by Jason Thibault
I should’ve done this earlier in January but we’ve been wrapped up in a pretty big project for the past 6 weeks. I’ll let you know more about that later in the week. It’ll be worth the wait.
In 2009 just under 38,000 people stopped by our site for various reasons and some stuck around to see what we’d do next. Some even came back.
We only managed 49 posts last year which is a little embarrassing but we tried to make up for it by providing as much value as possible. And we did manage to pull off quite a few interviews with artists in our Masters of Ink series. We’ll make sure you get both quality and quantity in 2010.
So from fifth to first, here’s the five most popular posts from 2009.
5. Our Masters of Ink Interview with Jason Shawn Alexander
Art by Jason Shawn Alexander
It took many months to obtain this interview with Jason Shawn Alexander but it was worth the wait. It was one of the most inspirational interviews that we pulled off and detailed the story of an artist willing to do anything and sleep on any floor in order to achieve his dreams. It’s been awesome watching Jason’s star rise in both the comic industry and the fine art world.
4. Hart Fisher on Marvel and the Most Controversial T-shirt in Comics History
Hart D Fisher
This was a fun blast from the past. I struck up a friendship with Hart Fisher back in 2007 and he spent the better part of 6 weeks constructing some massive essays on his experiences publishing controversial comics and facing down the media circuit in the 1990’s. I had originally had posted these on our MySpace page but we were pretty unorganized back then.
Hart has since unearthed videos from that time period and we were able to present excerpts from his behemoth of a multi-thousand word opus in a proper format. Both the Robot 6 blog at CBR and Publishers Weekly’s The Beat were kind enough to link to it sending over hundreds of readers. It was a fun week.
We eventually published the whole 16,000-word saga in Optimum Wound Volume One. It’s one of the most fascinating stories from a turbulent decade in comics and we were honored that Hart first chose us to break radio silence. We wanted to honor him in return by presenting the piece on glossy paper.
3. Five Reasons to Draw With Pen and Ink on Paper
Art by Bill Sienkiewicz
I had a lot of fun writing up this article as pen and ink artwork is one subject that I’m unconditionally passionate about. There’s been a proliferation of computer generated comics and illustration in the past half decade. A lot of it is extremely talented work but I wanted to write a love letter to India ink-stained Bristol board and dulled pencil leads.
I rolled out my five main reasons for drawing the traditional way and then showcased a lot of badass pen and ink artwork. And a couple of thousand of you stopped by to check it out.
2. 23 Ways for a Comic Artist to Survive and Thrive in any Economy
23 WAYS for a Comic Artist to Survive and Thrive in any Economy.
Just shy of 4200 people read our post that suggested 23 ways for comic artists and illustrators to market themselves and grow their audience. Despite only coming in at second place last year this was my favorite piece of 2009. I felt like I was finally finding my writing voice again and that I was helping fellow creators find new ways to earn cashola with their artwork.
1. The Submission Guidelines for Every Comic and Manga Publisher in the Universe
And of course the daddy of them all. Our comic submission guidelines directory post. It took 2 months of spare time research initially to put this sucker together. And it’s been updated a few times since then. The last major overhaul was in December of 2009.
There’s a few others out there but I believe our submissions list to be the most comprehensive and up to date one on the net. Being publishers ourselves it was also an amazing exercise to go out visit every other comic companies’ websites to see what they did right.
Close to 18,000 peeps stopped by last year to check out this omega directory and hundreds more continue to do so each week. It rapidly became our flagship piece on the site and I’ll continue to update most likely on a quarterly basis.
2009 was a hard year, we learned a lot putting out our second book and we’re stoked about what we have lined up for you this year.
-Jay
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