Articles by chuck-rozakis
Tue Apr 7, 2009 — by Chuck Rozakis
I-Con 28: 'Under the Radar: Comics You're Missing'
Among the exciting adventures at I-Con was a panel titled "Under the Radar: Comics You're Missing." The panelists (Carl Fink, Bob Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Andy Weir, Bernie Hou, and me) and attendees came up with the following list, which we promised we'd post for reference. You should check them out if you aren't reading them already:
Webcomics:
- Alien Loves Predator
- Casey & Andy
- Cheshire Crossing
- Alice! Comics
- Medium Large
- XKCD
- Order of the Stick
- Goats
- Gunnerkrigg Court
- Dealing With the Devil
- Lady in Shadow (we're looking for where it went)
- Minus
- Garfield Minus Garfield
Print Comics:
- DC's new ongoing version of The Spirit
- PS238 by Aaron Williams
- Tokyopop's DramaCon
- BOOM Studio's The Muppet Show
- BOOM Studio's The Incredibles
- BOOM Studio's Potter's Field
- First Comics's Warp
- Oni Press's Damned
- Free Lunch Comics's Bigger
Of course, the real takeaway from the panel was that you should be getting your comics news and reviews from ComicMix.com!
Sun Nov 16, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: A DC Wiki?
A few weeks ago, I discussed the usefulness of active, available archives for webcomics. Archives provide huge amounts of free content to draw in new readers; and they prevent continuity lockout by providing a way to easily go back and refresh your memory of previous events. With print comics, especially before the advent of everything getting collected in trade paperbacks, there really wasn’t a way to avoid that — which is a lot of why Silver Age stories needed to be as self-contained as they 
were.
Nowadays, people who are flush with cash can always go buy a TPB collection of stories they missed or forgot. Who the heck is this character in the latest issue of Ultimate Spider-Man? The editor’s note says he first appeared back in Ultimate X-Men #17. All it takes is one trip to Amazon.com, several days for delivery, and then reading time, and I’ll be caught up enough to understand what’s going on in the comic currently in my lap.
Of course, those of us with rent bills to pay have to make do with the lower-cost option: The internet. There are lots of choices to catch up on, say, DC Comics continuity: The DC Wikia, the Justice League Library, Heroes Wiki, and heck, even granddaddy Wikipedia itself.
But you know where you can’t go to figure out what happened in that recent issue of Batgirl you missed, or that Green Lantern plot point from 1988 that recently cropped up? DCComics.com.
Now, don’t get me wrong: If you want to see artwork previews, or check the list of everything that’s in print, or get a short graphic bio of most of the characters, DCComics.com is the place to go. But say you haven’t been following Trinity and want to catch up. If you go to the forum and ask for the best place to do so, they’ll point you to Wikipedia.
Of course, Marvel's website already has their own version of the wiki and it's pretty nifty, too.
So here’s my suggestion to DC: You need a wiki. You’ve got an army of fans just aching to show how much they know about the characters and storylines, as evidenced by the other wikis that crop up everywhere. You need accessible utilities that’ll help build a bigger audience, especially among younger people, who don’t have the continuity knowledge to get into most recent titles. You need to drive traffic to your website as effective advertising for your products, and keep people at your website, rather than shunting them off to an outside source. And you’ll want all of this to be under your nominal control.
Here’s how you do it: Acquire the Wikia content (I don’t know the legal channels, but I’m sure you could find them). Hire a few of your most OCD fans (and a couple of the ComicMix contributors come to mind) as moderators. Set a few ground rules (no spoilers for this month’s books, no speculation, no flaming), and let the fans go from there. Link in the original stories, history of the DC and other online content you currently have, and have the last line of the wiki entry for each ongoing book or characters be a link to a preview of the next issue. Heck, if you set up creator/author/artist pages right, you can have an “subtle” way of linking fans of one book to things that they would also want to buy.
Also, everything that currently in print? There should be a “Buy It Now!” icon. Not a tiny, blend-in-to-the-background “Subscribe to your favorite comics” down at the bottom of the page. That’ll also be really easy to transition to digital pamphlets when the time comes and the color ebook readers are ready.
