See that graphic above? Whenever you see that over the course of the next week or so, you’ll know that you’re getting honest-to-goodness Webcomics Weekend news, straight from someone who was there!
Also, if you’re on Twitter and Tweeting about anything WW-related, use the hash tag (#neww, sans parentheses) to put it all in one easy-to-read thread on the Twitter search site. Reading through those posts is fun enough, I can’t imagine what the event itself will be like!
Webcomics.com had a really nice relaunch under the new owners, with some well written, useful articles, and then it sort of disappeared, due to problems with their web host. Now they’re back, sort of, although their RSS feed stopped working in my reader and I had to cancel and resubscribe. And they are looking for new content, so if you want to share your learning experiences with other creators, here’s some info on submitting a story.
El Santo has a nice review up of Dawn of Time at The Webcomic Overlook.
At Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Ada Price takes a critical look at reading comics on the Kindle. Despite the imperfections of the platform, publishers are taking it seriously as the next step in the long march to digital distribution. In other platform news, Slippery Brick notes that Sony is working on downloadable comics for the PSP.
Kevin Church is posting brief takes on webcomics by Twitter users at his blog, BeaucoupKevin(dot)com.
Here’s a new comic that’s worth a look: Model Behaviour, a manga-style comic about a shallow ladies man who happens to work in the fashion industry and becomes obsessed with a model. It’s a light comedy, and you can sort of see what’s coming with the latest twist, but it’s a fun read.
The sixth print volume of Dandy and Company is now available from Lulu.com.
Cory Doctorow has high praise for the print edition of Get Your War On at Boing Boing.
At ComicMix, Marc Alan Fishman recommends that you read Rogue Robot.
Stuck at your desk? Mari Kurisato lists three webcomics that are safe for work.
Thank you, Scott McCloud, for saying what needed to be said:
The page designs of most long form webcomics suck donkey dick. Good artists and writers—including some of my favorite cartoonists in the world—force readers to sroll, then click, then read, then scroll, then read, then click, then scroll again for no other reason than a stubborn belief that all comics pages have to be taller than wide, and that all web pages need a metric ton of blinking crap at the top to work.
T Campbell checks in in comments to defend his use of vertical pages, but I remain unconvinced. As Scott says in his response, scrolling is OK and clicking is OK, but the click-then-scroll required for every page is distracting and annoying.
Greg Hatcher has a lengthy but very readable essay up at Comics Should Be Good that considers paper vs. digital comics in terms of both the creator’s economics picture and the reader’s experience. With pictures of his own collection, it’s well worth a click.
The Canadian magazine Mcleans has a nice profile of Kate Beaton, whose loosely drawn comics make history fun. (Via Blog@Newsarama.)
Also at Blog@, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis have brief reviews of White Ninja and Kukuburi.
Here’s a nice bit of niche marketing for you: BikeRadar.com interviews Rick Smith about his bicycle-themed webcomic Yehuda Moon. (Via Journalista.)
Space oddity: Japanese sci-fi manga creator Leiji Matsumoto’s latest work, Out of Galaxy Koshika, will be distributed digitally via the Wii Shopping Channel. Readers will pay 500 Wii points for the first chapter and 200 for subsequent chapters. The manga is being published only in Japan for the moment but the online version includes an English translation; no word yet of any print version.
Here’s your freebie of the day: vol. 3 of Oddly Normal: Fignation Times, which the publishers have kindly made available online. (Found via Sean Kleefeld.)
Webcomics Weekend is only a few days away and the official information is finally here!
Of large note is the panel list for the weekend. There’s everything from a live Webcomics Weekly recording featuring the Halfpixel crew to a livedrawing exhibition featuring a Cintiq tablet and a host of webcomic creators. If you didn’t think you had enough to keep you busy, well, you were just plain wrong.
Also, a map has been provided for the pub crawl on Friday night (good for all-ages, at least some parts). The weekend is shaping up to be one of the greatest in (the short) webcomics history! Hope to see you there and check back with Digital Strips during the weekend for up-to-the-minute updates on the goings on! Also, follow me at Twitter (mdnytecartunr) as I’ll be Tweeting away the whole weekend!
The Laugh Out Loud Cats is a much-admired webcomic around here, and we’re glad to hear that Abrams ComicArts just brought out a print edition. Over at Neatorama, creator Adam Koford discusses the origins of the comic and some of his creative influences, including Paper Moon, Dennis the Menace, and one of my all-time favorite movies, Sullivan’s Travels. (Via Robot 6.)
Over at Good Comics for Kids, Kate Dacey reviews the first print edition of The Araknid Kid, by Josh Alves, which started out on Zuda and moved over to Sugary Serials before hitting the dead tree format.
Bengo has an interesting post at The Floating Lightbulb, in which he looks at Google’s graphs of traffic for various webcomics and sees a marked decline in readership over the past few years. Readers question the accuracy of the data in comments, and I don’t know enough about Google data to be able to analyze it myself, but the trend looks marked and consistent, and some interesting discussions crop up in the comments section. UPDATE: Over at The Comichron, John Jackson Miller is hearing from webcomics creators that Google Trends seems to be understating their traffic.
One sign that a trend has jumped the shark is when the politicians start getting into the act, so make what you will of the fact that the Washington state legislature just passed a resolution honoring Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade. (Via Journalista.)
Jennifer Contino talks to Johnny Zito and Tony Trov, the creators of the Zuda-winning Black Cherry Bombshells, at The Pulse.
Shaenon Garrity interviews Ed Quinby, the creator of Teregrin, at Talk About Comics.
