Greetings! Too much to talk about! Jump in! It’s Interest Piquers, the 03.25.08 Edition!

– First, and most egregiously, the ComixTalkers have uncovered a sinister secret behind a new comicking tool called Bitstrips. Apparently, through some fancy wordspeak, the Bitstrips crew can claim joint ownership of just about anything you create with their tools. Scope this quote, straight from their terms of agreement:

Anything, including any comic strip, character, scene and/or text, that You create and/or make publicly available for use and modification through Bitstrips Tools by Bitstrips or its users (“Shared Content“), shall be jointly owned by You and Bitstrips with You and Bitstrips deemed to be joint authors. Any Shared Content that is modified by a third party user of Bitstrips will be owned solely by Bitstrips.

Beware! Bitstrips will help you with your webcomic creating needs, but should you develop enough skill with that, you will owe them your soul.

Also, this can be used to make silly strips in mockery of the whole thing, like David Willis did here.

Continue reading →

The webcomic news just keeps flowin’ in and I just keep lettin’ it sail right by! But lo, what’s this? I seem to have accrued a clog in my usually steady flow! Must be time to apply some WordDraino (patent pending) and unclog that stubborn drain. Here it comes, it’s Interest Piquers for the week ending 3/22/08!

– As most Americans know, driving anywhere these days is so expensive, it’s nearly idiotic. Bike, walk, do whatever you have to do to get to where you need to be, just don’t do it in a gasoline-fueled vehicle.

Well it will probably tick you off further to know that not only is Steven Cloud, creator of the existential short strip, Boy on a Stick and Slither, not only is he doing a fair bit of driving these days, he’s doing it from London to Mongolia. Now I flunked world geography (I can barely find my way out of my neighborhood most days) but that sounds like a looong trip. Why do it, Steven’s Livejournal post?

Continue reading →

I’m off to Anime Boston this weekend, H2 recorder in hand, and if all goes well I’ll be chatting up some folks on Artists Alley. In the meantime, here are some webcomics stories you may not have seen.

Gary Tyrrell has a lengthy post on the panel Webcomics: A Primer, which includes lots of nuts-and-bolts discussion among creators Dean Haspiel, Raina Telgemeier, Rich Stevens, and Ted Rall about timing, format, and “the economics of free.” Set aside some time to read the lengthy comments thread as well.

At Broken Frontier, Tyler Chin-Tanner interviews Joe Infurnari about his webcomic The Process. I don’t really have words to describe The Process, but the art is wonderful and you should really just go look at it for yourself.

Shaenon Garrity deconstructs the WCCAs in her latest comiXology column.

At Precocious Curmudgeon, blogger David Welsh reviews the print version of North World.

I can’t imagine there has been a huge demand for this, but Harlequin and SoftBank Creative just announced that they will be making Harlequin manga available for cell phones starting next month. Enjoy!

Over in Japan, the publisher Shueisha is launching an online manga magazine, Ultra Jump Egg. Go to the link for an explanation of how to navigate the pages if you don’t read Japanese but want to see the art anyway.

Over at Webcomics.com, T Campbell posts the top webcomics for March, based on Compete and Alexa rankings. As usual, caveats and analysis follow. Also posted on WC.C lately: Elanor Cooper interviews Sarah Ellerton, creator of Inverloch and The Phoenix Requiem, and Alexander Danner plays “where are they now” with four webcomickers who have moved on to other projects.

I wish I had been able to get to this: Gary Tyrrell reports on the graphic novel symposium Splat!, and Karen at Pen in Hand posts her illustrated notes.

Rick Marshall of ComicMix talks to Wes Molebash about his Zuda experiences so far.

At The Webcomic Overlook, El Santo has a very thorough and entertaining review of the print version of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, which we discussed briefly in our most recent podcast.

Eric Burns’ lengthy post on why he is bored by Kevin and Kell caused me to take a look at it out of curiosity, and I ended up really enjoying it. Go figure.

Vintage comic link of the day: Golden Age Comic Book Stories presents Fired! by Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta, from Crime Suspenstories #17, June-July 1953.

Man, I gotta write all my posts with the caps lock.

Wes Molebash’s Zuda Comics entry, The Litterbox Chronicles, faces scrutiny of the flaming kind on the comment board for his strip. For days now, a user known only as Maledicta has taken Wes to task for not only the quality of the strip but for the method by which he is garnering votes.

Being a comment board, there has been a tendency for the discussion to slip into the flame war territory, but by and large, heads are staying cool and the Wesheads are coming to the defense of their leader.

The discourse centers around the fact that Maledicta feels Wes’ approach of “Everyone come to the site, register, and vote for me!” is unfair and borders on ballot-box stuffing, which, after a quick Google search, I see is not nearly as vulgar as I thought.

Continue reading →