The Webcomic List presents a daily list of updated webcomics from all over the web, we currently have over 13800 web comics and online comics listed within our site.
We aim to be the number one online comic directory, visit us today to help us achieve that goal!
Welcome to the news page! We aim to bring you the latest comic news from around the globe, straight to your eager door. If doors can be eager? I suppose you'd say that automatic doors are eager. Hmmm.
Shaenon [Garrity] is self-publishing the first volume of Skin Horse, and she's getting a submission packet together for Diamond Comics Distributors. This is a line from their submission guidelines:
If you publish comics, Diamond generally receives a discount in the range of 60-70% off the US retail (cover) price.
If we offer a 70% discount, I'm sure that Diamond is more likely to consider listing Skin Horse in their catalog, but we'll only get $4.20 per copy sold (minus whatever shipping costs we incur getting the books to Diamond). If we offer a 60% discount, we'll make $5.60 per copy sold -- still not great, since we're self-publishing this, but I always prefer making more money instead of less money when possible.
So, the question is: Is offering a 70% discount going to greatly improve our chances of getting listed in Diamond's catalog? Is only offering a 50% discount a guarantee that they won't even look at the book and will automatically reject it?
Given Diamond's new standards, what can we do to improve our chances apart from putting Wolverine or Barack Obama on the cover? Are any self-publishers getting picked up by Diamond at all right now? Are there any other alternatives to Diamond if we want to get into comic shops (apart from the traditional method of hauling books from store-to-store and trying to convince the owners to carry it)?
Newsarama interviews Andy Belanger about his Bottle of Awesome. Not yet available in stores, this drink will make you bigger, badder and well, awesome.
Want to see what your site looks like on really small and really big screens and most in between? I assume the smallest is for handheld devices and phones but see for yourself.
I wanted to express some thoughts about the history of comics.Please keep in mind that I am not a comic historian.What I am is someone who has read comics since childhood and continues to do so in my adult life.I am writing this history based on my experiences.
First and foremost (to me) comics are a visual medium.Even before I could read the words I remember pouring over the illustrations on the covers.My cousin Charlie always had tons of comics that his Mom gave away when we visited.She would let my brother and I take stacks of comics home.This was late sixties early seventies.Lots of great Marvel stuff.After a while I got to know the artist’s names like:Jack “King” Kirby; “Big” John Buscema; Gil “Sugarlips” Kane; Don Heck;Gene Colan and Neal Adams.These were my first art instructors.
I was especially fond of John Buscema’s work, to me it seemed as if no one else’s work was as natural, emotional and graceful. I like Neal Adams for his naturalism and clean illustration style; Gil Kane for the structure of his figures; and Gene Colan for his use of shadow.I didn’t appreciate Kirby back then, but I always loved his Fantastic Four and later I appreciated the dynamism and fun he brought to his drawings.These artist and the books that they illustrated (The Kree Skrull War; Galactus trilogy; Silver Surfer vs. Mephisto; Savage Sword of Conan Magazine, etc) are joyful memories to me. Also consider what began to happen at DC in the 70’s as a result of Marvels success.Wrightson and Len Wein did Swamp Thing,KalutaWorked on The Shadow, Neal Adams worked on Deadman and Green Lantern.Kirby moved to DC and created the New Gods. Just look at the difference in styles from Kirby to Kane to Colan to Buscema, Adams, Wrightson, Kaluta and Steranko.What variety.
The comics currently produced today have lost a step - not in talent, there are so many talented artists out there and color has improved a hundred fold.They just don’t seem as fun a read.Instead they come off as corporate and predictable. Not all, but enough of the books being published today have a similar graphic look.Sometimes they are sold as collector’s items, rather than the collector deciding the value for themselves.
These days I like to pick up Hulk, Thor (I read anything Straczynski writes) and of course Conan.Beyond that I often search for an interesting read, but it changes from week to week, month to month.
I have also been looking at webcomics. This is a new thing for me. While I enjoy some of the daily humor strips my real interest lie in something closer to the Marvel, DC comics I grew up reading.Some of the digital comics look interesting but I’m not ready to single out any one of them yet.What I see is a new medium with a lot of possibilities. Comics are moving on to a new playing field.The old ones were crowded and cramped, now there is room for more voices, more experimentation- like the golden age starting all over again in a different arena.There may be new opportunities for some fun memories.
It's been an important couple of days around here. First of all, I turned in SMILE this morning! The whole thing is colored and ready to print, and I couldn't be more pleased with the way it turned out.
I also discovered yesterday that you can pre-order a copy on Amazon! (Book's not out till February, but if you order now it'll ship when it's in stock.) Paperback or Hardcover.
