An extended fugue state ramble about the shape of comics and, God, I don't know, a dozen other things.

October 11, 2011 3:42 PM

Why people like digital comics: you can charge for them, and they look pretty on an iPad. Why people like webcomics: they're free. - Warren Ellis looks at The Broadcast Of Comics.
posted by Artw (14 comments total)

Rest of the essay aside, it is great to see somebody giving American Flagg! the props it so desperately deserves.
posted by Shepherd at 3:46 PM on October 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

GOGANG! GOGANG!

(I loved American Flagg; I just reread the first year's worth, and it remains surprisingly fresh.)
posted by chavenet at 3:58 PM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm glad that Artw is back posting cool links.
posted by Elmore at 4:00 PM on October 11, 2011 [8 favorites]

Being a comics geek and a web geek, it's almost a little embarrassing to me that I don't follow any webcomics. Too much bother to keep up; too slow to read in one sitting; too annoying to spend years waiting for a story that may or may not ever finish. (Yeah, I know about RSS feeds and dailystrips and whatnot; I've just never overcome the inertia to set them up.) Being an anti-DRM zealot, I'm not going to touch Comixology or any of their competitors.

So I'm waiting for 1) the trade, 2) anyone who wants to put a comic in a DRM-free epub sized to look OK on a 6" e-reader.
posted by Zed at 4:20 PM on October 11, 2011

John Allison of the fantastic Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery talks print vs. ebooks.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:26 PM on October 11, 2011

That's pretty cool he used Cerebus as an example....considering I'm in the middle of scanning in all 6,000 pages for Sim right now! The first volume and High Society are done, I'm about halfway through Church and State as we speak. Back to work...
posted by antihostile at 5:51 PM on October 11, 2011 [5 favorites]

Are there any recommendation engines for webcomics? I prefer intellectually and/or darkly humorous comics, but usually loose interest in epic stories, although I finished Freakangles.

I suppose my favorites are/were xkcd.com, pbfcomics.com, truckbearingkibble.com, abstrusegoose.com, cowbirdsinlove.com, smbc-comic.net, explosm.net, oglaf.com, sexylosers.com, ghastlycomic.com, rockpapercynic.com, and dfc.furr.org.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:16 PM on October 11, 2011

And I’m telling you now, if you’ve never read AMERICAN FLAGG!, and you’re interested in comics and science fiction, then you need to sort that shit out, because this is the great lost commercial graphic novel of the 80s, and it should be racked with WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS everywhere.

Fucking A.
posted by Scoo at 6:32 PM on October 11, 2011

antihostile - interesting! Do you know what Sim wants to ultimately do with the digitized version?

Can you provide us any detail on what you're using as a source, and what digitizer you're using? Any post-digitizing processing?
posted by porpoise at 6:46 PM on October 11, 2011

OT: My staff at the comic shop relentlessly picks on me about my love for AMERICAN FLAGG and Howard Chaykin's art, but I just throw my head back and laugh, and figure they will eventually get it... or not, who cares? FLAGG was/is awesome in the real sense of the word, and quite groundbreaking in it's effervescent style. Comic books rule.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 8:58 PM on October 11, 2011

This article will be great for me when I crack Reinventing Comics. Thanks!
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:51 PM on October 11, 2011

Without Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, there would be no Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns. We could really do with a nice retrospective post on Chaykin. Time to start checking out what's out there on the web, see if I can't work something up.
posted by KingEdRa at 12:35 AM on October 12, 2011

I just wish more webcomics understood pacing. I find a webcomic I like read the backlog and wow, this is great! but then 3 month's later I realize that oh my god this makes newspaper serials look action packed. Oh and you all convinced me to take American Flagg off my I should read this list and buy damn copy already.
posted by aspo at 1:01 PM on October 12, 2011

The State of Colleen’s Industry From Print to Web: It’s working, and I didn’t need a gag strip to make it pay
posted by Artw at 9:33 AM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]