John Allison
Monday's Comics
Submitted by Derik Badman on August 31, 2010 - 07:57
Contents of Webcomics Folder in Google Reader for Monday: 1 episode of Lewis Trondheim's Les Petits Riens, 1 episode of John Allison's Bad Machinery (Note to John if he's reading this: Do you realize the only place your name appears on your home page is in the copyright notice at the bottom?), Yeast Hoist #1 by Ron Regé Jr..
Comix Talk for Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on August 4, 2010 - 09:23
I suspect posting will be relatively light this month unless I get my act together this week and recruit some more interesting guest bloggers (I'm still open to unsolicited offers to guest blog!). I started a little work on a story I thought might be interesting if I uncovered anything -- basically I tried to contact the first 100 members of ComixTalk thinking I might discover a mix of stories from people who've stayed pretty visible in comics to those whose stories maybe have never been well-covered. I've gotten a few responses but it's too much work in tracking down folks to take that approach for any larger number of member accounts. (If you have an old account at ComixTalk you're having trouble accessing please let me know -- I'd be happy to try to help you out) So my new pitch is -- if you joined ComixTalk (Comixpedia in those days) in 2003 and you're interested in giving me a snapshot of now and then for you in comics (I have some questions I've been emailing to folks; but that's what I'm after) please email, comment here or tweet me.
MILESTONES
- Lauren Davis writes about the ending of Bellen! by Box Brown -- sounds a bit Newhart-ish to me!
- Spwug writes about the ending of Dreamless, a webcomic they thought stopped a bit suddenly.
HYPE
- Raina Telgemeier has a new short webcomic up called Can I Try An Eskimo Pie?
- John Allison with the definite version of The Hulk!
- Darryl Cunningham writes another well-done journalistic comic -- this time a debunking of the "moon landing was faked" story.
INTERVIEWS
- Brigid Alverson interviews Phil Foglio, on recent new projects involving his webcomic Girl Genius.
- Deb Aoki interviews Bryan Lee O'Malley.
- The Webcomic Factory runs an interview with Ivan Cortez, the artist on the webcomic, The Gentlemen’s Club.
- Tim O'Shea has an interview with MK Reed.
CONVENTIONS: SPX announces that Dean Haspiel and Kate Beaton will be guests this year. Between SPX and Intervention that is going to be an epic comics weekend in the DC area.
MAILBAG: I got an email from creator Lee Leslie about the webcomic RiGBY, an Epic Webcomic about the Tales of an Amateur Barbarian. RiGBY follows the adventures of the titular hero as she navigates a world of reanimated skeletons, warriors on dinosaurs and savage snake-men. Leslie describes the webcomic as combining "the fun world-building of high fantasy stories like Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian with a fun and relatable protagonist. Basically, she’s the love child of Indiana Jones and Red Sonja.”
Comix Talk for Thursday, June 17, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on June 17, 2010 - 09:21
Um... World Cup? World Cup! Oy, South Korea really let Argentina run away with that game this morning.
These stories aren't novel anymore but still interesting when a creator makes a public break with print for the web. Robot6 has the story on Rich Tommaso dumping print for webcomics. Tommaso has a new site up for his comics online.
This article on how to make webcomics from the Webcomics Builder site is full of obvious advice but it is in one handy place.
INTERVIEW: Battlemouth has an interview with John Allison (Bad Machinery).
SWAG: John Allison on the difficulties of coming up with a hit t-shirt.
NOT WEBCOMICS: A preview of a new videogame based on Scott Pilgrim.
Comix Talk for Monday, April 5, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on April 5, 2010 - 09:02
AWARDS: The Hugos now include a regular Best Graphic Novel category -- which is really pretty fantastic. This year's nominees include two webcomic entries: Girl Genius, Vol. 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm -- Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment); and Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse -- Written and illustrated by Howard Tayler. (h/t Robot6)
CONVENTIONS: Pete Abrams, creator of Sluggy Freelance, is going to be at Intervention. Jamie Noguchi, creator of Yellow Peril, former artist on Erfworld is going to be at SPX.