And now that I'm done, I can focus on a couple of other things at hand: I'm speaking at an SVA class tomorrow night, and then next week Dave and I are teaching a 2-day teen comic workshop in Cape May, NJ! I don't know if anyone lives in that area and wants to come, but you need to sign up in advance if you do. The number to call is in the link! I'm looking forward to a few days of being on the shore, too...it'll almost be like a little vacation.
And of course, this weekend is the fourth, which means swimming and barbecue and raspberries off the bush and hanging out with friends, in the backyard which was the model for Stacey's family's yard in BSC#4--if you remember the scene with the kids chasing Louie the collie around and giving him a bath, you've got an idea of where I'll be!
After all of that, it's time to shift gears and work on my next couple of projects. I've got two things I'm excited to work on, although I won't really be able to talk about them for a little while. To tide you over, though, our X-Men manga comes out on August 11. We're hoping to throw a book release party the following week; stay tuned for details!
Hope everyone's having a great summer so far. It finally warmed up around here, and me and my tomato plant are both pretty happy about it.
You may now pre-order your autograph edition of XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, by Tracy and Curtis Hickman, illustrated by Howard Tayler. Tracy Hickman is the co-creator of Castle Ravenloft and the popular Dragonlance series. His son Curtis is a practicing magician. And me? Me you probably already know.
If you play table-top role-playing games like D&D*, Rifts*, Shadowrun*, or GURPS* then XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery is the best game supplement you can buy. Its principles will make anybody a better game-master, and will turn good game-masters into small gods. Its principles will also make for better players, so whether you’re running a game or playing in one you will benefit from this book.
And if you just want to read it for the sheer entertainment value I promise you that it’ll hold up just fine. This is not a dusty reference tome. This was written to be read, learned from, and above all enjoyed.
But that’s not the only new thing in the Schlock Mercenary Store this morning. You may have heard that Under New Management has gone into a second printing. We’ve fixed the typos, tweaked the cover and spine, and are now opening pre-orders for numbered sketch editions. We only did 300 of those the first time around, so some of you may have missed out.
And that’s STILL not where it ends. We also have Tagon’s Toughs t-shirts coming back to the store, and a new shirt that I’m not going to spoil for you here. Why not? Because it uses a punchline that won’t appear on in the comic until August. If you want to read it now, go window-shopping.
(*Note: D&D, Rifts, Shadowrun, and GURPS are all other people’s trademarks, and they want you to know that.)
Tiny Folk by Michal Jedinak is the kind of comic that I always enjoy. It is wordless.
This poses some difficulties for the artist who tries it. While a character’s facial expression and body language can communicate the emotions they are feeling, things like dialogue and explanations have to be implied. You can show what a character is doing but they can’t show you what they plan to do. Sometimes subtleties are far easier brought out through dialog than image.
There is something powerful going on when you have to search for meaning in a picture because no explanation is offered. I’m not going to try to justify some explanation about how dialog activates the logical side of the brain while images fire up the other side, or anything like that. It’s the difference between immediately understanding something when you first see it versus reading the contextual notes.
Tiny Folk mostly avoids these problems with single panels and almost no facial expressions, to boot. I like the snowmen attacking the snow cone merchant. It’s clear, to the point and funny. There are a few other ones that I don’t quite grasp, but that’s the trouble with having no dialog to provide context. It’s going to happen sometimes.
Having said that, this is a recently posted comic which seems to be updating regularly so far. I’m sure time and experience will continue to improve Tiny Folk. It seems to cover topics that are self conflicting, so there’s plenty more to see.
What did I learn?
I can’t help but think that every comic would be improved if the action, theme and emotional content were clearly understood before a single word was read. Clearly, words and pictures combined can accomplish a great deal more than either alone, but it is good to examine the extreme cases sometimes. We should all keep our eye on comics like Tiny Folk and make sure we are making the most of the image side of our comics.
(As of the scheduling of this repost, Tiny Folk’s last update was in April 2008.)
It's Wednesday and that means it's July. We'll have new art from Isabel Marks up top of the site there for July sometime this evening. Also you all already read webcomics.com, right? Well one more reason to add it to your daily feed - that site just got a website design refresh, plus it now bills Brad Guigar as "editor-in-chief". Good stuff!
I'm going for a supernatural story that's serious but also makes fun of itself. The main character is deeply intwined in all of the things going on but his attitude is to look around at everyone else and point out how insane or stupid they all are. I'll be writing about all kinds of supernatural happenings as the protagonist meets and mocks them. Hopefully people will enjoy it and it should be interesting anyway.
