Happy New Years everyone!  I'm still blogging away at Altertainment which you should hop on over to right now to check out a review I just posted of Digestate: A Food & Eating Themed Anthology.

Just a note as I'm recovering from the annual Amerikuh tradition of over-eating for a day (a day? isn't that the new normal now...) that I am blogging on an irregular schedule about webcomics and other pop culture topics at ALTERTAINMENT.  

Consider yourself invited over there.

Howdy comics fans!  Well hope you had a nice summer, I sure did.  Still evaluating plans for what to do with COMIXTALK 2: THE TALKENING but I figured I owed someone a post about something.

CONVENTION TIME: Washington DC has both SPX and Intervention happening this month.  Plus Baltimore's Comicon is this weekend.  When it rains it pours (except when it's humid and it just kind of sticks).  I am going to try and make SPX and Intervention this year.  

SPX is September 15th and 16th.  Going to SPX is like taking a deep dive into comics as comics. \ Very little (NONE!) of the trappings of a more "community" oriented comicon.  Although lines have gotten longer over the years also a great place to meet some of the creators of the best comics on the web and off.  Plus attendees can vote for the Ignatz Awards.

Intervention is on a different weekend this year, September 21-23 (RELIEF - both cons on the same weekend last year was a killer!) and has more of a general cool stuff from the Internet vibe to it.  Still a different animal than a standard comicon but an altogether experience than SPX too.  A great list of guests this year -- Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey Wells, Danielle Corsetto, Jennie Breeden, Pete Abrams, Rob Balder, Christopher Baldwin, Jami Noguchi, actually more more more (I give up, just go to their website).

READING COMICS: I read Drama by Raina Telgemeier.  REALLY GOOD - will have a real review up soon.  Also got a copy of Superhero Grammar.  My kids who are already full fledged GRAMMARIANS said they thought it might be a good book for younger kids learning grammar. (Scholastic gave COMIXTALK review copies of both books).  Also saw that AMULET 5 is out -- I need to get ahold of that!  I have also been rereading a lot of webcomics over at Comic Rocket; many posts at my new blog ALTERTAINMENT are about that -- check them out.

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Just to make it official-like, ComixTALK is on a bit of a hiatus, at least for a chunk of the summer months here in Norte Americano.  This website is a project that I love and have had a wonderful time writing for in all of its incarnations over the last almost-but-not-quite a decade, but it's also run out of steam for me.  I'd really like to bring it back as something different about comics so stepping away from it will hopefully give me a chance to try and make that happen.

Also, I started a new blog called ALTERTAINMENT where I still do write quite a bit about comics but will mix in other subjects too. For whatever reason, it felt like the right time to make a new home for me somewhere else on the web. It's still a work in progress, but since it's not ComixTALK, I get to make up what it is everytime I decide to post something.

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MILESTONES: Super Brophy Brothers celebrates 100 webcomics with COMIC TIME!!!

A slightly random post on what's what recently.  I also posted a review of Spike and Diana Nock's Poorcraft over the weekend - be sure to check that out.

DIG THAT DIG DUG: I played the Dig Dug back in the day day so I read with some interest the massive tweetstorm about the webcomic drive to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the game.  All of it is organized by ShiftyLook, the Namco/Bandai portal of webcomics based on old video games.  The list of creators in on this includes - among others - Brian Clevinger (Atomic Robo), Dean Haspiel (ShiftyLook’s The Five-Dimensional Adventures of Dirk Davies), Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (Penny Arcade), Scott Kurtz (PVP), David Maliki (Wondermark), R. K. Milholland (Something Positive), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Krishna Sadasivam (PC Weenies), Kris Staub (chainsawsuit), Zach Weiner (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) and Jim Zubkavich (ShiftyLook’s Wonder Momo, ShiftyLook’s Sky Kid).

LUCKY DUCKY!: Earlier this month Reuben Bolling announced a kind of "club/pledge drive" for his brilliant Tom the Dancing Bug comic.  For $9.99 you get six months of inner access to the comics, including insight into the work process. What does it say about alternative weeklies in terms of comics though that one of their absolute superstars has to refocus even more on the web? 

