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New Resource for Online Comic Artists
gmezero writes "Ten on-line comic artists from strips such as Angst Technology, Lethal Doses, and Polymer-City Chronicles have banded together and launched Rocketbox Comics in an effort to help other comic creators improve their art and to promote the idea of keeping on-line comics free."
This is cool, but what online comics really need is hosting that doesn't whack them into oblivion with bandwith charges when they get popular. Preferably hosting that doesn't also put restrictions on them or make them charge for access to the archives.
/. Oh well...
My favorite online comics are User Friendly, Megatokyo and Circle Weave. At least two of these have a huge audience and equally huge bandwidth usage. For all I know the third one will also now that I gave its URL here on
Jack William Bell
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
probably a time issue. do free daily comics come out of nowhere, no cost to anyone? -- nope. most take a couple hours, perhaps? adding shaded color to a sketched comic is almost like redrawing it completely. even just adding solid colors can be a pain, keeping them consistant, making sense with them, not making comics look super-saturated.
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Wow. Since when has colour or lack thereof been an issue that even remotely relates to quality? And you can have amazing art and have total crap for stories. And in my not so humble opinion, a good story is far more important than perfect anatomy.
Angst Technology is currently one of my favourites. I find that Barry always tells an amusing story, and his characters are well drawn, if perhaps a little funny looking (Who else would have the courage to have a llama as a character?!?)
Its certainly not a cost or resource issue (just click the little icon of the paint bucket or gradient tool).
It might be a skill issue, as its very easy to take something that looks nice in black and white, and botch it up by adding horrid colors.
Penny arcade is a great example of a colored comic.
sinfest is a great example of a black and white comic.
It's more to do with the artists personal preference than anything else. Some dilbert comics are B&W, some are in color.
I read Angst Technology every day, in fact, when I started reading it I spent the good part of 3 hours reading all the strips from when it started.
No matter which way you look at this cartoon it is damn funny. Most people in the IT industry will get the jokes. As far as reusing whole cells is concerned I don't think it happens. He may reuse drawings of individual characters but I have not noticed and has not detracted from how good the strip is.
I find it just as funny as User Friendly but with better cartooning.
I would tend to agree with the posts concerning the need for better storylines being priority over better art, at least initially. ;)
;)
Perhaps there's room for artists to get together and provide a service such as this also? Take sites devoted to providing info on the technical aspects of amateur video productions (eg. slashcam), they also have articles on making good on storylines etc.
Cover both sides of the coin and we're sure to end up with better storylines and better art
Two of my favourite online comics luckily have a bit of both it would appear; Stars and Steel is a comic with what appears to be a storyline which is fairly decent and a lot of potential, with art which is not too bad at all either - the other, Outsider, is a comic which is reminicent to me of the Wing Commander games with the whole space saga thing going on there, the art being pretty damn well done there also.
There's potential out there
DR-C245H