New podcast debuts tonight!

As part of the revitialization of Boxcar Comics and the group’s continuing effort to promote themselves publicly in a cross-functional manner, we have created a brand new podcast at TalkShoe called the Boxcar Comics Hobo Jamboree!

What is our podcast about? Good question — one that we will be answering tonight during our first broadcast recording TONIGHT at 8:00 PM CST! The goal moving forward is to talk about the world of webcomics from the creator’s perspective. We’ll cover everything about the creative process — including how we come up with ideas for jokes and storylines, artistic technique, promotion, planning, audience reaction and criticism.

If you are a fan of HalfPixel‘s Webcomics Weekly, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here, but Boxcar Comics Hobo Jamboree won’t be weekly right out of the gate. We plan on hosting our show once a month. If there is greater demand or we have more topics we want to discuss, we might bump that up to two a month.

Tom Brazelton will be the moderator for each show and various members of the collective will rotate in and out as their schedules permit. If you can’t join us live, remember that you can download the show from TalkShoe. We’ll be adding it to iTunes in the near future.

Kris Straub conquers the world!

In a week or two, my contract at my day job is drawing to a close, and I’m going to be looking for part-time or other contract work so I can pay rent. But … I think Starslip Crisis is already enough to bring in a full-time wage — at least if it’s cultivated. Right now we really don’t spend much time together, and eight hours of my day are occupied elsewhere, so I’m either at work, or we’re shipping, and not growing Starslip into the bastion of sci-fi humor it should be.

I’m looking forward to having a couple weeks to regroup and refocus, and I’ve been planning out the year.

If I can come back to webcomics full-time — if you help me come back to webcomics full-time (!) — then I will not do Starslip Crisis, or Chainsawsuit, or a twice-weekly pop culture strip, or a thrice-weekly brand-new strip.

No, friends — I will do all of the above. I have concrete plans for four concurrent strips. I just need the time to give to them.

Not content to conquer the Gervaisian webcomic mindspace, Owen Dunne’s running a banner ad promising the return of You Damn Kid … sort of.

And for those of you that need to point friends or family to a compact What are these webcomics, anyway? primer, Lea Hernandez has you covered.

So Lore has been messing around with his drawing. First Lore needed a representation of Lore to interact with Lore Brand Lore; his first attempt looked like Charles Addams was idly sketching a young Pope Fester, but he got better.

Now Lore‘s engaged in the venerable cartoonist exercise of messing with eyes, and has tried out a variety of them from various webcomics, and you can play the game at home — match the webcomic to the eyes, and for bonus points, assign an emotional state. And remember the lesson of Meredith Gran: assymmetical eyes are 37% funnier than their matched counterparts.

In other news — and it’s nothing to do with anything — but advertisers really need to pay attention to the demographics of webcomics readers a bit better. I can’t think of an audience likelier to be hostile to the message of Ben Stein’s evolutionists = Nazis propaganda fest than the readers of Diesel Sweeties (I assuming that the readers of DS overlap quite a bit with the readers of xkcd and Dresden Codak), and yet there’s a 300 x 250 ad there on the front page. So on behalf of Mr Stevens, thanks for throwing away your money directly into his pocket.

PS: Smock.

Webcomics are represented in the following categories:

Best Publication For Teens

Best Humor Publication

Best Digital Comic

If I had to make a guess at this early stage, I’d say that Sugarshock! is a lock for the category that best matches “webcomics”, which is odd because it was a total of what? 15 pages? and the the criteria for the category read professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online. If Planet Karen got rejected for not being “long-form” (which it did), I’m not sure how Sugarshock! (which I enjoyed, but it’s essentially a one-shot) could possibly qualify. So okay — let the bitching begin!

The Eisners will be awarded at San Diego Comic-Con in July.

A major addition to the American Elf archives just hit; let’s let James Kochalka tell us all about it:

In May 2002 I started posting my daily diary comic strip online. However, the strip actually began several years earlier than that, in October 1998. The early years were collected in book form by Top Shelf, but they were never included in the online version of American Elf … until now!

