News Blast: Top News of the Day...For Me Anyway

Learned about the existence of Them Crooked Vultures. Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones, nuff said.

These fucking robots are going to kill us. Thanks a lot Switzerland, now we know why you were neutral during the human wars.

Geocities is shutting down today. XKCD has a tribute.

Yanks made it back to the World Series, but if you care at all you probably already know that.

Scott sent me this one today...Society made them that way. Killers and why they kill. It's your fault, and your fault, and especially YOUR fault.

More Comics Theoretical Stuff That YOU Don't Care About

Warren Ellis posted about this today and I think it's fucking rad: http://www.flickr.com/photos/warrenellis/4043479776/sizes/o/.

Basically its a cheat sheet that came out something like forever ago on the 22 panel formats that always work when illustrating a comic. It's fascinating to look at these and say to yourself, "Yep...they sure do." Good to know as someone who wants to write. I'm sure they are even more helpful for artists and editors.

Hey, does anyone want to do a magazine with me? Could really be about anything, but I think it would be cool to try MagCloud out. Basically you send this company PDFs that you want in a mag and they do all the distribution for you....You just set your own markup per issue and sell away. I think we'd need an artist, a photographer and someone to handle the PR at the very least. I've got some people in mind, but I don't know what their schedules are like. I'd love to be able to put something out in the next year or so. As always, anyone interested, give me a shout.

EDIT TO ADD (Because I think this should be part of this discussion as well): InPrint is another one of these DIY publishing companies. Basically the artists send in digital copies of their art and people can purchase them on a single print basis. No more doing expensive ass print runs only to not sell them all and end up in debt. Take a little bit of the starving out of the artist.

B+W v. Color: The Malice over Palettes

My take on why B+W comics are not more popular, basically boils down to, I think B+W is often used as a financial, rather than artistic decision, and that causes a whole bunch of other stuff. Original thread at http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=7057

Here's what I think. People will buy anything that is of high enough quality and has good enough advertisement and has little enough competition that it isn't drowned out.

There has been very good B+W work, but it is often drowned out in the market by so-so comics that are only in B+W because a big publisher wouldn't pick them up and self publishing is much cheaper in B+W. The color in comics often signals quality because it was worth shelling out the extra cash to print in color. Color basically means someone thought these comics would sell and B+W comics seem often a financial decision rather than an artistic one.

Really if a big comics writer, such as our curator here, wrote in B+W, I doubt sales on that book would be low. That is because Warren Ellis has no competition in his niche, he's fucking Warren Ellis. You see a book by him, you will buy it. You see a B+W book by Joe Shmoe 1 vs. a color book by Joe Shmoe 2 you're probably more inclined to buy color because hey, more production value often means better product. Don't get me wrong...a lot of times it doesn't, we all know there's a lot of crap with high production costs, but c'mon, there's a lot more crap with low production costs.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying this goes for everyone, just that it seems to me to be the general consensus.

Hey You, Get Off of McCloud

I've been doing a little reading about Scott McCloud's ideas re: the future of comics and have come to the conclusion that he's a pretty smart guy. His take on the medium as a whole has made me think a lot about the differences between print and digital and the myriad of new directions that the medium can take...

I've thought for some time that the possibilities in traditional comics themselves have barely been touched, let alone the artistic freedom you get from a completely digital canvas.

Check out McCloud's infinite canvas ideas here: http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/index.html, and this example he lists in the article is pretty eye opening.

I found some other great examples of tricks that digital comickery can pull where print wouldn't get away with it: here and here. The first one being a bit mind blowing (I originally got it off of a Pia Guerra post at Whitechapel, the Warren Ellis run message board) the second just good use of disestablishing the norms when it comes to comics (though a bunch of these conventions have been used in comic-TV or comic-movie conversion, Watchmen did one just before the movie came out).

Anyway, I wish I could draw because I have a couple of ideas swirling, but alas, I think I'm going to need to find an art-eest. All interested parties make yourselves known.

4th of Joolaii

Going down the shore today, going to bring a bunch of beer, a bunch of books and a bunch of steaks and see where that takes me.

Started up a new site. It's about zombies and life after them. Check it out, let me know if you want to post on it. With all the traffic I get through here I'd be surprised if I didn't get a few writers.

I was thinking about editing that joke because it was kinda opaque, but then I realized no one will read it anyway so it stays. And now I've described my joke to the no one who will read it...I think that means it's time to stop writing.