The Webcomicker

So, yeah.  I hate to say it, but I honestly don’t have time to keep this site updated right now.  I remember when Eric Burns first started “going todash” I would think to myself: “How can he not have time to write a single post over the course of a whole month?”  And now I know how that can be.  I find myself so bogged down with commitments that I only really have time to READ webcomics maybe once a week, much less write anything of value about them.

So I’m putting the blog on indefinite hiatus.  Maybe at some future date life will settle down and I’ll have fewer things pulling on my time, and I’ll be free to write again.  Until then, I’ll leave you with this bit of wisdom:

Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad is a really, really terrible blog.  It was kind of funny at first, but I soon realized that this site wasn’t writing biting satire, or even writing heartfelt posts hoping to truly affect a change in the community.  No, it’s just another example of “guy yelling on the internet for no apparent reason except to make himself feel like he’s better than someone else.”  No more, no less.  It’s the equivalent of trying to have a reasonable discussion about an interesting topic while some little kid yells “Your topic sucks!  Everything about you sucks!  You’re dumb because I say you’re dumb, and anyone who disagrees with me is dumb,” except with a lot more swearing.  I’m glad the blog is on hiatus and I hope that like all things fueled by sheer “I wanna be cool by making fun of everyone else” projects that it will eventually just fade away from lack of energy.
I’ll leave the writers of that blog with this quote from Teddy Roosevelt, which will hopefully fire off a couple of neurons in their pride-soaked brains:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points
out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer
of deeds could have done better.  The credit belongs
to the man who is actually in the arena … who, at best,
knows in the end the triumph of great achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly.  So that his place will never be
with those cold timid souls who know neither victory
or defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

I’ll see you all later!

In case you missed it, Ryan Estrada announced on Sunday that he is going full-time cartoonist.  Chalk down another point for webcomics.  And how many new newspaper comickers have we seen this year?  None?

Yeah.

But rather than coopt this post for yet another rant about the superiority of webcomics, instead I’m simply link you to quite possibly the most awesome “going full-time comics” celebration EVER.  Estrada didn’t just put up a slapdash “Thanks, everyone, looking forward to more” splash page.  No, he celebrated by creating guest comics for no fewer than 50 other webcomics and someone coordinated them all to appear on the same day.  AWESOME.  And now, for those of us that missed it (I myself am having trouble getting in front of a computer these days outside of work), we can all relive the glory as he’s reposting all the strips over at his website, with a new one every five hours (starting here).  So go on over and celebrate with him, why don’t you?  Bring cake.

The cover page from A Week in September.

Is there really anything that can be said about September 11, 2001 that hasn’t been said already? Surely there have been greater tragedies, even in our own time, but none has ever hit home with Americans like the day the Twin Towers were destroyed. And given the course of events since that time, there’s probably been very few (if any) events which have had such a far-reaching effect on the global sociopolitical climate.

In the few years since that day which will forever burn the numbers 9/11 into our minds, the events which took place in New York city have become a great many different things to different people. They’ve become a symbol. They’ve become a motivation. They’ve become a turning point. In some cases, they’ve even become an excuse.

And that’s why it’s important to always look back, think back, try to reframe your consciousness into the frame of mind you had when you first heard about the World Trade Center bombing, or even the moment when you saw the plane crash into the second tower. Try to grab hold of the thoughts that went flying through your head in those moments, and the few days that followed, when every last one of us was still trying to wrap our minds around it, trying to find any sort of explanation or understanding.

That’s why I recommend you take a moment from your day today to read A Week in September, by Grant Thomas (a former collaborator and continued friend of mine). It’s an incredibly honest retelling of simply the thoughts and feelings that went through his mind in the week after September 11, 2001. And I think you’ll find yourself relating to it very closely, although obviously each one of us had their own unique experience, because the thoughts and feelings are real, not just what he thought he was supposed to think. Of course there is shock and sadness, grief and concern, but there’s also that melancholy feeling of disinterest that sets in after awhile, the desire to just get your life back to normal. There’s anger and annoyance with how other people are reacting to the events. A feeling that everything is just so damn petty. And through all of it, the continued attempt to understand an event that can never fully be understood, not really. No one can wrap their mind around the entirety of September 11, 2001 and the events that followed, the nationwide wave of mingled grief and anger.

