Read Comics

This Pink Tentacle article has a ton of wacky subway posters from the late 70s. I thought these three with superman were pretty hilarious.

While I was out of town, a co-worker sent out a link to these awesome one-liner comics inspired by spam email subject lines. As you can see, an ironic meaning is often illustrated, rather than the one the often broken english subjects are meant to invoke. The illustrations/comics are drawn by graphic designer Elliott Burford, whose other projects (in the site’s navigation) are well worth checking out.

Also in my inbox this morning, (or, perhaps in my twitter stream) was a link to Opertoon‘s iPhone/iPod Touch app Ruben & Lullaby, which is a self-described: “digital comic/game (we call it an “opertoon”) that lets you shape the emotions of a quarreling couple with a touch”. I haven’t downloaded this yet, but I will be checking it out sometime in the near future. It looks quite interesting.

More photos of this awesome mural (and some backstory) over at Mission Mission. Additional photos on my old friend Doctor Popular’s blog and flickr stream. And some more over at what I’m seeing.

Sharyn (whose birthday it is today, happy birthday Sharyn!!!) sent me a link to this crazy relationship map. Click the thumbnail to see it full size. She found this over at UncannyXmen.net, which appears to have a whole crap-ton of x-men comic synopses, as well as loads of other x-men content.

Jason points out that, in all those characters, he could only find one same-sex relationship in the whole map, and two same-sex crushes.

It’s time for me to finally do the post about webcomics I have meant to do since Christmas.

Here are three I don’t think have been mentioned on this site yet.

Anders Loves Maria

I love this strip!  It is about a young Swedish couple who are having a baby, and probably shouldn’t be.  Given that Anders can’t stop getting involved with other women, and Maria can’t seem to grow up.  It is wickedly funny and terribly authentic.  The art work some how manages to be simplified, and sophisticated at the same time.  I was really tempted to buy an original page, but unfortunately the I did not get my tax return before the half off sale ended.  It should be mentioned that even though the people are drawn in a very non photo realistic manner, 60% of the strips have included extremely explicit sex, that is probably not safe for work.

Sister Claire

This strip is only a few months old.  It follows the adventures of a very naive young girl who was raised by nuns.  It is drawn in the style of  kwai(cutesy) anime.  Claire  wants nothing more in life than to be the best nun ever, while still getting to indulge in all things sweet and cuddly.  Unfortunately for her a sexy messenger from God disrupts her cloistered existence.  I am totally digging it!

Finally we have Finn and Charlie are Hitched

It is a slice of life styled strip centered around a gay male couple and their circle of friends.  It is not as serialized as the previous two I mentioned, going with the more traditional 3 to 4 panels leading to a gag format.  It is consistently funny and done by local Chicago artist.

My co-worker Sheldon sent me a link to Splash Page, a blog about comic book movies. They’ve got a lot of great stuff on there, and (presumably because they’re owned/operated by MTV) updates are quite frequent, with some of them even featuring real reporting. (As in, original stories, or real interviews, that sort of thing.) Here’s what it says in their sidebar:

You’ve turned the page to the place where panels and popcorn meet. From coverage of comic-inspired flicks to that buzzed-about graphic novel that’s being primed for the big-screen, you’ll find it all here at MTV’s Splash Page. Check throughout the day for breaking news, exclusive chats with Hollywood stars and comic legends, and first looks at the blockbusters of tomorrow.

Thomas Scioli (of Godland fame) did their header and logo and background graphic (pictured above). As you may have noticed, I’ve added the link to our sidebar.

I suppose this is not quite a comic, but Patrick Moberg is responsible for this fabulous graphic of our Presidents, past and future. This is best viewed full size.

This is probably relatively old news (I’ve been meaning to post it for a while), but if you haven’t already seen this livejournal post full of side-by-side comparisons between Kermit the Frog and Christian Bale, you really should go check it out. It’s simply brilliant.

Now, I feel dumb for admitting this, but I’ve have to admit… I don’t know where the Kermit photo I clipped is from. When does Kermit dress up as batman? Was it in Sesame Street? I did some youtube searching, and I can’t seem to find it. Anyone know?

I’ve been meaning to write something about a whole slew of Watchmen parodies that have started cropping up all over the net in anticipation of the movie, and seeing Kevin Cannon’s Blotchmen today reminded me of this endeavor. Blotchmen was created as part of the 24 Hour Comics Day event right here in Minneapolis. (I should have at least stopped by to check it out while it was happening. Maybe next year.) I think it’s especially cool because as well as parodying Watchmen, it also pays homage to a couple of my favorite children’s books at the same time. Just go read it!

