Rock Atlas: Notes on Process

On the BTA blog I wrote about my experience drawing the Rock Atlas for City Pages. The account is more technique than gossip, but still worth a look.

Comics-making Workshops

Saturday, June 30 and Saturday, July 14 | 10:00 am-4:00 pm | VSA North Fourth Art Center | Albuquerque, NM

7000 BC will be conducting two day-long workshops, open to the public ages 15 and up, that will guide participants in making their own comics. Participants will work with 7000 BC members and to create their own sequential art project. The suggested donation is $20. For more information, or to register, send an email.

The Patrick McDonnell Center for Cartoon Studies Commencement Speech

Check out this inspiring commencement speech to the first graduating class of The Center for Cartoon Studies by the great Patrick McDonnell at Tom Spurgeon's excellent Comics Reporter Blog.

Mr. Spurgeon has also reviewed a recent run (May 13-19) of McDonnell's Mutts strips having to do with writing a commencement speech here, one of which can be seen above.

The Fountain Pentel, and why I love Wet Paint

I've been using the Fountain Pentel as my pen of choice for many years, and I love them... The Fountain Pentel has a unique plastic nib which bends to draw a different thickness of line depending on how much pressure you apply. They are fun to use, and like no other pen I've ever experienced.

I actually bought a gross of them in the 90's as I was afraid they would stop making them, as they were always a hard to find pen. My supply of this unique pen is dwindling.

Looking recently for replacements, I discovered that, horror of horrors, my premonition was accurate and they are no longer sold in the US... in fact, I couldn't even find an image of the Fountain Pentels I use online, they are so out of date. Here's one for you I just scanned:



Fortunately, in St. Paul we have Wet Paint, the world's greatest art supply store. I contacted Tim Jennen, the marketing manager and buyer for Wet Paint (who also happens to be a member of the Conspiracy) and let him know about my dilemma.

Tim has a passion for hunting down obscure art materials, and he just emailed me some good news shortly after my inquiry:

Hi, Steve—

I’m still hoping to bring in the regular Fountain Pentel at some point, but I have brought in a different version of this pen that I found—the Tradio Fountain Pentel, which is refillable. Here’s some info on it:

Tradio Fountain Pentel TRJ50

Tradio Fountain Pentel

A fountain pen with the perfect combination of style and performance. A flexible plastic nib creates a variety of line widths, from thick to thin, depending on the angle and pressure applied. The innovative, see-thru free-flowing system delivers a consistent ink flow for smooth, effortless writing from the first stroke to the last. The ergonomic barrel design provides added comfort and writing control. Black ink. Uses Pentel's MLJ20 refill in black.

TRJ50A-A




The pen is $10.00, but on sale during our Make Your Mark sale through the end of April at $8.50. The MLJ20 refill is $3.95.

The next time you’re in the store, check it out!

----------------------

Tim Jennen, Marketing Manager/Buyer
Wet Paint: Artists' Materials & Framing

Refillable! This is very exciting news to me, as my major gripe with the (disposable) Fountain Pentels I've used is that they fade with age... hopefully the ink in the cartridges is non-fading, or I can figure out a non-fading ink solution for this. I can't wait to try one... I'm gonna try and make it over to Wet Paint this weekend, and I'll give you a comparison to the disposable models once I try this out.

So now Wet Paint is apparently the only US supplier for two of the greatest cartooning tools ever created... the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (which we've mentioned many times before) and the Fountain Pentel. I believe they are also the last place left that you can buy supplies for gocco screen printing machines, which are quite wonderful.

If you're looking for a specific art supply and can't find it anywhere, contacting Wet Paint is a good bet... they have an online store with their wares as well, so you don't have to live in the Twin Cities to get a hold of these wonderful tools. Their prices are great too... we're very lucky to have them in the Twin Cities.

How to Make Mini-Comics

We recently completed work on the first volume of the Cartoonist Conspiracy L'il Library (to be used at this weekend's Mouth Off event at The Center For Book Arts)... How to Make Mini-Comics. Click on the image below to download the pdf... then print it out, cut it up, fold it, staple it and learn. Please note that this is a pretty big (4MB) file, so please help conserve our bandwidth and only download it if you intend to use it.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License. It may be printed and distributed freely. It is intended to be an educational tool, and it is our hope that it will be widely used as a "textbook" for teaching how to make a mini-comic.

Thanks to Adam Wirtzfeld, Bob Lipski, Maxeem, Bud Burgy, Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, Dank!, and Eric Lappegard for helping me (Steven Stwalley) put this together.

Note that any cartoonist who is interested can contribute a volume to the new Cartoonist Conspiracy Li'l Library. This is intended to become a downloadable pdf library of cartooning tips and techniques in mini-comics format, all using the above creative commons license. Let us know if you're interested.

How To Exhibit

For those of you unsure about how to go about getting a table to exhibit at a comic convention, New Mexico's Over The Top Comics presents this instructional video:



The first video in their series, Drawin' Comics Like We Do, is here.

Tips and Tricks From Big Time Attic

The Big Time Attic blog has been posting all sorts of wonderful stuff lately, including some excellent "tips and tricks"...



