Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

That’s how the kids talk today, right? All “cool” and “hep”? Anyway, I noticed that several webcomickers have been taking swipes at the current financial crises here in ‘Merica. For those of you in the rest of the world, short version: we’ll be bartering cigarettes by this time next year. In the meantime, please enjoy the comedy musings of Matt Boyd & Ian McConville, Sylvan Migdal, and Tatsuya Ishida, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

New webcomic discovery: Tim Smith, one of the creators of Head In The Clouds, invited me to take a gander at this newish (two months or so) offering. It’s a two-character play, a new microscene staged in each strip, and within those inherent limitations it’s doing pretty well. There’s something about this that makes me think of haiku — very brief, very minimalist in art and dialogue, very clean and expressive. Good start so far, and I’ll be interested to see if the creative spark can be maintained inside the self-imposed structure without it going stale.
Tommie Kelly has invited me a few times to take a gander at Road Crew, which just hit 100 updates and the end of a storyline, so this is a decent time to mention it. A little expository at the beginning, but it looks like that was just Kelly setting the basis, since there’s been a better story flow since then. At the risk of being slightly cutesy, it’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to F Chords’ Hamlet. Don’t get too excited about the Shakespeare references (after all, being called “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies” sounds grandiose at first, too) — I just mean to say that Road Crew is what happens just off-panel in a story about musicians. Point it out to the roadie in your life.
Interview with Chris and Kyle Bolton over at The Pulse. I haven’t read SMASH before, but I think I’m going to have to check it out.
One thing I really enjoyed doing last year (and sadly, don’t have the time to do this year) was be a judge for Webcomic Idol. This year’s judging panel has just been, um, empaneled, with DJ Coffman and Xaviar Xerexes returning, to be joined by newcomers Brad Guigar and indycomics superstar Jim Mahfood (I loved the stuff he did in Oni Double Feature).
It’s just about a week or so until the call for entries, so put your applications together, and figure out how you’re going to interact with the judging panel. Best guess — DJ will channel his inner Simon, Xaviar will be Randy, and the other two will have to reveal themselves in terms of their judging styles¹.

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¹Brad’s widely known as the nicest guy ~~in webcomics~~ on the planet, so we’ll have to see if he can bring actual critical feedback to these kids with a Cintiq and a dream of making it big. I’ve never known him to look for anything other than the best in people, so one is forced to assume that he’s totally Paula, only less batshit insane. We hope.

Hey Thanks for the mention,

I actually love “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, so it’s all good!

[…] out Fleen, Road Crew gets a […]

[…] [Profile] Jennifer Contino speaks with Smash co-creators Kyle and Chris Bolton. (Link via Gary Tyrrell.) […]

[…] our earlier question about the judges, it appears that Brad I don’t do portfolio reviews Guigar is Simon, and that’s a good […]

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