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Kleefeld On Webcomics #71: Original Art

Posted 8/3/12 2:30 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld

One of the great things about webcomics, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned at least once or twice before is the fact that they’re digital. You can keep up with some really great stories and strips while you’re travelling, or when you’ve got a few extra moments in the library, or whatever. There’s no concern about whether or not your local shop will carry the issue, or if it might be sold out. Since webcomics are digital, they can be sent anywhere in the world any time you like, as often as you like. They take advantage of some of the key facets of the internet to full effect. Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #70: Thoughts From Greg Rucka

Posted 7/27/12 3:30 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld & Greg Rucka

Greg Rucka is a name you might be familiar with. He’s written several novels (including the Queen & Country series) and quite a few comics (including Action Comics and Batman), and had his and Steve Lieber’s Whiteout adapted for a major motion picture. He’s won a Harvey Award and four Eisners. He’s currently writing The Punisher for Marvel.

The man clearly knows a thing or two about comics, and has a vested and ongoing interest in printed comics. But last year, he also started up a new webcomic with Rick Burchett and Eric Newsom called Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether. In a recent break between chapters, Rucka posted a reflection on the previous year and some of the differences he sees between webcomics and what shows up in most comic shops every week. He’s graciously allowed us to reprint his piece here...

It was, roughly, just over a year ago that Eric, Rick, and I debuted our flight of fancy here, and, yes, a whole lot has happened, and a whole lot has been learned, and a whole lot has been observed. We’ve discovered just how difficult it is to work in this medium, and with this schedule; we’ve made many mistakes, and struggled to correct them as they arose; we’ve learned that the Beast must be Fed, and that our fan-base is our greatest strength; we’ve learned that there are more of you out there than we thought. We’ve learned a lot about loyalty, too. Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #69: Whither Con

Posted 7/20/12 12:28 pm EST by in Webcomics


Comic book convention season is officially underway with the launch of Comic-Con International in San Diego. (You may have seen some news to that effect elsewhere on this site.) Throughout the summer, there will be cons all across the country and they’ll vary in size and focus and demographics and just about every other variable you can think of.

The original reason for having a convention was to get like-minded individuals together. Ron Foss started this somewhat informally as he travelled across the country in the early 1960s by visiting the homes of other fans he had communicated with. Jerry Bails brought almost two dozen people together in his own home in 1964 for what was dubbed “the Alley Tally Party” and it was only a few short months after that when the first formal comic book convention was held in Detroit. It was small by today’s standards, but the basic elements we associate with a convention were in place; there were a dozen dealers, door prizes were handed out, and the H.G. Wells movie Things To Come was shown. In San Diego this year, there are hundreds of dealers, free goodies are handed out by the truckload, and dozens of films are screened, many of which are marking their public debut.

But how do webcomics fit into that? After all, webcomics by their very nature do not exist in a real space the way printed comics do. Webcomics aren’t tangible, and they’re generally given away for free online. Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #68: "Of Eisners and Harveys"

Posted 7/6/12 3:33 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld

Comics, like many artistic mediums, have a number of industry awards that are given out annually. The earliest was the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonist Society, and named for famed cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Though it was originally called the Billy DeBleck Memorial Award, it was first given to Milton Caniff in 1946 for his work on Terry and the Pirates. The Award was renamed in 1954, and all the previous winners received a Reuben statuette. Tom Richmond was named the most recent recipient this past May.

In 1985, Fantagraphics began a Kirby Award, named after Jack Kirby. It was managed by Dave Olbrich, an employee of Fantagraphics. In 1987, a dispute over control of the Kirbys erupted and it was discontinued in favor of two new awards: The Harveys, named after Harvey Kurtzman, and The Eisners, named after Will Eisner. Both are voted on by industry professionals and run several months apart, so as not to compete too directly with one another. This past week, nominees for the Harveys were announced with final awards to be given out in September, and next week, at San Diego Comic Con, the winners of The Eisners will be announced. Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #67: The Buffer

Posted 6/29/12 2:30 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld

Earlier this week, fans of Girl Genius saw the Foglios’ strip updated at the usual time, but not looking quite as polished as normal. It included a note that said, “We’ll get the color in sometime while it’s still Monday, but Cheyenne [Wright, the colorist] was with us at ConTemporal this weekend, and we just got home about an hour ago.” Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #66: We're Going On An Adventure

Posted 6/22/12 3:52 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld

The root language of the web is HTML. You often see it as the file type for many pages online, but it stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language. It essentially allows a person to write a document that uses a standardized method of recognizing basic formatting -- things like italics, bullet points, line breaks, etc. -- and can connect to other documents via hyper-text links. Thus, you can create a document that connects with other documents, which connect to other documents, which connect to still more documents. This is the basic functionality of the internet; you’re able to read this column and I can provide you easy access to webcomics like Two Guys and Guy or Nnewts.

