As a contributor and public shill, it is my duty, and privilege, to remind you that The Kid’s Book Project, spearheaded by Michael Rouse-Deane of Webcomics In Print fame, is underway and nearing the halfway mark of completion!
Pre-orders are already being taken on this 60-page tale of adventure, whimsy, and more adventure! Really, I can’t tell you what it’s going to be about as I’ve only seen two pages of the book thus far, the one that came after mine and the page I created.
The typical view of webcomics, by those that even know what they are, is of a story-telling style geared mostly towards the 18-34 year-old demographic. Look at some of our best examples and you’d be hard-pressed to argue. But there is actually a fair number of all-ages fare out there, you just have to know where to look. And with those kid-friendly works come kid-friendly projects, geared towards the young tykes and older folks alike. For us in the latter category, the question is a combination of “How much did you really grow up?” and “How much do you want to support webcomics?”
The gaming strip, F@NB0Y$, recently ran some guest strips, most of which were the usual fare; take the established characters and give them a character beat to follow or make fun of video game X. Good stuff all around, but one in particular caught my eye, and not because of the content in the strip itself. Reading further down the page, Scott Dewitt’s blog (creator of F@NB0Y$) revealed that one of the fan entrys was by 15 year-old Katie Tiedrich, creator of Awkward Zombie, another gaming satire webcomic that tends to focus solely on Nintendo-branded humor.
I immediately went to the AZ site and checked out the shallow but impressive archives. With a very VGCats/Americanized-anime feel, Katie has harpooned some of the best Nintendo franchises will great skill and hilarity. To find out what the impetus might be for a teenager to undertake such work, and online no less, I hit Katie up on AIM to get the full story. What follows is just what you might expect: a chat with a teenager over IM about video games and the growing danger of pregnant women eating pencils.
For once, I believe I can agree with Scott Kurtz.
The current issue of PC Gamer features five collector covers of Penny Arcade characters, highlighting the feature in the pages of that magazine on the upcoming PA game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (or PAA: OTRSPOD). If you’ve ever read a magazine, you’ve seen an editor’s note or two and know that they usually expound upon some aspect of the cover story. What they don’t typically do, however, is bash the work or person they have chosen to put on their cover. Apparently, the EIC at PC Gamer didn’t get that memo.
It’s finally here, folks! The long-awaited 10 Best Webcomics list is finally here from the biggest, bestest webcomics authority on God’s green Earth, PC Magazine!
Ok, so PC Magazine isn’t the first publication you’d think of when it comes to our hard-to-define medium. Hell, it isn’t even ninety-first. But it is a big publication and if they list their favorites, why shouldn’t we tear these picks to shreds and call out those know-it-alls for their horribly adjusted misconception of the place many of us call home?
I’ve got several questions for you guys, so I’ll just jump in and see where we end up. First, how do you organize your webcomic picks? Favorites list on your browser? Internet-based pull list? Or do you simply remember the few that you enjoy enough to keep coming back for more and enter them manually per update cycle?
While I used to utilize the no-fuss, no-muss Internet-fueled list, I found it just wasn’t quite comprehensive enough to fit my needs. So, I moved back to a simple Favorites list, meaning if I was ever away from that one, particular list, my favorite strips were once again up in the air, left only to the memory of a brain struggling more and more to contain the knowledge acquired from day to day. Suffice to say, that pool would be a shallow one to fish from.
It’s highly likely that Ninja Bunny by Philip Spence has been written about before in this space, but it wasn’t by this cape-wearing webcomic afficionado, so deal with my thoughts on the incidental silliness of the Bunny one more time.
Of course, these write-ups have to be birthed from somewhere, and this edition comes courtesy of a milestone for Ninja Bunny, the 200th strip milestone to be perfectly exact. After only a year and a half’s existence in the ‘Tubes, this achievement seems to be a big one, but truthfully, it’s not hard to make yourself seem bigger and better than you really are on this, the Internet. Post something for a year or so, send the AP your press release, and voila! You’ve got yourself a milestone, regardless of content, quality, or frequency of updates! What remains is to decipher said milestone and see whether it is truly something to celebrate.
It’s been a long time coming, this update. Every time I sat down to write about… well, something, I just lost the motivation after opening the WordPress page. Since then, there’s been enough news popping up for a proper update, so why not? I’ve chosen tonight to put up posts here as well as on my own personal blog, so let’s just see what happens together. I’ll start things off with this teaser panel from the latest Digital Unrest. Good, good stuff.
The Penny Arcade brand name is one synonymous with quality. Now more of a media juggernaut than anything resembling just a webcomic, the adventures of Gabe and Tycho have evolved from two guys talking about their passion for gaming in all its forms to the first (and almost unanimously most trusted) source for gamer satire. The duo have run the gauntlet, with a ridiculously successful children’s charity and lucrative annual convention under their belt as prizes along the journey. With all of these accomplishments under the PA empire and an amazing pedigree to live up to, is it really any surprise that a collection of the webcomic that started the whole thing rolling is among the most professionally produced collections out there?
No. The answer is no. And there’s your review.
End of week? Check.
Tons of webcomic news to sludge through? Check.
Interest Piquers? Check!
