Pre-reg for New England Webcomics Weekend is now closed.
Organizers are accepting waitlist requests, and are going to do their best to accommodate as many people as possible. If you have made travel plans and didn’t get registered, Meredith Gran is requesting you contact her at the email address provided on the registration page.
This is growing unexpectedly huge, and so very quickly. Webcomics are clearly a force to be reckoned with.
Superosity, now ten years old, retains every last bit of it mind-messing powers. Add to that the fact that it takes a killer blizzard to keep Superosity from updating, and you see what an achievement we’re talking about. Fleen congratulates Chris Crosby on his incredible act of longevity.
We at Fleen have written about Scott Campbell before — he of the awesome Igloo Head & Tree Head stories in the various Flight anthologies, the cover of MC Frontalot’s latest CD, and the hundreds of comics over at Double Fine. Honestly, we at Fleen can’t get enough of him.
And those of you in the greater LA area will have an opportunity to check out even more of Campbell’s work this weekend, as his solo show, HOME SLICE, comes to Gallery Nucleus:
HOME SLICE is a cleverly conjured concept of cutaway homes which allows all of us the opportunity to peer into the everyday lives of the numerous charismatic characters which inhabit Scott C.’s world.
Scott C. illustrates the internal workings of Rocket House, Whale House, and Cloud House among others offering his largest original works to date.
This exhibit will be unparalleled in nature with over 25 new works, a contest giveaway, an exclusive print release, installation work as well as puppets (yes, puppets!) handsomely crafted by the talented gang over at the Annie award-winning Screen Novelties.
The opening reception is this Saturday, March 7, from 7 pm to 11 pm local time. As is the custom at such events, Campbell will be there to meet and greet, and there will be refreshments. HOME SLICE runs through March 23rd.
Hey, have you been following the new series at Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods? Today’s installment of Forumville features rotating text in the first panel; so far, I’ve seen seven different setups, and it has an odd effect on the rhythm of the joke. I keep imagining that Splat returns time and time again to the conversation between At and Pipe and is disappointed every time.
Interestingly, it’s all a giant Easter Egg. On the Bad Gods site, there’s no notice of the changing text — if you didn’t happen to reload the page, you’d miss it entirely. Contacted for comment, Sjöberg told us that the text is selected randomly from a pool of:
[r]ight at this moment, thirty. [A new one is selected] every three minutes. I’m going to do another twenty over the course of today, and probably leave it at that for a total of fifty.
There goes my productive time today.
In less frustrating news, as long-time readers of this page will be aware, the road to webcomics success runs through me — not unlike how the road to the White House runs through Letterman. Thus, given my vast powers1, I declare today to be Kate Beaton Day in Webcomicstan. Check out some of her Conversations With My Younger Self strips, which have been remastered and posted in cleaned up form.
Then be sure to closely study her entirely true presentation of Darwin’s travails to get his theories accepted at the lastest Dark Horse Presents at MySpace. There’s also pieces there by some guys named Malki ! and Onstad; they look pretty okay.
Oooh! Oooh! Wild speculation! Dark Horse publishes Wondermark and Achewood books! Could a sufficiently big response to Beaton’s two pager prompt them in that direction with her? Tell all your friends about The Origin of Man now, because I want to do more than just send Beaton my undying affection for her work. I want to give her American cash money in exchange for a physical artifact that she can sketch in, and so should you.
_______________
1 A complete catalog of said powers would be revealed as nearly identical to those possessed by Wonderboy and Young Nastyman.
Quickly, Robin! To the Linkmobile!
Back hurting, but driveway clear. Short one today.
First off, something that you may have seen around the net; wasn’t sure I was going to talk about this because it’s not about webcomics per se, but there’s an object lesson there so let’s run with it. From Ted Rall, current president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists came a letter regarding the situaion of Brian Duffy and the Des Moines Register. Short version is that Duffy was fired recently as their editorial cartoonist, and the Register has kept his originals (25 years worth) and plans to dispose of them themselves. Full letter under the cut at the bottom.
I don’t know if Duffy’s terms of employment specified that the Register owned his originals, or was silent on the matter, or merely this is/was customary practice. Fact is, guy’s lost a job, and lost whatever value he might have obtained from selling his originals. Rall is appealing to the Register to return the originals, to (as near as I can tell) no response from the paper. Were this Europe, which has a history of creators being able to assert “moral rights” to their work, this wouldn’t have happened — but it ain’t.
