Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is there a reason that most online comics are in Black and White? Is it a cost issue? A resource issue? I hope that a site like this will bring better quailty to the acutal art of on-line comics.
Noooooo... i used to read those 3 (of the 10) and they have MAJOR flaws.
Angst technology is a comic that re-uses a few finished comics with new scripts. If you read this comic, you'll notice the only difference between a lot of them are th scripts and not the art. It's as if the artist was too lazy to draw a new comic every other day and instead just erased the words from last time and replaced them.
Polymercity tried to do the plot thing, like sluggy and its walky!, but is failing since it is drawing it out too much. It's almost a year since that plot began. Its strenght was in the witty one-liners it had goign. It was a Userfriendy style comic strip with a sci-fi twist.
Lethal doses just was too far and inbetween new drawings.
It's like the strips which I'd least like to read banded together to become one target for me to avoid. ug
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
It depends on the artist. A friend of mine and I do a webcomic he draws in black and white because he has a rough unfinished like kind of style and the comic is supposed to resemble an low budget movie. (thus things don't look 'real').
On the weekends I draw the directors of 'the movie' and they are in color as they are in the 'real world'.
Plus black and white does usually produce a smaller image size for those of us who pay for our bandwidth and hosting services but I digress.
The Anti-Blog
On a somewhat related note this really cool site (okay so I'm a bit biased) is trying to promote other good web-comics and its own new community with a web comic contest
:) )
You're welcome to sign up yourself if you like. We get a decent amount of traffic so you could get some exposure (as well as some other things, check it out
The Anti-Blog
1. Knowledge of how to make colored comics, scan them, and still make them look clean.
2. The ability to efficiently use or lack the of quality graphics arts tools.
Alot of people out there can make quality sketches. Alot of people out there are very witty and know how to pander to an audience. However, not many people have the resources or the knowledge to make color graphics look good on the web.
Sounds like a good mission statement- I hope they have a plan to back up that goal.
How do they intend to keep on-line comics free? By subsidizing the cartoonists? By supplying them with enough free stuff that it's worth putting up their comics with them? By posting to Slashdot so they get a zillion banner views? It's unclear to me.
Comics artists gotta eat, too (and if you've been to a comics convention, you'd see that they gotta eat more than most- I'm talking about me here, too). In the end, there needs to be some correlation between putting content online and money appearing. Just aggregating content and hoping for the coolness to start generating dough sounds a lot like some dot-com business plans.
In the comics project I'm peripherally involved with, the idea is that the online component serves as a marketing tool for the printed magazine (yes, those are still around- for a while, at least). Additionally, the hope is to sell related products via the web site and recoup some money there- I think that's the main business model for The Joy of Tech.
If either of those fail, the online (free) stuff will go away. Thus, it's in the interest of people who like the stuff to buy a t-shirt once in a while, or even just donate some cash. Otherwise, the online comic will remain the province of the subsidized hobbyist who quits once they have a family to support.
I'm not slamming these guys for banding together to promote the art form as a whole- anything anyone does to bolster the sagging comic industry is OK by me. I'm just hoping this is not another "Great idea, we'll put on a show!" concept that will run out of steam once people start wondering where the reward is.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
One syndrome I dislike seeing in Slashdot is the tendency to sound the trumpets any time we see the word "free," without inquiring into the context.
The nice folks at Rocketbox say that they are committed to providing Web comics that you don't have to pay to access the archives of. That appears to be a slap at Modern Tales, which is using exactly that model so that its cartoonists can see a dime or two of compensation.
Well, okay. Never mind that sites like Modern Tales have only a minimal cost (a coupla greenbacks per month). Never mind that if you visit Modern Tales each time your favorite comic comes out new, you never have to surrender a nickel. Never mind that you can set up a damn cron job and grab each comic when it comes out, thus making sure you don't miss any.
This is worthy of the front page of Slashdot?
I'd be impressed and interested if the comics were free-as-in-speech. Okay, maybe I'd be more impressed if Rocketbox's Top 10 list wasn't empty.
How exactly does Rocketbox plan to pay for its bandwidth bills? Let alone help its cartoonists afford their next ramen noodles? They don't say, as far as I can see.
This is frivolous. And it should be noted that most of the best Web comics (on or off Modern Tales, or with any revenue model) have not even been mentioned so far. I will mention some in a separate post.
For example, MegaTokyo.
Hell, you've probably even seen His banner add here on slashdot.
Piro Recently made the decision to got 100% FT on making His webcomic work, and has a dead tree version coming out this december. It seems to Me that He's doing reasonably well with making a free comic pay for itself, and possibly even put some money in His pocket....
Not to piss on rocketbox, but Piro's doing good, and I dont see anything but vaporware promises from rocketbox yet...
Dont get Me wrong, I read some of their comics daily, But this also means that I've been hearing about rocketBox for three months....
and in a church of all places!
Understanding comics is really a must read for everybody. Even if you don't like comics at all, there are some astonishing ideas disseminated in the book. To me, this guy is the RMS (or ESR ?) of comics. This is a sort of meta book on comics, what they are, why they talk to us, and (the really exiting part) where they could go from now, using modern medias. (ie : unlike a textbook, a web page has no borders and should probably be used in a different way.) And not only he talks about it, but he proves it !
Futhermore, one thing really shocked me in the book : how the use of comics to explain ideas is a real plus if it is well used. I do think that using this technique, McLoud could probably explain ASM to your grandma and she'd just say : "yeah easy". Just read it !