Get in on the ground floor with two brand new web comics. Check out the Secret Friends Society run by web cartoonists Hope Larson and Kean Soo for some excellent illustration work. They are just getting started with their site, so let’s give them some support.

Mike Wieringo has worked in the comics industry for years and has worked on Robin, Superman, Spider-man, X-Men, and tons of other titles. Along with a gallery of his work and links to online stores to buy his stuff Mike runs a blog. Recently on the blog Mike has started a really interesting experiment. Like a lot of comics artists Mike has been drawing since he was very young. He has now started sifting through his old drawings from childhood and is re-imaging them with his current skills. He has images of his original character drawings and his new visions of them. This idea is very cool and well worth having a look.

Maria Schneider runs a great online comic called Pathetic Geek Stories. In the strip Maria solicits stories from readers about sad and embarrassing things that have happened to them and she turns their stories into a comic strip. What a great use of web comics and the strip is so funny it’ll make you cringe.

Maria will be on G4TechTV tonight on the Screen Savers. If your cable provider carries the channel be sure to check it out. We’ll be talking more about Pathetic Geek Stories on an upcoming show.

You can check out a pretty interesting web comic all done is 3D computer modelling at Syntax Error. Damon Riesberg works at Dreamworks and has credit in Shrek 2. His strip is created using Alias Wavefront and is updated 3 times a week. A very new look to comic strips.

The Texas Star-Telegram wrote up a piece by David House that any new or potential comic strip creators should be warned about. This essay seems to suggest that the newspaper industry alone is responsible for all comic readership. House pats the paper on the back for doing so well at finding such a “diverse readership” he also goes on to explain their survey process by which they decide which comic strips stay and which get cut.

Continue reading →

You can get a pretty cool service over at Komik Werks. For a small fee you can have some exclusive comic content personally selected by comic legend Stan Lee sent to you on a weekly basis. The most recent stuff is available for free, but having it sent to you and viewing archives require a subscription. Some really cool stuff here.

Creating comics for the web opens artists and writers up to new possible formats for their work. An interesting trend in web comics is the journal comic. Artists are posting comics based on events that actually happen to them or that they observe in real life on a regular schedule, much like a blog in comic form.

The Journal Comic Jam has a large collection of links to these types of comics and you’ll find a wide range of comics there. Continue reading →

I don’t know when it happened but at some point I started to love political cartoons. Of course at first I liked them merely because they had really famous people looking silly. With the printed strip dying off one of the unfortunate side-affects has been the decline in quality of these social commentaries. Here’s the web is providing an outlet. There are cartoonists like Bill Mitchell who have gone completely digital and AWOL from the printed world and has been publishing online since 1995.

Continue reading →

The UW Daily, of the University of Washington-Seattle, is running an interesting story touching on the slow demise of print comics and the rising awareness of web comics. The article, by James Fraser, specifically mentions the end of the Garfield comic strip and references Comixpedia. Interesting read, although it will seem obvious to those of us who have been following this trend for some time.