Tips and Tricks: Jam Comics
Tips and Tricks: Drawing Out in the Cold
Tips and Tricks: Computer Coloring
Tips and Tricks: The Brush Pen

Interesting Articles From the Comics Reporter

I was just perusing Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter website and ran across some articles there that I thought would be of interest to you all (check them out at the links below). While you're there you may want to subscribe to The Comics Reporter blog as well (which is the main page of his site). Tom provides some of the best coverage of comics news on the internoodle.

Why Should I Make a Mini-Comic

Getting Published -- Comic Books

Getting Your Daily Newspaper Strip Syndicated

Places to look for Cartooning Gigs

There are enough cartooning gigs appearing online these days that I can no longer keep up with them, although I'll keep trying... there is a list on the top of the site (and the left side of the home page) of things I've heard about and got around to adding, and we have a section of the message board here that anyone can post their opportunities to. Fortunately there are other places to check as well!

Conspirator Andrey Feldysteyn does an excellent job keeping up a list of cartooning opportunies, with a focus on international cartooning and gag comics competitions (among other things).

The Comics Journal message board has frequent opportunites that pop, particularly for the small-press cartoonist:

Here is another newer site called comicjobz.com focusing on various general cartooning gigs.

The Digital Webbing forum used to be a good place to look for more mainstream comic book industry gigs, although I don't see much of that there these days glancing at it.

I'll post more of them here as I run across them... please post others on the message board here if you know of them!

Creative Commons Launches Tool to Reclaim Your Old Copyrights

There is an interesting post on Boing Boing today regarding the Creative Commons new "Termination of Transfer" tool for regaining old copyrights.

"Creative Commons has a new "Termination of Transfer" tool that could change the way that copyrights work in America forever. If you're a creator who's signed over your copyrights, the law lets you get them back from your publisher, label or studio 35 years later, no matter what your contract says. However, the process for reclaiming your rights is incredibly complicated, so practically no one can take advantage of it."

This tool is intended to change that situation. Hopefully it will be used by many, many cartoonists who want to reprint old work, but who lost the rights for whatever reason. Read more about it at the link.

Behind the Scenes of For Better or For Worse

For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston is easily one of the best done comics in the newspapers these days, and it has been for over 20 years now. Here's a behind the scenes look at how a FBOFW strip is created, which is pretty interesting & has some good tips for cartoonists.

Ivan Brunetti's 22 Panels That Always Work

Here's Ivan Brunetti's 22 Panels That Always Work.

Note that the subject 2200 Panels That Always Workhas been added to the ongoing online jam section of the message board... add your own!

Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work

You can download a huge scan here of the original of "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work," which is a widely used cartoonist "cheat sheet."

Using Blogger to Syndicate Your Comics on the Web for Free

I'm using blogger to post my comics on the web (soapythechicken.com)... it works great, for my purposes. It makes content management extremely simple, and makes it easy to offer subscription via rss feeds.

It is totally unnecessary to have any knowledge of web page building or anything to use this system... the blogger system is extremely easy to set up, and they will host all of your content for you if you want them to (or you can host it yourself, as I do, but that takes a wee bit of work & knowledge).

It is well worth picking up a bit of basic html tagging knowledge for posting to your blog... there are only a couple that are absolutely necessary to know though... the "a href" tag for linking, and the "img" tag for adding images to your posts. Here's a good "cheat sheet" for html. Really, this stuff is easier than pooping... don't be intimidated by it. You just put one tag at the beginning of the area you want to affect and one at the end with a / to close it. And you can look at almost any page on the web for examples of how to do this by going to the view> source option in your browser. EASIER THAN POOPING!

Blogger will set you up with a basic template for your site to begin with, but you'll most likely want to alter it. Again, a little knowledge of html goes a long ways to making your site more useful. For example, you will probably appreciate it greatly if you make the width of your content wider so you can do larger comics without breaking your page. The Soapy site is built off of the main default Blogger template, minima, with alterations to make the page wider, add a header, and to have some useful menus down the side. View the source and you can probably figure out how I did anything if you want to copy it for your own purposes. You may want to copy and save the template in a blank text file before you make any changes to it in case you accidentally make a change you don't like.

My experience with the feeds produced by blogger hasn't been so good. I tried hitting the feeds with myYahoo, and it didn't work. However, I found a good solution... I set up another free account on feedburner.com to produce an alternate feed, and that one seems to work everywhere so far. It makes it so folks can go to the page and click on a button for their preferred news reader, as well, which is nice. See the Soapy the Chicken Feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoapyTheChicken

Here's the blogger feed to compare it to, if you're interested:

http://soapythechicken.com/feed/atom.xml

The blogger/feedburner combo is definitely the slickest free solution for cartoonists to syndicate themselves on the web that I've seen.

Self-Publishing Resources

Here's a terrific new resource for information about self-publishing comics.

Picasa

Speaking of Picasa... I downloaded it yesterday and it is easily the best thing I have ever used to browse images on my computer. Picasa is a free image browsing/searching/editing tool that has come out from Google... it is pretty mind-blowing how much better it does this task than anything else I've seen previously. You would think they would build this sort of functionality into operating systems. I can see all of the Conspiracy jams at a glance with this thing... it's really amazing. It also has quick and basic image editing that does a nice job of simplifying photo editing tasks. I highly recommend it.

