Opportunity knocks: The Daily Cross Hatch is looking for some guest strips.

At Robot 6, JK Parkin interviews Thom Zahler, creator of Love and Capes.

Blog@Newsarama chats with Dean Haspiel, the prolific creator of Immortal, Fear, My Dear, Street Code, and a heap of other stuff.

And Jennifer Contino talks to Mike Dawson about Jack & Max Escape from the End of Time at The Pulse.

Larry Cruz has a thorough discussion of characters at the Webcomic Overlook.

NYCC reports continue to trickle in. At Wednesday’s Child, Paul DeBenedetto recounts the Comics and New Media panel, which apparently consisted entirely of people associated with A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. It’s a great comic, but Paul was disappointed by the panel.

Literary webcomics: Tom Gauld does pithy, colorful little drawings based on letters to the Guardian Saturday Review letters page. Many are cutely enigmatic, made more so by the fact that he doesn’t reproduce the letters they refer to. (Thanks to Derik Badman, via Twitter.)

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By now you’ve probably seen at least one story about Karen Ellis, creator of Planet Karen, and the fire that engulfed her apartment building, killing the neighbor upstairs and destroying everything she owned, leaving her essentially homeless.

It’s been proven, time and time again, that the webcomics community can work some amazing magic when someone is in need, and Karen needs as much as you can give right now. She’s since updated (via extremely sporadic Internet access) that she appreciates any donation and that giving actual, physical items right now is more of a burden as she has nowhere to put it.

Visit Karen’s page and click the donate button on the right side to give whatever you can to this webcomic creator in need.

OK, here’s someone who is taking digital distribution to its logical extreme: Dave Baxter talks to Hermés Piqué, who collaborated with Juan Romera on Misery Depot. The comic was published under a Creative Commons license which means anyone can redistribute it—digitally or in print—as long as they do so for free. This means the comic is being shared all over the place, via peer-to-peer networks, downloads of .pdf and .cbz files, online at its own site, and through iComics where, because of the CC license, it is the default comic. The conversation is well worth a read for its discussion of how to distribute a comic electronically, but conspicuously absent is any mention of how you monetize that.

Meanwhile, this newspaper interview with Howard Tayler explains how he did it the old-fashioned way, building an audience with Schlock Mercenary and then self-publishing the print edition to maximize profit.

At Blog@Newsarama, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis discuss webcomics formats and whether webcomics, like newspapers, can go beyond the daily gag strip to present long-form adventure stories. (Yes, I know that’s already happening.) To explore the possibilities further, Latino posts his own adventure webcomic as part of the column.

Stephen Schleicher says he likes reading comics digitally—not too many people are admitting to that just yet—and he considers some of the possibilities for the future of comics. Read the comments for more. (Found via Robot 6.)

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It’s like a dream come true for anyone who has followed webcomics, heard of webcomics, or who may have come into contact with webcomics (consult a physician).

This week, the Webcomics Weekend was announced, and it is packed full of webcomic talent, the likes of which has never been found under one roof. Taking place in Easthampton, MA, this meet-and-greet-and-possibly-buy-some-merch-not-a-convention get-together already has a huge list of guests and it’s just going to get bigger before the March 20th kickoff date.

Visit the Webcomics Weekend site, join the Facebook group, follow the webcomicsweekend bird on Twitter, and get yourselves to MA come March to take part in a milestone in webcomics history!

In a post that’s almost two weeks old now, Jeph Jacques defends the current selling-t-shirts-and-prints webcomics business model, pointing out that it’s just as valid as any other way of making money off of comics. Key quote:

Saying webcartoonists are t-shirt hucksters is like saying Charles Schultz was an insurance salesman because Snoopy is on the Met Life blimp.

Dave Roman considers the many possible ways of monetizing webcomics and ends up rather dubious about the notion that readers will pay directly for content, either online or on some sort of device. He sure asks a lot of questions!

Marvel exec Ira Rubenstein is more optimistic about paid content. Anthony Ha casts him as the Clueless Suit in this now-famous (on the internet anyway) exchange at the ICv2 Graphic Novel conference:

Rubenstein: Those are our characters. How could someone else write another Spider-Man story?

Roman: Because fan fiction is becoming so powerful. I’ve seen the power of fan fiction. Working at Nickelodeon, there are people out there doing ‘Avatar’ comics that are soooooo much better…

Rubenstein: But that’s like saying YouTube is a real entertainment channel. It’s not.

He leaves out the part where Roman and a bunch of other people yell “It is!” But Rubenstein responds in the comments that he was taken out of context, and he makes a good point:

I made the comment that only Marvel could create compelling new stories with our characters. To which Dave made the comment about Fan Fiction.

The point I was making was comparing fan fiction to our Marvel Comics is like comparing an Episode of LOST or HEROES to user generated content on YOUTUBE.

In other words, Continue reading →

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.