(Click the image above for a larger version of the strip.)

SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS

Welcome back, Blog@teers!

When I started WORLD OF HURT, I wrestled with the issue of how much fidelity I would have to the Blaxploitation films that inspired it.  In general, they were rather lurid and profane.  I wanted to stay true to my “creative muse,” but I also wanted my Mom to be comfortable reading it.  This may make me a terrible son, but in the end, the muse won out.  However, I did warn my mother beforehand that the language was somewhat salty.  (The first strip ran in April, but by July she had worked up the nerve to stop by the site.)

Nonetheless, I did work out a compromise with myself.  The only word that is off limits is the N-word.  I want to bury it forever, so even in the name of artistic license, I refused to give it validity or currency in my webcomic.

- JEP

Greetings, Blog@teers — have we got some news for you!

For the past six months, a webcomic has been featured by Ain’t It Cool News and CNN, celebrated for its action, characterization, and respect for the blaxploitation films that inspired it. As its creator notes, it’s Super Fly meets The Equalizer, the step-child of Shaft and Rip Kirby, a love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s. For some, it’s street justice like you’ve never seen — and for those on the run, well, all that’s coming their way is a WORLD OF HURT.

And in keeping with our mission to deliver the best and the brightest to you, our readers, we are proud to announce that WORLD OF HURT will be making its second home at Blog@Newsarama, as the latest in our weekly webcomics series. We sat down with writer/artists Jay Potts about the comic, his blaxploitation inspirations, and what the future holds for Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Newsarama: Jay, just to start out with, can you tell new readers a little bit about what World of Hurt is about?

Jay Potts: WORLD OF HURT is a weekly, black & white serial adventure webcomic that is my personal love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s and the Golden Age of newspaper adventure strips.  It is set in the early1970s in the city of Pointe Blanc, a fictional version of San Francisco and Oakland, and follows the exploits of a Black troubleshooter named Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Nrama: In terms of getting to know you a little bit — what’s your background been in terms of comics? Is World of Hurt your first one, or have you been building up this?

Potts: I’ve been drawing since the age of four and have been a comic book fan for just as long.  However, it wasn’t until I entered the graduate program in Sequential Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA in 1997, that I received any formal instruction.  What I learned there about storytelling and composition, and the exposure to an incredible range of talent, was truly eye-opening.

(more…)

The webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE has their own documentary!

Seth Kushner and Carlos Molina announced that they are almost finished their film on the group called “The ACT-I-VATE Experience,” and will premiere it at the Baltimore Comic-Con on October 11th. It will also be shown at Brooklyn’s King Con on November 6th.

Global Freezing part two of Jaia’s debut.  Find out more about her adventures here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com. 

As a comics critic, I hate Chris Onstad’s Achewood. As a comics reader, I love it—it’s by far my favorite web comic, and one of my favorite comic strips or comics of any kind…hell, maybe one of my favorite pieces of current fiction of any medium.

The reason part of me hates it and part of me loves it is the same. It’s such a unique strip, there’s nothing really even remotely like it, which, obviously, can make it really hard to explain to others, or talk about at all.

There are a lot of conceptual hurdles that can make entry into the world of Achewood kind of hard, hurdles I struggled with the first few times I tried reading it, until someone eventually advised to just pick a story arc from the archives and start reading—within a dozen or so strips, you should start to not only get it, but dig it. And Onstad is so accomplished at world building that the longer the strip goes on, the more you read of it, the more you get to know the surprisingly dynamic and versatile characters, the better it gets.

Those hurdles? Who are all these crazy anthropomorphic animals, and what species are they exactly? Are they anthropomorphic animals living in an animal-scaled world, or a human-scaled world? Why don’t squirrels have pupils? How is it that four such divergent characters as Mr. Cornelius Bear, Lyle, Teodor and Phillipe are roommates?

Achewood Vol. 2: Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar (Dark Horse Comics) is the book that the Caleb who once struggled with such things could have used to answer such questions.

(more…)

Via Comics Worth Reading, I found this post by Sean Kleefeld on the technological setup of Zuda comics. Being a bit of a media nerd, I read with interest and have some comments of my own.

Kleefeld starts off with a critique of browser compatibility, which hasn’t been a problem for me with Zuda (I use Flock, a Firefox-based browser) but his thoughts on Flash and “push” vs. “pull” models I think have some relevance on a wider scale.

