I’ve got a job, people. Anyway, Scott Kurtz has major news today — PvP is going animated. This is one of those ‘value-added’ deals that digital comics are capable of, one of the things you hear about all the time at San Diego panels, but don’t often see carried through to completion. In this case, it will involve traditional 2D animation (not Flash), with production and a voice-acting cast from Blind Ferret Entertainment (which is the shop of Ryan Sohmer, of Least I Could Do fame). From the esteemed Mr Kurtz:

Ryan [Sohmer] called on three separate occasions to talk to me about making a PvP animated seires.

And three times I said “No way!�

Saying “no� has been my default answer to anyone inquiring about animating PvP. Over the last five years I’ve had a lot of offers and inquiries from people in show-business, and had a total of four different representatives pitching PvP around Hollywood at various times. But, as always, I would rather bypass the normal route and do it myself. I want to retain ownership, start small and grow big. I want to learn the process. You can’t do that in Hollywood. But, I can do that with Blind Ferret. It just took Ryan a couple months to finally convince me of it.

Kris [Straub] and I are co-producers and co-writers on PvP The Series. We write the scripts, determine the direction, look and pace of the show. This is an incredible opportunity to learn the process, get our hands messy, work with animators, direct voice actors, learn script writing, work post-production and sound…all of it. This is a chance to take PvP and make a whole new animal with it, without having to sell it away to a faceless studio who doesn’t really understand it.

An opportunity like this comes once in a lifetime; how could we not take it?

PvP: The Animated Series is going to be a subscription feature, and it’s going to depend in large part on pre-orders to pay for all the animators and voice actors and production. Pricing for a year’s subscription will be $19.95 until January 1st, then jump to $29.95; the program is due to launch on February 1st.

Sight unseen, it’s too soon to determine if this is going to be a roaring success, a noble failure, or something in between, but given the pedigree of those involved, I’m tending more towards the “success” end of the scale at this time. We at Fleen will do our best to bring you interviews with the principals, and keep you up on the progress of the show.

For those of you who haven’t met Mr Jon Rosenberg, there is a remarkably accurate self-portrait in today’s Goats, which by the way is strip #2000.

To ensure that he makes it another 2000 strips, I encourage all and sundry to click through, enjoy a hearty laugh at Hoggle‘s antics, and resolve to contribute anew to Rosenberg’s deep sense of self-loathing. That’s where comedy comes from!

From page 16 of issue 183 of Wizard magazine: props for PA, DS, DC, SGR, and G.

Little Gamers speculates on Project Wonderful, Rich Stevens, Jeff Rowland, penis size, and horse cock, all in three panels.

Seriously, why are you reading this, American readers? You should be eating pie!

Anyway, quick bit today, as I received in the mail this week a Stuff Sucks skin for my iPod. As near as I can tell, Liz Greenfield is the first to put webcomics stuff on a iPod skin, and I’m surprised that others haven’t jumped on the bandwagon — it’s a great combination.

The actual manufactury is by the folks at GelaSkins, and not having been previously familiar with their products, I gotta say that it’s pretty nice, but a slight pain to apply. It took some patient attempts to get the skin to wrap my Nano with no overlap, and the screen insert took a while to give up its air bubbles. Also, there are almost vanishingly-small strips that need to be peeled off after applying the clickwheel & select button overlays, or the controls don’t work smoothly (you can see the white rings in the photo above, but this was not well explained in the product instructions).

But none of these concerns are major, and none of them detract from Greenfield’s killer art; I feel confident that my tunes are now sexily protected against all smears, scratches and minor bumps. It’s so nice, in fact, that my wife wants one with T-Rex and/or Utahraptor for her iPod (Are you reading this, Ryan North? It’s not a holiday for you today, but you can still have pie if you want!). Anyway, the totality of field testing from Fleen Labs has resulted in a rating of Unequivocally Worth Your Money for the Stuff Sucks iPod skin. Before we wrap (ha, ha!), let’s hear from the creator herself about recent goings-on:

One great thing about making webcomics in Manchester England, as I’m sure John Allison would agree, is that it never requires you to leave your house on a cold day in November while it is invariably raining buckets. I made a dangerous exception this [past] weekend to launch my first British art show, alongside four other creators from across the land! A wide array of traditional media was used including lumps of wood, heavy drinking, and vandalism. The turnout was enough fun to last me throughout the wet winter season.

(Rumor has it that Greenfield will be venturing afield again for the Birmingham International Comics Show, Dec 9 & 10; if you see her, tell her the skin rocks hard.)

Editor’s note: Yeah, we saw that the graphic didn’t upload. It’s a holiday, we’ll fix it eventually. Sorry. Fixed!

Man, is it a terrible thing that I forgot how much I love this strip? The hijacking of the bus/Sheriff Pony Goes To Hell storyline is making me crap vanilla ice cream.