I will be updating every monday and friday with random misc. updates during the week. I will have at least one new comic page done on monday and friday but might have more than one.
The nominees for the 2009 Harvey Awards are out -- all comics creators (those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field) are eligible to vote for the award winners from now through August 8th. Ballots for voting are available online here. There are a lot of webcomic angles to the list of nominees this year, including the seven nominations for Jeff Kinney's Diary of A Wimpy Kid (a comic with a webcomic origin) and 10 noninations for John Gallagher's Buzzboy which also has it origins in an online version.
Least I Could Do artist Lar deSouza also snagged nominations for Best Cartoonist and in the Special Award for Humor in Comics. David Malki! of Wondermark also got a nod in the Special Award for Humor category and another one in the SPECIAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PRESENTATION category for his book WONDERMARK, VOL. 1: BEARDS OF OUR FOREFATHERS (which I own a copy of and agree is absolutely deserving of this recognition).
In the BEST BIOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL OR JOURNALISTIC PRESENTATION category HOW TO MAKE WEBCOMICS, by Brad Guigar, Dave Kellett, Scott Kurtz, and Kris Straub received a nomination. In the Best Anthology category, FLIGHT VOLUME 5, edited by Kazu Kibuishi received a nomination.
Got to see the talk by Richard Thompson (Cul De Sac) at the Arlington County library tonight. He's an amiable fellow who, while not the most dynamic of speakers, did go through a nice overview of his work (which goes way beyond his more recent syndicated comic) up on the screen. A few interesting items from his talk and from the Q and A afterwards: he's in about 250 papers, which he contrasted to Zits and a few others in 1000+ papers. He didn't think anyone would hit that many papers again given the decline of the whole newspaper biz. I can't remember the quote but I think he said something to the effect of you can't make a living from a syndicated comic. I wanted to ask a question on that -- something like "well why do it then and are you looking at other opportunities for Cul De Sac online and otherwise" but I didn't get called on.
He also mentioned how he backed into the syndicated deal and how he never chased it. Essentially he's had a successful freelance illustration career (Washington Post, New Yorker, etc) so the work ethic and output is already there (I'm sure that was a consideration from the syndicate's perspective). In 2001 he wrote up a "poem" using quotes from George Bush to go with a cartoon of Bush at his first inauguration. The poem sans comic was posted by someone on the Internet and went semi-viral (and the version on the Internet actually credited it to him -- so go Internets). Much much later he got talked into doing a weekly comic about normal life in Washington DC by the then editor of the Style section of the Washington Post (sort of Cul De Sac 1.0). Then slightly later the editor at the Universal Press Syndicate saw the poem and on a visit to DC asked Richard to lunch. Richard took the opportunity to give him a package of the weekly strip -- and voila, the syndicate signed him up to do a daily version.
Cul De Sac is a very funny, sweet look at family life -- the young girl is a particularly strong character and Richard gets "child logic" pretty well (even though he admits that character, Alice, has the unlikely vocabulary of a college student.). Both in print and online, the first collection is in print (with a foreword from Bill Watterson!) and the second is coming this fall .
To be ranked as some of the best villains in marvel comics they have to be dastardly, cool, clever, or just plain evil. And the marvel universe is filled with plenty of villains that fit the bill. But only a select few of the villains in marvel comics are the baddest of the bad. Not all the villains in marvel comics could hold the distinction of the absolute best, but these are among the ones that can.
First up we have the Green Goblin, Norman Osborn. He may not be the most powerful of all the villains in marvel comics, but he's definitely one of the vilest. Terrorizing Spider-Man until Osborn's death, and then terrorizing him again when he came back from the dead, Osborn is vicious, depraved and unpredictable. And now that he sits in a seat of power over the entire marvel universe that unpredictability and his psychopathic tendencies just shot him up to the top of the list of the greatest villains in marvel comics.
Next we have the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk. All the man boasts is enormous girth, intense strength and a ton of money, which adds many minions to his call. A thorn in the sides of the likes of Spider-Man and Daredevil, the Kingpin was at one time one of the most ruthless villains in marvel comics. He had no regard for life and didn't care who he hurt. He was on top of the world and had the world fooled for a long time while he acted as the head of the criminal underworld. Had Daredevil not finally taken the big man down he'd still be sitting on his empire, an empire worthy of one of the greatest villains in marvel comics.
Then there's Ultron, the creation of Henry Pym that went on to terrorize and nearly destroy the Avengers on more than one occasion. This super-intelligent and possibly sentient robot is one of the greatest villains in marvel comics simply because he's not human. He doesn't have a heart or a mind, and thus everything he does is cold, calculated and despicable. His sole goal is to rid the world of the Avengers and anyone else who stands in his way.