Back when I was looking for this stuff, I discovered the official watchmen movie site hosts a feature/page they call The Gunga Diner, that looks to basically just aggregate all the Watchmen parody stuff it can find. It’s cool, but what I don’t like is that there are a lot of entries that don’t cite their sources. Maybe they just had the stuff emailed to them, but the Watchmen Peanuts sketch they host can easily be found to have originated from Evan “Doc” Shaner’s DeviantArt account. (Looks like it wasn’t a totally original idea, as Jeff Parker did something similar a while back.) Likewise the Lil’ Watchmen comic Gungan Diner hosts can be found (with quite a bit more digging necessary) over at the Silver Rage Archive/TOC.

An image that Gunga Diner doesn’t actually have listed is this awesome Jay Ward’s The Watchmen sketch by Jay Fosgitt, AKA, Four Panel Hero. (Jay Ward created Rocky and Bullwinkle.)

KO Fight Club, who I have linked to before, because it is a board gaming webcomic, has a whole page devoted to how they parody Watchmen (and another page about why).

Here’s a cool illustration of Watchmen Watches.

The Watchmen Movie site also hosts a page that links to a bunch of Watchmen fan films. I haven’t really watched them all yet, so I don’t know if that page is better about sourcing its material.

And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, the Mad Magazine folks made a seven page Watchmen Parody (PDF format) in their signature style. It was apparently distributed at San Diego Comic Con earlier this year.

Another political comic book is getting distributed, this one called Steal Back Your Vote!, and you can download it after you donate something via paypal (as little as a dollar). The art is by Lukas Ketner, (who also does this Witch Doctor comic), and Lloyd Dangle, (who has a pretty political comic called Troubletown).

There’s actually a lot more text inside than there is comic book, but you can see a couple of example pages on flickr: Vote Theft for Idiots: Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.

Completely coincidentally, I have been meaning to post a link to The Pain–When will it end?, which is the site for the (mostly political) cartoons of Tim Kreider. It appears to be updated more or less weekly, and the archives are very definitely worth a look. If I had a complaint though, the images are pretty damn large, and scrolling is not really an option so much as an obligation. Good stuff though.

I work with a bunch of computer geeks, and someone recently sent around the relatively new Sticks and Stones, which admittedly is pretty much an xkcd knockoff, (but I think there’s room for more in this genre, since I love it SO much).

Bonus link, there are a TON of people’s favorite programmer comics in this thread over at StackOverflow.com. That should keep me busy for a while.

UPDATE: Note that this is the 200th ReadComics.org post! W00-H00!

Both Florence and I have iPhones, so it seems natural to want to view comics on them… however, Florence has said she doesn’t think it makes sense for anything other than strip comics, because the screen is too small. But a couple of applications are trying to get people to read comic books on the iPhone, and while I have yet to install the 2.0 upgrade that allows you to add 3rd party applications to your iPhone, (so I haven’t tried either of these out), I thought I’d mention them here anyway.

The first is perhaps the most interesting because there is quite some controversy. Infurious Comics has created an app for the iPhone that allows you to view their comic Murderdrome. They tried to have it added to the iPhone application store (app store), and were denied, because it’s not suitable for all audiences (via Hypergeek). Here’s the video of the comic in action:

But Infurious didn’t let the Apple’s denial (some are calling it censorship!) stop them. They were, after all, developing a comic book application. So now sometime soon they’re releasing a new comic called Eye Candy. You can watch one of the developers demo that comic on youtube or the Infurious Blog. They added some new features to the app itself, including the ability to color the comic pages. They’ve also said they have more comics in development. Oh, and Eye Candy is going to cost $.99 in the app store.

There is another comic book application on the iPhone called ClickWheel that’s trying to be more of a comic book platform rather than just single issue comics. Check out their online demo (which is pretty amusing, but took me a few minutes to realize you could click and drag the comic to get to the later panels). Or you can watch this (not so flattering) demo off youtube:

I’ll probably try both of these out at some point in the near future, and I’ll report back if I find anything else interesting about them.

Yesterday, while reading Neil Gaiman’s blog (which is often written in the 3rd person, and probably not by Neil himself), I stumbled onto several interesting links, not the least of which is this song/poem titled “I Google You“. Follow the link for both a youtube video of someone performing the song, and also (in the comments) Neil himself has posted the lyrics.

