The webcomics blog about webcomics

Figure Charles Christopher Isn’t Gearing Up For A Return

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: no strip; the Tenmen are rocking it, though.

Three (3) returns to form that I wanted to mention today, as three (3) of my favorite webcomickers release evidence of getting back to their roots after far too long away. Plus one technology story because sometimes things don’t fit into the theme neatly.

  • First up, Karl Kerschl wrapped up his contributions to Gotham Academy with issue #12 back in December, leading people like me to wonder when we’d see new updates to The Abominable Charles Christopher; as he told me about 18 months ago, he’s got about a year of storyline left to go, and that means he’s got just about the perfect amount of time to finish the story, put together Book 3, and debut it for the Summer 2017 con season.

    Granted, he hasn’t made any formal announcement yet, but why else would he be drawing critters? It could only be more obvious if this fox were instead my beloved Luga, or perhaps Sissi Skunk. Time will tell, but we at Fleen are cautiously optimistic.

  • It’s been too long time since Boy On A Stick And Slither was a regular thing, with bursts of strips in Spring 2015, pre-Summer 2011, and Halloweenish 2010 tiding us over. Steven Cloud, beard-haver extraordinaire and world traveler of renown, is signaling that public-type drawing is perhaps becoming a regular thing again. Instead of comics leading to a punchline or a philosophical point, Cloudy is Instagramming space bases and dream houses along with the occasional cryptozoological treatise. These drawings will make you find your inner 11 year old dreamer.
  • Rich Stevens, having hit 4000 comics last week, has been running some of his favorite comics from days past (with a plan to do so for a couple of weeks) while he retools and decides how to relaunch. He doesn’t seem to be talking about a reboot (which he did before, in conjunction with his foray into syndication back around Aught-Seven) so much as redoing his infrastructure. What will make his comics look as they should on a phone or a tablet, as you can no longer count on everybody browsing by with a monitor at least 1024 pixels wide?

    He’s been talking about the need to rework his site with adaptability in mind on his podcast with Danielle Corsetto, and he’s determined to make things as simple and functional as possible. I believe I heard him mention a standard of being able to update with a text editor and a phone — no fancy CMS for Stevens, no sir; I only just hope that the need to make things look good on phones doesn’t mean we lose out on strips like this one¹.

  • What may turn out to be a decent method of distributing longer comic book-type comics to phones (with the promise of payments to creators, but I guarantee it’s not updateable with a text editor) gets off to a start today: Stela is all about mobile delivery, and that is the entire extent of what I know about it because it’s not launching with an Android version. Somebody with an iPhone let me know if it’s worth anything because hell if I know.

Spam of the day:

Thank you garytyrrellat Red Lobster SurveyPartners!

Why am I being invited to Red Lobster? Oh shit, did I fuck someone good and manage to forget it?

_______________
¹ We will leave his uncharitable attitude towards New Jersey to the side for the moment.

RSS feed for comments on this post.