Larry Cruz checks in with reviews of Sister Claire and The Princess Planet at The Webcomic Overlook.
Delos reviews Dovecote Crest at Art Patient.
At Occasional Superheroine, Valerie D’Orazio reviews three webcomics that “address sensitive women’s issues with a great frankness and courage, and demonstrate what can be done using this medium for the cause of education & social justice.” They are: Unmasked: The Ariella Dadon Story, The Shake Girl, and Hathor the Cow Goddess.
I never said I’d be good at these. I want you guys to all remember that.
The Comic: Evil Inc
The Creator: Brad Guigar with colors by Ed Ryzowski
The URL: http://www.evil-comic.com/
The Verdict: Keeper-for-now
I started following Evil-Inc back when it debuted in full color a while back. I was familiar with Guigar’s work from Greystone Inn and other projects but this was the first time I really took a real look at it. I was not disappointed. This strip has a great premise that really speaks to a comics geek like myself. Just the idea of an all-powerful corporation, employing all the world’s most dangerous villains being run by the cast of your average office sitcom makes me happier than I can describe.
The art is solid. The characters are all well designed and hold together well. The aforementioned color really makes everything pop all the more and makes an already enjoyable picture all the more so.
Like all gag-a-day strips out there, some days are stronger than others, but the over all quality is still good. I usually at least grin to myself in a very pleased way.
All that being said, it’s still not a comic I’m passionate about. If there’s ever a link in the daily section of my comics bookmarks that I just forget to hit, it’s this one. I can’t really figure out why though. I think it’s the pacing, it takes a long time for some of the story lines to finish. This is really sort of a nitpick for me, but that’s what ya’ll come here for isn’t.
Evil Inc is becoming like Beetle Bailey in the comics page I read as a kid (I’m not comparing them in quality, EI is much better than BB. And Lightning Lady is way hotter than Miss Buxley). It’s not the driving force in my decision to pick up the paper, but I’m glad it’s there.
And of course, every week or so Guigar totally nails one out of the park. And that’s more than St. Snorkel ever did.
If you live on the East Coast, then like me, you’ve found that March has indeed rushed in like a fierce, untamed lion. This also means that we are less than two weeks away from the biggest webcomics gathering ever!
As I will be the sole representative for DS at Webcomics Weekend (that pre-reg craziness didn’t bode too well for people who aren’t online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) I’ve decided to put that full-access pass to the biggest names in webcomics to good use. Click over to the guest list at the NEWW site and see which creator you’d like to pin down to ask a few questions.
Shoot ’em to me, either at jasonsigler@gmail.com, or in the comments section below, and I’ll make sure to corner them until I get the dirt. It’s all for you, webcomics faithful, so get those questions in and let’s see how many people we can collectively make quite uncomfortable in the span of a weekend.
I will make sure to ask the tough questions… they just might not be to the right people.
Meredith Gran, de facto organizer of the mass gathering known as the New England Webcomics Weekend, has let it be known today that a pre-registration for the event is now required due to the huge influx of visitors and creators they are expecting.
Go fill out a quick form and make sure you won’t be the one whimpering, “But my girlfriend’s in there”, to which Gran will reply, “Hey, a LOT of people’s girlfriends are in there.”
UPDATE: And registration is closed. Wow. Check back here or the Webcomics Weekend site to see if more space might open up, because this is one party you DON’T want to miss!
It’s no secret that we here at Digital Strips don’t dig the MySpace model of reading comics. It’s clunky, ugly, and infested with poor, user-manifested web design. This would be the main reason why I’ve never bothered with the Dark Horse comic series, Dark Horse Presents. Today, however, there is hope at the end of this long, dark, dank, diseased tunnel.
Three webcomics all-stars are now featured in the twentieth edition of DHP. In this edition, you can find:
As loathe as I am to say this, you should very quickly and very carefully check the DHP site for some webcomics goodness from three of the industry’s (community’s?) finest.
Dylan Horrocks has launched a new webcomics site, Hicksville, with four comics—two short stories and two longer serials. The design is nice and clean—I wish all webcomics sites were like this!—and the comics look good, so go take a look.
Larry “El Santo” Cruz urges everyone to be a good citizen and contribute some updates to Comixpedia. He also has new reviews up of Anders Loves Maria and Nedroid’s Picture Diary, as well as an interesting interview with T Campbell, writer of Penny and Aggie and A History of Webcomics.
Shaenon Garrity interviews Aaron Neathery, whose post-apocalyptic webcomic Endtown debuts this week at Modern Tales.
The Amway of comics? Johanna Draper Carlson looks at an online “manga,” Guardian Angel, that allows readers to set up their own purchase link and get 50% of the price. Interestingly, Guardian Angel bills itself as a MangaFox top manga. MangaFox is a scanlation site, and when I clicked over there, I saw that Guardian Angel is listed as a sponsor. So they expect people to pay for their comic, but they have apparently teamed up with a blatant violator of copyrights to promote it.
At Blog@Newsarama, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis look at webcomics apps for the iPhone. And at the Gillians Heart blog, Dave Baxter waxes enthusiastic about the Android Comics Reader for Google phones.
NYC Graphic Novelists catches a video of Dean Haspiel talking comics and other stuff with Seth Kushner, who photographed him for NYCGN.
Therefore Repent, Jim Munroe’s post-Rapture graphic novel, is now available in its entirety here in a variety of formats. (Thanks to Matthew J. Brady for pointing that out.)
If you scroll down far enough in this Cup O’Joe column, you will see what Joe Quesada thinks of digital distribution of comics. Continue reading