A new update to vir Bonus is available. New updates are planned for mondays.

As reported by Newsarama and the Live Journal Poison Elves community: Poison Elves creator Drew Hayes died late last week of a heart attack while recovering from pneumonia. He was 37.

Listen to The Triple Feature talkcast at 9:00 PM CST tonight and win free stuff!

Everyone's A Critic.

**ahem** cheap advertising available...

HEADLINES

Continuing rumbles over how to turn the CBR/CBZ file format into the mp3 of comics, this time from Modern Tales publisher and WebcomicsNation owner Joey Manley:

All I need is RSS-with-enclosure subscribability — a CBR reader that acts just like a podcast catcher, in short, only snagging .CBR or .CBZ files, instead of .MP3’s.

I can’t take credit for this idea. take a look at this thread started by the well-known comics writer Warren Ellis almost two years ago. “TIVO for comics,” he calls the idea. That pretty much sums it up.

INTERVIEWS

• The Indie Spinner Rack podcast has interviews with Viper Comics and a few of its creators (link from Journalista!).
• If you haven't stopped by the Webcomics In Print blog recently -- they've got a whole bunch of interviews up from the recent U.K. Webcomic Thing convention.

DIGITAL FORMATS

• Publisher Active Images has announced that it will distribute the Image comic book Elephantmen on mobile phones. These comics on mobile phones press releases have been steadily coming out for a couple years now. What I haven't seen is stories on how well that's working out for anyone. Do readers like this format? Do creators see a dime from distribution this way (or gain new readers or otherwise increase their audience?)
• Flickr gets more comics-friendly. I guess Flickr has given up on insisting its site is solely for photos since it now allows users to define images loaded to the site as "photo, illustration/art/cgi, or screenshot". (link from Drawn! blog) Speaking of Flickr, Drawn! also spotlighted Applegeeks artist Mohammad "Hawk" Haque's flickr stream where he posts photos altered to include miniature versions of himself.

SPRITE: The UnComic

• Sprite comic creator alert!! Philipp Lenssen has posted over 700 sprites that he created for a never-released fantasy-style game. Even better is that they're available under a Creative Commons license. (link from Drawn! blog)
  

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

• Tyler Martin is the artist on two new webcomics: The Check Family, which is about lacrosse and also appears at LaxPower; and Double-A Zone which appears on the official NCAA blog.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• Raina Telgemeier and Gene Yang were selected by Booklist for their 2007 Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth. (link from Flight blog)
  
• Ring, ring, ring, BANANARCHY!!
  
• In not-comics, Broken Frontiers has a column on the hip-hop subgenre of nerdcore.
• The magazine Animation has an interview with Todd Rosenberg about turning his webcomic Odd Todd into cartoon project. (link via Journalista!)
  

Hi folks,

I just wanted to let you know that i have finally made an animation short based on one of my comic strips...

You can see the original Corporate Machine strip here at The Flowfield Unity and you can compare it to the animation here at youtube.

Well, go on then - when is a girlfriend like a go-bot? Believe it or not, there's an answer to this in Lee Munday's scarily funny The Lumbering Dead this week. No, really.

Discover the answer for yourself in the latest instalment at Broken Voice Comics. Go on, it's quite safe. I promise it has nothing to do with setting your mobile to "vibrate"!

The Kosmix "Year One" my compilation of one year of webcomics

is now available to you at comixpress.com.

Here is the link...

I recently came across this article about Wikipedia's co-founder starting all over. Although it does not mention a word about webcomics, given the fuss that has been raised in the past about Wikipedia, it's well worth reading.