The best we can do is remember it.

A very Starslippy first strip from Alterverse War.

So apparently Kris Straub has decided that after so many years of giving to the webcomic community, he needs to, um, give… something… to the webcomic community. *ahem*

I’ve been amazed by how much more output we’ve seen from both Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz since they started the Halfpixel office in Dallas.  We’ve already got Webcomics Weekly and the How to Make Webcomics book as discussed in the post below, plus the guys are apparently working on a new comic for Image, and of course let’s not forget PvP: The Series, which continues to improve with each passing episode (August’s episode was the first that I actually felt I could show to my non-PvP fan friends and have them be amused by it.  And they were.) and is (soon?) going to be offered on XBox Live.

I kinda expected Kurtz and Straub to have negative effect on each other, just like whenever I’m around my friends I can never get anything useful accomplished (such as writing posts for Webcomicker), but apparently there is something magical about having an actual office away from your home where you go to work which drastically increases your output.  Perhaps some other webcomickers should take note (*ahem*FredGallagher*ahem*).

But I digress.  The point of this post is to highlight something new that Straub is working on, in addition to all his usual stuff.  This isn’t the classic webcomicker “Hey guys, I know you’re a fan of such-and-such work, but man howdy, I’ve got this kicking new idea so such-and-such is going on hiatus while I pursue my new project!”  Another bonus to our week, brought to us by Kris Straub, c/o the Halfpixel Office, which has markedly increased both his and Kurtz’ output and quality.

The new strip is called Alterverse War. And it consists of a war in space between many being from different dimensions.

Wait, did I say dimensions?  I meant many different webcomics.  See Kris Straub has put out a call to all sci-fi webcomic creators out there to put their strip’s ship into the battle.  He’s looking for all the ships which make our favorite sci-fi strips possible, those brittle eggshells containing the atmosphere and organic matter that keep our favorite futuristas afloat.  And it sounds like he’s planning to scramble up one hell of an omelet.

Obviously, Starslip Crisis’ main ship will be there (The Fuseli), but who else will have the guts to join the battle?

• Tagon’s Toughs and the Touch and Go?
• Zap and friends in the Excelsior?
• Sam, Florence and Helix in Sam’s ship (If he can ever get it off the ground…)
• Or even, hope against hopes… THE STEEL DUCK?

There are still a lot of questions to be answered (we are only on strip two, after all) but I think one thing is for sure: we’re going to be in for a wild ride.  Straub has made it very clear that he’s looking for a fair fight, so no one’s allowed to bring a fleet of Star Destroyers in the mix.  It’s unclear at this time if Straub is going to be doing all the art, or if the duties will be shared by the participators, but either way I think it’s gonna be a whole lot of fun.

Ok, it’s time for my semi-monthly drive to ramp up my output here at Webcomicker. I know I consistently lose all my readers due to my lack of updates, but the fact of the matter is that I often find myself simply without time and energy to write. So I’m once again going to try for that ever illusive “update more frequently by writing shorter posts” mark. Here goes.

Big news for today is that Scott Kurtz, Kris Straub, Brad Guigar, and Dave Kellett have started what may just be the greatest webcomic podcast since the Blank Label Comics Podcast: Webcomics Weekly. It’s a podcast about the making of webcomics, the ins and outs of the business of webcomics, what makes webcomics good and what makes them bad. They’ve promised not to talk about any webcomics “drama” (we’ll see how long that promise can last) and focus on helping other webcomickers out, dovetailing nicely with Straub and Kurtz’ upcoming release of the book How to Make Webcomics.

