WORLD OF HURT- The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 43: “Hell Hath No Fury”

I wanted Caroline Belmont to return to the strip, mostly to rub metaphorical salt in her husband’s wounds by revealing her affair with the very man who’s trying to kill him.  However, I wasn’t certain how far she should be involved in his ultimate downfall.  Should she be the one to delivery the final blow?  I wasn’t sure, because it would relegae the protagonist, Pastor, to the sidelines.  Ultimately, I decided that at the very least she should have an active hand in thwarting Ned’s plans by stealing the gun from his safe.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 42:  “He’s One Man”

Pastor’s basic fighting strategy is to go for the soft parts and the parts that bend.  If it bends one way, make it bend the other way.  To work out Charles’ dialogue here, I spent a fair amount of time at my desk, reciting dialogue like I had the worst headcold ever.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 41:

See? Dirty fighting.  There’s a little WWE in here, but I thought it was a pretty fun- and painful looking- sequence.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

In recent years, there’s been an explosion of comics into the digital frontier. Comics being downloaded into phones, comics for digital readers like the Kindle and the iPad, comics on the internet, and the special category of motion comics. It seems everyone’s trying to figure out what comics will be from all different angles and presentation styles. Both Marvel and DC have their own unique formats (with Marvel Unlimited and Zuda respectively), and a mainstream book publisher is entering the fray as Tor.com has recently begun running webcomics.

Tor.com is an outgrowth of Tor Books and it’s parent company Macmillan. Tor is well known for its rich tradition of novels in the science fiction and fantasy realm, and if you’ve read any comics or been to any conventions – those fanbases and tastes overlap well with comics. Over the past year Tor.com has been running short one-shot comics, but recently it launched its first ongoing series: Red Light Properties by cartoonist Dan Goldman (Shooting War, Kelly). For this new comic they’ve developed their own engine for viewing comics, which uniquely blends the panel-by-panel viewing commonly seen with iPhone comics with a more subtle pacing that gives the comic creator an opportunity to control the pace of the reader not unlike a film.

With Red Light Properties being serialized online every other week and at the 100 page mark this month, Newsarama.com spoke with Tor.com’s Web Producer Pablo Defendini, who acts as both a project manager, content developer and editorial director for Tor.com – both the comics and non-comics content. We spoke to him by email about Tor.com’s comic reader and the Tor/Macmillan publishing giant’s plan for digital comics.

Newsarama: Pablo, the recently debuted comic Red Light Properties makes use of a new comics viewer Tor has. Tor has run comics online before – so what was the big push to come up with a new comics viewer in 2010?

Pablo Defendini: It’s all Dan’s fault. I met Dan at NY Comic Con in 2008, at a panel he moderated about digital art. We hit it off immediately, and I bought a short piece from him for the site. After that, we’ve continued our conversation, and we always came back to talking comics on the internet: modes of delivery, reader experience, etc. He approached me with the idea for Red Light Properties, and we realized that it was the perfect excuse to develop a comics viewer specifically with our concerns in mind: allowing the artist to control pacing on a fine level, but also allowing the reader to control their reading experience, much like in printed comics.

Nrama: What was it about Dan’s project that made it one you wanted to with, and make a comics viewer specifically for it?

Defendini: In many ways, Red Light Properties is Dan’s baby in a way that his previous work hasn’t been, and he was adamant about taking it somewhere where it could shine. The story is very compelling, and as a latin american living in the U.S., his characters and settings really resonated with me. Additionally, Red Light Properties is giving us a chance to experiment with online publishing, which is one of the central missions for the site.

Nrama: Will the older Tor webcomics be redone in this format?

Defendini: All the old comics have been migrated to the new viewer, but Dan’s is the only one that takes advantage of the panel-by-panel navigation, and that’s by design. Since none of the older comics were created with this type of navigation in mind, what we did was develop a viewer that could work both ways: with traditional page-by-page navigation, or panel-by-panel. The cool thing is that if other artists want to take advantage of the viewer, they can do so, or they can still do page-by-page comics, no problem.

Nrama Besides Red Light Properties, are there other webcomics in the pipeline for Tor.com?

