Category Archives: Useful Information

Journalista!

Dirk Deppey has started up his excellent Journalista! blog at the Comics Journal again, which I’m sure will rapidly become one of the best read blogs in comics, if it isn’t already. Deppey has a broader scope that anyone in his coverage… the only comics blogs that really compete are The Beat and The Comics Reporter (other comics blogs, including this one, tend to canibalize from these three sources probably more than any others). Of note in particular for cartoonists looking to promote their work or activities is this note in Journalista!:

Want to see your comics-related event listed here? Email me at dirk@tcj.com and let me know. No sales-only events, please — it’s nice that you’ve marked things down at your store or website, but I won’t be listing it here.

The entire Comics Journal website has been redone, including much more exclusive online content. They now have a PHPBB message board, where you can actually make edits to your posts, which is nice.

Old Paper

I just discovered Kevin Huizenga’s blog… Huizenga is a wonderful cartoonist and the proprietor of the very cool USS Catastrophe minicomics distributor.

He has an excellent post here on the destruction of old paper by libraries, including much (probably most) of comics early history… we almost lost the brilliant color Krazy Kat strips (currently getting beautifully reprinted by Fantagraphics). Here’s a quote he posted from Bill Blackbeard, to whom we all owe an huge debt for his enormous contributions to comics preservation (which he practically invented).

“There are just over four hundred and fifty of them, and each one a masterpiece of graphic comedy. The marvelous product of the last nine years of Garge’s richly fruitful life, these weekly color Krazy Kat pages, stunning as they are, almost failed to physically survive the editorial and institutional rigors of their time. We are, in fact, damned lucky to have them on hand at all as source material for this series. There were, you see, just two newspapers — six day a week sports and crime news afternoon newspapers, throwaway rubbish — that printed virtually all of the color Kat pages from start to finish. Neither the New York Journal nor the Chicago American, sensational Hearst papers, had any referential status at all, and most libraries in their sales areas shunned them — two papers that virtually no one of any artistic or literary taste and judgment ever saw fro mthe the strip’s 1935 start to its 1944 conclusion. Two tombs for the foremost comic strip of all time.

Luckily there was a single dedicated comic strip buff, August Derleth of Sauk City Wisconsin, founder of Arkham House in 1939, who clipped and saved every color Kat page, donating his run to the Wisconsin State Historical Society…”

Quote from Bill Blackbeard’s introduction to Krazy & Ignatz 1935-1936: “A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy”

Participate in MicroCon

MicroCon is coming up on April 30th this year at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. The Minnesota Comic Book Association puts on some of the most creator-friendly comic conventions in the US, and they have invited the whole Cartoonist Conspiracy to attend. The MCBA continues to offer free space to ALL cartoonists at their conventions (they are also responsible for FallCon). That’s right, ANY CARTOONIST can get a space for FREE at a convention loaded with comic fans. It is very rare to have this sort of opportunity, I hope a number of you will take advantage of it. At most conventions you have to pay for space, and it isn’t cheap.

For more information, and a form to send in asap so they will reserve you a space, download this pdf.

Using Blogger to Syndicate Your Comics on the Web for Free

I’m using blogger to post my comics on the web (soapythechicken.com)… it works great, for my purposes. It makes content management extremely simple, and makes it easy to offer subscription via rss feeds.

It is totally unnecessary to have any knowledge of web page building or anything to use this system… the blogger system is extremely easy to set up, and they will host all of your content for you if you want them to (or you can host it yourself, as I do, but that takes a wee bit of work & knowledge).

It is well worth picking up a bit of basic html tagging knowledge for posting to your blog… there are only a couple that are absolutely necessary to know though… the “a href” tag for linking, and the “img” tag for adding images to your posts. Here’s a good “cheat sheet” for html. Really, this stuff is easier than pooping… don’t be intimidated by it. You just put one tag at the beginning of the area you want to affect and one at the end with a / to close it. And you can look at almost any page on the web for examples of how to do this by going to the view> source option in your browser. EASIER THAN POOPING!

Blogger will set you up with a basic template for your site to begin with, but you’ll most likely want to alter it. Again, a little knowledge of html goes a long ways to making your site more useful. For example, you will probably appreciate it greatly if you make the width of your content wider so you can do larger comics without breaking your page. The Soapy site is built off of the main default Blogger template, minima, with alterations to make the page wider, add a header, and to have some useful menus down the side. View the source and you can probably figure out how I did anything if you want to copy it for your own purposes. You may want to copy and save the template in a blank text file before you make any changes to it in case you accidentally make a change you don’t like.

My experience with the feeds produced by blogger hasn’t been so good. I tried hitting the feeds with myYahoo, and it didn’t work. However, I found a good solution… I set up another free account on feedburner.com to produce an alternate feed, and that one seems to work everywhere so far. It makes it so folks can go to the page and click on a button for their preferred news reader, as well, which is nice. See the Soapy the Chicken Feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoapyTheChicken

Here’s the blogger feed to compare it to, if you’re interested:

http://soapythechicken.com/feed/atom.xml

The blogger/feedburner combo is definitely the slickest free solution for cartoonists to syndicate themselves on the web that I’ve seen.

Picasa

Speaking of Picasa… I downloaded it yesterday and it is easily the best thing I have ever used to browse images on my computer. Picasa is a free image browsing/searching/editing tool that has come out from Google… it is pretty mind-blowing how much better it does this task than anything else I’ve seen previously. You would think they would build this sort of functionality into operating systems. I can see all of the Conspiracy jams at a glance with this thing… it’s really amazing. It also has quick and basic image editing that does a nice job of simplifying photo editing tasks. I highly recommend it.

Web Comics Growing and Making Money Sometimes

Here’s an interesting article on webcomics from the Washington Post. Good to hear that some people are starting to make some sort of a living doing comics on the web… hopefully this is a trend that will continue to grow.

If you are a web cartoonist, here is a site that is organizing comics on the web, thewebcomiclist.com

Here’s what their “about this site” area reads:

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The Webcomic List primarily helps you keep track of which of your favourite comics have updated. To do this we monitor over 4300 comics, checking them several times a day; this enables us to keep you updated as fast as possible.

Some things you should check out while you are here:

* Latest Updates – Check out which comics have updated recently. See it really does work!
* Comic News – Want to know what’s going on in the comic world? Well look no further this is the place for you.
* Comic Profiles – Over 4300 comic profiles, go check them out. You might find some hidden gems you never knew about!
* Register – Once registered you can grab yourself a personalised favourites list and change how the site works to suit your needs.
* Submit Your Comic – Do you have a webcomic that isn’t on this list? Well get it added!

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4300 comics!

If you are doing web comics, I imagine this is probably a very good place to register.