Let's Rock This Joint In The Old School Way: Have you all been following Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree over at BoingBoing? It's a super interesting, entertaining look at the origins of hip hop music.  I also love the "family tree" icon Piskor uses to show the archives of the webcomic.  The latest one is posted here.

COME ON FEEL THE HYPE:  I really dig Zen Pencils - which presents inspiring and famous quotations in comic format.  Really creative interpretations, more than solid artwork -- I am pondering buying prints of almost half of his archives.

READING HABITS: Has anyone else tried these tools to open different tabs in your browser based on the day of the week?  Seems pretty helpful actually and ripe for a webcomic-focused fork.

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Poorcraft: The Funnybook Fundamentals of Living Well on Less began as a successful Kickstarter effort back in late 2009.  It is now a real live book about to drop in on the world this May 20, 2012.  Written by C. Spike Trotman and drawn by Diana Nock -- Poorcraft makes excellent use of the comics medium to deliver some very practical advice on how to make the most of your resources. A book that will be pretty handy not only for many starving comic artists but anyone trying to stretch their means, especially when just starting out on adult life.

Spike who is perhaps best known for her Twin Peakseque webcomic Templar, AZ, has done an impressive job here -- the book is well organized and shows a tremendous amount of research and thought.  The book opens with a general chapter on the philosophy of "poorcraft" and then moves to chapters organized around practical issues like: housing, food, clothing and health.  Spike also covers transportation, education, emergencies and entertainment in other chapters. There is also a huge chapter with additional links and resources at the end of the book.  The idea of "poorcraft" is a collection of tips to do more with less, be financially savvy, and take more advantage of free and low-cost opportunities where they exist.

All of which might make this sound like a dry, dull resource book.  Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a very fun read with all of the information presented as a dialogue between the poorcraft-savvy Penny and her neighbor Mil, who like a lot of us has fallen into a lot of financial and lifestyle habits that most of us don't even stop to question why. Spike makes the comic as much a story as a how-to book, following Penny's efforts to help Mil learn poorcraft and get out of the many financial problems she has wandered into.  Between Spike's snappy dialogue for both characters and Diana Nock's fun, loopy, entertaining artwork, the book is a good, fast read. One that you will want to go back to individual chapters to review when you're interested in the particular advice on that subject.

Definitely worth checking out. If I was organizing a "gift guide" from comics -- this would be a great gift for someone leaving the "nest" for the first time. Unlike countless other books on the subject this one is almost certainly going to be the most fun one to read.

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COMIXTALK: Making bad puns in the blog post titles since 1886

Welcome to another edition of Let's Get It Arted eh actually let's stick with:

Ooh, yeah 
Kickstart my art
Give it a start
Ooh, yeah, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-baby 

First off let's congratulate recently funded projects including Tiny Kitten Teeth, Dear Dinosaur, Jet Pack Jenny, Circus Saudade, Spike's Smut Peddler which so far has doubled its funding goal, and Shannon Garrity's Skin Horse 3 Book which has nearly tripled the goal she set for it.  Some of these are still live so more money pledged might mean more stuff made.

THIS KICKSTARTER DRIVE IS SO BABIES! Dave "Whatchoo Talkin' 'Bout" Willis is in the midst of a drive to raise the cash to print the first book collection of his newest webcomic Dumbing of Age.  He's also said in the project that if this Kickstarter fundraiser reaches $20,000 he will reprint the out-of-print Shortpacked! Book One again.  

FUND A WEBCOMIC? This Kickstarter drive, titled "Fund Our Webcomic: Montgomery X. Chesterfield" is actually what it says -- give the project money and Salvatore Pane, Mark Kleman and Kat Larkin will make a free webcomic. "The more money we generate, the more frequently we can update MontyX.com with more free material." Honestly, while I'm not going to begrudge anyone trying anything to help themselves make comics, this surprises me that Kickstarter approved it.  Granted they are only asking for 100 bucks but there's no real there there to what the project is funding.  It's not even a commitment to a particular update schedule or a number of comics or finishing a story or...