The archives at American Elf now go all the way back to October 26, 1998. The early strips are black & white, and then when I began putting them online I decided to try a 2-tone color system. However, that two-tone system very quickly expanded into a full and vibrant exploration of color. I’ve tried to use it to enhance the emotional power of the work.

But the early black & white strips have a special power of their own. Both are good, powerful in their own way. Now the readers can see the full evolution of my grand diary experiment, which is really turning into my “life’s work” it seems. The first color strip appears May 12, 2002.

The reader should note that the main American Elf archives are free, but that Kochalka has a ton of subscriber-only bonus stuffs: Bonus Elfs, and stories about Fancy Froglin. Also be sure to check out tracks by James Kochalka Superstar, and Eli Kochalka’s comic blog, Monster Attack.

Lots of stuff this Monday morning. Let’s tuck right into it.

• If you’re anything like me (and I think we should all pray that you’re not), you’ve been wondering when Owen Dunne would find the time to get back into the webcomickin’ game. Well, not only has he, but he’s hit something of a motherload first day out:
  

  It’s not often you start a webcomic on a Friday, then by Sunday have 5000 visitors, but that’s what happens when Ricky Gervais mentions your new strip in his blog.

  It’s called The Pilkington Files and it’s a bit esoteric unless you know the history of Ricky and Karl Pilkington and the Guardian Podcasts and their old XFM radio show.

  I’ve gotten more response in one day with this strip than in ten years with YDK.

• Can we stop spreading the Orphan Works FUD, please? If you’re concerned about big, bad media companies ripping off little artists via a new bill making its way through Congress, please understand that said bill doesn’t exist. Small artists getting ripped off is a real enough problem without inventing fictional iterations of the problem. Definitive debunking to be found at Radio Free Meredith.
• Interesting idea out of the NCWCCCCC for creators looking for a new revenue stream at conventions: mini-prints. You can do 4 x 6 prints at a low enough price point that they can be sold at a profit in the $5 range; make them a con exclusive, and you’ve got yourself a money-spinner at that all-important entry-level price point. Details from The Otter and The Wombat (with an especially evil suggestion from The Bedfellow that you should be sure to pay attention to).
• Reminder: The first Gunnerkrigg Court book (a 300 page hardcover) is due at the end of the month from Archaia Studio Press (known for the delightful and historical Inanna’s Tears, the delightful and not-Satanic-Porn second Devils Panties book, and the delightful, opposite-of-all-ages Artesia). Talk to your local comic shop, or pre-order at Amazon. I suspect that similar tactics will work for The Devil’s Panties (looks like April is going to be a pricey month for me).
• And finally, what would Monday be without a touch of webcomics STD? Here’s hoping that you enjoy your case of Chloomydia.

Want interviews? You got ’em!

• First up, world adventurer and Boy On A Stick And Slither creator Steven “Cloud” Cloud, talking with Rick Marshall (who released a day early this week, damn his sneaky eyes). If you haven’t come up with a sponsorship for Cloud’s brush with death, now’s the time! As an official sponsor, you can ask the lads of Best Intentions Tea & Travel to perform a service; I’m still pondering what to ask of them.
• Next up, David Malki ! talks with a large angry cat about the forthcoming Beards of our Forefathers and what it’s like to crush dreams into freshly stomped dream juice (thanks to Randy Milholland for that metaphor). Fun!
• Finally, Stephen Notley of Bob The Angry Flower (paradoxically, he’s not very angry this week) notes how a likely swipe of one of his old drawings (above) got used as the logo for a burger place in Michigan, and promptly embroiled (ha, ha!) itself in a controversy over the objectification of women. Notley was micro-interviewed (quotes are like interviews, right?) in a followup story.

  Weirdly, this is not the first time I’ve seen a cartoonist’s work swiped to serve as a business logo, having personally witnessed a series of not-at-all-disguised J Scott Campbell drawings serving as the logo dress for a building in Montreal. Curiously, there was no outcry about the art objectifying women, probably because it adorned a local peeler joint.

¡Journalista! caught it: Courtesy of Nicholson Baker and The Grauniad, the Great Webcomics Purge of Aught-Six is now, itself, notable. Cue Alanis Morrisette:

In the autumn of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists – some of the most original and articulate people on the net. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006”. A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: “I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sandcastles.” Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organised deleters to book burners.