Just because classic print comics and “webcomics” as I define them are different animals, doesn’t mean they can’t take lessons from each other about what works in terms of monetizing web content.
(On the odd chance someone official reads this and goes ahead with this idea, I’d also love to see a Showcase volume of my dad’s work from the 70s and 80s, particularly ‘Mazing Man. Also, a pony.)
Wed Oct 29, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I recommended this comic to a friend of mine. She wrote back that her office's content filter blocked it as "tasteless and offensive."
This is an entirely accurate statement about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. What they fail to mention, however, is that it's also hilarious.
SMBC is a daily single-panel comic, in the vein of an R-rated The Far Side. The humor is primarily based on taking the punchline in a completely different direction than expected. It's not suitable for kids. (Or adults who want any claim to maturity, for that matter.) It's also not suitable for people who are sensitive about sex, death, religion, fetishes, cheesecake, herpes, dolphins, politics, or your mom.
There's a SMBC store, though it's currently closed for renovations and expected to reopen in November.
Notable moments:
- The Socratic Method
- Space Ace
- The bad pun isn't the punchline.
- "Agarn, I don't know why everyone says you're so dumb."
- Superdickery
- Life goals
- Suspiciously specific disclaimers
- Funnier than All-Star Batman and Robin (maybe not by much)
Drama: Nope. Black comedy, maybe. Not the slightest hint of drama.
Humor: Imagine Gary Larson's sense of humor melded with Kevin Smith's potty mouth and you'll pretty much have Zach Weiner. As noted, what lesser cartoonists would use as the entire joke, he uses as a set-up to something unexpected and much more disturbing.
Continuity: None. There's a "random" strip button on the site, and it's one of the few comics where that's actually a worthwhile idea.
Art: Reasonable; it gets the job done. All the people look pretty much alike, and Weiner probably won't be winning any awards, but he's conscious enough of his own skill that you never find yourself missing a joke because you can't figure out what that blue thing is.
Archive: Six years, about 1325 single-panel or two-panel strips. (Don't let that scare you, though: There is absolutely no need for an archive trawl. You can read as many or as few strips as you want.)
Updates: Daily, consistently.
Risk/Reward: Reading too many of these in a row may make you realize you're a horrible person. (There's no ongoing storyline, so there's no risk should the comic suddenly cut off.)
Sun Oct 26, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: Dead Comic, Living Archives
I’m a chronic re-reader/re-player/re-watcher. Combine having a lousy memory with a love of the familiar, and you’ll find someone who loves re-reading old comics, re-playing his old collection of Super NES games, and re-watching TV shows of years past. This carries just as much with webcomics: I’ll discover a comic, read all the archives, keep up with it regularly, and periodically go back and read the archives again. It’s like a chunk of my comic collection that I can use to procrastinate at work.
Webcomic archives mean that there’s never a continuity lockout: You’re always able to go back and learn what came before. If DC doesn’t reprint a Martian Manhunter story from 1992 and I wasn’t reading comics at the time, then I’m totally lost when it gets referenced in Infinite Crisis. If Fred Gallagher wants to reference a previous storyline in Megatokyo, he can just put a link to it in that day’s news post and rest easy.
As an aside, a few comics make the most recent strip freely accessible, but make the archives pay-to-view. This model is okay for low-continuity gag-a-day or newspaper-type strips, but effectively locks out much of the new audience if you’re very storyline-focused. But then, if there’s no storyline, you don’t have the same desire to go back and read older strips. Garfield liking lasagna and hating Mondays gets old fast(err) if you read 200 of them in a day.
And oftentimes, even when the comic is finished, the archives will stay. Often, the author has another project in the works, so it contributes to his online presence and, as the occasional new reader discovers it or an old reader like me re-reads it, it might even bring in a little ad revenue or a few new book sales. The old comic, typically completed intentionally, rather than having faded out, is archived like a classic novel, available in its entirety. (Expect a few of these to show up in my Webcomics You Should Be Reading columns.)