All the guys in the podcast are polished speakers, great humorists and good friends to boot, so the show is both interesting and amusing (although it does tend to go off topic, as do all conversations with friends). Still with industry professionals (at least in the webcomics world, I mean they do all make their living doing this) such as these, we’ve got a great chance to actually learn something here. As they say in the first episode, it’s “shop talk”, not “fan talk” or “wacky radio show guys”.
They’ve only got two episodes up so far, so it’s a good time to get on board. In the first episode they spend some time talking about the philosophy of the show, then have an in-depth discussion about speech bubbles and text (and speaking of speech bubbles and text…). In the second episode, they talk about some techniques for making your punchlines more clear, and the pros and cons of offering your strip to college newspapers. And each show ends with a “Tip From the Expert” from each of the four guys. We’re talking rock-solid stuff here.

So check it out.

Ok, finally got my internet up and running, so it’s time for me to indulge in a fanboy moment and post all the stuff I bought at Comicon this year. The more serious part of me says that a post like this is pretty lame and probably discredits me as a critic somewhat, but the inner fanboy demands it!
Interestingly, I’m realizing as I’m sitting here writing this that I didn’t buy a single thing from the Dumbrella booth this year. I guess I really am just a geek at heart, and not “indie.” Ah well.

And without further ado, here’s all the whiz-bang webcomic stuff I got.

Books:

• Penny Arcade Volume 4: Birds are Weird
• Sheldon Book 3: 62% More Awesome (Not even available in the Sheldon store yet! Wowza!)
• Starslip Crisis Volume 1 (Containing all material from the previous two books plus about an equal amount of new material, so it’s actually quite a deal, especially if you’ve never bought the books before)
• Courting Disaster Volume 1
• Full Frontal Nerdity 1: The Big Book of Epic Fail
• The Nodwick Chronicles Volume 6: Nodwick goes to Hollywood
• PvP Volume 4: PvP Goes Bananas
• Truth, Justin, and the American Way Graphic Novel
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Volume 1
• Zap! Volume 1
• Funny Farm Volumes 1 and 2
• Girl Genius Volume 6 (By far the longest Girl Genius volume to date, and that’s a comic that just keeps improving with every page, so… Awesome)
• Buck Godot Volume 1
• Unshelved Volume 5: Read Responsibly
• Ctrl+Alt+Del Volume 3 (Ok, technically I didn’t buy it at the con, but someone delivered it to me at the con, so that counts, right?)

Shirts:

• Questionable Content Comic-con Exclusive “Hannelore Worrying” T-shirt! Sweet!
• Sheldon Comic-con Exclusive “Coffee, It’s What’s For Dinner” Ringer! Double Sweet!
• Questionable Content “Evolution Kills” T-shirt
• Starslip Crisis Space Pirate T-shirt
• Free Keenspot T-shirt for buying three books at their booth (Thumbs up to Keenspot for having the best freebies, they also had their Free Comic Book Day comics there)

Posters:

• Penny Arcade Comic-con Exclusive Armadeaddon Poster (It rocks my face off)
• Penny Arcade “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness” poster (I also considered a “Birds are Weird” poster, but cooler heads prevailed on that one)
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Poster
• Questionable Content Full Cast #2 (Now the only question is do I hang it next to my Full Cast #1 poster or not?)

So there you have it, a full-out fanboy haul. It was a very good year, merch-wise.

As for webcomic panels, I actually missed most of them this year. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, it’s just that there was always some other “Sweet Baby Ray I cannot miss this” panel up against them. For instance, I kinda promised some people I’d be at the Keenspot panel, only to realize later that it conflicted with a panel by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys promoing their new series. This is the sort of panel that makes all promises fly out the window.

Still, I did make it to the “spotlight on Scott Kurtz”, which was pretty fun and featured the PvP animations, which were cool to see on the big screen (also, big announcement by the Blind Ferret guys about a Looking For Group movie, which honestly I could care less about but other people assured me was the awesomest thing on the planet). I also made “The Business of Webcomics” with Scott Kurtz and Robert Khoo (the guy who handles the business end of Penny Arcade), a panel which started out awesome as they talked about the right way to go about developing a new webcomic with a practical example by developing a webcomic right on stage. I especially liked when Scott Kurtz talked about character designs and the importance of having complementing bodytypes (like having a fat guy and a skinny guy together) in a strip to keep it visually interesting. But unfortunately it soon dissolved into random tangents, and while there were some good one-liners thrown out I felt the panel would have been much better if they’d actually stayed on topic.

