While Ben Hatke of Zita the Space Girl may seem like an old hand at art and illustration, one thing he’s a newcomer to is bookstore signings.
In this short strip set at Politics and Prose, watch him try to eat when nervous, attempt to talk and sign at the same time, and find out whether it’s possible to outdo Eragon’s Christopher Paolini. (Probably not.)
(via Doodles and Dailies)
New York City has an abundance of bogeymen for New Yorkers to scorn or fear, but there are few that engender as much hysteria as the common bedbug. Apartments, hotels, subway stations, Abercrombie & Fitch—there seems to be no location, no social stratum that these pesky bloodsuckers haven’t penetrated in recent years.
Gabrielle Bell is no stranger to the bedbug menace, having been their victim four times in the past. When she found herself scratching and scratching once more, she realized that her old enemies were back and this time, documented the entire nerve-racking process of discovery, clean up/preparation, extermination, and eventual success/relief/lingering paranoia in her blog. It’s funny, creepy, and even educational, and you might find yourself a little more paranoid by the end.
(via The Beat)
I just finished reading Scott Westerfeld‘s novel Extras, the fourth book in the Uglies Trilogy. Putting aside discussion of the proper definition of “trilogy” for now, the book was interesting to me partly because the characters in it operated in a “reputation economy.” A reputation economy is one where a person’s worth is defined not by their material wealth, but by the deeds they do and how well-known they are. Extras is not the first work to explore such a concept, as Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom also runs on a reputation economy, and it has real-world applications on the Internet: Twitter calculates a reputation score for each user, and many sites like Digg allow you to vote on comments left by other users.
In order for a reputation economy to work, people have to receive credit for the things they do. Online, this usually means linking back to the source with proper attribution. Easy enough with articles, but images can be a tricky matter. Cool images often find themselves linked, e-mailed, uploaded to new sites, watermarks added, downloaded and uploaded again, and so on. Many artists don’t receive credit for the cool things they make.
Sick of this misappropriation, H. Caldwell Tanner and Rosscott have prepared a helpful flowchart to assist the average Internet user in crediting things properly. But this is no dry flow chart of text and funny shapes. This flowchart has illustrations. This flowchart is a comic! A very cool comic, indeed, one that you might actually feel the need to share with others. With proper credit to the original creator, of course.
(via Boing Boing)
One of my favorite columns in the New York Times is the Metropolitan Diary, where readers send in their stories about life in the big city, things they saw or overheard in the course of their daily lives as New Yorkers. Though coming from a wide spectrum of people, the stories tend to follow the same general themes of dry humor, whimsy, and naïveté (the latter not from the contributors, but rather those they encounter).
Kate Beaton has constructed her own “Metropolitan Diary” of a sort, though for a different reason than those Times contributors: she misplaced her latest Hark, a Vagrant! strip at some point during a shopping trip in SoHo, and so decided to run a series of short vignettes about her new life in New York City.
As a New Yorker, a lot of these made me go, “Ha, that is so true!” Because they are.
(via Robot 6)
Well, it’s Christmas Day, which means that some people are in church, many businesses are closed, small children are entering states of ecstasy, Jewish people are eating Chinese food, and lonely/bored people end up going online even though it’s Christmas and no one’s posting new content because those people have lives.
Science as we know it is a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method and an organized body of knowledge gained through such research. Then there is science!—note the exclamation mark—which generally involves the crazy misadventures of mad scientists and inventors as they battle those destructive forces which uncontrolled experimentation has wrought and explore the lost corners of the natural world encountering beings and places beyond imagination. Works that might be adorned with this label include Matt Fraction’s The Five Fists of Science and Phil Foglio’s Girl Genius series.
Perhaps feeling that there was a void to be filled (or not), Sydney Padua has created a series of comics about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage that could perhaps be described as—math!
The comic strips are largely fiction; in the comic Lovelace and Babbage use the power of the difference engine to solve problems and fight evil , but in reality Lovelace died young and Babbage never built his calculating machines. However, each crazy misadventure is informed by actual facts and research, and there is the occasional strip based in reality, like Ada Lovelace—The Origin and this guest column for BBC TechLab, with snippets of dialog and other information taken from their original writings.
Sydney Padua is an animator, which shows in the expressiveness of his work. The Lovelace and Babbage stuff is being kept on a separate site from her main portfolio, which is probably a wise choice, as there is quite a bit of it. In addition to the main comics, the site is stuffed in every nook and cranny with sketches, designs, single-panel cartoons, and lots and lots of historical information.
LARP (also known as “larping”) is a very misunderstood activity; most people don’t even know that it’s an acronym for “Live Action Role Playing,” much less that it’s not a bunch of nerds in bad costumes running around public parks with a tenuous grasp of reality. Well, that it’s not JUST that.
In an attempt to educate, as well as exercise his illustration skills, Nick Edwards put together a LARP guide book that touches on the basics of larping—genres, costumes, weapons, why people do it, the dangers, and relationship dynamics. The comic doesn’t go into the history of LARP too much, or really argue for it as a legitimate activity, leaving that to a brief infodump on the first page; instead the intended audience is people who are looking to join a LARP game. The most useful part is the “dos and don’ts” section, which clearly and humorously lays out what you should and shouldn’t do in order to make the LARP experience enjoyable to everyone.
However, my favorite section is probably the “dangers” page, because it doesn’t use words to explain, letting the images do all the work in showcasing some of the common problems.
I larped back in high school, and let me just say this: YEP.