EXPENDABLE: I like the title on this one --  the funds will go to printing a Henchmen for Hire graphic novel which will collect the first story of the webcomic in a large, full-color 140+ page paperback format.

PUSH IT OVER THE LINE: This one is super close to hitting its goal. The elevator pitch for it: "It’s basically Beowulf, starring a bunch of nerds. Also, Sasquatch."

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS: This one looks like a lot of fun - 

Tomorrow Jones is about a 14 year-old girl named Tomorrow who comes from a family of superheroes. While she may be strong enough to fold an armored truck into origami, Tomorrow has to pretend to be a normal girl at school. Her father won't take her seriously, and her traditional heroine mother expects Tomorrow to follow in her footsteps. But Tomorrow doesn't want to dress in skimpy spandex though, and starts fighting crime unmasked and simply wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her real initials on it. All the while her parents keep trying to get her to do things "the traditional way" and Tomorrow finds she might be getting in over her head in the superhero community.

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Whew - got one more post in before the beginning of May.  That brings my 2012 average up to -- what? -- one post every 2.5 weeks or so.  Thanks for bearing with me (well whomever is bearing out there in Internet-land).  New job, new projects, shifting priorities means less time for ComixTalk which isn't likely to change this year.  I do have some great ideas for building a couple of webcomic-focused sites that I really want to use on a regular basis.  I suspect others would find them useful too. Unfortunately not sure when any of it will happen. 

So COMICS!

iWEBCOMICS: Jerzy Drozd linked to this story on the new Marvel infinite comics format for the iPad.  I've always been a fan of the web part of webcomics.  But there's a way to stretch comics without breaking it and then there's motion comics...  This approach by Marvel looks interesting -- it appears to leave control of the viewing/reading experience in the hands of the reader and it still maintains the panel as the atomic unit of storytelling.  I'll be curious to read the reactions from the blog-o-comicsphere.

FINDING NEMO -- AND COMICS: I've checked out Just the First Frame a couple times -- my big problem with it is that as a hand-crafted webcomic, it ain't scalable and that success will kill it.  Still I always suspect Lauren Davis is smarter about this stuff from me so let's all give it another look this week.

INTERVIEW: There was a good interview/feature on Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content at Bleeding Cool last week. Definitely worth reading if you missed it. (And if you missed Lauren Davis' review of the webcomic from earlier this year - also worth reading)

KICKSTART MY ART:  Charles Cutting has a Indiegogo campaign going to fund The Dream Quest of Randolph Carter - a print version of his graphic novel adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft story. You can read the comic online to check it out.

In Search of... SCIENCE!: PhD Comics has comic-fied an interview with physicist Daniel Whiteson who discusses the search for the Higgs Boson particle at CERN (PhD Comics also did a similar comic-fied take on dark matter).

MAILBAG: Richard Pulfer writes that his webcomic, Blue Yonder (illustrated by Diego Diaz and written by Richard Pulfer and Luke Perks) is starting its second storyline:

When readers last saw Jared Davenport, aka Blue Yonder, the young hero had flown the coop from Claremont Apartments after learning his new allies included an ex-cop convicted of stealing evidence and a black ops solider with an even more checkered past. Will his old friends, the police-themed N-Forcers, be any help in locating his missing family? What about Voltra, the young girl who befriended him at the run-down Claremont Apartments? The answers to these questions and more will be revealed when Blue Yonder continues its weekly updates on Wednesday. 

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A great overview/interview of Richard Thompson, creator of Cul De Sac over at BoingBoing.  I really love Cul De Sac -- I wish it had a more organic webcomic presence because as great a newspaper comic strip as it is, newspapers just don't appreciate great comics like they used to.