In case you were wondering where this image came from, Neil has a new book coming out soon called The Graveyard Book. It’s another full length young adult novel, and is about a boy who grows up in a cemetery, raised by ghosts. Click the title for a lengthier description.

Bonus links: Neil answers questions at the Mouse Circus FAQ. The latest issue of ImageTexT, (“a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives”) features “The Comics Works of Neil Gaiman”, which basically means a bunch of scholarly essays about Gaiman’s comic books. I find this sort of academic BS hard to read, but maybe there’s some interesting stuff buried in there.

Google has announced they are launching themselves into the web browser development business this week with an open source browser they call Google Chrome.

The funny (and relevant) thing about this is that they’ve created a comic book that explains why and what they’re doing, drawn by none other than Scott McCloud.

It reads like a textbook, or maybe like a complex user manual, but the illustrations are clear and overall it does a good job of explaining some difficult ideas and concepts. It feelt a bit simplistic to me, but I’m a web developer, and these concepts are part of my job. I’m probably not the target audience. Also, I sort of wished there were links at various parts of the comic. I’d have liked to read more about some of the things they’re claiming this browser will do for us. But probably those links aren’t public yet anyway. The beta (for windows first) is supposed to be released sometime today.

UPDATE: Scott McCloud has a page on his website about this project. (Via Blogoscoped, where you can view some additional screenshots of Google Chrome in action.)

ReadComics.org co-conspirator and friend Stephanie invited me to the Comic Books Application on Facebook a few weeks ago now, and I’ve been playing with it a little bit each week. It’s an interesting way to keep track of your pull list, and to browse comics that were released the past (or current) week. It’s also set up to keep track of your collection if you use it that way, and allow for easy discussion of individual comic book issues, which each have their own page, and generally browse comics by creator, series, or publisher. (Doubtless there are more ways to browse the issues as well.)

I posted a few weeks ago in the forums, and the developer Chris has been really responsive and helpful. He even added some of the features I was asking for, which goes quite a ways toward convincing me that this thing is going to be around and maintained into the future.

You can add the Comic Book application to your facebook profile to show your friends what you’re reading, or just to check out all the cool features I’ve listed above.

UPDATE: I’ve just created a page for ReadComics.org on Facebook. Stop on by and become a fan, why don’t you?

Webcomics authors Richard Stevens (of Diesel Sweeties) and Meredith Gran (of Octopus Pie) gave an hour long presentation at Google sometime back in June. I don’t remember how I stumbled onto it, but found this originally over at Major Spoilers.

Update: This should be required viewing (I mostly just listened) for anyone wanting to start out and make a webcomic. Some of the names dropped were Scott Pilgrim (not a webcomic, unfortunately), Kate Beaton (interesting, I’ll have to look at this more), jonathan rosenberg (who does Goats which is AWESOME), MC Frontalot, Scott McCloud and Ryan North who does Dinosaur Comics. This was part of the Authors@Google series, and there are hundreds of these videos, including one of David Hajdu (who, as you may recall, wrote Ten Cent Plague).

I went googling a few comic book scripts (more to see how they’re formatted than for any other reason), and found this interesting site: The Comic Book Script Archive. There’s no real design to speak of (it’s all created with Google Pages), and most of the links are to external sites that host the scripts, but I think this site is a worthy addition to our sidebar, of interest to burgeoning comic book writers and artists alike.

Today is Free Comic Book Day, so don’t forget to head down to your local comic book shop and ask for–nay demand–your free comics!*

* Note: Not all stores participate in Free Comic Book Day. Your mileage may vary. Some assembly required. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.

I was curious, so I went wikipedia hunting. Free comic book day started in 2002, and the first one was scheduled for the day after the first Spider Man movie was released. Many free comic book days have coincided with big comic book movie releases. (Iron Man just came out yesterday.)

Linked from wikipedia was this interesting blog post about the real costs of free comics, and who pays for them.

In about half an hour, I’m meeting Jason J, Mike, Jason T, and maybe some other folks for breakfast before we head to The Source for their comics, and the annual sale they have on Free Comic Book Day. Maybe I’ll see you there!

Two links to resources for educators/teachers to use in their classrooms:

Comics In The Classroom.net Lesson Plans

Teaching with Comics Resource Page (at flummery.com)

Also worth linking (and only slightly off topic), my brother John Grider (aka the stencil artist broken crow) was recently interviewed for walkerart.org, which was then picked up by woostercollective.com.