Comixtalk
Mini Reviews: Lauren Barnett, Kelli Nelson and Trees & Hills
The one thing minis and webcomics have in common is the DIY spirit. Make a comic and put it out there for people to see. Here's some short reviews of minis I've been reading this week from Lauren Barnett, Kelli Nelson, and the Trees & Hills Comic Group. If you're interested in getting a mini reviewed at ComixTalk, you can find our contact information on the About page.
Comix Talk for Thursday, February 18, 2010
Pretty quiet today although check out this stunning creative innovation from the newspaper comic B.C. Wow! Now that's how you stay hip and current...
INTERVIEWS: Josh Lesnick, creator of Girly, is interviewed by the INTERNET!
REVIEWS: Johanna Draper Carlson has a review of the new mega-Penny Arcade book, The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade. For all the reasons she's a bit lukewarm on it, I will probably love it.
CRAFT: Nice little tutorial from Jim Zubkavich on the process for a recent illustration he did.
BUSINESS: The Beat reports that Graphic.ly, "a fairly new but bold player in the digital comics distribution field", has announced the acquisition of iFanboy, the popular comics news and information community. Graphic.ly is in "private beta" -- anyone using it right now?
Comix Talk for Wednesday, February 17, 2010
DEAD TREES: Scott McCloud writes about a forthcoming project from Jason Shiga called Meanwhile. I've seen pictures of the original hand-crafted version of this "choose-your-own-adventure" style comic but not the actual artifact. Shiga is a dang good, inventive comic creator.
Interviews: WebcomicBuilder.com has an interview with Gianna Masetti, the creator of The Noob, a gamer comic set in an MMORPG.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
- Seven Stories Press is serializing on the web, As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial, a graphic novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan, originally printed in 2007.
- DailyCartoonist.com reported that Go Comics opened up its archives for free viewing for a couple of weeks (starting this past Sunday).
- BleedingCool.com shows us a recent Day By Day comic from Chris Muir with an.... interesting take on the reference to the American "Tea Party" protesters in a Captain America comic. I really can't wait for Shaenon Garrity's take on this one.
First and Last: Player Versus Player
Back in 2006, we did a "First and Last" snapshot of PvP by Scott Kurtz. Even then Kurtz had shown a lot of growth artistically from the origins of the comic. It's worth revisiting PvP again, as Kurtz has probably shown even more growth since 2006 then in the period up to then.
ComixTalk for Tuesday, February 16, 2010
We had the Son of Snowpocalypse in Washington DC yesterday. Not all that exciting actually. Also finally saw AVATAR in 3D on Sunday night. (Ain't Mrs X cool to take me to that for Valentines Day?!) Reviews were dead-on; awesome world-building and special effects to carry it off, story was Dances With Wolves With Four Eyes and Gil Slits. All in all, a great movie experience.
AWARDS: Tom Spurgeon has a list of the nominees for this year's Glyph awards.
MILESTONES: Congrats to Brad Guigar on 10 years of comicking! Brad has had a heck of a decade pioneering this thing we call webcomics and I hope there's lots more to come. In his blog post there's a BIG hint that a full collection of his first strip, Greystone Inn, will be coming to print.
Also docking in close to 10 years is the Flight anthology series. Kazu Kibuishi announces that Flight 8 will be the last edition of that very successful project.
INTERVIEWS: Growly Beast has an interview with Tom Dell'Aringa of Marooned and The Internet Review of Science Fiction has a fairly indepth interview with Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary. UPDATE: Graphic NYC has an interview with Raina Telgemeier, who's most recent work is the graphic novel Smile.
JUSTIFY VARIOUS PEOPLE'S HYPE:
- Back on January 31st, Warren Ellis had one of his hype your webcomics threads at WhiteChapel that's now got an overflowing bounty of potential links for your perusal.
- Scott McCloud links to an interesting comic-like project from a photograher - the "comic" is called A Garden Not Lost to Us.
- I noticed that you can buy the originals from Christopher Baldwin's new webcomic Space Trawler. Beautiful stuff!