INTERVIEWS: I missed this in my mailbag last month, but Public Radio Kitchen interviewed Franklin Einspruch about his painted comics which he posts online at The Moon Fell On Me. Einspruch is creating a kind of comic tone poem with his work; I found myself liking it more than I would have expected. It's largely a very peaceful experience reading through his comics.
FROM THE MAILBAG: I got a nice email about a comic called Indestructible Will which is about a character who doesn't feel pain (apparently a real medical condition). Unfortunately the comic is only available in pdf format, so you have to download each chapter before you can read it. There's just no reason to do that. Most readers aren't going to go to the extra step of downloading your unknown work when they could just as easily read a jpg, png or gif in their browser.
I got an email about FR33, self-described as "a webcomic about a drug abusing self-proclaimed artist, seeking his place in a near-future world of free culture" which is another photo comic. Since I'm giving out practical website advice today, I'd redo the "about" page to tell readers a bit more about the comic, maybe even try to pitch the longer-term arc of it to try and sell the comic.
Comix Talk for Friday, April 2, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on April 2, 2010 - 12:15
REVIEW: El Santo tackles the denizens of Tackleford in a review of John Allison's Bad Machinery.
CRAFT: Webcomic Builder has a few words of inspirational advice for improving your art.
FROM THE MAILBAG
Poseur Ink which published the Side B anthology has a Kickstarter drive going to pre-sell a new book, Octobriana from Steve Orlando and Chaz Truog. Orlando is the author of the innovative adaptation of Paradise Lost; and Chaz Truog is the artist of Grant Morrison's legendary Animal Man. Poseur Ink describes the book as "an action-filled fantasy piece that follows the heroine, Octobriana, on her quest to claim her title as the goddess of lust. Set in Soviet Russia, with chapters full of sex, psychics and Russian mythology, this new incarnation looks to be a titillating thrill."
Ed Contradictory is a webcomic with an archive back to 2007, with a lot of meta stuff going on, jokes about the creator's control over the comic, etc. The art is serviceable, but boring in a repetitive, and bland kind of way. The comic does seem to keep getting better though and to the extent you love jokey meta kind of webcomics, this might be one for you to check out. (In fairness Greg Burgas at CBR liked it a lot more than I did).
A pitch for Cheapjack Shakespeare, a webcomic with a decently polished pr pitch attached. Except that the website itself is still sporting "hosted free, courtesey ofGo Daddy.com" -- guys, there's plenty of free webhosting not cluttered up with ads and stuff designed to make your site look like an escapee from Geocitites. (Let alone maybe you should spring a few bucks for hosting?). In any event, it looks like the webcomic "preview" on the site is really a promotional piece for a desired movie deal. The webcomic preview is available at a small size -- too small to read actually -- and with an interface that's a bit of a pain. Sorry not to be able to comment on the story itself but if I can't read the comic, not much to say.
Got an email about the Charlestown City Paper's coverage of a photo comic called Blood Rose. I'll admit up front, the number of photo comics I've liked in my life is pretty small. And this one started off confirming my bias - static scenes, horribly clunky dialogue; but I was impressed with the visuals after finishing the story. Charlie Thiel staged a lot of action really well and the actors were pretty decent. But the dialogue... oy, that's got to improve. (It wouldn't hurt to polish up the website either). Anyhow, the next storyline debuts today in the afternoon (EST I suppose).
Comix Talk for Monday, February 22, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on February 22, 2010 - 08:44
Welcome to Monday! May I direct your attention to a review of several mini comics posted late Friday? If you enjoyed John Allison's COMIX REMIX of the above photo, you might want to check out the entire series he posted to FLICKR.
REVIEWS: Delos reviews Odori Park by Chris Watkins and El Santo reviews the Xeric Grant-winning Haunted by Joshua Smeaton.
INTERVIEWS: Growly Beast has an interview with Alice Hunt and Tracy Williams of Goodbye Chains.
REMIX: The Webcomic Builder has a lengthy essay on fan-comics; something maybe we ought to relabel "remix comics"?
NOT WEBCOMICS: Kickstarter fund drive for an American Elf videogame? I'd buy that for a dollar!
INTERNATIONAL:
- Scott McCloud highlights something I'd actually missed in reading the new Zahra’s Paradise at First Second: its availability in multiple languages: English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch.
