Comic Book Resources

Unbound: Getting in on the ground floor

There are some things about comics that work better online than print, and there are some things that just don’t work as well.

For instance, you can pick up a 200-page graphic novel and read it in pretty much one sitting, and usually that’s a pleasurable thing to do. Reading 200 pages worth of webcomic archives? Not so much. No matter how interesting a comic may be, a screenful of links to past episodes is a daunting sight to the new reader, and clicking, waiting for each page to load, and scrolling can become tedious pretty quickly.

So, for those who don't have time to wade through pages of old comics, here are five promising startups, all new comics that have launched since the beginning of 2010. There's a variety of styles and genres here, but all are so new that you can be up to speed in a few minutes. And all look like they will be worthy additions to any RSS feed.

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Unbound: Talking with Phil Foglio

Phil Foglio is best known as the co-creator, with his wife Kaja, of the insanely popular webcomic Girl Genius, and for a pioneering of a business model that a lot of people thought was simply insane: Posting a comic for free online and relying on people to buy the book anyway.

The model worked for the Foglios, who have won numerous awards for Girl Genius, including the first-ever Hugo award for graphic fiction, and Phil Foglio has been posting his earlier comics work online as well, including Buck Godot and What's New with Phil and Dixie. When Buck Godot wrapped up, a few weeks ago, he replaced it with the his first comic series, Myth Adventures, based on the humorous fantasy novels of Robert Asprin.

I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to talk to Foglio about why he is resurrecting a 20-year-old series, how he has managed to turn a profit with the free-comics model—and what's up with his one subscription comic, the adult series XXXenophile. Read on for all the answers.

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Unbound: Talking to Josh Alves

Josh Alves's all-ages comic Araknid Kid, started out on Zuda, built a following, and then, when it didn't win, moved over to Sugary Serials, to complete the story. Araknid Kid is a cheery little comic about a superhero with spider-like powers—he walks on the ceiling and shoots webs out of guns—but it is set in the Old West and bears absolutely no resemblance to that other comic about a guy with spider powers. Araknid Kid is definitely a kids' comic (the main character speaks in rebuses and someone gets punched out by a boxing glove on a spring), but the goofy humor and splashes of wit make it a good read for adults as well.

After wrapping up Araknid Kid, Alves launched a new comic, Heropotamus, last Christmas. When I saw that go up, I decided it would be interesting to talk to Alves about his work and the challenges of all-ages webcomics in general.

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Unbound: A field trip to the ALA Midwinter

As you might expect, the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting is a fairly staid event, compared to, say, New York Comic-Con. The average age is older, the decibel level is lower, and there are no booth babes. The only high-profile guest was Al Gore, who as far as I know has never made a comic, and a lot of the exhibits on the floor are for things like new bookcase systems or databases of scholarly articles.

On the plus side, there was free coffee and pastries, free internet and… comics! Graphic novels, actually, because that’s what librarians like (the traditional 32-page comic book doesn’t hold up too well under the stress of repeated readings). Librarians have long been enthusiastic supporters of the ninth art, and this year they gave it a boost by giving two of their traditional book awards to graphic novels: David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir won an Alex Award (for adult books with strong teen appeal) and the Toon book Benny and Penny in The Big No-No won the Geisel Award (named after Dr. Seuss) for “the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year.” The good times will continue later this month when the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) presents their Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.

Given that a big-city librarian may buy hundreds of copies of a single title—in hardback—it’s not hard to see why publishers felt it was worth their while to make the trek to Boston for the midwinter meeting. Only two of the large independent publishers, Boom! Studios and Viz, came to this show, but this is actually a smaller event than the ALA Annual Conference, which takes place in June. But a number of other major publishers were there—Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins—and they all publish or distribute graphic novels, so there was lots to see if you knew how to look.

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Unbound: Talking Gyakushu! with Dan Hipp

Dan Hipp's graphic novel Gyakushu! debuted in 2007 as one of Tokyopop's original global manga titles. Like many of the books in that line, Gyakushu! could only loosely be described as manga, as Hipp has a drawing and storytelling style all his own, and judging from the favorable reviews it garnered online, the series seems to have been popular with fans of American comics as well as manga. Although the third (and final) volume has been complete for some time, it has yet to be published, due to structural changes at Tokyopop, although the plan is to eventually publish it online.

So Hipp decided to take matters into his own hands and use the web to build an audience. This week, with Tokyopop's permission, he put the first two volumes online in their entirety, along with a preview of the third volume. We were curious about this and e-mailed Hipp to find out what he is up to. In addition to Gyakushu!, Hipp is the artist for The Amazing Joy Buzzards and Ben 10 Alien Force: Doom Dimension, which was scripted by Peter David and is due out in February from Del Rey. He is also the creator of Bonehead.

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Unbound: Brad Guigar on Webcomics.com

It sounds like a paradox: Webcomics.com is a how-to site explaining how you can make money as the creator of a free webcomic.

