The Collective Noun For Webcomics News Items
For those looking for the Howard Tayler interview that was promised yesterday, it’s coming. In the meantime, consider the following, please.
- Speaking of Tayler, changes o’ plenty over at Blank Label’s homepage in the past few weeks. Over roughly the past ten-twelve days, we saw several comics failing to update daily; Paul Southworth’s Ugly Hill leaving the strip lineup and list of comics at the top of the page but not the “Brady Bunch” thumbnail set; the same for Paul Taylor’s Waspi Square; the addition of a link for new member Dave Reddick’s Legend of Bill but pointing to a not-yet active placeholder on the page; and today, the return of Steve Troop (who, by the way, is one of the creators interviewed in that new Calvin and Hobbes sorta-bio)’s Melonpool.
We at Fleen are have not yet determined if these are programming issues or membership shakeups, but one might reasonably assume the latter: Southworth, at least, has launched his new strip wil Bill Barnes, which would complicate the act of keeping the strip at BLC because BLC is a different kind of collective; to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only one out there that merges the revenues of its members.
Other high-profile collectives like Halfpixel or Dumbrella are really just a common brand name (aka A bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists I’m loosely associated with. We have a sort of mutual non-aggression pact.) without intermixed finances from things like ads. We may be seeing BLC transforming itself from a corporatized collective (CoCo?) to just the regular kind. Or it could be bugs in the code — I have not received definitive information from anybody in a position to know, and I imagine we’ll all find out what the deal is soon enough anyway. Lesson to take away: webcomics journalism is hard.
Also, if you’re going to have a collective, think about your lineup changes carefully and always compare them against the most important yardstick of all — Will this make Gary change his morning browsing habits? If so, it’s a bad change because Gary is a creature of habit and his brain takes a while to wake up.
- 24 Hour Comic Day is coming up this weekend! So far, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub seem to be setting up a Dallas branch of the effort, with KC Green coming into town to join in on the fun. My guess is that all three of their twitterfeeds are going to hilarious once the sleep deprivation sets in. Who else is planning on tempting the gods of caffeine and madness?
- New Yorkers and those who love them: the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, as part of their regular Thursday-night event series, will have a panel discussion tomorrow evening on The Comics Press, including friend o’ webcomics Heidi MacDonald, along with Aaron McQuade & Evie Nagy and Douglas Wolk. 7:00pm at the museum, $5 general admission, free for members.
- Also starting tomorrow (and running through the weekend), the Marbella International Film Festival (that would be Spain) will include in its screening schedule a short based on Doug Wilson’s webcomic, K-9 Lives. In honor of the screening, I’ve been trawling Wilson’s archive (only about 100 updates) of wordless comics. The navigation’s a bit of a pain (driven by drop-down list, be forewarned), but the wordless story of a dog with a cat attached to its buttocks is more entertaining than anything describable by that story hook has a right to be.
I’m very excited about 24 Hour Comic Day, though I’ll probably *hate* it by 4 am on Sunday.
By Geoffrey on 09.30.09 4:10 pm
May I propose that the collective noun would be a Scrawl of Webcomics? It also echoes the archivial Crawl.
and in non-comic news, I have an odd short story in this month’s Blotter [http://blotterrag.com]. Grab the PDF for October.
By mckenzee on 10.01.09 12:04 pm
[…] followup: K-9Lives, an animated short with webcomic roots did pretty well at the Marbella International Film Festival; let’s let creator Doug Wilson […]
By Fleen: Try Our Thick, Creamy Shakes » All Con Reports In The Future Should Follow This Format on 10.21.09 3:21 pm
[…] K-9Lives, the short film née webcomic? Got some news on that front from creator Doug Wilson: K-9Lives: Episode2 has recently been […]
By Fleen: Home Of The Webcomics Action News Team! » Better Today, Thanks For Asking on 03.04.10 3:27 pm
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