Continue reading The Theory of Webcomics: Dead Comic, Living Archives ›
Wed Oct 22, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Have Read: Minus
One of the most endearing features of Calvin and Hobbes was Calvin's overactive imagination, which created amazing scenarios of space battles, time travel, and talking tigers. What if it wasn't all in his imagination, though?
Ryan Armand gives us a brief look at childlike innocence and imagination brought to life in the world of Minus.
Minus is a little girl who apparently can do anything she can imagine -- she flies, creates worlds, travels in time, talks to spirits and grants wishes. And though this leads to the occasional retribution against bullies or mean adults, unlike Calvin, she also shares her gifts with her friends. Minus will offer someone a flying unicorn as easily as another little girl might offer a lick of her ice-cream cone.
Armand's site also includes a serial comic called Socks and a collection of older stand-alone comics. He doesn't have a storefront, though archived newsposts note that he used to do prints of Minus comics; he might be willing to start up again if requested.
Notable moments:
- The Slow Path
- Exploring the Spirit World
- He followed me home! Can I keep him?
- The saga of the Dread Pirate, Minus the Black
- The adventures of Minus the Ghost
Drama: There's always some drama when you're tugging at heartstrings, but Minus' world is not a world of adult problems and relationships; it's a child's world, where everyone eventually gets a happy ending, even if they're occasionally bittersweet.
Humor: While many of the comics earn a chuckle, the focus is more on evoking a sense of childlike wonder. And it succeeds.
Continuity: Low to Moderate. Some strip string together in sequence, but knowledge of previous ones isn’t terribly necessary to enjoy later strips.
Art: Each minus strip is painted with watercolors on a 15x20" piece of Illustration board. The style implies an enterprising painter more than a traditional comic artist.
Archive: About 130 strips. Two years of weekly Sunday newspaper-sized comics, though many are several "strips" long.
Updates: "It'll be updating every Thursday until I suddenly stop!" Armand stopped updating the strip in March 2008 and started updating Socks in monthly chunks.
Risk/Reward: Some comics are ongoing, telling complicated stories, the ongoing events in characters' lives, or just a joke every day. Some comics say what they want to say and end. Minus ends on an up-note, keeping tone to the very end. It's worth your time.
Mon Oct 20, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
'Ctrl-Alt-Del' Joins Forces with Blind Ferret Entertainment to Produce Books
First Volume due in 2009
As recently announced, Blind Ferret Entertainment will be taking Tim Buckley’s self-published Ctrl+Alt+Del collections onto the mass market.
The three self-published volumes are currently available through online retailer Split Reason. The new books are expected to be seen in bookstores, libraries, comic shops and other mass merchandise outlets worldwide. Volume one, tentatively re-titled This Is a Great Idea, is expected to hit stores in the 2nd quarter of 2009, with volumes 2 and 3 to follow.
Blind Ferret currently co-produces Buckley’s CAD animated series. Randy Waxman, President of Blind Ferret, has commented on the great success of that joint venue and his high hopes for this one.
First published online in 2001, Ctrl+Alt+Del has a fan base of nearly 1 ½ million readers each month, and is a Webcomic You Should Be Reading.
Sun Oct 19, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Saturday was 24-Hour Comic Day! Did you celebrate?
24 Hour Comics Day is an annual challenge for cartoonists to produce a 24-page comic book written, drawn, and completed in 24 consecutive hours. The event was founded in 2004 by Nat Gertler, prolific author and publisher of the About Comics company. Currently, the event is organized each year by the comic book specialty retailer trade organization ComicsPRO, and hosted by independent comic stores around the country.
The idea of the 24-hour comic comes from Scott McCloud, who originally came up with it as a creative exercise for himself and Steve Bissette. McCloud’s rules for the challenge were thus: The comic must be begun and completed within 24 consecutive hours. Only one person may be directly involved in its creation, and it must span 24 pages, or (if an infinite canvas format webcomic is being made) 100 panels. The creator may gather research materials and drawing tools beforehand, but cannot plan the comic's plot ahead of time or put anything on paper (such as designs and character sketches) until he is ready for the 24 hours to begin. Any breaks (for food, sleep, or any other purpose) are counted as part of the 24 hours.