AWARDS: I completely agree with Lauren Davis' reaction to this year's nominees for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Digital Comic.  My extremely quick reaction was pretty similar but Lauren is a real journalist and so actually constructed sentences and presented coherent thoughts.  Still I suspect she might agree with my final thought: 

This year's [EISNER Best Digital Comic] nominees in particular feel like a world where instead of the Emmy awards, the Motion Picture Academy had just added a "Best Television Movie" category to the Oscars.

RAMBLING RAMBLING RAMBLING MAN: I had just fallen out of following writer, cartoonist, van-traveling troubadoor, LORE SJÖBERG, so it was a bit of a surprise to see his blog turned into a travelogue as he and his amazing van travel the country.  Fun stuff - worth catching up on if you aren't already following him.

KICKSTART MY ART: Keith Knight just finished a successful kickstarter campaign and lived to tell about it.  Actually he posted some tips on what he learned from his effort that are pretty useful ideas.

FORMATTED FOR YOUR COMFORT: Boing Boing writes up the "Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF)" which is a free/open format for online comic books.

ACBF has a lot of cool features: support for creator metadata; per-panel/page definitions; multiple text-layers for multiple languages; text formatting and style data; auto-indexing and more. The format is CC-BY-SA, and can be found on Launchpad, along with GPL'ed viewers for GNU/Linux and Windows.

EVENTFUL:  I don't know why I'm stumbling on to Rare Words so late to the party but the Internet is a biiig place I guess.  Rare Words is a blog where Mark Burrier draws sketches based on phrases submitted through the website.  There will be an exhibition of his work this June at the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Maryland.

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Another day another Kickstarter - this one a bit more modest than comic efforts of late. Grant Thomas is looking for a mere $500 bucks to fund another print edition of his webcomic My Life In Records:

While we're here let's open up the ComixTALK mailbag:

Chance Argabright-Wees writes that Fat Cat Gameworks is going to collaborate with Christopher Hastings, of the webcomic, Dr. McNinja, to create a game based on the comic. It is planned to be "a free-to-play, retro-style platformer for iOS, Android, and the web" which I suspect means something! A third Penny Arcade videogame and a Dr. McNinja videogame?  That's... four webcomic-based videogames!  There's a kickstarter for this project too!

Other recent radical emails to ComixTALK?

Terry LaBan writes in about a new iPad version of the comic Muktuk Wolfsbreath - a mysterious tale of love, murder and demons set among tribal reindeer herders. The comic appeared as an online graphic novel last year, has been published as both a downloadable pdf and an on-demand trade paperback. The pdf version of Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard Boiled Shaman: The Spirit of Boo can be downloaded here. 

Ray Hayden writes in about his webcomic Agatha Crup -- "Three issues in and we've got over 50,000 unique visits on the site."  He plans to put out another issue around the end of April along with an animated 3 minute video with characters from the comic.

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The Hugo Award nominations were announced and the nominees for Best Graphic Story are:

• Digger by Ursula Vernon (Sofawolf Press)
• Fables Vol 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
• Locke & Key Volume 4, Keys to the Kingdom written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
• Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication written and illustrated by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (The Tayler Corporation)
• The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan created by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross (Vertigo)

This may be the first time a Foglio is not amongst the nominees, but congratulations and good luck to the webcomic contenders Schlock Mercenary and Digger.

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The nominees for the Eisners are out - here's the Digital Comics category:

• Bahrain by Josh Neufeld
• Battlepug by Mike Norton 
• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff
• Outfoxed by Dylan Meconis
• Sarah and the Seed by Ryan Andrews

An interesting mix of new and familiar names (to me at least) and a range of styles and subject matters to boot.  I haven't read any of these so here's my quick ill-informed reactions and/or paraphrasing of the about pages:

The full title of John Neufeld's webcomic is Bahrain: Lines In Ink, Lines In The Sand and follows Mohammed and Sara, two young Bahraini editorial cartoonists who found themselves on opposite sides of Bahrain's short-lived Pearl Revolution. Neufeld met Mohammed and Sara at workshops he led while visiting the tiny Persian Gulf country on a U.S. State Department trip. Neufeld documents their impressions of the events, through their words, experiences, and their own cartoons, which were published as events unfolded.  A self-contained, non-fiction, journalistic effort.