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS: Kids book author/illustrator Mo Willems takes a crack at Hilary Price's Rhymes With Oranges this week. Also details on Hilary's trip to Cuba with Jeannie Schulz and other cartoonists including Alexis Fajardo. Haven't talked with Alexis in years - maybe I better catch up with him! :) (h/t Daily Cartoonist)
SECRET SCIENCE ALLIANCE ACTIVATE! The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis won this year's CYBIL award for the graphic novel category. The CYBILs are the Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards. And TCJ posted a four part interview with Eleanor, husband Drew Weing and the rest of the creative crew from the Secret Science Alliance book. Here's part one (with links to part 1 & 2 and part 3 & 4):
Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher by Jake Parker
Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher is a household favorite here. Both of the x-girls (especially the youngest) raved about the book. It's a really exciting tale, jam-packed with action and plot points. Creator Jake Parker has tremendous art chops and visually this book is like a revved-up Saturday matinee special.
Happy Hallmark Holiday!
Happy One-of-Several-Hallmark Holidays or maybe we could call it Sgt Pepper's Day? I saw some funny V-Day cards you might enjoy -- add other good stuff in comments, please? BloggerDad has a couple of batch (2010, 2009) worth checking out. Awkward Valentines is totally hilarious. (psst, did you remember to send Diesel Sweeties cards this year?) Gamer comic 2PStart covers that genre in cards.
MILESTONES: Medium Large hits 1000 strips! Congrats to Francesco Marciuliano, who also writes Sally Forth. Medium Large should be on your reading list. File under "consistently really damn funny".
Code: A beta of the latest version of the Wordpress webcomic tool, stripShow, is out. A true beta so don't use on a live site yet but I bet Brad would love as much feedback and bug reports as possible.
Review: Robin Gibson reviews the revived Commander Kitty.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS: The latest issue of the International Journal of Comic Art is out.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE: The Monsters In Real Places blog is a great art meme concept. Take a real picture, draw in a monster, send it to this blog.
Webcomic Beacon #108 – IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUUUUUUUU!
Webcomic Beacon #108 – IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUUUUUUUU!
Jillyfoo (Demon Eater) and Nate (Jazz and Jess) joins Fes, Tanya, and Mark to discuss Self-Insertion, Mary Sues, Canon Sues, and Anti-Sues. Some debate rages on about what characters may fall prey to which category, as well as bringing up the flaws in writing things as such. We also put a bit of hate into Twilight… because it’s so deserving of our disrespect.
Nobody else is going to draw your comics.
To all comic artists and graphic designers:
For many years, I've got a very tight grip on my pens. A very, very tight grip, as I thought it was the most precise way to have absolute control over the drawing.
Plus I used to draw for hours and hours, ocasionally stopping to take a glance 'round and realize I'm still in 'this' world and not the one I created. I've spent many, many hours not only drawing characters but illustrating backgrounds and populating them with subtle, almost obsessive textures, all proudly hand-drawn, panel after panel, page after page.
And for many years, I've heard people suggesting me to ease my style of drawing. That I could end hurting my tendons and muscles. But, in spite of those suggestions by people who have been on the business for much longer than me (actually, I've never been 'in the business') I kept with my bad habits, and continued strangling my drawing pens as if I was -squeezing- the ink out of them. You know, kinda like when your parents keep telling you to sit straight and you nevertheless prefer to get a loosier pose on the chair when they're not around.
Comix Talk for Friday, February 12, 2010
We're finally digging out of the snow here in Washington DC -- apparently the volume of frosted flakes falling felled a record. Anyhow - wanted to let everyone know that new user registrations are back online at Comix Talk. You don't need to register with Comix Talk to comment on anything BUT registering gives you the ability to have a user blog and post to Comix Talk news and hype if you so desire. New registrations are not automatically approved, however, so it may take up to a day for me to check them.
All Ages: El Santo had an interesting overview of what makes comics good for kids. A good source for what's new with all ages comics is the Good Comics for Kids blog. I've certainly had more interest in these comics again as my kids have gotten into comics.
No Good Deed Goes Unpublished: Coyote Trax has an article about webcomic creators involvement in charity and other good deeds. El Santo had a recent post about the comic Snowflakes participation in Heart Health Month.
INTERVIEWS
- An interview with Julia Wertz, creator of the webcomic Fart Party and the editor of the I Saw You anthology. Wertz constantly makes a point of saying I'm not a webcomic person (she said something similar at the SPX panel she was on last year) and I've never quite figured out what's going on that motivates her to feel the need to throw down that marker.
- An interview with Faith Erin Hicks, who is still working on her next graphic novel, Friends with Boys.
- Comic Alliance has an interview with Anthony Clark of the comic Nedroid. Clark is also the current colorist for the Dr. McNinja comic.
- An interview with Kazu Kibuishi on his book Copper and work on the next installment in his graphic novel series, Amulet.