Numerous notable comic creators have attempted the challenge over the years. Dave Sim published his 24-hour comics in the back of his popular book Cerebus the Aardvark. Neil Gaiman and Kevin Eastman tried and failed, and became the namesakes for the two varieties of “noble failures”: Gaiman stopped his comic at the 24-hour mark; Eastman continued to the full 24 pages. McCloud maintains a site for the challenge and also keeps an official list of recognized 24-hour comics. ComicsPRO reports that over 1,000 people have completed the challenge. Compilation books are available of the completed challenges for the past few years, and McCloud has a book on the subject as well.
While most participants are amateurs, many pro cartoonists take part as well. In addition to the most common black-ink-on-white-paper drawings, participants have done full color painted comics, computer-drawn comics, photo comics, comics made of pictures of posed action figures, a series of painted stones with captions, and a Daredevil superhero comic made by cutting pictures of Ben Affleck's head out of magazines and pasting them onto stick figure bodies. The biggest single event was in Austin Books in Austin, Texas in 2005, with 70 cartoonists. 2006 saw event sites in 17 countries, and the reports for 2008 are still coming in.
My favorite 24-hour comic? Scott Kurtz’s take on Batman.
Sun Oct 19, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: The Daily Grind
The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge is a competition between online comic artists to see who can maintain the longest Monday to Friday update schedule, following a strict set of rules. Each artist lays $20 USD on the line. The last man left standing takes the entire pot. The competition started on Monday, February 28, 2005, and is still going with ten contestants remaining.
Webcomics giants like Scott Kurtz, Chris Crosby, Steve Troop, and Jennie Breeden have all missed updates and been beaten out for the top spot. Conversely, none of the remaining contenders feature on Wikipedia’s list of Self-Sufficient Webcomics. Does this seem counter-intuitive?
Any successful webcomic creator will tell you that regular updates are important — in order to build an audience, you need to provide regular content to keep people coming back to the site. And very few comics have come into success with only one comic a week — you could pretty much count them on one hand — so you’d need at least two or three updates each week. If you can stretch it, five is optimal, because it gets the working world checking your site as part of their daily routine.
If your readers have the right sort of personalities, an irregular update schedule could work in your site traffic’s favor. Studies of gamblers has shown that irregular rewards — that is, receiving a reward only sometimes, and seemingly at random, for the same action — play all sorts of fun games with human brain chemistry. This is pointed to as the cause of the Las Vegas zombies who sit at slot machines for days. Is that any different from checking Order of the Stickevery day hoping that one of the three weekly updates will be there?
(Well, how different it is depends on how much of a reward you consider a new OotS comic to be. Money is a pretty universal reward. The comic needs to be good enough to trigger a “reward” response, because a sporadic, unfunny comic quickly gets dropped, rather than obsessively watched.)
Thu Oct 16, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: Ctrl-Alt-Del
Years ago, I was at a comic convention where Jimmy Palmiotti told a story about the most vocal fan he ever encountered: A fellow who apparently was constantly sending letters and posting to message boards about how he read the latest thing Palmiotti had done and it sucked, sucked, sucked. At first he was annoyed, but then Palmiotti realized, hey, this guy buys and pores over everything I ever write or draw. This guy is my biggest fan. So he sent him a Christmas card that year.
Tim Buckley, creator of Ctrl-Alt-Del, must have a really impressive Christmas card list. (Just look at the comments on this review for an example.)
Ctrl-Alt-Del follows the misadventures of Ethan, whose hobbies include gaming, slacking, completely misinterpreting normal human interactions, flashes of engineering brilliance, and forming gaming-related cults. The vibe is sitcom-esque—imagine Friends if everyone played video games, Chandler was a robot built out of an Xbox, Ross had a pet penguin, and Phoebe was the main character. (It really plays better than it sounds. Kinda like Friends, actually.)
Buckley also produces an online animated series which can be downloaded via subscription, or purchased on DVD. There are three compilation books available at the CAD Store along with shirts, magnets and posters. And Buckley has organized an annual massive LAN party called Digital Overload in Providence, RI.
