Gotta keep this one relatively brief, as there’s things to get done before the road trip tomorrow to pick up my new coffee table/art cabinet; this is what webcomics creators have driven me to: I no longer have enough wall space to display my originals and must invest in furniture to store them. Anyway, two webcomics to compare/contrast — one’s brand new, one’s been around a while, both new to me.

Richard Kirk wrote:

For your consideration… Semi-autobiographical cartoon. Nice, clean website. I have no connection except for being a fan.

and David Reddick wrote:

I’m proud to unveil my new twice-weekly fantasy webcomic and labor of love, Legend of Bill, presented by the fine folks at SoulGeek.

Em Cartoons is a nice autobio strip, and I dig creator Maria Smedstad’s art style a great deal — something about the face being so minimally rendered makes it easy to project emotions to the reader. But I have to disagree about the website. While clean, the archive links require an excessive amount of searching to make progress through the story of Em, and that’s death if you’re trying to get people to a) read your archive (especially one going back to November of 2006) and; b) fall in love with the strip and become a fan/evangelist. It would be a bit of work, but translating Em Cartoons to a design that features the standard <<, <, >, and >> buttons would be well worth the effort. I want those who might casually come across Em Cartoons to find it easy to be engrossed, because I think it’s good work.

Bill is just starting (only two updates so far), but features an intriguing premise: standard fantasy-type barbarian gets started not because he’s born on a battlefield and fated to adventure … he just got really bored with his intern gig. Although it’s not quite as obvious in the strips that are up, scroll down to check out Reddick’s sketches and wallpapers … his art is very Sergio Aragonés-esque, and that can only be a good thing. Nobody does loose, scribbly, and fun like Sergio, and the man may yet overtake Tezuka for most pages of comics drawn in a lifetime. If that’s where Reddick’s drawing (ha, ha) inspiration from, he’s in damn good company

Okay, on the one had Brooke “Otter” Spangler does a pretty damn cool webcomic, and on the other she has repeatedly threatened me with hideous fates worse than death. What’s needed here is a tie-breaker to kick her into either the cool people I should buy a beer or the mortal enemies who must be destroyed list.

And voilà: she’s sharing some of her well-learned lessons in an essay entitled The Eight Things I’ve Found Helpful in Creating a Webcomic. There’s some damn good thinking going on here that webcomickers of all stripes (but particularly the newbie variety) ought to read and digest carefully.

For brevity’s sake, I’m going to copy the Eight Things here, but go read the supporting thoughts in full.

1. Traffic doesn’t really matter
2. Your audience will create an image of you, so control it
3. Don’t whine, ever (or as close to ever as humanly possible)
4. You’re broke; get over it
5. Nine-tenths of everything you try will fail, so plan, plan, plan
6. You can’t please everybody
7. Good manners are essential
8. Don’t expect people to do things for you

To quote Miyamoto Musashi, You must practice this well.

I was going to add something like Pay special attention to these particular items, but they’re all pretty damn good; maybe not live in a cave like a hermit for years before writing it good, more like … no, wait. Scrabbling together a webcomic is kinda like living in a cave like a hermit. Now all Otter has to do is win 60 duels and she can be the reigning warrior/philosopher of webcomics for all time.

Had it not been for the quick email she sent, I might never have seen Eliza Frye’s webcomic The Lady’s Murder (that link takes you to the first page. Start there.). She bills it as a mystery comic, where she does both the writing and the artwork, and she’s posting a new page every weekday. Seriously. It’s a short story with daily updates “unraveling the untimely death and infamous character of Miss Marie Madeleine.”

I’m a sucker for interesting color work, and this piece certainly has that. I think it’s watercolor work, but I’m not certain, and I like that it isn’t easy to tell. But look, really, at that color work: from the blood spatter on that butcher’s apron to the fetching purple in the background of some of the pages (and while we’re here, can I just mention I very much enjoy the unusual page composition?), and the rich reds in others, it’s some compelling artwork the likes of which I don’t seem to see often online. Look at the detail. Look at how it evokes some of what you’d see in the Sandman series.

What’s particularly excellent is that it’s a very, very new series (I think we’re only about 12 pages in?) and so it’ll be an interesting experience for me to read along as the series moves forward. I’m not sure for how long she’ll be posting (or for how long the one-per-weekday posting will keep happening, given how detail-rich the work is), but I have some early guesses as to the culprit…

First, this. I would have mentioned it earlier, but modesty prevailed. However, we’re now on a trendline, people. Check it out: Fox in New York grilling one of Jon’s disciples, because he’s a threat. Or something.

