Strip News 10-2-9

While we wait for someone to confirm Apple’s entry into the ebook device market, let’s look at some of the great stuff you guys have done this week…

• Tangents reviewed Girls With Slingshots while Pigs of the Industry looked at WheelJack Union, Revenge of the Homicidal Pumpkins and Goldilock – which won the September 2009 competition. This Week in Webcomics reviewed Tuna Carpaccio P.I. and somehow I missed Morgan Wick’s review Scary Go Round earlier this month. Not to be left behind, Webcomic Overlook swung in with Gunshow.
• High-Low reviewed A Diary of a Work in Progress, Covered in Confusion and Ochre Ellipse and Optical Sloth covered Too Negative 2,3,7, 8,9 and 12, Blood Orange plus Mercy Killing and Tempo Lush with Delicate Axiom. Madinkbeard reread Hutch Owen: Unmarketable.
• The October issue of Wizard magazine recommended five comic art schools in GA, MN, NJ, NY and VT. They were the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, the School of Visual Arts and Center for Cartoon Studies. The article gives the tuition, famous almuni, instructors, how many students are enrolled, lessons and technology, what you’ll graduate with and what each of them is ideal for. The rest of the magazine is about the other Hot 50 things going on in comics. Two things that may give you pause in this hot 50… Three webcomics made it in at 33rd: SMBC, Chainsawsuit and Least I Could Do. And further down the list in Amazing Spider-Man, it appears that JJJ and Aunt May are an item. A serious item – which is not a selling point for me. Ugh.
• It escaped my conscious notice that Brom is also an author but now that I’ve been reminded, I do recall seeing book covers with his name of them. A Nickel’s Worth interviewed Terry Libenson and Aaron Johnson while This Week In Webcomics pointed us to interviews with Paul Taylor and Gisele Lagace. Dark Horse had an interview with Evan Dorkin, creator of Milk and Cheese. Thought Bubble talked to Hugh Raine and Marc Ellerby while Trouble With Comics asked Erik Larsen some questions that focused mostly on the comic business. I have a lot of respect for what Mr. Larsen has been able to accomplish but I think he and the interviewer should realize that the rules are changing – most entertainment is going digital and it’s not going back. He does make a good point that good comics definitely sell (in some form or another,) so the demand is there. We just have to supply it. (Also, one of my kids brought home a Scholastic News (click here and scroll down to the September 7th, 2009 cover image – you’ll see a boy with a textbook and another kid on a computer behind him. California public schools are switching over to digital textbooks. Schwarzenegger is all in favor of the switch so kids can be up to date on things.)
• I figure that this Astonishing X Men motion comic would probably be interesting to watch on a handheld screen but it doesn’t hold my attention on a regular screen. Also – I’m sure I’m not the only one who has this opinion – I don’t need to see screens of credits like I’m watching a movie.
• Ulysses Seen has a new update schedule starting October 5th and Dovecote Crest hit the one year milestone.
• Morgan Wick weighed in with interesting thoughts on the infinite canvas. He also had a 2009 State of Webcomics address that should get the required reading tag. Some of it revolves around the Floating Lightbulb – which recently had a post examining what results we can get out of Google Trends about the state of many popular webcomic sites and a follow up post that includes some unexpected replies. Since ArtPatient is far too small to register on Trends, I did my own comparison of Amazon.com on Trends and Alexa and the trends are reliably the same. Google finds value in Trends, so it would be foolish to ignore it just because we don’t know how it works. And as you know, we ought to get this reliable stats thing out of the way before we hit the final end of newspapers and all the newspaper cartoons really start to get an online presence. (Courtesy of Journalista.)
• And I found the Comic Reporter’s request to stop pushing him to review your comic interesting to read. It may come off a little harsh upon first read but it’s really just a plea for those making requests to be reasonable. After all, there’s only so much time in the day and there are other things that need to be done too. Say Tom gets ten review requests a day – there’s no way he’ll ever meaningfully get to all 3,650 requested comics during the year – or even half that many.
• Comics Worth Reading gave us some pointers on what to do with our damaged print copies and Comic Book Resources talked about iPhone comic apps. You may also find the Toonopedia fun to browse or research and we finally get an answer to the question many have had to confront: is it or is it not faster to work digitally than traditionally? We got some pointers on sharpening our two sentence comic synopses and then even more pointers, which included how to work large casts like super teams in the synopses. And, of course, you already saw mpd57′s thirty golden rules for Zuda submissions.
• Finally, we now know what to do with all those dried out markers.

ArtPatient.com