Category Archives: Useful Information

Help the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund by Surfing the Web

Useful Information

I recently found out about the search engine goodsearch.com, which donates a penny for every search you make to the charity of your choice. This is an easy way for comics enthusiasts to help out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The search engine is powered by yahoo, so it should work pretty well. Here’s a news video about it.

You can see on the site how much has been raised so far for the charity of your choice… so far, in the history of the search engine, a total of $1.89 has been raised for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. We can do a lot better than that. Get searching! I just made them four cents!

Obviously, one person doesn’t make a ton of difference doing this, but an organized effort definitely can. The above video mentions one charity that made over 2 grand.

Unfortunately for the Fantagraphics Legal Defense Fund, only non-profits can earn money from goodsearch… otherwise I’d suggest searching for them, since the CBLDF has unfortunately decided not to assist them with their current legal troubles. However, you can still do yourself a favor and support Fantagraphics by buying some of their numerous excellent books!

How to Make Mini-Comics

Cartooning Lessons, Cartoonist Conspiracy Li'l Library, Lessons, mini-comics, Projects, Useful Information

We recently completed work on the first volume of the Cartoonist Conspiracy L’il Library (to be used at this weekend’s Mouth Off event at The Center For Book Arts)… How to Make Mini-Comics. Click on the image below to download the pdf… then print it out, cut it up, fold it, staple it and learn. Please note that this is a pretty big (4MB) file, so please help conserve our bandwidth and only download it if you intend to use it.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License. It may be printed and distributed freely. It is intended to be an educational tool, and it is our hope that it will be widely used as a “textbook” for teaching how to make a mini-comic.

Thanks to Adam Wirtzfeld, Bob Lipski, Maxeem, Bud Burgy, Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, Dank!, and Eric Lappegard for helping me (Steven Stwalley) put this together.

Note that any cartoonist who is interested can contribute a volume to the new Cartoonist Conspiracy Li’l Library. This is intended to become a downloadable pdf library of cartooning tips and techniques in mini-comics format, all using the above creative commons license. Let us know if you’re interested.

Conspiracy Website Updates: Feeding Frenzy

News, Useful Information

I’ve been doing some updates to the site and adding some new features today. If you’re reading this on the site, and not in a newsreader, you can see we now have a handy bunch of site navigation on the right hand side of the page, which hopefully will make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

Four of the links are to some new feeds we’ve added to the site:

CONSPIRE! CONSPIRACY NEWS (subscribe)

This is a feed that mixes this blog with some other conspiracy blogs, such as the just-joined-today North Carolina Webcomics Coffee Clatch, 7000 BC, and The Comic Creators Network of Kansas City’s the Kansas City Comics Scene Blog. If your cell has a blog they want added to this feed, let me know and I’ll add it. Additionally, this feed will include items I find elsewhere that seem appropriate (which is true of all the new feeds).

CONSPIRE! CONSPIRATORS (subscribe)

This is a feed mixing various conspirators feeds… any conspirator who has a feed can be added to (or removed from) this feed who wants to be… just contact me and I’ll set it up.

CONSPIRE! CARTOONING LESSONS (subscribe)

This is a feed of various posts from various feeds around the web that aim to teach something to cartoonists, animators, self-publishers, etc.

CONSPIRE! COMICS NEWS (subscribe)

This is a feed of feeds from various comics news and opinion feeds… unlike the lessons feed, it is not edited by me… it includes all of the info coming in from these news sites. If you would like your comics news feed added to this feed (or removed from it), let me know and I’ll take care of it.

All of these feeds will be updating all the time… if you’re interested, I highly recommend using a newsreader to subscribe to them. I use Google Reader, and it is an excellent one (and it lets you access it from any computer with an internet connection).

Stwalley’s New Blog

comics, hype, Useful Information

I’ve altered my personal website at Stwallskull.com to be a blog. You can subscribe to it here, if you’re inclined. It will talk a lot about comics and cartooning, as well as a multitude of other topics that interest me (old music, weirdness, animation, technology, etc, etc, etc).

In addition to the mail feed on the site, there is a feed on the right side of the page that is also “Stwallskull’s Interesting Links” a very frequently updated list of choice articles that I run across on the web on a wide variety of topics of interest, including, of course, comics and cartooning. You can subscribe to that here.

Interesting Articles From the Comics Reporter

Cartooning Lessons, Lessons, Useful Information

I was just perusing Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter website and ran across some articles there that I thought would be of interest to you all (check them out at the links below). While you’re there you may want to subscribe to The Comics Reporter blog as well (which is the main page of his site). Tom provides some of the best coverage of comics news on the internoodle.

Why Should I Make a Mini-Comic

Getting Published — Comic Books

Getting Your Daily Newspaper Strip Syndicated

Places to look for Cartooning Gigs

Cartooning Lessons, Lessons, Useful Information

There are enough cartooning gigs appearing online these days that I can no longer keep up with them, although I’ll keep trying… there is a list on the top of the site (and the left side of the home page) of things I’ve heard about and got around to adding, and we have a section of the message board here that anyone can post their opportunities to. Fortunately there are other places to check as well!

Conspirator Andrey Feldysteyn does an excellent job keeping up a list of cartooning opportunies, with a focus on international cartooning and gag comics competitions (among other things).

The Comics Journal message board has frequent opportunites that pop, particularly for the small-press cartoonist:

Here is another newer site called comicjobz.com focusing on various general cartooning gigs.

The Digital Webbing forum used to be a good place to look for more mainstream comic book industry gigs, although I don’t see much of that there these days glancing at it.

I’ll post more of them here as I run across them… please post others on the message board here if you know of them!

Creative Commons Launches Tool to Reclaim Your Old Copyrights

Cartooning Lessons, Lessons, Useful Information

There is an interesting post on Boing Boing today regarding the Creative Commons new “Termination of Transfer” tool for regaining old copyrights.

“Creative Commons has a new “Termination of Transfer” tool that could change the way that copyrights work in America forever. If you’re a creator who’s signed over your copyrights, the law lets you get them back from your publisher, label or studio 35 years later, no matter what your contract says. However, the process for reclaiming your rights is incredibly complicated, so practically no one can take advantage of it.”

This tool is intended to change that situation. Hopefully it will be used by many, many cartoonists who want to reprint old work, but who lost the rights for whatever reason. Read more about it at the link.