Not really webcomics per se, but sorta: I was just going to quietly revel in the awfulness of the now-infamous new Tokyopop contracts, but I don’t need to because Bryan Lee O’Malley’s already done so. More on the general topic of giving away your IP from the Halfpixellians in Webcomics Weekly #34.

And if you are going to work for essentially free, wouldn’t you rather it be for a good cause? Michael Rouse-Deane is looking for artists (who aren’t already working with him) to contribute to the Guest Strip Project‘s big charity push:

Basically, I’m after 31 artists that ain’t on my list so far to do stand-alone strips for August as the GSP is having a huge month donation drive trying to gain money.

So I’m asking the artists to do strips during July for me that are stand-alone and don’t relate to any of the storylines we’ve had, and that the whole month is gonna be filled with artists and people visiting the site every day and hopefully donating to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Books!

• Andrew Bell‘s Do Not Eat! is now available to those that haven’t fortunate (?) enough to be in near proximity to Andrew Bell. Please, share the tender back meat.
• I’m not sure how Paul Taylor manages to draw in a style that comes across as so light-hearted and fun, yet also satisfies every cheesecake fan that wants to be serviced. Whoof — that sounded sketchier than I intended, which I guess is okay, because Taylor’s just released a sketchbook of Wapsi Square mystery girl Monica. Non-repro blue never looked so good.

Were I the sort that believes in things like karmic debt, I’d start to suspect that James Kochalka feels really guilty over something he did in a past life, ’cause he’s sure doing awesome things for us to make up for whatever it might have been. As you all no doubt recall, Kochalka opened up the archives of American Elf not two months ago, and now he’s given us another gift.

In celebration of his birthday (yesterday), Kochalka added SuperF*ckers to the AE site; the latest one is always free and the archives are available to Elf subscribers (elfscribers?). In his own words:

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until the end of June, there will be a new page of SuperF*ckers comics. Four issues of the series have been published by Top Shelf, and it is among my most popular work. It’s not a superhero parody, not quite a satire, not completely ironic. It’s a story of a bunch of superpowered teenagers living in a clubhouse together. It all takes place down the bank behind my house, in a field.

(In my mind, I actually consider this new comic to be sort of a spin off of SuperF*ckers, with that series’ most prominent character getting his own book. Consider this Jack Krak #1.)

There was also a cryptic comment about wanting to make “another exciting announcement like this soon”, but honestly — he’s given me enough for now. Any more excitement, I might burst.

• Other webcomickers with a 26 May birthday: Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman (that is so damn cute, but exactly what I’d expect from the perfect couple)
• The world of webcomics will have to do with one less Ryan for the next month or so, as Ryan Estrada heads off to scale Kilimanjaro and have adventures. First up: getting on your scheduled flight is for wusses.

Okay! Check these, then get back to your grilling.

• Much Bellen! news from Box Brown: he’s having a contest to celebrate the 2 year anniversary and 400th strip, which just happen to fall on the same day. Of additional interest would be Bellen! guest week (running now) and Bellen! #4 is now in print.
• Lucas Turnbloom of Imagine This writes to tell us the creation of a new collective, Tall Tale Features. Tale-tellers include Brian Anderson, Dave Reddick, Mike Witmer, Scott Metzger, Brock Heasley, and (of course) Turnbloom himself.
• Finally, big announcement from Jessi Bavolack of Geeks Next Door:
  

  I’m writing to you to let you know I’m getting married! We’ve been doing a wedding storyline in the comic (which will pause May 26th for the real-life ceremony and such; resumes on the week of June 9th).

  Fleen wishes Ms Bavolack (soon to be Pascal) and the lucky groom all the best. Their families, friends, miscellaneous guests at the reception, cater-waiters, heck — everybody in the immediate area also gets good wishes. Have a happy Memorial Day, everybody.

First and foremost, why did my wedding invitation not look like this? Dibs on the Helpolax!