Even if Duffy’s employment contract didn’t specify ownership of the originals, if the Register doesn’t choose to give them back, it’s a court case, delays, expense, and no clear outcome for potentially years. The lesson is this: if you work for somebody else in a creative capacity and you don’t have paper saying explicitly that you get to retain original works, don’t count on ever getting them back. Tattoo that someplace nice and visible on your contract-signing hand so you don’t forget.
Join us as we attempt to raise awareness about the nasty habits of broad-tailed rodents. SMOKING BEAVERS are a problem!* Really.
I hope this doesn’t ruin our chance to get sponsorship from big tobacco.
*If this notice seems vaguely pornographic, then get y’r mind out the gutter, son.
[M]y film critique site, Genrezvous Point is going into its third major story, this time covering the Oscars (as some sort of post-world metaphoric Olympic games – it’s weird, yes, but makes sense in context).
Also, figured I’d point out that when I was 12, I also did frog stories – “Commando Frog” which was a comic first before I made it into a weird stop motion short film later that year. Been trying to find pictures of it all day! The clay model is in storage, unfortunately.
Man, was I the only 12 year old without a frog fetish?
The first 200 strips are also being collected in trade paperback form and will be available by the time Heroes Con approaches in June.
Per yesterday’s note about Scott McCloud’s return to webcontentery, he’s off to a roaring start with a pointer towards The Grimace Project (note: McCloud’s site doesn’t seem to support direct linking of posts yet, so head to his LiveJournal instead).
Short form: it’s a software toy that lets you mix-n-match the emotional states from McCloud’s Making Comics, then shows you what the resultant face looks like; it looks like an invaluable tool for artists wanting to convey emotional states without confusing the reader.
Shorter form: it’s addictive as all hell. I’ve spent half the day trying to come up with a good mix to express schadenfreude (I think it might take more inputs than the system presently allows). Also, if you leave it alone, it cycles through emotions. Creeee-py.
It’s official. Ursula Vernon has stolen my heart; Kate, Rene, Otter, I’m sorry. You’ll always be special to me but you just can’t compete with this news:
Well, it’s getting close enough that I can finally make the announcement — Graphic Smash is spinning Digger off and giving it its own site! They think that Digger was pretty much the breakout hit of the site, and they’ve wanted to do this for awhile, but there was some buying out and corporate stuff, so everything was on hold for awhile. But now it’s back on track! We’ll have our own site! Woot!
It will also be going off subscription, and over to advertising — Graphic Smash is pretty much abandoning the subscription model. I’m pleased that we’ll get more traffic as a result, and that people will finally get to read the whole archives for free, but I also find myself wanting to do something nice for all my faithful subscribers, who quite literally paid my rent a couple of times — without them, Digger would have been abandoned long ago, and I owe them big time for having sustained me and my comic so wonderfully and well. [emphasis mine]
I cannot tell you how awesome it is that when people ask me about favorite webcomics, and I include Digger on the list, that I know they’ll be able to read the entire archive and get engrossed. No more subscription wall! It’s not live yet, but the new site has a handy RSS feed that will inform you when the transition is complete. Now here’s where you get to help thank Ms Vernon for this supreme gift to us all — if you haven’t read Digger, give it a solid try. If you read Digger (and therefore love it), harrangue all and sundry into joining the rest of us on Tuesdays and Thursdays for wombatty goodness (and once they’re hooked, point them towards the books).
Oh, and if you follow the link to Vernon’s announcement, she’s soliciting for ideas on what she can do to thank her soon-to-be-former paid subscribers. If you’re one of them, be sure to chime in.
While working on the graphic novel, I’m hoping to finally return to both regular blogging and to gradually finishing up The Right Number as well as one or two more Morning Improvs. I may not be making webcomics full-time for a while, just an hour or two of web work each morning, but I’d like to at least keep a toe dipped in the water on a regular basis starting next week.
Can I get a yay?
Um, woo? Haven’t seen much in the way of MG celebration in webcomicdom today — maybe tomorrow it’ll all be ashes and sackcloth and repentance, but somehow I doubt it.
All was well, then Andrew Hussie of MS Paint Adventures revealed that he too did comics when he was 11 — and it was called Super Frog (even more depressing fact — when Hussie was 11, I was at grad nerd school). Then we come to learn that a fellow named Blake Reitz also did a comic called Super-Frog (he was 12 this time … and I was already a homeowner — stop being so young, webcomickers!). This is just getting freaky. If there are any more instances of super froggery, please let us know. Science must know!
