whore of Turfan, written by Tina Anderson, who is well known in global BL circles, and illlustrated by MTCopyright. Just one page up so far, and the next one doesn’t go up until Friday, but already it looks lush and interesting.

Elfquest creator Wendy Pini took off in a new direction last year with her yaoi webcomic Masque of the Red Death. Pini’s version is a lush re-imagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic story of the same name. It got mixed reviews, but Deb Aoki finds a lot to like in her review of the first volume of the print edition.

Derek Kirk Kim has some nice drawings up in his sketch diary. (Thanks to Jason Thompson for the link.)

If you’re pushing around the idea of a webcomic in your head, take a look at this post on using Blogger as a webcomics host. It’s a quick, free, low-risk way to get started. (I’m a WordPress fan myself, but I can see that Blogger is better in some ways.) Also, I continue to be impressed with the short, meaty how-to articles on Webcomics.com. Stop by and take a look if you haven’t already.