Defendini: We’ve got a another long-form comic by Jim Otavanni and Leland Purvis slated to start at the end of 2010, which I’m really excited about. It’s a biography of Alan Turing, who is one of the fathers of modern computer science and cryptography (and the namesake of the famous Turing test). That in itself is enough to get my geek-antennae humming, but additionally, Turing was a homosexual who refused to be closeted, and suffered greatly at the hands of the British government for it (yes, the same government that he helped save during WWII by cracking the Nazi’s infamous Enigma code at Bletchley Park–the UK government finally apologized for this last year). So I’m really excited about that.

Additionally, we’re still running with Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devons’ delightful King of an Endless Sky, which I like to think of as a mashup of Antoine St. Exupery’s Le Petit Prince and Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, but with killer robots and sentient gerbils. Kurt and Zelda are wonderful to work with, and produce gorgeous work. We’re also running more A Softer World strips, and we’ve got a couple of pitches in from some well-known webcomics people who have reached out to us now that we’re making a bit of noise with our comics (but I can’t really go into those just yet–still in the works!).

Nrama: While digital comics seem to be a new frontier for the comics medium, the inevitable question with any online comic is “when’s the print edition?” Will Tor be publishing print editions of Red Light Properties?

Defendini: Well, Tor.com is a separate imprint from Tor Books within the corporate umbrella of Macmillan, so we don’t generally track with their publication schedule, nor they with ours. While a print version of Red Light Properties isn’t entirely off the table, we really haven’t contemplated it too deeply just yet- Red Light Properties is made for the web, and that’s where it will live for the foreseeable future.

Nrama: Tor.com does more than webcomics – can you give us a idea of what all Tor.com encompasses?

Defendini: Tor.com is a community site for fans of science fiction and fantasy, first and foremost. Our main feature is a robust blog with contributors from all walks of fandom: professional authors, as well as bloggers and straight-up fans. Additionally, we have a strong short fiction and comics publishing program; we generally have weekly comics and a new short story or two roughly every two weeks. Tor.com also has an extensive sf and fantasy artist gallery, curated by Tor Books and Tor.com art director, Irene Gallo. We’ve also got a print book store, and are dabbling in ebooks here and there.

Nrama: Before we go, we have a lot of comics fans who also read SF and fantasy books like the ones Tor published. Could you forsee any Tor books being adapted as comics for the Tor.com site?

Defendini: Hm. I would absolutely love to see Tobias Buckell’s wonderful series of Caribbean-tinged science fiction books translated into comics. I’ve been trying to find a way to do this, actually, but the opportunity just hasn’t arisen yet.

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 40: “Queensbury Rules”

I have a confession to make:  I actually enjoy drawing and writing the character stuff a lot more than the action scenes.  Most artists get a huge thrill out of fight scenes, but in WORLD OF HURT, I found that each I approached them with a certain amount of trepidation.  I think it might be due to the comic strip format.  In an adventure strip, the action sequences are the big pay-off for the reader, but with three panels to progress the story each week, I fear that a protracted fight, highly choreographed fight scene might bore readers.  Also, I wanted Pastor to do a little more than deliver roundhouses and haymakers to his opponents.  Creatively, I keep boxing myself into corners, but removing the standard, and most expedient solutions to resolve physical conflicts, like handguns and the standard punch ups.  Therefore, to keep it interesting for myself, the reader, and to stay true to Pastor’s character, you’re going to see a lot of dirty fighting in the strip.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 39: 

Despite the timeframe in which WORLD OF HURT occurs, I didn’t really have a political agenda when I started the strip.  I just wanted to tell a good crime story against a somewhat familiar, but misunderstood, backdrop.  However, as the strip evolved, I came to realize that overall, “The Thrill-Seekers” was a revenge fantasy built around a slave trade metaphor.  The metaphor included the complicity of Black people in the acquisition and sale of their fellow Blacks (i.e. Duke The Pimp) and Alicia Patterson’s own harrowing version of the Middle Passage aboard Charles Bouchier’s yacht. 