Notable moments:
From the very beginning, CAD set itself apart from the pack, though this distinction eventually disappeared.
Ethan invented the gaming holiday, Winter-Een-Mas. The holiday later became a tradition.
Ethan also established a gaming religion.
Early storyline breaks feature Chef Brian, a humanoid acid trip who cooks.
The recent “serious” storyline.
Drama: Low moving towards moderate. Early strips are disconnected and included some cartoon-style violence. Recent strips have seen several more serious plot arcs and dramatic situations, broken up by non-continuity video game parody strips.
Humor: Appeals to the 18-25 male demographic. Heavy in the video game jokes and geeky sitcom-style plans that cause hilarity to ensue.
Continuity: Moderate to high. Plot arcs will run for several weeks, and be broken up by stand-alone bits. The earliest comics stand alone the best, and set the stage for the running gags and character arcs in the later ones.
Art: Buckley has been criticized for his characters looking similar, though that’s a criticism of his style; you’d never have a problem telling them apart. Panels tend to be a bit static
Archive: Six years of four-panel comics (1000+ strips) plus several months of daily black-and-white “sillies”.
Updates: The main comic updates Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Sillies update daily. Buckley is excellent about keeping his update schedule.
Risk/Reward: Buckley’s recent increase in continuity is a very acquired taste for the audience—if you like it, then it’s easy to get into the “I must keep reading so I know what happens next!” trap. If you don’t, then you can obviously pick up and drop the comic at your leisure. Though the lives of the characters can and will obviously go on for some time, Buckley is very good about wrapping up individual plotlines and creating points where the story stops for a while. It’s fairly safe to assume that if he decided to abandon the comic, there’d be a passable ending.
Tue Oct 14, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: Order of the Stick
Roleplaying games are a rich forum for comic material, whether you’re riffing on the setting or the game system itself. Typically, this involves have “players” and the characters they play, and either cutting between them or having the players semi-narrate the action.
Rich Burlew presents the Order of the Stick, a group of PCs whose players remain unseen, but retain full knowledge of the game system that defines their world.
The aforementioned Order is an archetypal adventuring party, including Roy, the noble (and put-upon) leader; Durkon, the Scottish-accent sporting dwarven cleric; Haley, the leather-wearing kleptomaniac thief; Vaarsuvius, the haughty and verbose elven wizard; Belkar, the bloodthirsty halfling ranger/barbarian; and Elan, the clueless, excitable bard. Their overarching quest pits them against the lich-sorcerer Xykon, but along the way they fight dragons, giants, goblin ninjas, their evil opposites (the Linear Guild) and the legal system of Azure City.
Currently, there are three books collecting the online material, two with entirely-original flashback stories (the origins of the heroes and the villains, respectively), and a board game available at the Giant in the Playground Shop. (Plus t-shirts, buttons and the like, of course.) The Giant in the Playground forums also deserve a special mention as the most impressive collection of D&D geeks outside of the Wizards of the Coast forums—there is no D&D question they can’t answer and then debate for 30 pages.
Notable moments:
The relative intelligence of the party members.
The introduction of the Linear Guild
Who remembers the old Hostess Twinkie ads in comics?
The Order’s first battle with Xykon begins!
Dramatic confrontation with the shadowy pursuer!
The harsh light of dawn.
The prophecies that will drive the next 200+ strips.
Drama: Moderate. While there’s definitely some angst and some agonizing moments, Burlew also likes to skewer various tropes of adventure games and action movies. A pair of red-shirt characters manage to survive mortal wounds by revealing that they have names and possibly backstories.
Humor: A solid half of the jokes rely on basic knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly 3.5 and 4th Edition. There are also plenty of random pop culture references and obvious anachronisms in the fantasy world (like in any good rpg campaign), but this comic probably isn’t for you if you don’t recognize the phrase “Attack of Opportunity”.
Continuity: High. Start from the beginning. The first dozen strips are loosely-connected D&D gags, but the plot picks up early on and gets into full-on continuity lockout by the later strips.
