Strip News 1-19-9

This is a bonus Strip News, filled with all of the goings-on and derring-do of the comic world. At least, it’s the things I found noteworthy…

• Xeric hands out awards while Comics 212 has an article about a couple of creators, book cover design and the publishing industry. MPD57 brings us a snapshot of each Zuda comic in the January contest. The original Turtles can be found here. The Webcomic Overlook offers up a review of Nawlz. Do we finally, really know if the real Batman is dead? And Act-i-vate brings us Fahrenheit 451.
• Looking to be interviewed? Sign up here. In the meantime, here’s an interview with Eben07 and here’s another with Tony Piro of Calamities of Nature.
• Mark Waid talks more about designing effective superhero and pulp characters. I’m still thinking about this, but I suspect this can be adapted for designing characters in other categories like humor. (Here’s the  link to the previous post he mentions.)
• Seven Camels urges us to do our drawing research and gives us an easy way to spice up our artwork. Helpfully, here are some thoughts about creating an emotional dynamic between your characters. (Or so it promises. The video doesn’t want to play for me.) We also see that how you treat the people in your community contibutes directly to your audience. And here we see why the Muppets were a comic disaster – and I mean that in a good way. If you haven’t seen this video of Scott McCloud, I recommend it. (Personal note: I hadn’t realized how fundamentally different animation and comics were in how the senses are represented in time and spatially. He talks about that about 70% of the way through the video. Interesting. I knew comic panels were more than a snapshot of time and gutters add to the experience but animating the characters elminates the benefits of the panels and gutters in a very deep way. The imagination part of the comic experience is totally ripped away from you when it becomes animated. It’s also much clearer to me how simply adding music and sound to a conventional comic on the web can get in the way of enjoying the comic, though I have seen some enjoyable efforts.)
• Erika Moen (via Twitter) points to a wonderfully simple article about how to price your services.
• You’ve seen some fancy websites that have a wealth of things to see and do but they are hard to get around in. It might behoove us all to give this article a read on maintaining utility and visual decoration. Meanwhile, Xerxes has begun some other projects and is working on another comic management software.
• The newspaper comic pages continue to dwindle and comic books are not the cheap thrill they used to be. To end on an upswing, Kleefeld complements webcomics and ponders about change in reading habits.

This catches us up to Saturday morning’s batch of interesting stuff I found. Whew.