Mike Norton's webcomic is about a giant pug. OMIGOD PUPPY!!  On-going serialized comedic, fantasy adventure tale.

Tony Cliff's webcomic takes place in 19th-century Turkey where an officer in the Janissary army must struggle to repay a brash adventuress for saving his life, even though she was the one who endangered it in the first place.  Another serialized adventure story albeit much less wacky than Battlepug.

Dylan Meconis' is a fable brought to webcomic form.

Ryan Andrew's webcomic also has the feel of a fable or better still an alegory.  Both Dylan's and Ryan's efforts are self-contained, completed works of fiction.

I realize this is far from the due diligence of actual reviews but even so, it's striking how challenging it must be to try to compare the merits of such diverse work with such clearly different artistic and other goals.  This year's nominees in particular feel like a world where instead of the Emmy awards, the Motion Picture Academy had just added a "Best Television Movie" category to the Oscars.

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Today on the Webcomic Factory:

• Mitch deals with the "boss" in Tales of Pizza: Management Change
• US Representatives have an ironic view of history in The Antiwar Comic: The Protesters Know
• Watch where you look on a date in In A Relationship: Jealousy Filter
• Bitter hunts down his invisible bro in Super Frat: The Nerdiest of Hiding Spots
• Baby Max gets teeth, while his folks get no sleep in I Hate My Kids: Teething Time

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Just a reminder that the former ComixTALK P.O. box is no more.  If you want to send us physical objects please email first to find out where to send it.

KICKSTART MY ART: Kickstarter has cemented itself into comics in a way I doubt anyone really expected when it first debuted.  Shaenon Garrity just launched a kickstarter campaing for book 3 of her webcomic Skin Horse.  No question it will make it's modest goal (although - get over there and pledge!) -- in fact the interesting thing these days is seeing just how far past the goal these drives can go.

EXHIBTIONIST: The Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas (part of Lamar University) will be holding an exhibit of Ursula Vernon's work next month in April (begining April 4th) with a reception on April 6th. Make your travelin' plans now! The exhibit will featurie works from Digger, Dragonbreath (including a sneak preview of Dragonbreath 7), and several of Ursula's illustrations.  Ursula will also be doing a signing at the local Barnes & Noble.

MAILBAG

Richard Reynolds writes in about his webcomic, St. Shawshank's Infant School which he describes as "basically a re-telling of The Shawshank Redemption... only set in an infant school, and with all the added innocence that that implies."  That's an interesting twist alright!

Sasha Peric writes in to ask us to take a look at a new comic, Pustinja, hosted on Google+.  It's a wordless mini-comic, with artwork suggestive of wood-cuts. He's from Bosnia, and this new work looks like it's in a similar vein to previous examples of his comics.

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I really liked this short PBS documentary on Kickstarter and Creative Commons.  Well worth a watch.

iWEBCOMICS: So the new iPad 3 is out and it has a gloriously densely pixelated screen - RETINA-VISION or some such marketing moniker.  Of course I think this bodes well for comics. It doesn't mean legacy publishers won't continue to bobble their opportunities but for everyone not tied to the direct market, printed past, this is the best of times.  As far as digital goes I thought it pretty good news that Mark Waid is embracing digital and selling off his comic book collection, if not effective at raising funds is still a keen meta-commitment to his new direction

KICKSTART A WHOLE LOT OF ART: I blogged about some webcomic kickstarter projects yesterday.  I saw this morning that FLEEN had done some actual number crunching on recent Kickstarter activity -- worth perusing!

