Longbox Digital Comics, Life after Diamond and the new Whiteout Trailer
The weeks keep getting hotter and crazier.
A huge thanks goes out to Richard Caldwell and ComicNews.info for the interview that they did with me. Richard I have fun on twitter and I enjoyed trading emails back and forth with him for the past few weeks.
Comics
Zane Austin Grant over at Pop Matters has a nice piece on the history of comics conventions digging back 45 years.
Mark Ruffin investigates the continuing trend of novelists writing for comic book publishers.
Dwight MacPherson posts a quick and handy piece on his creative process and writing for Zuda comics.
Over at Robot 6, JK Parkin leads us over to artist J.H. Williams III’s Flickr stream. Beautiful work as always.
Webcomics.com continues to be a resource power house this time showing us how to use Flash to Ink your Web Comic.
D.J. Coffman writes a pretty heavy post on the future of the comics industry and comtemplates the possibility of life after Diamond.
The big news story that circulated around the net last week was regarding MySpace laying off a few hundred staff members. One of the side effects of this being that MySpace Comic Books closing up shop.
I’ve been eager as hell to get a peak at this since first hearing about it in early 2008 and finally a first look at Kevin Baker & Danijel Zezelj’s LUNA PARK.
DRAWN featured a video on Joe Lambert on making minicomics that stand out.
Sean T. Collins posted a good sized list of alternative comics creators and publishers on Twitter.
Longbox Digital Comics have finally made themselves known after three years in development. Hopefully these guys will be a viable digital solution for comics. Looks promising. Rantz is a very ambitious fellow and I have high hopes for a successful venture. Comic writer Kieron Gillen weighs in on Longbox and its’ potential.
Here’s a fantastic interview and walk down memory lane with legendary comics colorist Steve Oliff. A lot of pictures and process details are included.
Deb Aoki covers the details behind Oni Press’ 2009 Talent Search for Artists.
Artist Steve Lieber goes through his process on creating a comic page for his new series Underground.
Top Shelf Comics has been launching some of their books on the Amazon Kindle and one of the first major comic publishers to test out the digital platform.
Also at CBR Jeff Smith & Alec Longstreth converse on the Indie Way of doing comics. Very entertaining interview.
Shaenon K. Garrity presents a Half-Assed Guide to Comic Book Message Boards over at Comixology. Pretty funny stuff. I’ve personally had some new found enjoyment on the message boards but I haven’t contributed to 4 of the 5 that she reviews here.
Rich Johnston goes over a lot of the cool news that came out of Heroes Con that got glossed over on the net. I’m particularly happy about Ed Brubaker’s new Criminal series and the progress being made on the Sleeper movie.
There’s a beautiful preview of Brian Wood’s new Northlanders arc with art by Danijel Zezelj sitting over at Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum. Between Northlanders, Luna Park and what we’ve got cooking up (not telling yet), Danijel Zezelj fans are going to be very happy this year.
Valerie D’Orazio wrote a great post over at Comixology, You Have to Get Paid: Lessons in Freelancing. It’s a longer article and worth paying close attention to.
Art
Dig the sweet sweet illustrations of Dan Park over at Juxtapoz.
OMG Posters showcased the “Duality of Humanity 5? Art Print by Shepard Fairey and also found a really cool video of Shepard working on an original piece.
Artist / writer Rivkah debuted the First of 20 Lessons on Printing in Black & White.
Writing and Publishing
Mary Jaksch at Write to Done shows you how to put aside the digital distractions and get down to the business of writing.
Calvin Reed at Publishers Weekly gives his assessment of the new Amazon Kindle DX in his post entitled, Looks Good, Works Fine, Costs Too Much.
Here’s an oldie but a goodie from Zen Habits from back in 2007, How to Doggedly Pursue Your Dreams in the Face of Naysayers.
Social Media
Mashable listed 10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps.
Adrian Try over at Freelance Switch gives some suggestions on how to work less hours at your job. Something I’ve recently managed to negotiate with my dayjob.
And Glen Allsop gives some useful pointers that we could all use in his article, How to Clear a Massively Crowded Inbox.
Traffikd lists out some tools and platforms that enable you to build your own social networking site.
Arnold Zafra at Search Engine Journal covers 7 new features for Google Book Search.
Jack Humphrey interviews the creators of OpenZine, a free online magazine builder. This site looks like it has some possibilities. I’ll probably experiment with it when I get a chance.
Warren Ellis linked to a letter written by musician Amanda Palmer detailing how she made $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter. This was one of my favourite reads this week. She clearly gets her point across.
The Good Stuff
Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free
And probably the second most entertaining read of the week, Kevin Smith, taking questions while baked.
3 NEW TRAILERS caught my eye.
Whiteout
New Halloween II trailer
& the new Inglorious Basterds Trailer
How to Make Webcomics and some help from DJ Coffman
By Jason Thibault
I was recently handed a copy of How to Make Webcomics
A lot of me wishes that I had something like this 3 years ago when I was launching our own online comics. It has been a long journey figuring out the ins and outs of online comics. For the newbie out there, this book would serve as a worthy guide and probably shave months of time off your learning curve. Weighing in at almost 200 pages this book is resource heavy with plenty of useful links for the reader to go and search out online afterwards.
After the introduction the book covers formats, prepping your pages for online distribution, writing, graphic design for your comics site. Then it delves into different aspects of marketing (branding, building a community) and probably the most poured over chapter, 9: Monetizing your Webcomic. A comics blog The Floating Lightbulb has quite a detailed post on how they feel the monetizing strategies of the book are flawed. They’re conducting an experiment.
The last third goes over conventions and steps to take after you’ve been at it for a while.
Interspersed between the various sections are Hot Seat segments where each creator takes a turned getting grilled by the other three. The whole book is written in a pleasant conversational tone and is surprisingly consistent given the number of authors involved.
Given that this book is entitled, HOW TO MAKE WEBCOMICS, it has taken a few pot shots from several bloggers. This has also been referred to as a bible. That’s not fair as the amount of reference books for webcomics at this point is pretty slim. It’s probably the strongest entry so far but I think the definitive guide has yet to be penned. Webcomics have only been around for little over a decade. There’s still a lot to be determined.
The big four comic publishers are slowly making their way online through different initiatives. Marvel has a subscription service, DC has Zuda and Darkhorse has a strong MySpace presence. Thousands of other creators will be putting up online comics by the end of the decade and there’ll be new shining stars and new ways to make money by publishing online.
By the book here on Amazon
Host Your Own Webcomic
Before ending this, let’s give 1000 kudos to DJ Coffman for taking the time out to show noobs how to host their own webcomic. Run don’t walk to this post, it’ll save lives.
-Jay