It also lets a webcomic creator intertwine their series of individual comic pages into a collective whole, most commonly through forward and back buttons attached to the strip. As I spelled out in one of my earliest columns, it can also point readers to more about the creation by way of About, News, Comments and other links. Note in the previous sentence how I used a link to refer back to an earlier column I wrote here to provide a sort of continuity. Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #65: Keeping Up

Posted 6/15/12 5:15 pm EST by in Webcomics


 

From "The Adventures Of Shan Shan"

By Sean Kleefeld

I was playing this week with a new comics reader that’s still in beta. They’ve got most of the functionality in place, but are still making tweaks and improvements so I don’t feel comfortable doing a formal review of it yet. But in playing with it, I think I’ve already decided that -- regardless of its merits and through no real fault of its creators -- it’s not the tool for me.

The idea of a good comics reader is a tricky one. There are a number of hurdles that need to be overcome which require a combination of skills not easy to come by in a small group, and much harder to come by in a single individual. And the result is going to be tailored to the broadest possible viewing audience, which will almost certainly not include me. Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #64: Skirting Puttnam's Law

Posted 6/8/12 3:30 pm EST by in Webcomics


Although largely retired these days, David Puttnam is a movie producer who got his start in the 1960s. He didn’t make blockbusters, though, and focused on doing just what interested him. He’s probably best known for the Academy Award winning Chariots of Fire from 1981. His pictures, for the most part, were not great financial successes, often despite being critical ones. Puttnam clearly knew the movie business and simply chose not to make popcorn flicks. He was rewarded in 1986 when Columbia Pictures named him as their new Chief Executive Officer.

Puttnam reigned as Columbia’s CEO for only about a year. Officially, he stepped down of his own accord, but conventional wisdom says he was forced out. Because he wanted to do something different.

Once installed at Columbia, Puttnam made great number of enemies very quickly. He railed against talent agents who controlled much of the movie industry and the stars that he felt were extorting the studios. He cancelled many contracts and fired Ray Stark, another of Columbia’s big producers. He bad-mouthed the status quo and suggested that studios shouldn’t be throwing all their money at big budget features, going so far as to allegedly tell his board of directors: “I wouldn’t make a Rambo, no matter what the size of the built-in profit guarantee. If someone wrote me a check for the total box-office gross, I wouldn’t take it.” He wanted to make movies that were well done, regardless of their commercial viability. He wanted to make movies differently. Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #63: Besting Demons

Posted 6/1/12 1:45 pm EST by in Webcomics


Earlier this week, Warren Ellis posted some thoughts about the relatively recent spate of print comics creators getting into webcomics. He of course didn’t mention every creator who’s dipped their virtual pen into the webcomics inkwell, but there’s more than a handful these days. In fact, there are more than a few people known as webcomickers that actually had a long career in print before webcomics. Phil Foglio, for example, had a regular comic in the pages of Dragon Magazine as early as 1980 as his current strip with his wife Kaja, Girl Genius, also started as a print comic. As did Karl Kesel’s Section Zero.

One of the things Ellis points to in his piece is that many of these newer webcomics we something of a convergence on a similar format, roughly the equivalent of half of a printed comic page. That makes the graphic that shows up on the web more horizontal, therefore fitting most monitors better, but still allows for a fairly easy transition when the book is slated for print. However, what strikes me as more interesting about Ellis’ post is that he notes that, while working on Freakangels, he deliberately wrote the pages with the printed page foremost in his mind, with how it looked on the web as a secondary consideration. The story was written as a print comic, even though it premiered as a webcomic. Ellis notes that “it was mostly about ease of experience and ease of transition to print (where the money was).” Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #62: An Unseen Division

Posted 5/25/12 1:30 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld 

Last weekend, the University of Chicago hosted a three-day conference called Comics: Philosophy & Practice with the intent to “explore comics autobiography and journalism, the current shape of the ‘graphic novel,’ the power of hand-drawn images to shock and provoke, historical print culture, the narrative impact of comics style, and where and how today's most exciting work is happening.” The guest included some of the most long-standing, influential names in comics, including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel and Joe Sacco to name a very few. Unlike a comics convention, everyone was there exclusively to talk about comics in the context of an academic setting. There were no autograph lines or cosplayers or rows of long boxes with bagged comics. The whole event took place in a lecture hall, with people on stage discussing their thoughts and ideas about comics. It was a fascinating event with lots to take in and process. But there was almost no discussion of webcomics at all. Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #61: Going Mainstream

Posted 5/18/12 3:00 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Sean Kleefeld

One of the things that many proponents of webcomics have been striving for is achieving a sort of popular legitimacy. They want to overcome a stereotype of just doing a handful of doodles that get posted online where only a dozen people see them. You and I know, of course, that’s not remotely accurate, but I think that people in business still feel that’s how they’re perceived. We’re almost at a tipping point where webcomics achieve that legitimacy goal and, while I can’t tell you when or where that will exactly happen, I can tell you what form it will take.