He says:

See, there’s a larger problem with using Flash to deliver web comics, beyond iPhone users not being able to partake of the content. The model Zuda is using is what you would call a “pull” — Zuda is actively trying to pull readers to their site on a regular, recurring basis to read their comics. They have to reach out to users, get their attention, and convince them to click over to their site.

Many (I daresay “most”) webcomics these days instead opt for a “push” model. That is, they push their content out to the user via some form of syndication (RSS, XML, etc.) and the reader can view the content on a device and format of their choosing. Maybe it’s through a feed reader, maybe it’s through a customized iPhone app, maybe it’s part of a portal set-up someone created, maybe something else altogether. The point is that people can move the content around quickly and easily.

This seems to me to be symptomatic of the comics industry at large and its attitude toward new readers. Comic shops are wonderful things, but they are often not welcoming to the casual viewer (I know plenty of notable exceptions) and more importantly, many people never set foot in a comic shop–because why would they? They don’t read comics.

With the Web, and with “push” models like Kleefeld describes, comics have an excellent opportunity to reach out to people who wouldn’t set foot in a comic shop–and wouldn’t go looking for Zuda comics. If you could embed, move, link to individual pages, and other features that he mentions in the post, there would be many more opportunities to attract new eyeballs to the comics.

The problem is that viewers on one site are easy to calculate and easy therefore to charge advertisers for or to monetize. Embeddable video is not easy to monetize. Yet the media environment we are in, as many, many theorists have noted, is increasingly one where the price point is “free” and whether we like it or not, we have to think about different ways to support art and artists than the advertising-and-paid-content models we’re used to. (For some interesting thoughts on monetizing new media, check this post out.)

It’s Thursday. I have had too much caffeine and haven’t bought my comics for the week yet. Have some links.

Boondock Saints comics? Hell yes.

Becky Cloonan’s ongoing webcomic-saga of her “feud” with Amy Reeder Hadley just keeps getting funnier.

Warren Ellis thinks you should buy this print from Laurenn McCubbin. I think you should buy it for me.

One of my favorite political bloggers, Spencer Ackerman, is now the star of a comic book. Where the heck is MY comic book, people?

Jonathan Lethem on the “Squandered promise of science fiction.”

I’m sure Hawkman and Hawkgirl would beg to differ!

Courtesy of Player vs. Player, August 10, 2009.

First off, this Saturday I’ll be headed for this:

If you’re in New York, you too should check it out.

You don’t have to be in NY to read NYC Graphic Novelists’ profile on A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge creator Josh Neufeld. And if you haven’t read A.D. yet, um, it’s free and on the Web. Read it.

Finally, for iGoogle users, you can now get a constantly-updated iGoogle theme with the best of Oni Press’s creators’ work. Currently, it includes the work of Chris Mitten (Wasteland), Chynna Clugston (Blue Monday), Chris Schweizer (The Crogan Adventures), Lars Brown (North World), & Brandon Graham (Multiple Warheads). You know you want it.

Danielle Corsetto is no stranger to the world of webcomics, though she might not be a household name…yet. She’s been writing her own comics since the tender age of 8, albeit an obvious Garfield rip-off called “Fat Cat”. Chances are though, if you do know her name, you know it’s synonymous with the webcomic sensation “Girls with Slingshots”. It’s tag line is “two girls, a bar, and a talking cactus” might make one think of a Bryan Fuller project, it’s the story of love, friendship, and how at times, life is just that nutty.

The main characters are Hazel, the up-and-coming writer who is a bit stubborn and cynical at times. Jamie, who works at a local flower shop and, to me, has some of the best lines in the strip. Then there’s McPedro, the Irish talking cactus, that only really “talks” when Hazel when she gets inebriated. He loves his giant spider girlfriend. Of course the comic is not just about them, there is a plethora of assorted characters, each having their distinctive voice and personality. When I read it, it felt more like a sitcom, since there is an actual on-going story, and not just a regular webcomic.

It’s LGBT-friendly and I think that’s what really drew me to it. It’s written with heart and humor made for adults, and Corsetto works hard for it and it shows.

If this sounds like something you would like, just click here and prepare to have some good laughs.

Want to catch up on your favorite books on your iPhone? Well, you’re in luck — IDW announced yesterday that it would be expanding its digital publishing operations.

The company, which released its first Transformers comics to iTunes in May, said it would be releasing the Transformers: Rise of the Fallen prequel and adaptation graphic novels starting yesterday. In addition, the G.I. JOE: Rise of Cobra prequel comic is also up, as did G.I. JOE: Origins and CSI.

