Hate Song. HATE SONG. Sing a SONG about Hate. Celebrate that you HATE!

Life is too short to drink cheap beer.

Move like some sort of jungle cat, silent… fast… strong!

Move yo Honkey Ass.

Get Back to the Yak, Jack.

Hop On!

Don’t be a hate monger, be a hate stylist!

I first heard about Josh Mirman because of Disposable Parts.

He wrote and drew Stubble for roughly four years, and Punks and Nerds for a little more than a year.

The last few weeks, though, he seems to have started to lose his focus a bit. Okay, more than a bit. In fact, despite some hints, it looks like he’s completely given up.

If we want to dig a little deeper into why, the evidence in his LiveJournal is pretty clear. Josh Mirman no longer wants it as bad as he did. It’s all about the money.

Or maybe he’s just gone completely crazy.

Here‘s the breaking point. Right there is where an artist loses his love. And it’s all your fault, Internet!

Matt Buchwald started drawing Fodi in the middle of 2003. The story of Fodi is a classic story of triumph over adversity, time travel, beer, and Matt’s strange obsesssion with winged women.

Before we dig in, Matt wanted to make sure that he would get to say at least one funny thing. So here’s Matt for a brief intro:

A chicken walks into a library and goes up to the front desk. She asks the librarian, “Book book book book?” The librarian leaves and comes back with four books. The chicken takes the books and sits down at a table, where she hands the books to her friend the frog. The frog looks at the books in turn and saids, “Read it, read it, read it, read it.”

Mission Accomplished, Matt! And now, our interview about Matt, Fodi, and the Beer That Saved Pittsburgh.
(more…)

Some quick news from the Dayfree Press front.

Butter Nut Squash started updating last week after a several month long hiatus.

They are also selling a 30 page book containing reprints, new material, rants, and pinups. It was supposed to be released on the 15th.. but they don’t tell you where or how to buy it. I imagine they don’t actually want to sell any copies, just have them printed up so they can roll around in them ala Scrooge McDuck. Now, some basic deduction would lead one to suspect that it’s being printed by Speak Easy Comics, and is available at comic stores you can find using Comic Shop Locator. But SpeakEasy’s website claims that BNS stuff will be “coming soon”, and Comic Shop Locator doesn’t have a way to find out which stores have BNS stuff.

Most of the artists who use our contact form to entice us to read or review their comic also include something else. They apologize for marketing their strip – and usually in the contradictory form of “sorry for the shameless self-promotion”. If you’re apologizing, you’re not shameless, sorry!

TK Longmire sent us just such a missive yesterday – and guess what? It worked. This is the lesson for the day. If you want to make money off your comic, then you need regular readers. In order to get any readers at all, you must market your strip!

TK’s comic, Tasty Human Meat starts out being about a guy and his robot roommate. Despite this fairly pedestrian setup, it gets quirky fairly quick.

And then he switches to a series called Alternate Universe Comix, which takes place after a nuclear holocaust turned everyone into sealife.

TK has given us an entire world, with melancholy, schadenfreude, office life, teen bravado, communists, and everything else.

Under the sea? Yeah. That’s where I’d like to be. Thanks for a good comic, TK.

Jin Wicked does a pretty good job of making pieces of her life amusing and interesting. Some of her jokes material is a bit overused, but all in all, she stays entertaining.

Be warned, though, she expresses her political views!

David Malki ! apparently employs a cast of thousands in the production of Wondermark.

At least, if you believe a single word of his three page missive on the Making Of Wondermark. According to this missive, no I say it’s a manifesto, David employs the following persons or groups of people:

• creative staff
• research department
• writing staff
• Creative Director
• Executive V.P.
• compositing team
• Line Cook
• auditing agency
• liners
• ballooner/balloonist
• penciller (six)
• layout artists
• Korean roughing studio
• research team
• letterer
• inkers (three)
• Distribution Chief
• freelance antiquers

Counting the timeframes given and doing some estimating of my own for the rest… it takes somewhere between three and six months to produce each Wondermark strip.

The piling on of lies in this “making of” document compound to the point of indecency and beyond to a level that is clearly illegal.
It makes my head ache so bad I wish it would explode!

Saturday was your big chance to be part of history, to join in the 70th annual Burt Reynolds day.

I remember the first time I celebrated Burt Reynolds day. It was, in fact, Saturday.

I was sitting in an odd little pub, having beer with Byron of Team Special Olympics. “Today is Burt Reynolds Day”, says your intrepid reporter, “You should participate!”

In a flash, Byron produced some bristol board and a blueline pencil, and had whipped out a number of extra fine quality comics that not only featured the man of the hour, Burt Reynolds, but also had wit and charm that made the entire bar fall on the floor and roll around on that sticky sticky surface laughing uncontrollably.

And I knew that I was in a moment of greatness and that nobody there would fail to remember Burt Reynolds Day, and that I had witnessed a tiny slice of history being created.

If only Byron had posted his comics.

P.S. Buy! Buy! Buy! (this message brought to you by D.J. Coffman)

But most importantly, Girls With Slingshots is pretty funny.

Give it a whirl.

You’ve decided you want to make a webcomic. Yay! Good for you!

Now you need to decide what kind of webcomic to make.

The single panel gag-a-day strip looks like it’s easy. All you have to do is, every day, think of a joke and then draw it.

That’s not hard at all! Jokes are easy – just whatever makes you laugh at the time. And you know how to draw… why, everyone knows how to draw.

So you start your comic, and you put it out there. And maybe you do some minimum of marketing other than telling all your friends “Hey, I started a webcomic, isn’t it keen?”

But guess what?

Single-panel gag-a-day comics are hard. Very Very Hard. They are hard to get right, they are hard to maintain.

There’s no room for character growth, because you don’t really have characters. There’s no room to tell long stories, because you’ve only got one panel. There’s no room for artistic growth, because there’s nothing driving it – the joke is the point of the strip, not the art. So if the barn doesn’t share the same perspective with the road leading to it, and the pig sits on a different horizontal plane than the guy applying the wrench… It doesn’t matter. It’s a pig being adjusted with a giant wrench! That’s got to be funny, right?

And six months later, you’ve been doing a daily strip, and you’ve got less than 100 regular readers and you don’t know why.

You would have been better off starting out with two guys on a couch playing video games.

Because then you have room to grow, and room to learn, and room to change.