Posted 11/30/12 4:18 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
When I started this column, I said it was my intent to cover all aspects of webcomics. Now you could either look at that as an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, or you can look at it as a cop-out statement that gives me a lot of leeway in trying to figure what the heck I’m going to write about. Neither position would be wholly inaccurate. Read More...
If you’ve looked at more than even a few webcomics, you’re pretty likely to find a fairly wide range of sizes and formats. Some are square, some are horizontal, some are vertical. Some are about the same proportions as a comic book, some are more like a newspaper strip, some don’t seem to fall into any regular pattern at all. Why are webcomickers all over the map with this?
Let’s take a quick history lesson first, and look at the comics of the early 20th century. Newspapers are the size they are because paper manufacturers. When paper manufacturing first became industrialized, the sheets they could cost-effectively produce topped out at around two feet by two and a half feet. This was called a broadsheet, and printers built their presses to fit that size. If you fold that sheet in half, you’ve got a pamphlet that’s about 15” x 24”. With that booklet style format, you could nest several of these folded sheets together and -- voilà! -- you’ve got the basics of a newspaper. Read More...
The comic book industry, as people are familiar with it today, has been in place for over seventy-five years and has remained fairly unchanged for the past thirty. The newspaper strip business has been around longer -- over one hundred years -- and has been pretty stable and consistent for most of that time. All of this can be evidenced by some of the characters that have remained viable to this day: Dagwood Bumstead, Popeye, Superman, Batman, etc. still appear in much the same form and format as they did over a half century ago. Compare, for example, these two Phantom comic strips from 1939 and 2012... Read More...
Posted 11/2/12 12:38 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
The web was still in its infancy when I started looking at it in earnest. I enjoyed being able to find things from all around the world without having to leave the comfort of my bedroom. After a little while, I came across a brochure that was perhaps eight pages long explaining the internet in its entirety. It had a history, some technical information about information packets and IP addresses and a reference guide to HTML. Obviously, with only eight pages, everything was a pretty high level summary. But the HTML guide took an entire two pages and covered literally every bit of code that was available at that time. I learned the basics of HTML in one weekend, and had everything pretty well mastered in a second weekend. Not that I was particularly talented with it, there simply wasn’t much to learn back then. Read More...
Posted 10/26/12 4:15 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
When I first became interested in comics, it was largely because of superheroes. The adventures of Batman and Spider-Man were colorful and exciting, and sparked my imagination. I wanted to see more of their adventures. Beyond what I would read in the comics from month to month. Beyond even the weekly animated shows that aired on Saturday mornings. My imagination would run wild with ideas that ranged from the completely nonsensical to the legally improbable. Read More...
There’s a weird intersection of ideologies in webcomics. On the one side, you’ve got the people creating webcomics who are mostly interested in expressing themselves and telling stories and drawing. On the other side, you’ve got programmers and coding experts who organize databases and write coldly logically software to connect together all the pieces of what we call the world wide web. It’s a rather classic left brain/right brain type of scenario. The programmers want make a predictable and orderly experience, while the artists want something that catches people off guard. Read More...
Posted 10/17/12 5:19 pm EST by MTV Geek in Digital Comics, Webcomics
By Danica Davidson
Investigative journalist Tori Marlan is working on a book about 16-year-old Ethiopian orphan Fanuel, who experienced human trafficking and smuggling while trying to make it to the U.S. In the meantime, she’s hooked up with graphic novelist Josh Neufeld (A.D. New Orleans) to make an enhanced e-comic about part of Fanuel’s story. Published at Atavist, the 43-page e-comic "Stowaway" includes special extras for more understanding of the story, including maps, timelines and videos. It's available both through the Atavist mobile app or online via a web browser. MTV Geek caught up with Marlan and Neufeld to get more details. Read More...
Posted 10/12/12 6:32 pm EST by MTV Geek in New York Comic Con, Webcomics
I’ve got around 200 comic titles in my feed reader right now. Not all of them are active, mind you! Some have concluded, some are on indefinite hiatus, some are just very sporadically updated. But there’s probably around 125-150 that I read regularly; not necessarily daily, just on whatever regular update schedule their creators follow. There’s a combination of newspaper strips being syndicated online, old comic books given new life via online serialization and, of course, true webcomics. Read More...
Quick, what’s the website address of xkcd? On the off chance that you don’t know, you could Google “xkcd” and, sure enough, Randall Munroe’s webcomic site pops up as the first entry. That should come as no surprise since the letters xkcd never really appear in that specific combination in any existing word. The only other place it might appear where somebody wasn’t talking about the comic would be if your cat happened to walk across the keyboard while you were on message board or something. According to Munroe, “It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.”