Furthermore, IDW has promised that J. Scott Campbell’s Danger Girl will be the next comic to be hitting the web, as well as — wait for it — the 1980s classic Transformers comics! By supplementing and bypassing the traditional distribution routes by going to a device as ubiquitous as an iPod (the newer versions being able to download anything via WiFi anyway), this is a really smart move for IDW, and will really help get their catalog out to not just people far away from a comic shop, but to iTunes shoppers who might not ordinarily consider looking to buy a comic in the first place.

“The digital medium represents a huge opportunity for the comics industry, and we’re proud to be leading the way,” IDW’s CEO Ted Adams said in a statement. “Through epublishing, we can introduce an entire new audience to comics and the joys of comic books.”

What do you call a story about grandfathers, comas, legacies, and mysteries?

Perhaps Sin Titulo is the only good name for it.

Though you might not have heard of it, Cameron Stewart, the artist behind Seaguy and the Apocalipstix, has been setting Twitter aflame with his neo-noir webcomic, as part of the ambitious Transmission X crew. With Sin Titulo, Stewart has charted out the course for Alex MacKay, a lowly fact-checker who begins to fall deeper and deeper into a mystery linked by his late grandfather and a mysterious woman in sunglasses. Cameron was kind enough to answer a few questions for Newsarama as a primer for his work.

David Pepose: Well, first and foremost, I have to ask — what inspired this story for you? It seems like such a hodge-podge of different genres, yet it all seems to work.

Cameron Stewart: When I first decided that I was going to do a comic of my own, I started with an entirely different premise - I was intending to write a pulpy action adventure series, and I attempted to sit down and script the entire story from beginning to end. I found this much more difficult than I’d anticipated, and I became crippled by the pressure of wanting every early scene to cleverly pay off later, every line of dialogue to have multiple layers of meaning, and so it became really unenjoyable to try to write this way. I shelved that idea (I’ll probably revisit it at some point in the future) and decided that I was instead going to try working on something that was more open, more stream-of-consciousness, something that allowed me to feel free to explore different plotlines as and when I thought of them.  I wanted to do something fluid and dreamlike and so the first page of the comic (which has since developed into a significant part of the story) is taken from an actual dream that I’d had.

Around this time I’d also found out that my grandfather had passed away, and had been dead for almost a month and I’d not known about it.   I felt terrible and guilty and so I thought it might be a form of self-therapy to incorporate that event into the story.  From there it’s developed naturally into a mystery story based on my interest in that genre. It’s been described by various sources as a stylistic mashup of Raymond Chandler, David Lynch, Haruki Murakami and “Lost,” all of whom I’m a fan.

(more…)

What happens when the quest for eternal life goes horribly wrong?

Captain America artist Mitch Breitweiser and new comics writer Patrick Stiles are finding the answer, in their new webcomic The Futurists, which has just opened on their web site, WhoAreTheFuturists.com. The series will come out about 3-4 times a month, Breitweiser says, according to his commitments at Marvel. Here’s a taste, from the first page (bigger image here):

The logline of the story: ” Set in colonial India in the late 1800’s, The Futurists is an epic tome about the quest for eternal life gone horribly wrong, the search for absolution , and the path to self destruction.” Want to know more? Mitch was kind enough to answer a few questions from Newsarama on the series.

David Pepose: I see on your web site that The Futurists is a story “set in colonial India in the late 1800’s… about the quest for eternal life gone horribly wrong, the search for absolution, and the path to self destruction.” So the first question I’d have is — what inspired this story?

Mitch Breitweiser: Patrick and I had been crafting stories since college, but  with my career taking off, and his writing talent really maturing, we felt the time was right to fully develop and publish one of our collaborations.

As for the inspiration for The Futurists, we actually sat down one weekend for a creative jam. Our previous ideas were good, great even, but they were too familiar. We wanted to take advantage of the perspective we’ve gained since our college years and create something with greater depth of character and a richer atmosphere.  Then, we threw it all out and just focused on elements that entertained us, which was far more satisfying.

(more…)

Need a little bit of music with your webcomic? Well, look no further!

Matthew Petz, creator of the supernatural western adventure The Corpse Carries A Gun, has written a nice little theme song for his Zuda comic.

You can rock out to the song here, and learn more about the series by clicking here!