Art: Burlew draws the strip using vector-based illustration software, in an enhanced stick-figure style. The art has improved over the years, and though the changes are nice, they’re nowhere near the radical changes many hand-drawn comics see. Flashback comics are done in a crayon-like scribble style.
Archive: Five years of page-sized strips (including some double-pagers and infinite-canvas strips), about 600 strips.
Updates: Erratically. It averages three strips a week, but they might be spread out M-W-F, or you might get two on Sunday and one on Monday.
Risk/Reward: There’s a full-blown epic story and Burlew has noted that he knows how it ends; hopefully he won’t disappoint the fans by not getting there. The storyline has yet to hit a comfortable “stopping point” of any kind, which means getting into this strip may get you hooked for several years.
Mon Oct 6, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: Superstar Theory
In my last entry, I discussed a number of the ways that webcomics make money and mentioned that only a few of the thousands of webcomic artists are able to actually do so. There are a number of factors that play into which comics make money (and for that matter, which attract the most readers, and which work best with each type of business plan), but I think a critical one is what economists know as “Superstar Theory”.
Aside: I am an economist by schooling, and years ago, this was a major point in my undergraduate thesis paper. I didn’t invent the phrase—that honor goes to actual economists like Sherwin Rosen—but I suspect I was the first person to use it in reference to webcomics. I’m going to assume you have a basic idea of how economic supply and demand works, here: As people demand more of a good, the price goes up; as producers make more of it, price goes down, and everything else pretty much flows from that.
The classic model would be a baker: If more people want cupcakes, and start lining up at his door to buy them, then he can raise the price and make more money. If a second bakery opens up down the street, people can buy cupcakes from either of them, and the first baker will need to lower his prices or he’ll see his business go to the competition.
In most modern artistic fields, there are a small number of artists that grow huge followings and tend to get the majority of the word-of-mouth “buzz.” This concept is known as the Superstar phenomenon, in which a relatively small group of people earn significantly more money than most in their field, and, in fact, dominate that field in general. Performers, writers, and sports players of the first rank command huge incomes, and there is a large gap between their salaries and those of people of the second rank—though the difference in skill between first and second rank may be minute. (Think of what Harrison Ford makes versus what his “unknown” female co-star makes.) For an economist, this can be complicated to examine with your classic supply-demand model, because that model assumes that products are undifferentiated—one is as good as any other. What’s missing is an account of “box office appeal,” or the ability of a single person to attract a large following.
Continue reading The Theory of Webcomics: Superstar Theory ›
Sat Oct 4, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: 'Wonderella'
What if Wonder Woman was a total jerkass? Not evil, or a supervillain, or the crazy Nazi-lady from Whom Gods Destroy, but just a self-centered, self-absorbed jerk?
Justin Pierce answers that question, by showing us The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. [link: http://nonadventures.com/].
Pierce skewers (did you see that? That was totally a pun) bits of DC Comics continuity, along with barely-disguised cameos from both DC and Marvel, and a smattering of other pop culture and cartoon references. Wonderella and her sidekick Wonderita fight evil (when it gets in their way), get drunk, travel through time, interact with historical and religious figures, and demonstrate superpowers they don’t even have names for yet.
There's a book available that collects the first 99 strips, titled Everybody Ever Forever, plus the usual assortment of prints and buttons for sale. The strip also appears on Graphic Smash, where you can pay a fee to read Pierce's other superhero-themed comic, Killroy and Tina.
Notable moments:
- The introduction of the nefarious Doctor Shark!
- The Death of Wonderelle
- The Clone Saga
- The Dark Wonderella Strikes Back
- Don't call me again.
Drama: Not as such. This is a humor strip. There's some lovely schadenfreude, though.
Humor: Requires at least a basic knowledge of comic book superheroes, and a willingness to accept that the protagonist is OMG TEH WORST PERSON EVAR.
Continuity: Low. Reading from the beginning will allow you to pick up some of the running gags, but pretty much every strip is self-contained and can be read independently.
