Strip News 10-9-9

You all just don’t take a week off, do you?

• Pigs of the Industry kvetched about Incarna and was dazzled Over My T-Shirt Fairy Tale while the Webcomic Overlook peeked at Eerie Cuties and School Bites. Spwug covered The Meek and Tangents talked about ’shipping and Red String.
• Surfing the Bleed reviewed Robot 13 #2 while mpd57 reviewed The Barber and This Is Where I Am on the Ulysses Seen site. Kevin C also reviewed the new issue of Robot 13 and High-Low covered AAOGFCTSV2. I Love Rob Liefeld adds another four short comic book reviews, as well. Optical Sloth reviewed And Then One Day, Rock & Soul and The Machinist plus Glorianna and Space Pilot Girl along with The Dreamer. The Comics Reporter talked about the comics he keeps going back to.
• If you like to be pointed to even more comic treasures, keep your eye on Comics Bento. Maybe Madinkbeard’s 5 Hour Recipe Comic will be featured there someday. I’d also like to see Ben Towle’s take on a famous classic, too.
• Comic Book Resources had this great behind the scenes sort of interview with Ron Perazza from Zuda. Project Fanboy interviewed Tom Hutchinson while A Nickel’s Worth interviewed Benita Epstein and Guy Gilchrist. Trouble With Comics snagged Tom Spurgeon for five questions and Thought Bubble talked with Steve Tillotson and Jack Fallows. Comics Alliance interviewed Jeffrey Rowland and Fleen talked with Howard Taylor. And just the other day, Agent X interviewed Scott Gallatin
• Congrats to the Daily Cartoonist on hitting four years. Keep up the good work. Our Last Gasp hit the one year mark and our old pal Crackwalker is also staying busy – I hope he does more with Hero High, personally. In the meantime, Surfboards and Rayguns is back from its hiatus while Kukuburi went on a hiatus due to travel but is seeking guest art.
• Is the Hulk really on Twitter? Awesome!
• So why did you buy your last comic or graphic novel? I know it probably felt like it was entertainment or escapism but I wonder if it’s deeper than that. What was the real reason? My last book purchases were for three or four comic-creating books which one would assume had to do with being useful but I think I was hoping that I might learn enough to create something new and different. Artist angst paves the way…
• Okay, so newspapers are having to confront the difficulty of delivering content online and turning a profit. And now so are magazines. TV is making inroads largely by embedding mandatory advertising but that’s just taking advantage of television viewers being trained to wait through commercials. But don’t run with that for comics – by that logic, then we should all be able to sell sea monkeys and x-ray specs. Hopefully those magazine folks will come up with something useful.
• Things continue to change. Soon, bookstores won’t be there for you to browse books but rather to print them off. That price tag is a little steep right now but it will come down once Blockbuster’s dvd thing gets popular. Maybe then readers won’t think they are entitled to riotous outrage. Speaking of demanding readers, it is my opinion that your comics newest update should show in your RSS feed and probably should be on the front page in most cases, IMO.
• Webcomics.com has a post on the Four Kinds of Free and a thread on Webcomic Author Drama. And speaking of unnecessary drama, I went back and updated all the reviews where I was sent something to review because of this. According to this, that’s probably not necessary but why take chances?
• Joey Manley had some advice (and discussion) about how to make a living with webcomics. I think step #2 is either a lengthy and difficult road OR you are the very fortunate recipient of a number of happy coincidences. Of course, accomplishing step 1 is the most solid thing you can do to accomplish step 2 but maybe these five steps will help you spread the word about your great comic.
• The Rampage Network has a caption contest going, here is a new way to find exactly the photo reference you’ll need and comics begin to merge with video games.
• Over on the Webcomic List forums, Tom asked what comic news sites would be good to send press releases to. Mostly obvious avenues present themselves to me ( i.e. other webcomic review sites, small press review sites, digg, reddit, etc.) Any other good ideas out there? Maybe local and regional papers?
• Some places with more comic news items include This Week in Webcomics, The Manga Critic, The Daily Crosshatch and ComixTalk. Check ‘em out.
• And the age old question: What’s your website worth, anyway? Did you make room on your site layout for Google’s Sidewiki? More importantly, what are readers saying on there, if anything, that you may not even be aware of?

ArtPatient.com