FINDING NEMO WEBCOMICS:  I also heard about Just the First Frame from Fleen and it's a nifty idea.  Time always tells whether it's a practical idea that one can use on a daily, regular basis but I'm intrigued enough to play with it.  Finding webcomics -- filtering -- well it IS the problem for the reader today. This site's approach is to show the first panel of a comic so that you can click through to it.  It doesn't really do any recommendation though and the guy behind the curtain is creating the panels manually (crop and paste) so I wonder how long it will be around.

MAILBAG: Lee writes that his webcomic, RiGBY, is updating on a regular basis again.  Update were slow for awhile when he was working on the new Screamland series for Image Comics.  That series has since concluded, and updates to RiGBY are now back 3 times a week.

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Hello hello hello.  Let's call today's post a rally round the flag, consider splashing some cash kind of all KICKSTART MY ART post.  It's amazing how many webcomic projects have been funded now through Kickstarter.

MULTIPLEX BOOK 2:  Gordon McAlpin was one of the first webcomic creators to use Kickstarter and now he's back to raise funds to put out Book 2 of his webcomic Multiplex.  He's still got a ways to go but 20 days should be enough time to make it.  If you're a fan of this webcomic pledge pledge pledge!

ALL NEW ISSUES: This webcomic is running a drive to print its first book.  You can check out the webcomic here before deciding whether to pledge or not.

GOATS IV: BACK IN THE SADDLE: It's finally over and I managed to get my pledge in before it finished.  Looking forward to my autographed book. Pledges passed $50,000 easily.  People love goats I guess.  

Fubar Press: These guys have made their goal but they've still got nine days to go. Their project is to print up an anthology to give away on Free Comic Book Day this year. Free comic book day is an annual event, held on the first Saturday in May where just about every major comic book company distributes a few titles for free to comic shops all across the country. The idea is to bring in new fans and get old fans back in on what ends up being one of the busiest days of the year for comic shops.   

CARPE CHAOS:  These guys are down to the wire trying to raise 7,500 and they have less than 24 hours to go (more or less).  The drama of Kickstarter! Jason Bane, Eric Carter, Anthony Cournoyer, Daniel Allen, Joe Slucher, and  others create Carpe Chaos, a free web-based sci-fi graphic novel series.  They want to create a concept art book called The Art of Carpe Chaos that will featureall of the artwork they produced when we were creating the universe. 

We've got a ton of material, we've got graphic designer Christopher Kosek to help us, and we've got a $7,500 quote from a printer. Whether we get 250 books or 1000, the price doesn't change much because most of the printing costs are for getting everything set up to print in the first place. 100% funding means a print run for us! 

YEAR OF THE DWAGON: This one is also over but Rob Balder met his goal for Erfworld and ran a pretty impressive Kickstarter campaign while he was at it.  Did I say "met his goal"? I meant smashed it, raising almost $85,000.

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The very British Eagle Awards for Comics is holding its worldwide vote online right now -- you can vote up until April 1st.  For Best Webcomic you can pick between Ace Kilroy, Axe Cop, Freakangels, Hark! A Vagrant, and xkcd.

This Friday, March 23, is the deadline for voting in the Hall of Fame for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The Eisner Awards judges have selected pioneering newspaper cartoonist Rudolph Dirks (The Katzenjammer Kids) and comic book artistHarry Lucey (co-creator of Archie) to be automatically inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame this summer.  The judges have also chosen 14 nominees from which voters will select 4 to be inducted. These nominees are Bill Blackbeard, Howard Chaykin, Richard Corben, Carlos Ezquerra, Lee Falk, Bob Fujitani, Jesse Marsh, Tarpé Mills, Mort Meskin, Dennis O'Neil, Dan O'Neill, Katsuhiro Otomo, Trina Robbins, and Gilbert Shelton. 

Online voting is now open. To vote, you must be a professional working in the comics or related industries, as a creator (writer, artist, cartoonist, colorist, letterer), a publisher an editor, a retailer (comics store owner or manager), a graphic novels librarian, or a comics historian/educator. Eligible voters can visit www.eisnervote.com to register and then select up to four picks in the Hall of Fame category.

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