In any case, if there’s one thing for me to take from Comicon, it’s a reinforcement of my belief that we desperately need to start planning a Webcomicon. Comicon has convinced me that webcomics have gotten a big enough base to support it, and simply hanging on at other cons is not gonna cut it for me anymore. There was a lot of really cool webcomic stuff going on at Comicon, but it was simply swallowed up by the bigger stuff, and I imagine that happens to the webcomickers at pretty much every con they attend. We need a con of our own. Based on what I’ve seen and read about webcomickers at other cons, we’d have no problem filling up the programming with some pretty cool panels, and we could certainly start off with a reasonably small venue. I mean, even PAX started with just a couple rooms in a convention center before growing to consume the entire building.

Webcomicon needs to happen. And if nobody’s gotten it done in a couple years, when I feel like I’ve got my feet under me I’ll just have to start organizing it myself.

So, I’m in the process of moving right now, so all my stuff’s in boxes.  I was gonna throw up a post about all the awesome stuff I got at Comicon this year when I got back (16 books!  five t-shirts, I think, and like four posters, all from webcomics alone), but all that stuff pretty much immediately got thrown in with all my other moving stuff and is currently still all boxed up at my new place because I haven’t had time to unpack yet.  I’m planning to get a nice shot of my webcomics bookshelf (It’s become quite prodigious), but I think I’ll hold off on that until my next Lulu order comes in.  Then you can prepare to be amazed.

Also, Mousewax is back.  I’ve long contended that Mousewax is the most underrated webcomic on the Internet (seriously, ask my friends.  I contend it all the time), and when Brandon Lewis put it on hiatus I was afraid it wouldn’t be coming back in August as he promised.  But it did!  And I am happy, in spite of the fact that I somehow went through another Comicon without meeting Mr. Lewis, even though we were both there.  Such is my lot, I suppose.

Anyways, go read Mousewax.  I’ll have a con wrapup when I get my new place squared away, hopefully this weekend if I ca get my internet up and running at the new place tomorrow.

Girl Genius 101 caught up with Girl Genius Advanced today.  For those of you just joining us, Girl Genius is a comic with two histories: The first was as an independent print comic, the second is as a webcomic which publishes collected volumes.  When the Folios made the switch to online, they decided to reward their print readers while at the same time not completely slighting their new online readers by releasing the old print volumes online one page at a time, MWF, instead of just putting the whole archive there all at once.  Old pages went up at Girl Genius 101 while simultaneously new pages were added MWF to Girl Genius Advanced, continuing where the print volumes left off.

And while I understand the want to please the original fans who had paid good money for the independent comic books before the online shift, it did make life a little difficult for new online fans, who had to either suffer a gap in the story or buy the collected volumes to bridge the gap (which, by the way, is not a bad investment anyways.  The books are very high quality, and Girl Genius reads better in book form).  And it probably turned some people off, or made them say “Eh, I’ll read it when I can get the whole story all at once, rather than just fragments.”

Well, today you can.  Today the two Girl Geniuses have converged, and every excuse anyone ever had not to read it has been taken away.  The whole kit-and-kaboodle is available free online, right now.

Time to start reading.

So, although I made the assertion in my previous post that this year’s Comicon is really nothing special, I am going to backpedal a bit on that statement because I realized that there is something new going down for webcomics this year:  Exclusives.

You know what exclusives are, don’t you?  Special stuff you can only get at certain events?  Exclusives are one of the big perks of going to cons, and the Comicon is packed with them.  Comicon is so huge that the major companies really work hard to try to stand out in the crowd, so you can always go expecting to walk away with tons of free posters, shirts, maybe a CD or a hat or even a DVD.  And beyond the free stuff, lots of companies have stuff to buy that’s only available at the con as well: a special figurine, or maybe a wallscroll, or a special edition of a game.  There’s tons.