But you will have to pay to see it.

The standard model for creator-owned webcomics is to put the comic up for free and make money via ads and the sale of books, T-shirts, and other merchandise. And one of the most influential guides to that model is How to Make Webcomics, authored by the four members of the Halfpixel collective: Brad Guigar (Evil, Inc.), Dave Kellett (Sheldon), Scott Kurtz (PvP), and Kris Straub (Starslip).

In late 2008, Halfpixel took over the domain webcomics.com (previously owned by T Campbell) and reconfigured it as a how-to site for webcomics creators, providing advice on everything from how to draw word balloons to how to build an audience. Guigar is the editor-in-chief and writes most of the articles, with Kurtz and occasionally the others also providing content.

On January 3, literally overnight, Guigar put all the content behind a pay wall and announced that henceforth, readers must pay a $30 annual subscription fee to access it. The internets swelled with outrage, but Guigar pointed out that the site is a professional tool, not a webcomic, and thus of monetary value to creators.

I interviewed Guigar via e-mail about his reasons for the change and his reaction to the criticism that followed.

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Unbound: The year in manga

At the outset, 2009 didn’t look like a promising year for manga. Tokyopop had split in two, laid off a third of its staff, and seemed to be tottering toward its grave; Broccoli had just given up the ghost; Vertical let its marketing manager go; and ADV couldn’t bring itself to publish Yotsuba&!, despite the fact that fans were climbing the walls for it. The economy had tanked, and the general feeling was that 2009 was going to be a bleak year.

And yet, here I am at the end of December, surrounded by so much good manga that I don’t know where to start.

Tokypop rallied nicely and, despite losing some licenses, is bringing back series that everyone was convinced were heading to limbo. Yen Press rescued Yotsuba&! and republished the earlier volumes as well. Del Rey tested the waters with a variety of global titles (with more to come next year) and kept cranking out solid shoujo and shonen series from Japan. CMX kept up a steady stream of tween- and teen-friendly titles as well as the more mature suspense series Fire Investigator Nanase and Astral Project. Vertical was the darling of New York Anime Fest with their announcement that they had licensed the cute cat manga Chi’s Sweet Home and Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo; they kept fans busy in the meantime with a steady stream of new volumes of Black Jack.

And Viz! Viz outdid them all, launching series after series to enthusiastic response: Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto and 20th Century Boys; the foodie manga Oishinbo; the beautifully drawn Children of the Sea; the new Rumiko Takahashi series Rin-ne (released online simultaneously with the Japanese releases); Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers. You could go broke trying to keep up with Viz’s output, but if you did, you could console yourself with the free manga on their SigIKKI and Shonen Sunday websites.

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Unbound: The year in webcomics

While the rest of the world went to hell in a handbasket, webcomics did pretty well in 2009, in part because the medium provided alternatives to structures that were cracking because of the poor economy. One of the most important events of the year had nothing to do with webcomics directly but probably had a huge effect on the medium as a whole: In January, Diamond Comics Distributors raised its minimums, that is, the number of units a comic would have to sell in order for them to carry it. As Diamond has a near-monopoly on distribution to comics stores, the result is that many comics will be squeezed out of the market—and webcomics became a more attractive alternative, especially for creators who are just building a following or are marketing to a particular niche. It's hard to know how many creators turned to the web because of that—how do you measure a negative?—but James Turner’s Warlord of Io has been mentioned specifically as a comic that did not make Diamond’s minimums and wound up on comiXology’s iPhone app.

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Zudist Colony: Talking to December's Zuda Contestants

Every month, Zuda Comics hosts an online competition in which ten webcomics teams provide eight pages each of their comics, and readers vote on the winner. And every month we here at Robot 6 ask all ten creators the same five questions, in order to get a little more insight into both the comics and the creators.

I'm guest hosting this month, so JK can have a bit of holiday time off. So, on with the questions!

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Unbound: Elan' Trinidad on God (TM)

Elan' Trinidad's latest comic, God™ (that's the shorter version of the name) is a bit of a challenge for strictly linear thinkers.

Trinidad was nominated for an Eisner Award for his haunting comic Speak No Evil: Melancholy of a Space Mexican, in which he illustrated the voicelessness of illegal aliens by creating a society that literally removed their mouths. He handled that heavy metaphor with great delicacy, creating a surrealistic world where such things are almost plausible.

While Speak No Evil was compact and self-contained, God™, is a sprawling and ambitious satire that takes on both commercialism and religiosity. It's also wickedly funny. The basic idea is that a large multinational corporation has bought up all the intellectual property rights to God and the whole cast of characters of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The comic intersperses slices of broad satire about commerce and religion with slices of a day in the life of accountant-priest Joeb Kim, who is having a tough day to say the least. I checked in with Elan' via e-mail to see what he is up to and where he is going with God™.

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Unbound: See you in the funny papers

It's the holiday crunch time and we could all use a bit of humor, so today, for your reading pleasure, I'm reviewing two very different webcomics that both made me laugh out loud.