Art: Pierce uses a bright, no-outline, construction-paper-cutout style reminiscent of early Scary-Go-Round [link: http://www.scarygoround.com]. Various deviations from this indicate that it's obviously a stylistic choice, not an artistic limitation.
Archive: Two years of page-size comics, about 115 comics.
Updates: Once weekly, on Mondays.
Risk/Reward: Wonderella tends not to suffer consequences of her actions, so long-term conflict and resolution is really not an issue with this strip. Enjoy it while it's here, mourn it if it goes stale or ends.
Thu Oct 2, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
'Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog' Headed for TV
Webcomic Heads for old Media
Jonathan Mahood’s Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog may soon be coming to television. The strip was optioned by producer Radical Sheep Productions in May 2007, and recently announced a deal with TVO to develop an animated series based on the strip. The series is planned to be 26 11-minute episodes aimed at the six to 12-year-old audience. Script writing and animation design is already underway.
The strip tells the story of a ten-year-old boy who wanted a dog and got Bleeker: a canine-shaped walking cell phone/mp3 player/camera/printer/smoke detector/GPS that isn’t actually very good at being a dog. As Skip struggles to enjoy dog ownership, he is hampered by Bleeker's quirky operating system, low battery life and frequent calls to technical support.
Pat Ellingson, Creative Head of Children's Media, Content and Programming for TVO says of Bleeker, “What we love about Bleeker is that it's a show that makes you laugh but has a lot of heart. Amongst all the comedy and the antics, Bleeker teaches us life lessons about the importance of friendship, community and family. It's both educational and fun. We think it's a great fit for TVO.”
Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog was launched in July 2006 on Comic Sherpa. In February 2007 it was picked up by GoComics.com for online syndication, where it can be seen daily. Mahood has a Cafepress storefront with the usual assortment of branded clothing, and the first collect of Bleeker stripsis available from Lulu.com.
Wed Oct 1, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
'Least I Could Do' Volume Five Available for Pre-Order
Comedic Adventures Continue
Ryan Sohmer, creator of the webcomic Least I Could Do, announced that the fifth collection of his strip, titled Yield To Me, is available for pre-order. Four other collections are also available, collecting the first four years of LICD strips: I Have My Moments, My Will Be Done, Because I Can, and I Love This Guy. Limited-edition box sets of all five books are available for pre-order as well, and pre-orders of book 5 will also come with a limited edition key chain.
Least I Could Do follows the adventures of Rayne Summers, the wish-fulfillment Marty Stu of every single man. The comedy is reminiscent of Comedy Central’s The Man Show, with overblown plots that seem to somehow work out and constant sex-based farce. (Sohmer’s original blog post announcing the book also includes a photo of a naked woman tastefully presenting the book. This should give you an idea of his authorial style.) LICD premiered in 2003, created by Sohmer and Trevor Adams. Adams was replaced by Chad Porter later that year, then by current artist Lar deSouza in 2005.
Sohmer and deSouza also produce the fantasy webcomic Looking For Group. Their company Blind Ferret Entertainment produces animated shorts based on their comics, as well as the PvP and Ctrl-Alt-Del animated series.
Tue Sep 30, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Former Syndicated Cartoonist Steps into the World of Webcomics
Both Sides Skewered
Rob Cabrera, best known as the author of United Media-syndicated comic Silo Roberts has started a new independent strip inspired by this year’s presidential campaign. Super Tuesday plays the standard political-cartoon style and focuses specifically on Barak Obama and John McCain. Updates are expected to vary in frequency as events develop on the campaign trail.
Silo Roberts, Cabrera’s previous strip, was “the story of a multiethnic middle child who struggles to find his place in today's melting pot of a world”. The strip was syndicated by Uniuted Media from 2004 to 2006, when Cabrera ended the strip to focus on graduate school. The Silo Roberts section of Cabrera’s website is “under construction,” but promises a print collection of the comic in 2008.
Cabrera’s previous notable move was a rare crossover of comic strips with the NBA: Silo Roberts featured Miami Heat superstar Dwyane Wade in December of 2005. The strips and a related news piece were featured at NBA.com, and the strip was made into a series of limited-edition Topps trading cards, released in May 2006.
