Tycho from Penny Arcade comments on the San Diego Comicon and in particular singles out Michael Jantze of The Norm, a syndicated comic strip for some PA hazing:

I wanted to apologize to everyone who attended the Syndication panel on Sunday, at least, apologize to those who survived that guy from The Norm's fucking interminable sermons. He was so boring that I literally thought I would die if he didn't shut up. Maybe his strip is the bee's knees, I honestly don't care, but I have serious doubts regarding that man's ability to evoke joy.

Like all old people, he is convinced that his suffering is somehow more genuine, his wisdom more relevant, or his victories more enduring than those of younger people. Things got underway with Gabe saying that syndication was "worthless," and things degenerated from there. The Social Entropy forum tried to interject some lighthearted amusement into those dire proceedings, but the deck was stacked against them. The man absorbs and annihilates humor.

I briefly met Jantze at SPXPo last year. He seemed, well not what Tycho said anyhow. I like The Norm myself but I guess I wouldn't be shocked if someone like Jantze was a bit bitter about traditonal newspaper syndication when said someone was trying to make a living off of that fuckedanddying business model.

The Pulse has some photos from the Eisner awards, including one of Derek Kirk Kim who won the award for "Talent deserving of wider recognition".
Congratulations.

Would folks be interested in participating in webcomic reading club(s)? Something like a book club if you've heard of those. A place online where people would read a selected webcomic for the month and than meet at the end of the month to discuss. The meeting could be in a chat or a forum - Comixpedia would essentially be providing a meeting place (and I can help set up a group or groups of people) but the idea here would really be for these groups to run themselves.

A basic outline of a club though could be something like - 12 to 24 people. Each member picks a comic (or a chunk of an serialized comic - something reasonable to read in a 2-3 week period) for a month for everyone to read and in the last week of the month establish a regular date for a chat or a time period to post and discuss on a forum (which I can set up here for each club) or both. This isn't intended to be a reviews club for other readers or even a creators - let's review each other kind of thing. This would be for readers to talk about webcomics (Creators can be readers too of course!). We could leave the scope of the club(s) wide open or people could express interest in having one with a specific focus.

The whole point is just to share experiences and talk about webcomics. I just read Farley's Spiders again. It's be cool if others had just done the same and we could just talk about it - It'd be more fun if everyone just flew over to my neighborhood and we could go hang out and talk about it but this Internet thing will have to do :)

Feedback?

Through the Modern Tales Newsletter comes the news that Lea Hernandez, author of Rumble girls and editor of Modern Tales sister site Girlamatic (etc. etc.), has won the coveted "Lulu of the year" award handed out by Friends of Lulu.
Congratulations.

Graphic novel review is a magazine (I'm not sure wheather it is will be web-only) that will debute this fall. Published by Joey "Modern Tales" Manley and edited by Alexander Danner.

Alexander Danner:
In preparation for a fall premiere, The Graphic Novel Review is currently seeking an official logo. To this end, I am pleased to announce the Graphic Novel Review Logo Design Contest.

The design requirements can be found in the forum thread announcing the contest.

Are there any?

Do any universally accepted sizes for pages in webcomics world exists? Or all we are just doing our own thing? Naturally, as webcomics can be any size and shape, all infinite canvas stylez, we have the freedom to make comics anyway we want. But I was just curious, because I have a lot of trouble figuring out a size that my "pages" should be, in terms of readability and computer-screen-fitting-on-ness. When I am making a comic for the web, I don't know what direction (horizontal-monitor shaped/vertical-paperbooked-shaped), or what size to make it. Also, since I am not making just one continually-updating comic, but rather many different comics, I don't have an obligation to make all me comics the same size.

Anyway, what do you all do? (This question is by the way more directed at the "page-ish" sized comics rather than the "strip-ish" sized comics, but whatever)

Hopefully this rambling psuedo-question made sense.