The first is The Princess Planet. I saw people recommending it here and there, but I resisted for a long time because anything involving princesses reeks of kid stuff. Having survived my daughters’ princess phase, I was more than happy to pack it in.

As it turns out, though The Princess Planet channeled what I was muttering all those years and turned it into funny. The star of the show is Princess Christi, who gets bored on the very second page and turns herself into a superhero, leaving her attendants behind to draw moustaches on the skinny girls in her magazines. That sort of deliberate anachronism, drawing bits of modern life into the faux-medieval world of fairy tales, is the straw that Brian McLachlan has been spinning into gold for the past four years. The jokes mostly turn on the characters' self-awareness that they are fairy-tale clichés, and running gags include one-upmanship among the princesses and the king and queen’s quest to find a new heraldic symbol for their kingdom to replace the current one, a pile of grass eating a sandwich.

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Unbound: Ben Powis on the iPhone

Where Grows the Bitter Herb

Here’s a post-Thanksgiving special that won’t cost you a dime: Robot Comics is offering the iPhone/iPod Touch version of British artist Ben Powis’s Where Grows the Bitter Herb for free until December 8. Another Powis comic, Turtle Guitar, is always free. (Both comics are also available for Android at the standard price of 99 cents.)

Both stories are little folkloric tales brought to life with lovely art. Powis uses simple shapes with heavy outlines, textured backgrounds, and varied hatching to create comics panels that look like drawings from a picture book. The watercolor-like textures show up nicely on the backlit screen of the iPhone, and the panels also appear to be cropped differently than they were in the print edition of the book, providing a different type of reading experience.

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Unbound: Thanksgiving buffet

Thanksgiving is around the corner; by the time you read this, I will be baking pies and getting out the good china. But first, I want to sit back and take stock of all the things I’m thankful for this year. Webcomics-wise, that is. Think of this as a buffet of my favorite dishes, and perhaps, when the table is cleared, the game is over, and the kids have spun down and fallen asleep on the floor, you’ll have time to sample them and find something new to like.

Breakfast of the Gods: Snap, Crackle, and Pop have been kidnapped (and tortured!), the Honey Bee turns up dead, Count Chocula paces the ramparts in his castle—and Boo Berry shows up to needle him. In Breakfast of the Gods, Brendan Douglas Jones shows the darker side of the cereal mascots of the 1960s and 70s in a fantasy adventure that’s part Lord of the Rings, part nutritious breakfast.

Unshelved: Bill Barnes’s art is simple to the point of being rudimentary, but he still manages to endow each of the characters in this library-themed comic with a unique and believable personality. Even better, he and co-writer Gene Ambaum really nail the feeling of working in a place where you have to deal with the varied whims of the public as well as your own wacky co-workers.

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Unbound: Josh Way on the end of Chronicle

I discovered Chronicle shortly after Josh Way started posting it online, and I liked it immediately. It’s the story of a brash big-city newspaper editor sent out to run a two-bit paper in a modern-day Green Acres, a small town with more than its share of colorful characters. I really enjoyed Way’s sense of humor and his varied cast, so I was disappointed when he brought the comic to an end this spring.

The end of Chronicle

Since I spoke to Joe Infurnari last week about the abrupt end of the Process, I thought it would be nice to talk to a creator who brought his work to a more deliberate end. For Way, Chronicle was a testing ground where he developed both his cartooning skills and the discipline to draw a daily comic. And now he is applying those lessons elsewhere: as it happens, Way is launching a new comic, Strewth!, on November 30 (but click now for the preview art).

Brigid Alverson: Why did you decide to end Chronicle?

Josh Way: I knew from the start that Chronicle would have an ending, though I was flexible about how and when that would happen. There was always a sense that Chronicle was a prelude to something else. Not that it was a throwaway or a false start, but it was as much about developing discipline as a cartoonist as it was about the story. For lack of a less dumb analogy, I suppose it was a kind of cartoonist boot camp I devised for myself.

The decision to actually end the strip came when I felt I had established some discipline in the daily work, and when the story was moving naturally into a kind of "third act." I started wishing I could apply the things I'd learned to something new, and the web platform gave me the freedom to move in that direction.

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Unbound: Joe Infurnari on the Process

Last week, I wrote about the way webcomics end—sometimes with a bang, sometimes with a whimper. Unlike print comics and graphic novels, which almost always have a predetermined structure and pace, webcomics often flicker and die before their time. The reasons for this point up some of the structural and creative differences between webcomics and other media, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss the phenomenon with some creators.

The Process is not officially dead, but Joe Infurnari stopped updating it in mid-2008, right around the time it was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. The Process is thoughtful, well executed, and embedded in a stunningly beautiful website. So what happened? I went straight to the source and asked Infurnari, who was good enough to speak frankly about the creative and economic pressures of the webcomics creator’s lifestyle.

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