It’s been a long holiday and I’m finally back for the holidays. I try not to let more than 4 days go by without giving you webcomic goodness but sometimes you can’t help but enjoy time with your sig other’s family. No worries, your minds can rest because we have more linkage to massage it. It helps that my alerts went nuts and I’m sitting on 30+ news articles.
Let’s start with an interview that’s days old. Lately there seems to be more and more sites covering webcomics, to the point where I could spend day after day trolling sites for you link to. More to the point, it’s a great way to get introduced to someone’s creation when you can hear their voice. One example is this interview from fandomania with the creators of Evil Diva. Kelly gets into some questions about how the strip was started and what goes into it’s routine in creating it. From the banter we get back and forth between them I would probably listen to a podcast, but luckily we odn’t have to deal with the competition and instead get a rather cute, unique, and creative strip.
If I had to write the obvious steps to take when creating a webcomic I think this would be it. I think I find these at least once a month and there’s always that one piece of advice that bugs me every time. They always tell you to write what you love, as if that is a magic formula to producing mass quantities of fantastic material. Every time I read this advice I get the same reaction: “What they’re really telling me is write what you love so you don’t feel bad when you don’t make it.” If you want some real advice I’ve got two things for you. 1) Write what you know, not what you love. 2) Don’t start off with your comic. The reasoning is simple. Just because you think you love something doesn’t mean you can be a brilliant commentator about it. It takes practice and experience to be good.
Missed another webcomic convention in Webcomic-Con 2009. I don’t know much about it but it looked like there is finally something on the west coast that wasn’t either Comic-Con or PAX. Yes I know there’s others like Emerald City but this one seems dedicated exclusively to webcomics. Don’t know what happened so if anyone has followed up it feel free to comment.
Another print comic goes wild and joins the flooding ranks of comics online. After publishing two volumes of Chickenhare with Dark Horse Comics, Chris Grine turns the focus of its third volume to the Internet. The first volume of Chickenhare was published through Dark Horse comics in September 2006 and was amazingly nominated for an Eisner award in 2007! It has also been published in Italian where it was called, Leprepollo. The second volume, though it was praised, like it’s predecessor proved to be difficult to market due to it’s odd characters and off-beat story-lines.
Found another interview with a different comic. This time we get some intimate goodness from Comics Alliance over Mocktopus. Talk about something I would never have thought to review. Here’s a comic that specializes in not having a point. It’s a little like watching Seinfeld but in comic form and written by someone who’s dying to pick a major in Design. At least this high school student should because despite an unorthodox approach he seems to havea formula that works. Max set out from the beginning to create neither a gag strip nor an epic story. Fomr day to day you can expect any number of styles in both the line work and the inking, the color and the shading. but not the writing. Although I haven’t dived in to the comic it certainly looks worth a read.
