You Want The Young American[s]
When you meet a webcomicker at a con, there’s always some degree of pitch involved. Sometimes it’s smooth banter, designed to garner your attention and get you involved in conversation. Sometimes it’s a degree of surprise and gratitude for your trouble at dropping by in the first place. And sometimes, you’re caught in a metaphorical headlock of enthusiasm.
Case in point: Corey Marie Parkhill, is a compact force of nature in a hoodie. Before you know it, your hands are full of literature, your head is spinning as rapidly as all the projects she’s got in play, you’re converted into a committed reader, and you have the vague feeling that, somehow, you owe the Mob a favor. Seriously, webcomics scientists need to find a way to extract the purified essence of this woman and bottle it, and the obscurity issues of the medium would be gone forever.
So what is Parkhill (along with husband Tod, who possesses some truly amazing muttonchops, which could well displace me in the webcomics facial hair meme struggle, but I digress) cookin’ up over at Young American Comics? In addition to the webcomics, you’ve got the various open-invite anthology books (this year’s theme: What’s In The Box?), group projects (Lost Lunches and Crash! Bang! Boom!, submissions open until 1 October), and today we see the launch of the previously-mentioned 52 Comic Challenges — once a week for the next 52 weeks, artists and writers will be invited to meet specific challenges in a collaborative, feedback-rich environment.
Not quite ready to launch, but maybe most interesting from a webcomics perspective: Yesterdave, which is going to be a Choose Your Own Adventure-style comic; Dave’s a time traveller, and as readers vote the story will change. I’m not aware of a medium other than webcomics that could tackle this sort of thing. As much as Brad Guigar may claim (with respect to his Blank Label comrades), The world will be dominated shortly, I think at this point I’d have to give odds to a tiny woman from Richmond.
In other news:
- Shishio writes to let us know of a Talkcast by Something Awful goons/webcomics creators.
- For the moment, at least, Girl Genius and Octopus Pie have mitigated their bandwidth issues (related to being too popular because they’re awesome) … but for how long?
- Latest to take a whack at micropayments: Amazon. Perhaps a key difference from previous attempts — if I’m reading this correctly, Amazon’s offering a code solution instead of creating a company around a service to be provided. More on this when people who are better at programming than me have time to pick it apart.
Dave’s a time traveller, and as readers vote the story will change.
Has someone mentioned “Choose Your Own Carl? Or, for that matter, Zach Your Own Adventure?
By L on 08.06.07 11:15 pm
How about Turtle VS Bunny? It’s essentially over, though. There are one or two strips left of the story.
By Michael Kinyon on 08.07.07 10:12 am
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