So everybody spend your available free time getting back into the Wigu habit, and see what happened a week before that first Monday.

Enjoy Thanksgiving, those of you who are geographically situated to do so.

Oh, yeah.

No offense, Paul, but what’s up with the state of Rhode Island? And Connecticut? Seriously, check out this graphic, which shows the progress of the McCloud 50 States Tour. Now check out the Tour schedule, which finishes its Northeast Sector leg with three dates in Pennsylvania, and nothing in the aforementioned RI or CT (although apparently there is a thing for Delaware later in the Tour — they couldn’t get scheduled before the end of the year). If you know a group, store, company, school, whatever that would be a good sponsor for the Cavalcade O’ Fun, get ’em in gear … there’s still time to get a booking arranged. If not, McCloud’s threatened to do a guerilla event at a Denny’s, and I think we all know that can only end in tears (and a bucket).

In any event, the Tour rolled into NYU last night, with a sellout crowd filling the auditorium; Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman, Kyle Baker, Meredith Gran, Chris Hastings, and other [web]comics luminaries were in attendance.

The presentation itself was a highly-entertaining 50 minutes, covering the common thesis of McCloud’s books (that you can write with pictures), the five main areas of the new book (comics is a series of choices: of moment, frame, image, word, and flow), and how he came to the ideas of digital comics that caused such upset in the Reinventing days.

(more…)

Seriously, what I thought would be a mild discussion of marginal interest turned into a comment-fest (albeit a mostly polite and helpful one). So here’s one that, for all I know, will either drop with a thud, or turn into the Great Flame-Fest of Aught-Six.

Over at THE ENGINE, interblag home of Warren Ellis, is a discussion of standards. Colonel Joey kicked things off with what might almost be termed a Call For Proposals: if webcomics are going to be noticed by search engines, and if they’re going to have a prayer of shifting between service providers as needs require, we ought to figure out ways to do those sorts of things as a group. The alternative is that everybody works with something different, and creators may get locked into providers because the cost of shifting is prohibitive.

‘Round about the bottom of page one, Phillip Karlsson (aka “Dumbrella Hosting Guy”, aka “Publisher of Fleen”) chimes in with some of the background of the Goats strip transcription system (which dates to early 2003), some of how Oh No Robot works, and some of the design challenges of describing something as (and this is the only word I have that works — Phillip and I have talked webcomics data schema more that I care to recount) lumpy as a webcomic.

All in all, it’s fascinating if you happen to like this sort of thing; if you’ve got some experience in data slinging, you might want to take a gander at the discussion. We’re at a unique point in the evolution of webcomics, where people are starting to think about what kinds of tools are useful in making a webcomic (any webcomic) work well, and they’re making those tools available to all and sundry. If we can get a few more people making a few more non-propietary tools, we’ll be much better off a decade from now than we would have been otherwise.

Shishio has pointed us towards a forum topic at Comic Genesis (nee Keenspot Keenspace), that quite frankly has me puzzled. Shishio’s post in turn points to another by Matt Johnson at the Cornstalker forums. See what you can make of this:

To be honest, I’d like to see more comic artists willing to be active participants in the webcomic community. Maybe it’s just me, but there seem to be far too many people who have no interest in any other other comics online other than their own. And on the rare occasion they do show interest in others in the community, it’s in the context of asking for a critique, for a guest comic, an artist to draw for them, or an announcement like, “Hey, come look at my comic! I just finished chapter 13!” I know I’m a broken record on this subject, but the best part of doing a web comic is meeting all the cool people around here and learning from them. If you miss out on that, you’re pretty much missing out on everything that makes having a web comic so much fun.

I’m not sure it’s the issue that Johnson thinks it is (although there are differing views on what the ‘webcomics community’ actually is), but just in case Shishio tells us:

I agree that webcomic creators need to work harder to make webcomics as a whole more successful. And so I have launched The Webcomic Word of Mouth Project, the idea of which is to get webcomic creators to pledge to link to other webcomics they like which will hopefully increase everybody’s readers.

Maybe I’m reading the wrong webcomics, but I just did a quick scan of my trawl list, and discovered two things:

1. Pretty much every creator has between 10 and 20 links to other webcomics; granted, some of those links are going to be to collective-mates, but how do you explain Ryan North linking to 36 different strips? Okay, Penny Arcade doesn’t maintain regular links, but if they did, it could be construed as an act of aggression against your server.
2. Everybody links Achewood. It must be like a law or something.

I don’t think this is going to make much difference with established creators, but if you’re just starting out, the WOMP page adds:

I also invite you to sign up on the forum, where you can discuss webcomics, get critiques, assistance, look for collabarators, and of course, promote your own webcomic so that other creators might enjoy and link to it.

I think it’ll be a while before this one develops into anything significant, but then again: tiny seeds, mighty oaks, etc. See you on Monday.