- UPDATE: An interview with Raina Telgemeier on her new graphic novel Smile. (h/t Journalista!)
Flattr: Not Micropayments But Microdonations
I saw this blurb about Flattr over at Boing Boing today - a new micropaymentsdonations service from Peter Sunde, a creator of the Pirate Bay. It's in beta though, not sure I'm going to sign up for it yet. In a nutshell, the idea is akin to a shared tip jar -- people pay Flattr a monthly tip and than Flattr divides it up among all of the content creators you've clicked a Flattr button for that month.
Comix Talk for Wednesday, February 10, 2010
OMFGUIHAJB!!!! It is snowing again in Washington DC. IT IS SNOWING... AGAIN. I have a review of Smile up today. In addition, be sure to check out the bonus comic Raina Telgemeier did. I saw this funny comic about one of the downsides of the Internet today (see above) - Gemma Correll has lots more great illustrations on her Flickr page.
Congratulations: 1Up names Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik to their five most influential people in videogames for the last decade.
Weird, but something I suspect many readers here might be interested in checking out -- MyWebWill purports to be a service for managing your digital identity after death. Think about it -- you're going to create a ton of stuff online in your life, some of it at least as important as any physical stuff you'll leave behind.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE: Jamie Noguchi has a new webcomic called Yellow Peril. Jamie was the original artist for Erfworld, is a heck of an artist and part of the Super Art Fight crew. Jamie also runs Monster Cutie which is a great source of tips and craft for illustrators.
Last, not comics but this Oscar nominated short, Logorama, is all kinds of weird-cool. Language is very NSFW btw.
Smile by Raina Telgemeier
Raina Telgemeier has worked on Smile for a long time. First posting parts of it online, she eventually inked a deal to publish it as a book with the Scholastic, the publisher of the Babysitters Club graphic novels Raina worked on. As she explains in this interview, she had about half of it done online when the book deal came about:
I’d posted about 120 pages of Smile online, on a page-a-week basis, before Scholastic picked up the publishing rights. The pages were drawn over a four-year period and were written as I went along. So there were things I wanted to fix, a few continuities that needed to be straightened out…and I was suddenly working with editors! What I did was sit down and write out the entire rest of the book, and then we figured out what, if anything, from the first half needed revising.
The finished book is really good. It should fit right in with other favorite young adult novels of the middle school set.
WebcomicsPress: Comparing Webcomic Tools for WordPress
So a lot of you probably read about the hack attack on Karl Kerschl's site last week as reported by FLEEN. Wordpress has come to take a fairly dominant position in webcomics publishing in recent years with good reason. Wordpress is a fantastic blogging solution with an active development team and it's not a tremendous stretch to leverage it for comics. So which comics-specific solution should you use for turning Wordpress into Webcomicpress?
First let's see what is out there. If there are other projects out there to include beyond what I list below, contact me.
1. Comicpress. Tyler Martin's Comicpress wasn't the first Wordpress effort. but it was the one that caught fire and is now in wide use in webcomics. It's gone through several versions and now has a few add-on plug-ins for additional features. Version 2.8 is stable and in wide use.
2. stripShow. I think Brad Hawkins' stripShow might have been the first working hack I can recall. Currently, it looks like Hawkins is working on version 2.5, so it's probably a safe bet to wait until that next version is released to try it out.
3. Manga+Press. I know the least about this one, having not had a chance to try it out. It also looks like the most recent version is in beta and the creator still working to finish a final release of what will be version 2.6.
4. Webcomic 2.1. This project has been around for a bit, it seems to have been inspired in part by the creator's criticisms of Comicpress.
5. Comic Reef. The very most recent effort I'm aware of seems to be a project born in the Webcomics Community forums.
What I think would be the most useful approach to comparing them is to create a list of features and see each package implements them. Some obvious issues are how it handles comic images, navigation, themes... again, let me know if you have any suggestions for key criteria. I'll be working on setting up each one of these packages in order to write up a comparison of them for later this month.
UPDATE: An email exchange with Tyler Martin clarifies that ComicPress was actually the first WordPress solution and that stripShow was a "fork" of ComicPress.