Sidewise, an online comic by Dwight MacPherson and Igor Noronha which is in this month’s Zuda competition, has unveiled this new trailer for the comic:

All I can say is, while I’m pretty new to the webcomic, that’s a pretty slick trailer from a motion comics standpoint. Is it weird that I think this looks more put together than the BET Black Panther cartoon? What do you think, Rama readers? While I can’t endorse the comic over its competition (there’s so many to choose from!), you can read more about this time-traveling steampunk comic here.

[Tip of the hat to Steve Ekstrom for showing me this]

Zuda Comics, the online imprint of DC Comics, has posted the following tease about what looks like a new series, called Bottle of Awesome:

This tease, called “The Unattainable,” looks very… bald. There’s another teaser here.

While there’s very little information past the author, Transmission-X creator of “Raising Hell” Andy Belanger, we’ll keep you posted on any and all updates of this seemingly tongue-in-cheek series.

UPDATE: As soon as I sent this blog post, another, more retro tease came out. What is in that Bottle of Awesome?

Laura Lee, who does a pretty rad rendition of “My Sharona” in addition to her artistic skills, was introduced to me as another new New Yorker at the CBLDF party on Saturday night.

Her comic, Sealed: Growing Up Tupperware, is up on the Act-I-Vate site (if you aren’t checking out their webcomics regularly, you are missing out). It’s a quirky tale of growing up in a home defined by her mother’s Tupperware sales career, and the effects on her burgeoning feminism.

Sealed is destined for inclusion in an upcoming anthology called “The Big Feminist But” that is collecting comics about navigating the strange “post-feminist” world we live in. If it’s any indication of the type of work they’re getting, I’m going to love the collection.

Lee’s comic is full of hilarious little footnotes that made me giggle out loud in between observations about her family history with Tupperware. Versions of Tupperware ads are layered into the panels, which might feel parodic if Lee didn’t have a deep love for her subject that comes from having really thought about its effects on her character.

Her pages flow nicely, her panels layered and blended into one another and her art charming and distinctive–it reminds me of something I’ve seen before, but at the same time I can’t think of anything it looks like. The soft green tones have the comforting feeling of Tupperware itself.

Rumor has it that Lee is working on a graphic novel, and I for one am looking forward to it. There’s no good reason, though, for you not to check out her work on the Web. It’s free!

This is kind of a short’n’sweet rundown on the articles I bookmarked this week, as I’m knee-deep in so much stuff right now I don’t have time to do them justice.

The Hathor Legacy on Warren Ellis’s Freakangels.

The Angry Black Woman says she would make a terrible superhero girlfriend. She also takes on being a sci-fi/comics fan and being a woman of color.

Johanna Draper Carlson wants to know what your geekiest thing is.

Racialicious revisits Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology and finds a few identities still missing.

Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, prone to outrageous statements, will be the latest politician to star in her own comic book.

Todd Klein does the Library of Dream.

Splash Page has five out and proud heroes who’d oppose Proposition 8.

Daryl Cagle sticks it to the Huffington Post on comics and editorial cartoons.

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2009 Glyph Comics awards.

From the press release: The Glyph Comics Awards recognize the best in comics made by, for, and about people of color from the preceding calendar year. While it is not exclusive to black creators, it does strive to honor those who have made the greatest contributions to the comics medium in terms of both critical and commercial impact. By doing so, the goal is to encourage more diverse and high quality work across the board and to inspire new creators to add their voices to the field.

As Johanna noted, it is both a good and a bad thing for one comic, in this case Zuda’s Bayou, to sweep these awards. It’s great for a webcomic about to be released in print to be so acclaimed, but does it just point to a dearth of comics about nonwhite people?

G. Willow Wilson’s Vixen took Fan Favorite, Black Lightning from Final Crisis was chosen best male character, and Unknown Soldier #1 (which I just read this week and which will get its own post soon, I promise) won best cover. The Rising Star and Best Reprint were The Hole: Consumer Culture and Me and the Devil Blues V1, respectively, but Bayou took as many awards as the other books put together, winning Story of the Year, Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Female Character, and Best Comic Strip.

Clearly, I’ve been missing an excellent comic, so I’ll be sure to make up for it by picking up the print book when it comes out.

I had the wonderful opportunity to chat it up with iPhone/iPod developer Olivier Yiptong about his new app Comicstrips. It’s the best comic reader for the tech! Check out their site for the straight poop.

download original audio source