• Transplant Comics has added Stendec by Cory Osterberg; it’s a weekly black and white gag strip. Also over at Transplant, Adam York Gregory of The Flowfield Unity has just released his second print collection. What makes this one special is … let’s allow Gregory to tell us himself:
  

  I worked as a typesetter and designer for a publishing house for a while, and I know how to set books, but using a couple of the POD services I found that whilst 90% of the time the end product was fine, there would be a few occasions where the printers would mess up — lost pages, bad cropping, someone else’s book appearing in the middle of mine — and since the books are sent directly without me, or apparently anyone else checking them, the first I would hear is when I received an email from a disappointed customer.

  That’s just not on. At least by hand making the book [emphasis Fleen’s] I get to approve every copy. I use a traditional method, stitching the pages into sections (or signatures) and combining them before I add the cover.

  There was a time with these sort of comics when you knew that the person drawing them had very likely stapled your copy together … there is a contact link right there … and I wanted to go one further, I wanted to make each book an individual.

  It just seems to fit the ethos of my comic, the whole hand-drawn ideal translated reasonably well on the web, but in the process I lost something when turning it back into a book. Now, I’ve corrected that.

  Editorial note here — looking at the price of the hand-made book, it is somehow comparable to POD pricing. Well done, Adam York Gregory!

• Recent round numbers: Real Life has 2000 strips under its belt, and Arthur, King of Time and Space has reached four years. Congrats!
• And finally, Cat Garza wants you to know that his latest project (editing the Secrets & Lies anthology) will release at MoCCA in two weeks, in the vicinity of table C27. Old school comics guys, webcomickers, students from the CCS. Drop by and give it a good look-see!

Exciting things are afoot, I tells ya. I can’t even decide on what the top story should be, but here’s some candidates:

• Wigu is back! Three strips worth! Paisley is gothier, Quincy is Quincier, and Romy’s probably still sleepin’ off a bender since it’s only about quarter of eight in the morning.
• Astronaut Elementary is back! Plus Dave Roman has expanded a previous 2-page character intro into a 15-page epic complete with graytone in order to –and I’m quoting here — add to the overall space-iness.
• So that’s why I don’t have my copies of the first Gunnerkrigg Court and latest Devil’s Panties collections. Hopefully ASP will have their act together soon, but if these are books you want to see, I recommend putting in an order with your local comic shop — nothing prods a comics publisher quite so much as Diamond saying, “Uh, we really need those books now, please.” Okay, that’s a lie — historically, not much prods the average comics publisher, but judging from Jennie Breeden & Tom Siddell’s blog postings, they’re wondering where the books are too, so it’s not a case of artist couldn’t make deadline.
• From alert reader Brett g Porter (the “g” stands for “groomsman at my wedding”): a contest for cartoonists on the topic of keeping scientific enquiry free of political interference. I can think of a crowd of webcomickers that could do a sick job on this topic. Better yet, there’s a top prize of $500 plus a trip to Washington DC. EVEN BETTER: one of the judges is Wiley Miller, who doesn’t think very highly of webcomics and could be made to eat his words. Go to it, creators!

I’m having a wicked sense of deja vu: I can’t recall if I’ve written about Jessica McLeod’s work yet or if it just seems so familiar to me that it’s as if I must have written about it at some point! Am I sleepy? Has work taken over my brain? Did that rollerderby knock to the head scramble my brain? I ran across Ghost Farm recently and was just totally taken in by the clean linework and the colors, the cute little monsters and fangs. I read through them fairly quickly, but they’re something to which I’ll return; Ghost Farm in particulary struck me as something well worth reading.

She’s actually got a stack of comics, though Mungo Bean (“the adventures of an adventure pig!) looks as if it is the most recent of the seven or eight that are there. Activities for Rainy Days has also been recently updated, and is the one which looks more classically like what we think of as webcomics, perhaps, with word balloons and dialogue and such. There’s also a few 24-hour comics available for reading. I imagine these are all likely exquisite in minicomic form, which is not to say they aren’t so online–it’s more to say that they’re kind of adorable and precious, and I can imagine them appearing in print in a way which could potentially totally amplify that. It sort of makes me think about Hope Larson’s lovely Salamander Dream, which I’ve mentioned before.

Her bio, at least on the Webcomics Nation site, is simple and straightforward: “I like drawing ghosts and robots and dinosaurs and cupcakes and little girls. I am part of an artists’ collective, Monster and Robot Industries. You can go there to buy my minis! We also have a LiveJournal community.”

They’re quick, cute reads, perfect for cheering up a dreary day. I’m totally smitten.