Comix Talk for Tuesday, February 9, 2010
It's day 4 of Snowapalooza in Washington DC. I consider this a trial run for if I ever decided to move to Canada and so far... I don't think I'd make it. But being snow-bound has been great for catching up on comics. I also wanted to flag a few features at ComixTalk -- the calendar of comic events is available here, but you can also add it a number of other calendar programs and I'm always interested in co-maintainers. In fact I'd be very happy to see other blogs and sites join me in maintaining it and embedding it on their sites too. I also set up a hub page for the four webcomic titles that have run at ComixTalk over its 8 year history - click to discover work from Ryan Estrada, Kris Straub and Bryant Paul Johnson.
Awards: The Webcomics List, a hybrid tracking, popularity and news site for webcomics had a forum-organized awards program this year. It felt a lot like the old WCCAs. This Week in Webcomics covers the results. Gunnerkrigg Court won the nod for Best Comic and Moon Town won for Best New Comic. Coyote has a review of Moon Town here.
iWebcomics: So I'm kind of already burnt out on the iPad hype. I want to wait until the thing is available to think more about it. Others are though: Erik Larsen has an essay about it and Gizmodo salivated over how comics will look on the tablet device.
Dead Trees: Tyler Page talks numbers, costs and quality for taking the Print-On-Demand route for volume 2 of his Nothing Better webcomic. And starting this week, for a couple of months, Gordon McAlpin is working full time on Multiplex — and, the Multiplex: Book 1 print collection. This is all due to the funding he raised for the book through a Kickstarter drive.
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
- The recent rock concert contest storyline at Ornery Boy has been great - both funny and Michael Lalonde has done an awesome job with animating key panels. If you're going to do a flash comic than use it! Ornery Boy makes great use of Flash's capabilities.
- It's a been awhile since I've linked to Freak Angels. Things are happening again in the storyline and although I'm a bit annoyed that after a few years we still don't really understand the full logic of the "package" of the freak angels and their world, it's a hell of a comic. I'll also just flag again that what Avatar is doing here seems like a pretty good model for a publisher-creator relationship in the webcomic world. I'm not sure I've seen anyone else quite match it yet.
- The latest issue of Dark Horse Presents is out with webcomics from Graham Annable and others.
First and Last: Anders Loves Maria
We used to do an irregularly recurring bit here at ComixTALK called "First and Last" which seemed like a good idea to revive. Particularly with a comic like Anders Loves Maria where creator Rene Engström has not only constantly improved but also taken several stylistic leaps during the comic.
Comix Talk for Monday, February 8, 2010
Welcome to the new site design at ComixTalk. We're on a new server so let me know if it feels a bit zippier (it seems to be faster all around to me). Happy to hear about broken stuff -- I'm not done with tweaking things (never done!) and I can add it to the list. One thing I can warn you about is that a lot of the older URLs are still broken, but I hope to clear most of that up this week.
REVIEWS: I had the pleasure of sitting down with Copper in print this weekend and reading and re-reading it. Here's my glowing, gushing review. I also forgot to mention that we liked Kazu even before he was a star; here's the cover art he did for ComixpediaTALK back in 2004. Also, I'll have a review of Smile, the new graphic novel from Raina Telgemeier up this week. I did get a chance to read it this past weekend and it is an entertaining, moving story. Sure, the tale of the teeth and all of the work Raina had to go through are interesting, but she's done so much more with filling out the emotions and just the in-between-ness of those middle school years that it would have made a good story even without that hook.
MILESTONES: Last week marked the end of Anders Loves Maria, the breakout webcomic from Rene Engström. I'll second Gary's thoughts on the tale. Perhaps the ending felt a bit abrupt, even forced, but you can't deny it's impact. It's also worth noting that Engström's art continually improved throughout the comic and that in re-reading the archives of this comic, I'm even more impressed with where she is now as a creator. I hope the next comic comes soon.
CONTESTS: Ryan Estrada is competing in this month's Zudalympics and he needs your vote. His comic is called Sci-Fi Drive-By and you can vote by visiting his website. In non-Zuda voting, Comic Riffs, the Washington Post's blog about comic strips is having a Best Webcomic of the Decade Popularity Contest -- voting closes this Wednesday. The seven contenders are: Girl Genius, Hark! A Vagrant, Least I Could Do, Penny Arcade, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Schlock Mercenary, and xkcd.
Copper by Kazu Kibuishi
Copper is a beautiful comic. Kazu Kibuishi takes such care in rendering landscapes both natural and fantastic, that one can't help but be drawn into the page to fully appreciate the environment of Copper. In particular, I think Kibuishi must love drawing moving water because it is almost a constant presence in the book (The comic "Waterfall" is both a great bit of illustration but also an insightful commentary on it).