Good grammar is a rare and delicate creature on the Internet—hard to find, misunderstood, and readily dismissed by the masses. And should you actually dare to correct someone’s terrible spelling or punctuation, you may end up the one under attack, called “elitist” and in extreme cases, a “grammar nazi.”
You’re far from alone. Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal is sick of all the bad grammar out there as well, and he’s found a way to address this pressing issue in a light and informative manner, using comics.
He illustrates when to use i.e. in a sentence, the three common uses of irony, ten words you need to stop misspelling, and how to use an apostrophe; this phrase exists merely to demonstrate the proper use of semicolons.
Once you’ve mastered the basics of grammar, The Oatmeal offers a few other informative cartoons for your perusal:
The site is a perfect example of using humor to educate—though, I would think twice before taking his word on why bacon is better than true love.
We’re a few weeks removed from Comic-Con International, but there’s still a few things to talk about. Namely, the reaction to said Comic-Con. I won’t bore you with the wrap-ups you’ve probably read five times already on all the comic news sites. Instead, let’s take a look at some first-hand accounts of what went down at San Diego from behind the booth. Thanks to The Beat, here’s a few strips that give us some unique views from the floor.
The food of San Diego appeared to be a going theme this year, as both Jillian Tamaki, author of Indoor Voice, and Gabrielle Bell, creator of Lucky, were not impressed with their attempts at obtaining Mexican cuisine. From personal experience in San Diego, the Gaslamp District is mostly tourist country. You’re not going to find too many hole-in-the-wall places in the area around the Convention Center, which is traditionally where I’ve found the best Mexican food in every city I have visited. Other than the burrito woes, Jillian goes into her concerns coming into SDCC in her comic.
She was worried it wouldn’t be her crowd, that the noise and volume of attendees would become a major issue for her. Instead, both her and her dude Sam embraced the con with little adjustment necessary. Cosplay won them over, as did the ever-alluring joy of being stopped to have a picture taken of you. Best of all, they even partook in the pitcher full of dice! Okay, they did not buy a pitcher, but they did buy dice.
While Julian chose to go the one page summary route for her Comic-Con wrap-up, Gabrielle Bell’s wrap is still ongoing as of my typing this entry. Three parts have been posted, with Part One acting more as a prologue to Gabrielle’s experience at this particular Comic-Con. Unlike the last time she was there, this time her and her guest were given the royal treatment: comped accommodations at the Hard Rock, $50 per person for food, and passes to the con. Making it their mission to spend all $100 each night, they ate in style, and even got their party on a few times. The personality and humor is ever-present in these strips, and I hope they are eventually collected into either a mini- or full-sized comic at some point. Plus, it helps that the art is very expressive, even in its minimalism.
For a tweet-style we turn to Dylan Meconis, who actually sketched her full week at Comic-Con into one sketchbook. Nothing complicated here, just one panel strips with quick punchlines, probably sketched right after the thought arose or the even occurred. And yes, I do agree that Galactus hats are quite awesome. There are about 20 sketches on Dylan’s Flickr site, ranging from events at panels to being mistaken for your neighbor while behind the booth. They’re a quick read, so I’d recommend just chain-smoking them all when you get the chance.
Finally, we have Keith Knight of K Chronicles, who not only was invited to Comic-Con as a guest, but also ran a few panels and won an Inkpot Award while he was at it! And to complete the food pyramid, experienced the joy of San Diego lobster rolls, Boston-style, thanks to a reader of his. Even from the looks of how he drew this lobster roll, my mouth is now watering. Still, I wonder if he tried any burritos while he was at the con?
At last year’s New York Comic Con I picked up a stack of Dazzler comics (issues #1-14, circa 1981), for the bargain price of $0.25 apiece. I couldn’t tell you why exactly, except that maybe it was a good-sized run at a low, low price and I had heard things about the Dazzler series. Heck, I could have picked up even more issues, but I had to draw the line somewhere and a little over a year’s worth seemed a good place to stop.
There’s not much I can say about the series, it’s the adventures of a modern (eighties) girl dealing with life, love, and supervillains. There’s even a jealous rival for the affections of a handsome doctor. It’s mostly pretty silly, though admirable in how they took what in many circumstances would have been a throwaway character and said, “Look, this character is powerful and she matters.” I just wish current writers could have learned from that; I barely noticed Dazzler was back on the X-Men.
The comics themselves are interesting in how they present a time capsule of kid culture in the early eighties; there are ads for old Saturday morning cartoons, Dungeons and Dragons, and those programs where you sell greeting cards in exchange for prizes like a cheap handheld radio. Most amusing of all is that each issue features a Hostess ad at the end.
Older folks might remember these, a series of one page comics featuring a superhero (mostly Marvel but sometimes DC) battling the forces of evil with the help of some delectable Hostess treat, usually Hostess Fruit Pies, though sometimes Twinkies or cupcakes. The ads ran from 1977-1982, but live on in dollar bins everywhere. Most installments featured a villain’s dastardly scheme being thwarted by tasty pastry goodness, though there were variations, like this Aquaman adventure where a group of men inside a rocket venture underwater to introduce delicious “golden sponge cake” to the people of Atlantis, endangering a kelp farm in the process.
Seanbaby of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Cracked.com, and of course, Seanbaby.com has put together an archive of these Hostess ads, including an interview with Bob Rozakis, the writer of several DC-themed Hostess advertisements. He also has a section on other stupid comic book ads, including ones for the Charles Atlas “Dynamic Tension” system and Thom McAn shoes. It’s an interesting look at the history of advertising in comics, as well as worth a few chuckles.