Web Comics Growing and Making Money Sometimes

Here's an interesting article on webcomics from the Washington Post. Good to hear that some people are starting to make some sort of a living doing comics on the web... hopefully this is a trend that will continue to grow.

If you are a web cartoonist, here is a site that is organizing comics on the web, thewebcomiclist.com

Here's what their "about this site" area reads:

--------------------------------------------------------------

The Webcomic List primarily helps you keep track of which of your favourite comics have updated. To do this we monitor over 4300 comics, checking them several times a day; this enables us to keep you updated as fast as possible.

Some things you should check out while you are here:

* Latest Updates - Check out which comics have updated recently. See it really does work!
* Comic News - Want to know what's going on in the comic world? Well look no further this is the place for you.
* Comic Profiles - Over 4300 comic profiles, go check them out. You might find some hidden gems you never knew about!
* Register - Once registered you can grab yourself a personalised favourites list and change how the site works to suit your needs.
* Submit Your Comic - Do you have a webcomic that isn't on this list? Well get it added!

---------------------------------------------------------------

4300 comics!

If you are doing web comics, I imagine this is probably a very good place to register.

Joey Manley's new column

Joey Manley's new column on webcomics looks like it will be interesting to follow:

"there are more creator-owned webcomics generating full-time incomes for their creators than there are independent comic books doing the same."

Why Dreamhost.com is a good option for webhosting for cartoonists

A number of you have asked me what I recommend for a web host. For a long time I was using yahoo webhosting, which worked fairly well but was quite overpriced, and had some other annoying aspects that I won't go into. I recently switched my sites over to Dreamhost.com, which I definitely highly recommend for your webhosting needs.

First and foremost I recommend it because they pay generously for new customers sent their way, which will hopefully pay for our hosting expenses.* However, beyond the dirty, filthy lucre, they are offering a pretty amazing deal, they have by far the best deals on webhosting I've ever seen. I would strongly recommend them without the monetary incentive (that said, I would recommend them even more strongly if they offered me money and chocolate and a flat screen television with surround sound and a porkpie hat).

If you have the cash to pay 2 years in advance you can get hosting for $7.95 a month, which is extremely cheap... prices vary depending on what you want, but the $7.95 account (or $9.95 a month without the 2 year prepayment) will give the average cartoonist much more than they need for webhosting (note there is a $49.95 setup fee on all accounts).

The basic account includes 4800 MB of storage space, which increases weekly by 40 MB. It includes a very user friendly web panel that greatly helps for managing your website. You can ftp to your sites in your browser. You can install all sorts of components into your site very easily (with the click of a button, basically), like a blog or a phpbb discussion board similar to the one on this site. You can have up to 600 email accounts at your domain, and you can set up webmail. You can set up email lists and email discussion lists. You can host as many different domains as you want with no additional cost (other than the cost of registering the domain, which you can do there for $9.95 a year... the initial account comes with one free domain). They have extensive support information. They have all kinds of other stuff that you can read about in detail on their site.

Most importantly for cartoonists, they have no problem with smut! Here is their policy:

Can I have an adult website or dreambook?

Of course!

DreamHost does not restrict the content of sites hosted on our servers, except if that content is illegal in the United States. Illegal content includes:

blatant copyright infringement
libel
child pornography
Other than this, go crazy!

This is not the case with most hosts... like Yahoo, for example, which could have shut down the Conspiracy site at any time based on some jam comic with a wee willy hangus johnson dangling in it, had they ever took notice of one.

I would guess most of you would be very happy with this service... I defnitely am. Anyhow, if you are looking for hosting, and want to benefit this site in the process use this link.



If you are looking for hosting and don't want to benefit us, just go directly to dreamhost.com.

*Full disclosure: How generously will they pay us, you may wonder? Either a one time payment of $97 (plus $5 for each person the person I send their way sends their way), or 10% of each of the payments a person I send their way makes to them, and 5% of the payments the people they send to them send in.

You can easily do this as well if you use them when you inevitably end up recommending people to them.

Disclaimer: I just started using Dreamhost in July, so my opinion could change. Finding negative posts in google by putting the words "Dreamhost" and "sucks" in the search field isn't hard (which is true of most companies, I'm sure)... However, I think you are highly unlikely to find more bang for your buck out there, and for a cartoonist on a low budget- which is to say: as a cartoonist- this seems like a pretty ideal solution.

Some Tutorials and Useful Information For Cartoonists Around the Web

Here are some nice tutorials and other info I've run across:

RE: A Guide to Reproduction: A Primer on Xeorgraphy, Silkscreening and Offset Printing

Printing Comics

Overview of Copyright and Fair Use

10 Ways to Promote Yourself (there are other good articles down the right hand side of this blog)

Cheap Screen Printing Tutorial

Seven Steps to Getting Published

We have some other useful tutorials and information in our resources section. I'll be adding links to some of the above resources there as well.