Primate Typings

Been rewatching Monty Python: Almost the Truth on Netflix. It’s great documentary on them.

This video isn’t from that, but it does have a Python being sacarstic to his questioners, which pretty much captures the spirit of the documentary.

Pythons have fangs and make fun.

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

Erik Larsen of Savage Dragon fame, took some digs at webcomics on twitter yesterday and then caught crap for it. Or possibly he was trying to expand his knowledge on the subject and totally flopped on his presentation.

Why was this news? One of the industries leading publishers decided to inaccurately paint an entire sector of the industry with a broad-brush. Sorry, Erik. You have a couple of good points in there, but you buried them in some problematic language.

The answer to what in webcomics has reached the depth, complexity, and rules-breaking of Watchmen is Homestuck over at http://www.mspaintadventures.com/ . I’ll admit it lacks superheroes, but the direct market didn’t collapse the way the newspaper market did, so everyone who wanted to tell superhero stories during the early days of webcomics was still chasing publishers then.

As a delivery system, websites favor the recurring content that comes to a satisfying conclusion every time. Comedy works well in that format and tends to draw a stronger response from those not turned off by the joke, so most of the earlier commercial leaders were/are comedy strips. Considering they are working in the tradition of Peanuts, Doonesbury, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County, it’s no wonder that some of their fans got annoyed on the content being produce being dismissed as merely “good for a laugh.”

Now, like the newspaper comic page, there are some dramatic strips that turned out to be commercially viable also. The earliest of the would be http://www.megatokyo.com/ , the only webcomic whose trades are published by the Big 2. Despite giving away the content for free (with ads) on the web, the title was still too profitable for DC to cut loose when they shut down the rest of the CMX line. It was supposed to go to Wildstorm, but then that got shut down too. The last trade came out under the DC imprint itself. Of note, despite being a DC trade, my local comic store doesn’t carry the title, probably because they carry almost no Manga.

As a commercial venture, webcomics has settled on the television/radio model of making money off of stories. Ads, repackagings (trade collections), merchandising, and licensing pay the bills of fifty or so full time creators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-sufficient_webcomics . That’s not a big number, but let’s not pretend that the American direct market supports even a thousand full-time creators. This has nothing to do with Erik, since he wasn’t banging on them for selling t-shirts. But it’s a common enough complaint that I felt the need to address it. Looking down on people for making money off their audience is snobbery. Being a snob about HOW artists make money off their content is just weird. Oh, and Erik, most of the people on that list will tell you online trade sales a significant part of their income. So “willing to read but they would never pay for” is one of things you’re getting dinged for.

Finally, buried his under inaccurate broad-brushing of the webcomics, Erik does manage to make the point that there is a higher percentage of crap in webcomics than in published comics. He’s right. There is. He doesn’t clearly articulate a reason for it though, so I will here: money. It isn’t publishers or editors. It’s simply the fact that the production and distribution costs favor large production runs to minimize costs, and it takes a profit to make doing it more than once reasonable for anyone but a masochist. Profits go to the good enough and have a pretty sharp cut-off in the ink and paper world. On a web that has blog sites that host content for free, that number drops to zero. So yeah, more crap.

Luckily, there are people like Scott McCloud and myself who enjoy digging through the crap to find the good stuff. Name a genre, I’ll see what I can recommend. Don’t like sitting in front a computer for reading comics? Name the format you like, and I’ll try to point you to those that have already repackaged their stuff. Well, for trades or digital downloads anyway. Floppy repackagings are pretty thin on the ground. Not profitable enough.

Thank you everyone who made it this far, and Erik, please know that I continue to enough the Savage Dragon trades.

Kris Straub, job coach.

Alternative title: Kris Straub, traffic hazard.

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

I’m addicted to this song. Apparently it from a Japanese commercial.

Congratulations marketers!

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

Something for the Americans today to help expand their political horizons: The sheer awesomeness of Dutch politics.

I love a good parliamentary system.

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

Bully fills us in on the entire history of the Marvel comics universe.

Eventually he contracted ninjavitus. It was all downhill from there.

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

A couple of games to look at today. Here’s a taste of the second one first.

I’m getting too old for dungeon crawling.

The first is an iPhone/iPad game called Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. Superbrothers is apparently the name of the developers. I have no idea what the EP is about. It isn’t out yet, but just look at it.

I love pretty.

Who are you calling pretty?

The second game, Desktop Dungeons, isn’t pretty, but it is fun. Even better, it’s already out and free for Windows and Macs.

FEATURING BOTH HACK AND SLASH!

A roguelike, it takes maybe twenties minutes to play a complete game. Pick your race and class and fight your way through a single level. There’s just enough resources on the map to kill the final boss, assuming you’re smart and lucky.

Muscle Man!

Me, I die a lot.

You unlock new classes and new monsters as you play, so lots of replayability.

Did I say it wasn’t pretty? I lied. The default graphics aren’t as pretty as S:S&S EP, but they look great. Except for the Barbarian. He looks like a baby.

Give me my bottle!

There you go. Something to play, and something to look forward to you. What else could you want?

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.

There are some really good Lego stop motion films out there. This one by legolambs looks great, has good voice acting, and excellent sound editing. The skit itself would have worked well even with live actors. That means it had good writing, which is something always near to my heart.

  

(via Topless Robot)

The Internet is a giant slush pile, and I’m the unpaid intern wading through it. Here’s a bit of pretty dredged from the dreck.