Once I recognized that my own…biases (for lack of a better term) were subconsciously finding their way into the strip, I felt more comfortable in inserting some more overt political messages.  In this instance, it is my strong disdain for handguns.  There are so many senseless, cowardly crimes committed with easily concealed handguns, that I didn’t really want to have Pastor glorify their use.  Therefore, I decided to make it a running gag that whenever Pastor used one, or attempted to use one, things would go horribly wrong for him.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 38 – “Straight Right”

It wasn’t until I posted this strip that I realized how much the final panel reminded me of  Kevin Maguire’s classic “ONE PUNCH!” panel from Justice League International.  It wasn’t intended as an homage, and certainly not a swipe, but when I was going for an impactful image of Ned being laid out with a punch to the face, even I after nearly 30 years of reading comics, I can understand how that shot bubbled into my head:

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 37 – “You Are My Number One Guy”

I was so much happier with the pencil version than I was with the final inks.  It was during this time that I significantly changed my working method from what I was doing when I first started the strip.  Originally, I was pencilling on a custom blue line template that I printed onto Bristol board.  Each 11″ X 17 ” sheet had room for two strips.  As time went on, I stopped using the templates, and would just pencil on a large sheet of Bristol.  I thought I would take advantage of the capacity to digitally reproduce fine lines and more detailed work  that my newsprint forebears lacked.   As a result, the panels got larger and larger, until it reached this critical mass, where I was only able to put two panels on each sheet of Bristol.  I would then digitally crop and composite all three panels in Photoshop.  Since I also wasn’t paying much attention to panel dimensions,  I wound up with really flat, pedestrian panel compositions like you see here, particularly in the final panel, and I felt that although individual panels might be solid (like panel one), some strips didn’t have an overall cohesive feel.  Sometime around Episode 40 or 41, I started to pare back and return to a version of my old working method.   As a result, my speed has increased a bit, and I’m a lot happier with how the strips hold together as a unit.

Incidentally, today is the one year anniversary of the day WORLD OF HURT first went online.  I knew it would be another week before the first strip was posted, so I opened the site with a countdown to the inaugural episode.

Remember, new strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT - The Thrill-Seekers - Episode 36 – “Good Help”

This was a fun strip to do, because I got to design some henchmen for Ned.  As has been my standard MO for the strip, I designed them pretty much on the fly.  I wasn’t completely happy with my final rendering of Danny  The Fringe-Jacketed Thug, but his look was a big hit with the readers.  He was a little bit Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and a little bit Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

Cartoonist Mike Dawson (Freddie & Me) is trading in his sequined rock star outfits for boy scout colors in his new webcomic series Troup 142. The comic, which has been serialized for a few months now,follows the fictitious Boy Scout Troop 142 as they spend the week at summer camp. And if you’ve ever been to summer camp — especially a boys’ summer camp — you might have an idea what to expect.

Mature readers only, for sure. The third chapter, “Tuesday”, was recently completed with four more planned in the run. Fore more, visit the Troop 142 website.

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 35: “Fire and Desire”

It’s good to be back on the brand-spanking new Blog@Newsarama!  You may not see the changes from your end, but let me tell, you dear reader, the upgrades they made behind the scenes are hotter than fish grease.

I was pretty nervous about the response I would get to this one, but the feedback was all quite positive.  It’s a common lament, but culturally, I think we’ve become more accustomed to depictions of violence than sex.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

Editor’s Note: This “issue” of WORLD OF HURT is NSFW and can be found after the jump.

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 34: “Revival Tent”

Love, love, love the dialogue in this episode!  When I was working up the concept for WORLD OF HURT, I decided to thumbnail a few scenes, completely devoid of context, just to get a handle on the characters.  I also didn’t think about where, or if, they would fit into any larger story, it was just a writing exercise.  Next,  just to get a feel for the voices, particularly Pastor’s, I scripted some dialogue for what I had thumbnailed.  This was one of those scenes that I thumbnailed: it featured a lovely blonde sitting by the pool, amused and intrigued by Pastor forcing his way into a large, private estate.  However, when I decided on my basic plot for The Thrill-Seekers, that scene was nowhere to be found.  Once I decided that Ned Belmont would be the first to face Pastor’s wrath, I pulled the scene out of mothballs and tweaked it a little for The Thrill-Seekers.  So, largely what you see here is the first thing that I ever wrote for WORLD OF HURT. 