And this year, for the first time, it looks like webcomics are getting into the action.  Sure, there’s always been one webcomic or two selling buttons they had printed up for the event, but we’ve never seen a flood of merchandise like we’re getting this year.  An Armadeaddon poster from Penny Arcade.  Con-only shirts from Sheldon (Kellett’s got buttons too, but hey, we’ve seen that before).  Stickers, magnets, and animated series subscriptions from PvP.  Space Pirate shirts and temporary tattoos from Starslip Crisis.  Looks like Scary Go Round is going to have an exclusive mini-comic.  Jeph Jacques has secret things he won’t even tell us about.  And who knows what I may have missed in that lineup.

That’s a lot.  Way more than last year.

And it’s yet another sign of webcomics coming into their own.  Everyone I listed up there (except possible John Allison of Scary Go Round, who I’m not sure about) is making their living off their webcomic, and apparently feels financially secure enough to take a gamble on some exclusive merchandise with the assumption that there will be enough of their fans at the con and willing to buy to at least offset the cost.  And when you’re making that kind of gamble on posters and shirts instead of buttons and flyers, you’re feeling pretty darn secure.  No one’s hit the big leagues enough to be giving that stuff away yet (Penny Arcade probably could, but they know it would lead to a fanrush of Biblical proportions), but when you’re doing interesting exclusives that you probably could have sold through your online store instead for a safer bet, you’re at least in Triple-A.

And that’s just one step away.

So, as usual I’m going to be attending the San Diego Comicon this year.  And as usual it’ll probably be my only con this year (I considered GenCon but when I heard Rich Burlew wasn’t going to be there I threw it out, and I considered PAX, but really, I wouldn’t fit in with that crowd.  It took me like four years to beat Ocarina of Time, and I didn’t even start playing it until 2002, so yeah, I’m not a gamer).

Now, I’ve seen all this “Webcomicon” talk going around, and quite frankly I’m not all that impressed.  The booth layout looks pretty much exactly the same as last year’s except Scott Kurtz is a little closer to the action.  Comicon has already had a very strong webcomic presence in years past, and so far I haven’t really seen there being any real new panels other than Scott Kurtz’ own personal one.

That doesn’t mean I’m complaining, mind you.  Just informing the public that all this “Webcomicon” talk is kind of bunk and everything’s pretty much the same as last year, except a little better.  Someday we truly will have a Webcomicon of our own and I will do everything in my power to speed that day’s arrival, but this ain’t it.

But getting back to my original point: I’m not complaining.  I’m just as psyched about Comicon this year as I have been the past three because I know it’s gonna be awesome, just like it has been in the past.  You don’t have to try to make something seem more awesome when the awesomeness is already there.  And I’m ready to revel in the awesomeness yet again.

That being said, who’s going to revel with me?  Let’s have a roll call here and see who’s going to Comicon, beyond the creators who I already know will be there because dudes, I read your comic and news posts every day.  I’m wondering if any others of us fans are going to be there this year.  Last year I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the Terror Island guys, and I hope to repeat the experience.  So either email me or leave a comment hear on the blog and let me know!  I won’t be wearing a costume this year so I won’t embarass you!
ALSO: IF ANYONE WAS DUMB AND DIDN’T GET A HOTEL, I HAVE AN OPEN BED IN MY HOTEL ROOM.  You’ll be sharing a room with three other guys, but I got the reservations about a year in advance and it should be a really nice hotel.  Plus it’s only like two blocks from the convention center and it’s only 180+tax a night for the room, so four nights (Wed-Sat) divided four ways means only 180+tax total.  That’s a steal for Comicon, anyone will tell you.  If you’re interested, email me and let me know.

But even if you don’t need a hotel, still let me know if you’re coming to Comicon this year, so I can say hi and maybe we could hang out or something.  Just don’t go trying to duck ahead of me in line for those Penny Arcade Comicon-exclusive posters.  They must be mine.