- Not sure if this is good or bad but Bleeding Cool notes that "After filing for bankruptcy, German TV company TV-Toonland has sold Svetlana Chmakova’s manga-adapted TV show My Life Me to Classic Media. It will air in France and Canada later this year."
- Digital Strips has some factoids on webmanga, including Shuhuo Soto's earnings this year alone.
Comix Talk for Monday, January 25, 2010
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 25, 2010 - 10:50
For what it's worth, I've got a fresh install of DRUPAL on the dev server at home, working up a streamlined version of ComixTALK. Laid out the basic theme (moving to a 2 column layout) and now tackling cleaning up the horror that the tag and category system at ComixTALK has mutated into.... Right now I'm debating whether to port ComixTALK as is to the new server or wait until I get the redo... done.
One story that caught my eye this morning was this rant by blogger-czar Jason Calacanis about comScore. Worth reading to think about. Another interesting story from Tom Spurgeon, who has an essay up at the Comics Reporter which I think one could summarize as "wow, there are a lot more good comics than when I was younger..." I guess I would add, "wow, there are a lot more good webcomics than 10 years ago..." And if you need a recap of recent webcomic news, Delos has a whole bunch of interesting links covering last week at Art Patient.
NEW BOOK: John Allison posted the cover art from the forthcoming 8th book collection of Scary Go Round: "Recklessly Yours."
Cory Likes Corndogs: Goats scores a favorable review from Boing Boing Blogger Cory Doctorow for the second book in the new series: The Corndog Imperative.
ZUDA IDOL SCANDAL? Digital Strips reports on the departure of one of the ten finalists from this month's Zuda popularity contest. Apparently The Thunderchickens had a good shot of winning it too, so the undisclosed reasons for its departure must be something non-trivial.
POLLS: Over at the Washington Post's comics blog, Schlock Mercenary is leading their Best Webcomic of the Decade poll, followed by Girl Genius.
INTERVIEW: Inkstuds has an (audio) interview with Bryan Lee O'Malley.
Non-ZUDA CONTESTS: El Santo reports that John Lustig of Last Kiss is having a contest -- write the best dialogue for a comic captioned by Orson Scott Card.
ALL AGES: Comics For Kids has a list of recommended comics for the classroom.
It's Just Wednesday and Boy... Are My Gills Tired!
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 13, 2010 - 11:15
State of the ComixTALK update
Working on a Wordpress-powered version of the site on a development server. Had out the MySQL book last night trying to write queries for moving over a few of the tables from Drupal to Wordpress.
THEORY
Patric Lewandowski gave a 20 minute talk on ideas about comic theory he first explained in a series of articles he wrote for ComixTALK in 2008. You can see the video of Patric's presentation at his website.
AWARDS
After the one webcomic (Girl Genuis) in ComicRiff's "Best Comic of the Decade" poll kicked serious tail, ComicRiff decides to hold a "Best Webcomic of the Decade" poll. They're looking for nominations if you're interested in helping them out.
Webcomics.com Update
I got a press release from Brad Guigar this morning announcing that subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago's Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators' discount of 15%. According to Brad that's a total savings of $60 - which is pretty nice (and more than the annual $30 subscription fee to the site btw). This is very smart -- if Brad can leverage the new community he's building for partnerships and other promotions than that certainly adds a lot of value to joining that site.
And El Santo adds his two cents to the Webcomics.com subscriber model story.
THEN AND NOW
Jeph Jacques redraws Questionable Content #1.
John Allison is redrawing some of his SGR comics for the latest print volume.
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS
Artpatient linked to a funny comic by Caldwell Tanner called "What Kind of Artist Are You?" I fit in there.... somewhere!
The Joy of Webcomics: The Death of Webcomics
Submitted by El Santo on November 6, 2009 - 16:21
Rising from the dead… it’s the Joy of Webcomics! Sorry for not doing updates lately and opting instead for smaller news-related posts. Fact is, I figured This Week in Webcomics, Artpatient, Fleen, Comixtalk, and now Paperless Comics are all doing a far better job of providing up-to-date webcomic news. I’d only be repeating the exact same things said on other sites (and I am, in fact, doing so here). From time to time, though, there are a few tidbits that I find too interesting not to share.
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