Showing posts with label free comic book day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free comic book day. Show all posts

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Celebrate #freecomicbookday with Webcomics!


Today is Free Comic Book Day!

Celebrate the event by visiting your local area comic shop - and by reading some webcomics!

Here are some great webcomics that we have previously suggested that are well-worth checking out:


Abominable Charles Christopher
– Follow the adventures of a dim-witted yeti through a forest full of colorful animal characters.

Black Cherry Bombshells – An ultra-violent girl gang fights for supremacy in a doomed future where all men have been mutated into flesh eating zombies.

Chicago 1968 – The Democratic National Convention has made its way to the Windy City. The Vietnam War has entered its bloodiest year … and with Abbie Hoffman in the picture, things are about to get really interesting!

Dorming – One of the gURL comix branded for teen girls. It’s pretty cute, and I dig the style.

Evil Inc – Brad Guigar’s long-running series about an evil, super villainous corporation.

Freak Angels – Warren Ellis has a TARDIS in his brain, really it’s the only explanation for how he can keep that sort of genius contained. Now, goes read his steampunk-thingie.


Ghost Pimp – The tales of a Divine Dolemite, Cootie Brown – a super-cool, super-smooth, murdered pimp living in heaven who is sent to earth by G-O-D!

High Moon – Our kick-ass werewolf western series!

Imaginary Boys – Join Elise on her magical escapades, exploring all the worlds between life and death with her pet Robert. Death is not the end… it’s just the beginning.

Jon Raymond is… IMPOSSIBLE – It is just one of the many fine adventure pieces you'll find at Action Age. Action Age is what happens when you let Chad Bowers, Chris Nye, and Chris Sims, the twisted mind responsible for the popular Invincible Super-Blog, create comics.

Kelly – Dan Goldman’s psychedelic fever dream, captured for your enjoyment.

Lore Brand – Although this strip has been retired, it’s well worth checking out as Lore Sjöberg remarks on topics trivial, mundane, and profound.


The Marvel A captivating story about rocker scientist and occultist, Jack Parsons, the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Next-Door Neighbor – For better, and more often for worse, we all have some crazy neighbor stories. New installments appear every other Monday. Enjoy!

Order of the Stick – As a table-top gamer, I find this medieval fantasy webcomic to be an accurate reflection of the patter that develops during our gaming sessions. See also: Knights of the Dinner Table.

Platinum Grit – Discover primitive magic and crazy adventures, as Jeremy and Nils encounter aliens, showgirls, succubi, and more.

Questionable Content – Looking for a slice-of-life comic to help you forget your troubles? Join Faye and the employees of the local coffee shop for some romantic melodrama and sexual humor.

Raising Hell – The tagline reads, “As much as they wished each other dead, their love refused to DIE!” That’s only the tip of the iceberg in this exceptionally well-rendered, EC Comics-inspired series.

Smash – Mix the humor of "Calvin & Hobbes" with the adventure of The Incredibles, and you’ll end up with something like this series!

Tiny Ghosts – A weekly photo-comic filled with robots, rag dolls, ballerinas, and melancholy humor. See also: A Softer World.

Ulysses Seen – James Joyce’s epic rendered in sequential form!

Vulcan and Vishnu – The travels and travails of two honest workmen devising their way around obstacles and through calamities on their way to fortune and glory.

Wondermark –Take 19th-century illustrations, change the context, create humorous juxtapositions, and you’ll get something like this strip.

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language, and a breakout hit over the last few years.


Yenny
– The adventures of YENNY recounts the day-to-day experiences of a girl who is trying to make it in the adult world, but in quite an out of the ordinary way.

ZudaApparently, there are some really great comics on this site, but this is the only one you really need to read in FULL SCREEN MODE!

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Free Comic Day and Iron Man

I don't know if this is appropriate to have on this blog but...

It was pretty cool to see the turn out for free comics day at Midtown Comics West in Manhattan. There wa a line outside down the street to get in. David and I were on a city wide drop off of free Zuda samplers to the cities finest comics stores and Midtown was the first on our list. We told the who we were and we skipped the line and gave our samplers to Gaul, one of the managers.

Gaul handed us a paper bag full of free comics. I've only read some so far, but my first impression are pretty positive. One of the things I've become particularly sensitive to is comics for kids. I have a five year old and he likes comics but it's hard to find ones that aren't filled with post modern jokes( none of which he gets...they seem mostly written for the parents) references to long ago stories(and so aren't complete stories in and of themselves) and are well written and drawn. There seems to be a feelings among a lot of creators(not all mind you) that taking the same story you would give to an adult and replace grown up superhero with a fuzzy animal in a spacesuit and you've got instant kid material. It's tougher than that.

It's one of those things you can know when you see it but it's hard to define. Kids don't understand most pop culture references...they don't get the humor or the reference...and even if they recognize the reference they don't get irony...at all. Irony comes with life experience. Also, writing that relies too heavily on irony and pop culture ref is poor writing, the writer using glyphs( meaning writing using symbols that pretend to be story elements but are just lifts from other sources used as shorthand thus debasing your own work as derivative); and nods and winks to tell a story.

Kids don't care about continuity...or realism. In my experience kids love free standing stories which have and end in the book (if you've ever read a comic to a five year old you will also know that trying to explain all of the continuity winks and the hanging storylines, you will understand the frustration the kid feels)

As a grown up who can't pick up all the titles from a given publisher to follow the continuity, I appreciate individual issues and complete stories as well, if I'm gonna plunk down my $3-$4 on a comic...it damn well better have some kind of a resolution at the end of it's flimsy 22 pages.

There seemed to be several things in the bag which satisfied the older reader in me and the young reader in my son....I haven't read them all yet.

Iron man was cool...distilled forty years of confusing often baroque storylines into a clean elegant origin story....which it seems is the essence of good comics movies...take tons of material and cherry pick the essence of the story....cool...it's almost four AM...I'm going to bed

Steve
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