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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?
When this is the #1 spot on a Top 10 list (the rest are empty), a site needs some help :)
If you're really interested in learning more, a writer/artist by the name of Scott McCloud has probably done more for the medium and getting the message out than anybody else.
McCloud wrote an incredibly popular, well-written, and informative book a few years back called Understanding Comics, about the underlying principles that make comics as a whole work. He followed it up with Reinventing Comics, which was more about methods of distribution and why he thinks online comics are the future. But interesting reading nonetheless.
The first was great. I go to an art school, and the kids in the comic art program actually have to read it as a text book for several courses. In my opinion, though, the second book was less successful, and more opinion-based. I probably just don't agree with him on a few points.
Regardless, his site is worth checking out for those interested in the topic. He's probably online comics' biggest and best-known advocate.
More than anything, I would said it's a tradition issue. There is a long-standing Sunday-in-color, rest-of-the-week-B&W tradition in newspaper comics.
While IANACA (...not a comics artist), how complicated color is to add would depend on how they produce the color work initially: manually or digitally. Coloring by hand takes a lot of time. Using a paintbucket in an illustration program doesn't take much at all.
Same here, or at least brings more exposure to the quality comics out there. Witness PvP's announcement that their real-world books are going to be relaunched under the banner of Image Comics. Go Scott!
Online comics (and I don't mean web versions of print comics) have a long way to go before reaching the same 'credibility' with the non-online world as their traditional counterparts. People like Scott Kurtz are pushing the boundaries for what influence an online comic can have offline. It might take a generation or two of people getting more news online than off for digital comics to reach the same mindshare as, say, a Cathy or Doonesbury.
Slightly offtopic, I miss Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes more every day I open the newspaper.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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....