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By Sean Kleefeld

I knew I could be long-winded, but I am genuinely surprised this is my one hundredth Kleefeld on Webcomics column. When I first started this, I had my doubts as to how long I could keep this up, but roughly two years later, I’m still finding different angles to look at!

I had a column written up back in January that was attempting to be very forward-looking. There were some things that I thought we would see happen in 2013 and some things that I wanted to see happen. But then I had a chat with my editor. Don’t get the wrong idea -- she liked the column and had planned to run it, but the chat we had was around things we wanted to do see happen on MTV Geek more generally. We were totally on the same page with things, and came up with some new ideas and approaches that I’m pretty excited about, particularly as it means I’ll be able to contribute more to MTVG! More on that in a bit. But she also realized that I was coming up on my one hundredth column here, and thought that this would be a better time to talk about where we’re going. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

I try to be particular in my word choices, so let’s clear up “fumetti” right off the bat. In English, the term is commonly used to describe comics that are made up of photographs instead of drawings. It’s actually a borrowed word, though, originally coming from Italy. “Fumetto” is the Italian word for a comic, with “fumetti” being the plural form. It got lifted into English with a slight alteration to the meaning, and the basic concept of photographed comics was reasonably popular throughout the 1970s. Most commonly, they were used as printed adaptations of movies and TV shows, with still shots being used as a quick and easy way to show the same story. This allowed fans to revisit their favorites repeatedly before the widespread use of home video, and these fotonovels, as they were often called, largely disappeared from store shelves with the advent of VHS. Although, strictly speaking, “fumetti” are comics produced in Italy, I’m going to use the term here in the common English vernacular. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

For a long time, there were two names in the comic industry that I loved and hated at the same time: Kubert and Romita. Joe Kubert and John Romita both started working on comics back in the 1940s. While their earliest pieces perhaps weren’t stellar, they quickly learned on the job. They both worked tirelessly through 1950s and ‘60s, and gained more than a fair amount of notoriety for their work as it became more and more impressive in both illustration and storytelling. Some of the characters they worked on, while not owned by them, became synonymous with their names. Kubert was THE Hawkman artist; Romita was THE Spider-Man artist. Both very talented men, to be sure. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

Behind the scenes factoid: I write all of my Kleefeld on Webcomics columns in the cloud. Actually, I do almost all of my writing in the cloud these days. Wait... is “the cloud” common nomenclature yet? OK, for those who may not have heard about “the cloud” yet, it’s a fairly generic term referring to where my data is stored. Until recently, you were limited to your hard drive and maybe a few flash drives to port things around. The cloud refers to storing your data online. That way, it’s automatically backed up via the large storage servers and I can access it from pretty much anywhere with an internet connection. Which means that I can start writing this column from the comfort of my home, but then pick up and finish from a computer in the local library. Or at friend’s place. Or wherever. I can work on this almost whenever the mood strikes me, regardless of whether or not I thought to make a backup copy on a flash drive and carry that around with me. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

Every year, towards the end of December, things tend to get a little nuts. With several holidays clustered together, many people are out trying to prepare for at least one of them and, even if that precludes buying gifts, there’s frequently extra meal planning to take care of. Which also makes things busier for folks working in retail. Plus, there are office parties to attend, charities asking for contributions of your time and money, and seemingly no end of family obligations. With everyone rushing around trying to care of their business -- on top of keeping up with their regular work schedule -- everything seems to take longer. Checkout lines are longer, there’s more traffic everywhere, and there’s always that little old lady who still doesn’t even take out her checkbook to pay for her groceries until the cashier has told her the total. And you thought you could just duck into the store quickly to pick up some egg nog on the way to the party! Read More...

I’m dating myself a bit by kicking off this week’s column with a Great Space Coaster reference, but I think Gary Gnu was wrong: no news is NOT good news! At least when it pertains to webcomics.

One of the reasons that I was eager to start this column not quite two years ago was that, while there were plenty of large comics/pop culture/geek websites out there, none of them were really talking about webcomics. It’s not like webcomics were being wholly ignored, of course, but the big sites tended to only make reference to them when there was some kind of crossover news item. Faith Erin Hicks’ Superhero Girl being printed by Dark Horse, for example, or Karl Kesel working on City of the Dead. Where it was coming up as a news item not so much for the fact that it a webcomic was involved, but because there was some more traditional association with printed comics. Either a print creator was foraging into webcomics territory or a webcomicker landed some kind of arrangement with a print publisher. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

This is Part Two of an interview with Chris Watkins, who has been publishing Odori Park since 2009. On his comic’s “About” page, he assures readers that “Odori Park is total fiction, and in no way autobiographical. Except for the part about being married to a Japanese woman, and having multi-racial children. And having taught English in Japan. And running a small business. And at least half the gags. Other than that, really, it's woven out of whole cloth.” Recently, Watkins deliberately went through a series of “artsperiments” with his webcomic to see how he could improve the strip, and I caught up with him to talk about those changes, how he got to making them and what he came away from them with. Read More...