Of course, searching for the website is something of a moot point since Munroe has it located at the straightforwardly named domain of xkcd.com. If you can remember the name of the comic, you can remember the address where it’s located. Read More...
Posted 9/28/12 4:00 pm EST by MTV Geek in Manga, Webcomics
I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to comics. Whether they’re webcomics, pamphlet comics, manga, fumetti, whatever... if they’re well done, I don’t really care. And right now, my favorite serial comic of any sort is a manga series called Bakuman. It’s by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the same guys who did Death Note.
(Bear with me. This will circle back to webcomics.)
The basic story of Bakuman is that there are two teenagers who really want to become mangaka, professional manga creators. They’re both very talented and, together, manage to get their work published while they’re still in high school. The series then follows their progress over the next several years, along with several other aspiring mangaka who come to the profession around the same time. I had originally wanted to read the series because it promised to showcase something of how the manga industry actually worked; while I knew it to be different than American and European systems, I didn’t know much in the way of specifics. What I found, once I began reading, was that, while the series does indeed provide a wealth of background information about how the manga industry operates -- in far greater detail than I had anticipated, too! -- it also has many interesting and engaging characters conjoined in a fascinating story. Read More...
A frequent complaint that’s heard in broader discussions of comics surrounds gender bias. Both behind the art boards and in the art itself. The comics industry is dominated by men, and female characters are often portrayed in a stilted manner. By not having layers of already-empowered men in to circumvent, however, webcomics have been more inviting to both female creators as well as positive female role models.
But here’s the thing. Comics aren’t the only issue. We live in a society in which we are constantly bombarded by images, designed mostly by men, which chip away at women’s confidence and self-esteem. Belittling them bit by bit as they’re told to live up to impossible standards that are largely thanks to various digital manipulations. So that when a girl enters adulthood, she’s already wrapped in a constant struggle with herself about how beautiful, smart, and talented she really is. Read More...
Posted 9/14/12 3:57 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
Prior to the web, people spent several of their formative years learning and then basically stopped. This was evidenced in the journeyman system that many trades exhibited. Once a child was old enough to handle physical labor, they went to work for their parent. In the case of boys, they would often work under their father’s tutelage and learn his profession; in the case of girls, they would often work with their mother to be educated about domestic duties. Once a formal public education system was established, the parents would send their children to school where they would learn reading, writing and ‘rithmatic. Many would learn the basics and then drop out to take up a trade; a few might go on to a higher educational institution like college and earn a degree. In either case, once they left school, their learning largely stopped. Although the specific numbers of students changed over time, this system lasted throughout most of the 20th century. Read More...
Webcomics, as the name plainly states, are comics on the web. Although that’s a bit misleading since many printed comics also show up on the web in various forms. But I’ve started seeing a variety of printed works gain a second life as a webcomic, despite not being true webcomics in the strictest sense.
Posted 8/31/12 1:20 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
Derek Kirk Kim came to prominence with his debut graphic novel, Same Difference and Other Stories. He’s worked on a variety of projects since then, and his latest two revolve around the story of Andy Go. He’s telling Andy’s stories through the webcomic TUNE and the YouTube series Mythomania. We were able to have a chat with Kim between chapters and seasons. Click here for Part One.
MTV Geek: You noted recently, to my surprise, that TUNE has basically been subsidized so far by First Second. It's a somewhat different model than most webcomics, and First second is one of the few publishers that seem to be actively pursuing it, having already done that with Friends with Boys and Zahra's Paradise. I don't recall seeing anything about that with TUNE originally, but was that in place right from the start?
Derek Kirk Kim: Well, First Second always backed the online serialization. The only difference was that, unlike the other First Second web-first books, TUNE was being serialized at my site lowbright.com at first. But as the pages stacked up, I couldn't handle the bandwidth costs anymore on my barebones site, so First Second swooped in and made a site specifically for TUNE and handled any costs from then on. But First Second was behind the web serialization from the get-go, just not financially at first. Read More...
Posted 8/17/12 12:48 pm EST by MTV Geek in Webcomics
So, the Penny Arcade Kickstarter project.
Two guys started a webcomic over a decade ago, and have become successful enough financially to have fourteen people on staff, set up a charity organization that’s raised over $12 million since 2003, and host annual gaming conventions in both Seattle and Boston. You wouldn’t think they’d need to Kickstart anything, and could easily afford to do pretty much whatever they wanted. What’s going on here? Read More...