Al Capp created the newspaper comic strip Li’l Abner in 1934. The story centered around the title character, his hillbilly family and friends who lived in Dogpatch, Kentucky. One of the recurring scenarios was that Daisy Mae kept trying to capture Abner’s interest romantically, generally with no success. Abner tended to be quite naive and oblivious to Daisy Mae’s charms. For that matter, Abner was oblivious to every girl’s charms; he was considered quite the catch and Daisy Mae wasn’t the only girl with her eyes on him. Read More...

"A.D.: New Orleans" Creator Josh Neufeld Talks "Bahrain: Lines In Ink, Lines In The Sand"

Posted 5/16/12 3:00 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Danica Davidson

Josh Neufeld (“A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,” “The Influencing Machine”) has been Eisner-nominated for his webcomic “Bahrain: Lines in Ink, Lines in the Sand,” which gives both a journalistic and personal perspective to recent uprisings in the Middle East. After visiting the small country of Bahrain, Neufeld became friends with local political cartoonists Mohammed and Sara, and soon learned that the two have very different opinions about what’s going on in their nation. Using their experiences — and some of their cartoons — Neufeld applied the comics medium to inform people about what’s happening in Bahrain. The piece has been translated into Italian, will probably be in Farsi soon for a liberal Iranian website, and Neufeld has been given the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship to study more on Bahrain.

MTV Geek: What can you tell us about “Bahrain: Lines in Ink, Lines in the Sand”?

Josh Neufeld: It came about from a trip I made with the State Department as a cultural ambassador of sorts. My previous book, “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” was critical in some ways of the government response to Hurricane Katrina, and the State Department found that it was a useful example of our country’s freedom of expression. So they asked me if I would like to travel to countries that don’t have that freedom and talk about it in that context. I went to the small country of Bahrain, which is a monarchy with a Sunni minority in control and a Shia majority. They’re very free in some ways compared to other Arab countries, but they have a very controlled press. During that trip, I made some appearances at universities, arts organizations and journalist organizations, where I met editorial cartoonists and aspiring political cartoonists. I met two twenty-year-old kids, a young man and a young woman, whom I stayed in touch with on Facebook. When the Arab Spring movement started to take place in 2011, Bahrain underwent its own upheaval. Through Facebook I determined pretty quickly that the two young people I’d made friends with were on opposite sides of that struggle going on in Bahrain. So my piece documents that whole story. Read More...

Kleefeld on Webcomics #60: Social Commentary

Posted 5/11/12 3:00 pm EST by in Webcomics


Despite what you may have seen on the comics pages in the newspapers over the last several decades, comics have a long history of using humor to create social commentary. As I noted in this column not that long ago, use of the word cartoon to refer to humorous illustrations was a direct result of Punch magazine satirizing what was going on in British Parliament at the time. Early favorite strips like Hogan’s Alley spoke to working class issues of the day, and later classics like Pogo often spoke very directly to social concerns held by the creators. The famous “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” line from the strip was specifically from a piece on the issues of generating garbage and waste.

But since the 1970s, comic syndicates (as well as many other large corporations) have become increasingly risk averse. That is, they really don’t want to take a chance if they can avoid it and they’d rather play things as safely as possible. That’s one of the reasons they like to keep legacy strips like Popeye or Blondie going after their original creators have passed away; they know the basic set-up of the strip and there’s less of a risk having a new creator work on established characters than there is with a new creators working on new characters. Read More...

Kleefeld On Webcomics #59: Kleefeld IN Webcomics

Posted 5/4/12 3:00 pm EST by in Webcomics


(Editor's Note: This week in "Kleefeld On Webcomics," we are going to try something a little bit different...)

Read More...

Liquid Comics, MTV Voices, And Open Hands Initiative Debuts "Silver Scorpion" Webcomic

Posted 5/4/12 12:00 pm EST by in Webcomics


By Danica Davidson

Bashir Bari, the star of “Silver Scorpion,” was created by twenty-six young people with disabilities while meeting at the Youth Ability Summit in Syria. The creators, a combination of Americans and Syrians, wanted to not only empower people with disabilities, but also to open up cultural connections. Thus this comic book superhero was born, but don’t just expect to see him on unmoving pages. A new webcomic version of the “Silver Scorpion” debuted earlier this week on MTV Voices, the international pro-social part of MTV.

The webcomic is a collaboration with MTV Voices, Liquid Comics and the Open Hands Initiative. In the short online episodes, we watch as Bashir starts out as an arrogant young man, but loses his legs and eventually becomes a superhero. Read More...

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