Of all the villains in marvel comics, Apocalypse is potentially the greatest threat. He's a seemingly immortal mutant that in every possible future of the marvel universe thus far he has ruled and reigned eventually. If the Age of Apocalypse story line showed us anything it showed us just how bad this mutant supremacist is.
And finally there's Magneto, the Master of Magnetism, and no list of the greatest villains in marvel comics would be complete without him. What makes Magneto so deadly isn't just his ability to control any kind of metal in existence, including the iron in our blood. But it's the cause that he fights for. He truly believes he is doing the right thing, and when a being with that much power is convinced that he's the savior of his people there's no limit to the lengths of destruction he might go to.
There are other great villains in marvel comics as this is just a few notable standouts. And each and every one of these listed have done much to deserve their place in such a list.
It’s been a downer of a week, especially if you’ve had your emotional core invested in celebrities. How to cheer up? Well, you could check your brain at the door and watch Transformers 2 (which I haven’t seen yet and which all the critics hate but which I am willing to defy the odds since I’m a puppet of Hasbro), or you can find your joy in the world of webcomics:
This week, Toothpaste for Dinner provided a fairly concise assessment of most of the “webcomic industry.”
Incidentally, if you enjoyed the new Dick Grayson Batman and Damian Wayne Robin in the new and highly acclaimed Batman & Robin #1, you might also enjoy Dave Willis’ 3-part Batman tale in Shortpacked!
Man, now’s your chance to hang with your cool literary friends because Ulysses Seen brings that infamous James Joyce novel (Ulysses) to life! Clearly it looks a lot like Watchmen. And… it’s as dry as everyone claims it is. Each page, when clicked on, provides a nice literary analysis of the work that has become synonymous with “stuff piece of literature that people who wear monocles read.” Hey, whatever makes AP English summer reading easier. Anyway, here’s to hoping it goes further than that 1984 comic, which got as far as Chapter Two.
Alexds1 of The Meek was nice enough to link to my site (”It has some pretty kickass webcomic reviews!”), so I’m returning the favor. I’ve been reading The Meek for a month now. I gotta say it’s one of the prettiest webcomics out there. It’s got mystery. It’s got danger. It’s also got a giant mudpuppy. I highly recommend it. And at only 38 pages in, right now is an pretty good jumping point. I’ll probably end up reviewing it after Chapter One wraps up, and needless to say it probably won’t get that 1-star rating that Alexds1 so desperately loves to consume. (NOTE: more than half of the comic right now features a very naked girl with very naked breasts. Not necessarily safe for work.)
Ping Teo of Lonely Panelchecks out Luke’s URL (or Luke Surl), which she says doesn’t have the nicest art in the world but has writing that tends to grow on ya.
Grim Tales (reviewed here) has ended, apparently. I am SO heart-broken. Though reader Quijotesca tells me that Bleedman’s threatening a sequel. Um… hooray!
In the end, the man lived a sad, sick life, but it’s the music that will live on forever and ever. Cliched but so true.
Not at all webcomic related, but some of these outdoor ads (care of mentalfloss.com) are too hilarious and too awesome not share. Especially the Spider-Man urinal.
AnotherCreating Comics! article at Comic Related is now up. In it, I talk about the development of a research plan for Interrogation Control Element. If you missed any of my earlier articles, you can always check them at over there, or follow these links:
iComics? Another article on Longbox - the announced "itunes for comics" service/software. Not a bad overview of the possibilities here, although a key difference between music and comics is that it seems iTunes rode the success of the iPod. I can't imagine iTunes becoming as dominant as it is without the tight linkage Apple created to the iPod. Longbox isn't going to have that advantage. On the other hand if Longbox can do deal with many, many major publishers of comics than it still might have a fighting chance (assuming it's a great piece of software with a really good customer experience). (h/t Scott McCloud)
BUSINESS Longbox is a software program for download for computers that is intended to be an iTunes like system for comics. Comics is in a much different place than music was at the time of iTunes rise to dominance (plus iTunes rode the iPod and there doesn't seem to be an iLongbox involved in this story) so I'm not sure there's any reason to predict success for this effort without seeing a lot more of it. If they had an exceptionally well-done piece of software, easy purchase process and lined up ALL or MOST of the major publishers than maybe it would get some traction. Convenience at the right price point CAN beat inconvenient and free for a lot of folks.
Fantasy Comics
Furry Comics
Gaming Comics
Geeky Comics
Manga Comics
Mature Comics
Quirky Comics
Sci-Fi Comics
Weird Comics
Workplace Comics
Genre-less Comics
