This week in Smithson:

Chuck and Micki sprint through the forest, in the hopes of escaping 23 Skidoo.

What can I say... I'm not a comic book junkie. My segue into work that runs along the same vein began with newspaper funnies; my home as a reader and artist. I graduated to webcomics when I started publishing my own work and if I'm honest, I have to say my favorites are still gag-a-day "funnies style" comics with consistent characters that have the occasional lengthy storyline (unless you count my compulsive read-a-thon through the Dark Knight series at a buddy's house back in the 90's but that was a one-night stand and she didn't mean a thing baby, I promise!). But my tastes have grown broader, to be sure, with the marriage of comic art and the web.

Anyway, I find the melodrama of many multi-panel comics too much. So when I found Hulk vs. Bizzaro by Michael Nelson over at 50ft. Robot Studios, I was pleasantly surprised. Laughing out loud really. And I like to do that.

The squat, thick, super-styled art is engaging. The dialogue is "dumb-monster" 3rd person (reminiscent of Graham Roumieu's Bigfoot Masterpiece) and gives a new perspective on what life's really like when you're big, green, and grouchy (...and who wouldn't be grouchy with a backward buddy like Bizzaro?)

Anyway, check it out and maybe I'll see you at the intersection between the funnies and multi-panel comic classics. I'm liking the vibe on this corner.

Tim Demeter will be a call-in guest on Fearless Radio's Play or Die program tomorrow, 2/24 at 1 PM central time discussing Rebellion's acquisition of Clickwheel or whatever the heck else they wanna talk about. Fearless is an internet channel and you can tune in anywhere, so please do!

 

Even the noblest of heroes must do mundane day-to-day tasks. The difference though is that for Roger Boring, most of his life is mundane, while we superheroes might spend only 30 seconds a day wiping our asses. The average person gets her 15 minutes of fame at some point in her life, whereas superheroes only get 15 minutes of non-fame, during which they cook their noodles and water their plants.

Seth Godin is a marketer and his insights range from the startlingly good to the blindingly obvious. This post though seemed to capture an idea that's rattled around my brain for a couple years. There's at least some portion of active webcomics creators that want to "succeed" and define that as some combination of readers, income, and attention. In a niche medium like webcomics by definition, successfully creating that perfect storm of success is something like what Godin calls "micro hysteria". It doesn't last forever, but achieving it at all tends to vault its creators into greater awareness (at least amongst the webcomics community).

In webcomics I can think of some things that seem like examples - the emergence of Eric Burn's blog Websnark in late 20052004; Adrian Ramos' then new webcomic Count Your Sheep; Dead Mouse's Ballad; - all things that seemed to suddenly be what everyone (okay - not everyone, but a significant number) was talking about for at least awhile.

Life, the Universe, and Everything has come to an end. Okay, I don't mean that quite like it sounds. My life carries on. The universe continues expanding. And everything is still... well, pretty much where we left it. But the Science-Fiction and Fantasy symposium called Life, the Universe, and Everything has ended, and I'm kind of sad about that.

BUSINESS

• Dirk Deppey has a great discussion today of the growth of graphic novels as the now-predominant form of print comics in North America. The discussion is based on analysis from industry analyst Milton Griepp (more of the analysis at ICv2). Interestingly, the total sales numbers also represent the highest sales for the comic and graphic novel market since the early 90s. Even more startling is Deppey's estimate that the manga market is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the total marketshare for comics of any kind in the United States today.

INTERVIEWS

• The Daily Cross Hatch presents the second part of its interview with James Kochalka (link from Journalista!) (The Daily Cross Hatch is a great new blog on comics - worth checking out!)
• CBR has an interview with Wesley Green, who publishes the online indy comic site Independent Propaganda and also started up Ambrosia Publishing and the webcomic hosting service Ambrosia Digicomics.

OTHER WIKI(s) WATCH

• I don't know why the TV Tropes wiki has entries on webcomics but there's an interesting one on "webcomics time", and a list of other "webcomics tropes":

• Author Guest Spot
• Filler Strips
• Life Embellished
• Three Dudes And An Animal
• Two Gamers On A Couch
• The Merch
• Planet Eris
• Wacky College
• Cerebus Syndrome
• First And Ten Syndrome
• Kudzu Plot
• Law Of Conservation Of Normality
• Webcomic Time

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

• PinkRayGun has an overview of a comics collectiveSweet 7000 Baaadassss Comics (7000 BC). Awesome name - go check out their comics. called
  

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Over at Fleen, Anne Thalheimer writes a self-described "fannish" post on some webcomics she likes. If you're going to go all fan-boy on something, Scary Go Round ain't a bad choice...
• Thomas Mauer says, "Build a buffer kids!" I'd link to his webcomic, The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo (if for no other reason than the name) but he didn't link to it from his blog.
• T CAMPBELL says Hey Rich Johnston! TokyoPop still does the webmanga!

I assume people know already that today is the first day of this weekend's New York Comicon. (But just a reminder - anyone can submit an event to our events calendar)

Joey Manley has a good post on the non-webcomics makeup of today's webcomic panel at the 'con. I believe FLEEN is attending with a press badge so I'm hoping they'll be writing up any and all news coming out of the events in the Big Apple (here's one last what-to-see post from FLEEN before Gary heads out the door). We'll all find out what got hyped up soon enough...

Chapter 3 of Victor Daniel's superhero-space opera The Vanguard has begun!

A recent email list discussion led to the following statement by myself:

With the advent of computronic technotext, we should be able to write paragraphs that will randomize how things are phrased without changing the meaning. For instance, I'm thinking of randomizing the subtitle of my webcomic to sometimes include the polymorphic phrase:

a[n] [inter|cyber|web|net|hyper|blogo|podo|compu|e|i|electro|data|techno]comic