Most notable (ha, ha!) to my eye was that Baker didn’t bother to define webcomics, he just referenced them and moved on; I may not be a real journalist, but I do know that you don’t reference without defining unless you’re certain that your audience has a good chance of knowing what the hell you’re talking about. Interesting.

In other news, there are now more opportunities to get stuff in return for supporting your favorite cartoonists:

1. Chris Baldwin
2. Randy Milholland

Go check ’em out, and ask if maybe they could provide permalinks for their blogs in the future. Thanks.

Things have been a little busy lately. Work’s good (and hectic). I joined the rollerderby (I’m learning to be a referee). I’m in an art show that opened this week in Greenfield (we had Twinkies at the reception), and I was interviewed for a local blog where we talked an awful lot about webcomics. I was actually able to keep up with the conversation, which was exciting, and the reporter and I talked an awful lot about art and commerce and economy. I had a little epiphany in the middle of it, where I realized I’d begun to let go a little bit of my dedication to print. Surprise, surprise.

But all of this is a long way of saying that I’m totally behind on my webcomics reading.

While I was poking around the web looking for something new and different to read, I ran across this page, and it absolutely cracked me up. I know the pictures are kind of old news (last updated about two years ago, I think), but I sort of love the concept. I know there are more out there; there must be legions of Scary Go Round tattoos (and if not, why not?!) and I saw a photo of a cat tattoo in a recent issue of High Maintenance Machine.

I guess my question is less about the why (I have tattoos; I understand, in some way, that piece of it) and more about what images folks might have tattooed. Any image stand out as something you’d have tattooed? Creators, does having your work inked on someone’s skin kind of freak you out and completely rock at the same time?

• 1000 strips from Jorge Cham’s PhD, which is the one webcomic I can’t read because it’s too good. Grad school almost sent me into a tower with a scoped rifle, and Cham recreates all the reasons why so very well. Okay, I read it, but it leaves me deeply conflicted, and I am not looking back at my grad school days fondly, got it? I’m not.
• Unable to find her watercolors, Rënë Ëngström uses a variety of coffees for pigments. The only question I have is, why has well-known coffee addict R Stevens never done this? He doesn’t always work in pixels, you know.
• Good comments about Threat or Menace — keep them coming and I’ll try to address all concerns in the panel.
• And finally, I’ve been told by a reader that my right to call myself a “webcomics journalist” (although I believe that “hack pseudo-journo” is the closest I’ve actually come to doing so) is in question if I don’t talk about the Choose Your Own Adventure thing going on over at Ctrl-Alt-Del these days.

  Truthfully, I can’t think of another webcomic doing the CYOA thing so formally before (but that could just be my meds), although one could plausibly argue that reader-involved webcomics could be found in the now-abandoned experiment known as [Insert Title Here]. Or, heck, the last eight-plus years of explodingdog. What would make CAD’s take interesting is if Tim Buckley’s got his whole story plotted out and shows us what the overall map looked like when it’s done … but based on his description, it’s made up as he goes along.

Okay, back to sleep.

A time for Webcomics: Threat or Menace at NYCC has been set:

There’s a dizzying array of different models for delivering comics over the Web, from Webcomics, to PDFs for a fee, to ad-supported PDFs, to PDFs as promotional tool, and behind it all is the backdrop of illegal file sharing of comics. Are comics on the Web going to be a tool to increase the popularity of paper products, an alternate distribution channel that takes sales from retailers and circulation from libraries, or a threat to legitimate channels as illegal downloads grow? Hear from legacy publishers and cutting edge pioneers on this critical issue for the near future.

Two notes:

1. Although the description above lists the session on Friday, it’s actually on Saturday at 12:00 noon, in room 1E09 (it’s correct on the PDF session grid)
2. Big props to the organizers for fixing the name. Anybody that ever read Spider-Man knows that it’s “Threat or Menace”, not “Menace or Threat”.

Okay, going back to my planned lying in bed with a fever now. If I die, avenge my blood.