Category: Arts

The TED conference has just posted a dynamic slideshow talk from 2005 by comics artist/theorist Scott McCloud, wherein he delves into his own biography and how his artistic vision was informed growing up by science. Which is interesting enough, but in the final half, he gives a crisp rundown of the analytical territory which he is famous for populating with graphic Aristotelian orgies, beginning with his 1993 treatise, Understanding Comics. The final third is the most interesting to me. McCloud is bearish on hypertext, or any form of interactivity which…

When BOOM! Studios published their post-ice-age/book-burning dystopian comic book tale North Wind, at Myspace concurrently with its retail release last January, brick-and-mortar comic shops chafed and some even rebelled, asking for “evidence” that free online simul-publication would not eat their collective lunch. (Funny how the common conventional wisdom that it would, requires no evidence whatsoever.) One year later, alongside last Wednesday’s (January 7th) release of their new miniseries Hexed under the same experimental distribution model as North Wind, BOOM!’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Waid has posted a video statement for retailers saying…

There is an entirely new blogging team at Blog@Newsarama, the old team having quit en masse last month due, as far as I can ascertain, to a surprise redesign and a glitchy comments system. The new bloggers seem, so far, eager to connect with the community, and particularly bullish about webcomics, which would be encouraging if it weren’t for the way they parrot all of the current conventional wisdom about ‘new’ media. That the web is only good for bite-sized information, for example. (Perhaps we should just pat HTML on…