Pastor’s rap is disarming in its down home folksiness, but just dripping with raw innuendo, and bordering on sacrilege.  I ran the risk that the moment might turn into a real groaner, but I thought it turned out both sexy and funny as hell.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 33: “Inside Scoop”

The night before I posted it, I completely redid the first panel of this strip.  I came over to my fiance’s for dinner that night, and as she was preparing a lovely repast, I was furiously drawing a new panel on a scrap of copy paper to ink.  I thought I did a pretty good job with the fish, especially the scales, but if you look closely, I think I left off its pectoral fin.  Oops!

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 32: “…And Then I’m Gonna Kill ‘Im”

I really thought I was firing on all cylinders with this strip, but the response far surpassed by expectations. This was by far one of the most popular episodes in the series’ run.  There was a whole lot going on in this episode and, in hindsight, it was one of the rare moments where the balls labeled Plot, Art, Characterization that you’re juggling all stay suspended in the air in one beautiful moment.  Some of it is pure happenstance and good fortune.  We get a nice peek into Pastor’s past, a bit of humor, some tough guy dialogue, backstory for Ned Belmont, and a dramatic reveal by the lovely Mrs. Belmont all in the span of three panels.  The line “…And then I’m going to kill i’m,” wasn’t the original line of dialogue.  I forgot what I originally had, but I remember changing it at the last minute.  I’m glad that I did, because readers absolutely loved that line, and I still get comments about it today.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

In his spare time, First Second’s editorial director Mark Siegel moonlights as a cartoonist.  If you haven’t seen his review of Scott Pilgrim 5, you really should.

Well, now he’s taken to using his mornings to write and illustrate a webcomic.  Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson is up and running at SailorTwain.com.  A tale of 19th century Manhattan, a sailor and the allure of the water, Sailor Twain is running new pages every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

It looks great and the story is shaping up nicely.  No mermaids yet, I like how he’s letting the story build itself slowly and organically.  And a deer swimming in the Hudson is bizarre enough to make me forget all about the promise of mermaids.

I have only two question: Mark Siegel has free time?  And does his staff know about this?

Want to get some tips on comics-making? David Gallaher has answers for you!

The High Moon writer and Zuda star is compiling a list of tips over on the DC Message Boards for all up-and-comers. Among his suggestions are Web Comic Triage, I Should Be Writing, and Scott Kurtz’s How to Make Webcomics.

If you want to learn more — or if you simply want to contribute your two cents — check it out here!

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

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 30: “Storming the Gates”

Pastor takes the fight directly to Ned’s front door!  To show you how committed I am to this, my Mac crashed two nights before I was supposed to post this strip.  Thankfully, I ink the old fashioned way, but I still letter using Adobe Illustrator.  Thankfully, my pal Stephen Lindsay, the prolific writer of Jesus Hates Zombies and The Frightful Fetus, among others, came to my rescue and supplied the lettering for this one.  However, when I scanned the inks, I accidentally sent him a truncated version of the strip.  Nonetheless, I kinda dug the way it was cropped.  In my original inked version, the first panel actually features a more panoramic shot of stately Belmont manor.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 29: “Feeling the Heat”

I was glad for an opportunity to shift the scene after the long mini-arc of “Tell The Truth, Shame The Devil….”  Pastor still remains an enigmatic phantom to the Thrill-Seekers at this point, but Charles is sensible enough to review him as a legitimate threat.  I enjoy setting up Ned for the big fall (but not in the same sense as Duke) that is to come.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 28: “An Abrupt Departure”

This episode was cathartic from a storytelling standpoint.  The upshot of the building with Duke represented as a tiny figure against the sky as he hurtled to his death was understated, yet powerful, and I am extremely proud of it.  Having Pastor standing there passively to survey his handiwork, instead of making some smart-ass quip, cemented the notion of him as a no-nonsense tough guy and underscored my desire to make WORLD OF HURT a serious, dramatic work exploration of Blaxploitation.

Yeah, I was pretty happy with this one.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 27: “Time to Go”

Like I said before, Duke is reduced to a quivering bowl of Jell-o from the tough guy posturing he assumed when we first saw him.  In my original pencil drawing of the final panel, he looked a lot like Edward Blake before he was sent down to the pavement below and turned into “human bean” juice.  If you don’t get that reference, you probably are on the wrong website. If you do, you probably know what’s coming next…

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP