Webcomic Readers Choice Awards
September 5, 2008 - Friday
This week the Webcomic Readers Choice Awards began taking nominations. The awards are organized by Philip Hofer (aka Frumph), who also runs the webcomic listing site frumph.net. How the awards work is that readers can go to the site and nominate their favorite webcomics for a number of categories. The top three in each category will then be voted on by a group of esteemed judges (which includes Steve Hamaker, who just recently completed the monumental task coloring the entire epic story of Bone). It takes a little work to get logged into the site to make the nominations, but if any of you could take the time to nominate Calamities of Nature for some of the categories, I would really appreciate it. I don't have any high hopes of winning, but it's still a really good way to let more people know about Calamities. By the way, if you visit the WRCA site, you may see a familar pink alien hanging out there.
This strip marks he end of the week-long comic marathon. It's been a lot of fun updating everyday, and I appreciate all the supportive feedback you guys have been giving me, both through the comment box and in e-mails. Next week I'll be beginning the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. But hopefully I'll still find some interesting things to discuss here in the blog on off days. If you have any topics that you think would be of general interest to Calamities readers, feel free to e-mail me with your suggestions.
Fan Art from Tom Dell'Aringa of the Webcomic Marooned
September 4, 2008 - Thursday
This morning I opened my e-mail and was happily surprised to find some great fan art by Tom Dell'Aringa. Click the picture below to see the full-size version. Tom does a full-color, sci-fi webcomic titled Marooned, which updates every Monday and Thursday. Although Marooned has only been around since March, it's already starting to build a loyal audience. I think this is a testament to the story he is telling, which really makes you want to come back for each update. By the way, it may help to understand the guest art that the pink character is a female alien named Ril that Tom recently introduced to his strip. In addition, Tom has recently made a trailer of his comic with the help of Steve Ogden (who you might remember did not one, but two guest comics for me not so long ago). A trailer like this is a really neat way to introduce a webcomic, especially when you have a sci-fi audience like Tom does.
I also wanted to mention that I know today's update is identical to a sketch I shared recently. But after posting the sketch, it really started to grow on me, and I wanted to see it in a finished form. I hope you don't mind.
FBORFW Begins "New-Runs" and Scott McCloud on Chrome
September 3, 2008 - Wednesday
Just a couple of quick pieces of news. Firstly, this past Sunday Lynn Johnston finished her incredible 29 year run on the comic For Better or For Worse. So how did she decide to celebrate? She promptly started on September 1st retelling the strip's narrative over again from it's 1979 beginning, but adding new art and some new dialogue, which Johnston called "new-runs". My cynical side can see how doing such a thing may be profitable for both the creator and syndicate. But from a creative side, I have a hard time seeing how this can be fulfilling. If you read her blog post I think it's pretty clear that she has grown tired of the increasingly complicated narratives she was pursuing and the more realistic artwork these stories demanded. But is going back to the earlier, simpler times and redrawing old strips really the solution? It seems like it would be so much more fun for her to scale back the narrative and focus on a few characters and some simpler gags like she would like. Or she could even start a completely new strip that had all the elements she's craving. On top of all this, she's really doing a disservice to all the other new cartoonists trying to break into the papers because her new-runs are taking up space that could be given to them. It will be interesting to see how long she continues these before new-runs turn into re-runs.
In other news, Google is getting closer to officially releasing it's new internet browser, dubbed Chrome, which is now in beta testing for Windows. Normally this would just be your standard "Google is taking over the world" news update, but what is pretty cool is that Google released a comic describing all the special features of Chrome. And it was written and drawn by none other than Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame (by the way, if you're a fan or creator of comics and you haven't read this book, turn off your computer immediately and go to the nearest bookstore now). I thought it was a pretty creative way to present Chrome, and on top of that, you can be sure that Chrome will be popular in the comic and webcomic communities!
Sketch from Patrick McDonnell of Mutts
September 2, 2008 - Tuesday
Over the weekend we were cleaning up our apartment and I found a sketch that I thought you guys might enjoy. I was at Comic-Con San Diego in 1998 and I was lucky enough to meet Patrick McDonnell, who does the great comic strip Mutts. Click the image below to see the full size sketch. If you're wondering why it's addressed to Anthony, that's my official name. Although I usually go by Tony, for whatever reason, my name tag read Anthony. As Patrick McDonnell whipped out the sketch I didn't realize he was writing Anthony until it was too late.
Welcome to the New Calamities of Nature!
September 1, 2008 - Monday
Well here we are, the new Calamities of Nature! As you can see, I've decided to make a number of changes to the site. I'm really excited about this new direction. To celebrate, I'll be updating 5 times this week! That's right, updates on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday! So be sure to come back often because there will be plenty of new material to read!
Before I give some background on how I decided to make these changes, let me start by summarizing the main changes. First of all, Calamities of Nature will now be a newspaper style comic strip, which will update three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday--after this initial week, of course). This format will allow me to tell shorter gags, which is where I feel my writing has been veering lately (and I still have the option of stacking two strips when I want to tell longer gags). Also, I can now update more often because the comics take much less time to complete. I was debating whether to change to black and white comics and update five times a week, but I think color is so integral to Calamities that it's worth updating less and keeping color. Because of the new format comic, the site has been substantially redesigned. I hope you find the new, brighter style to be a better fit. If you have any suggestions or feedback on how to improve the site, I'd be happy to hear them.
Besides these larger changes, I've also made a few smaller ones the you may be interested in. I have updated the gallery to include all the pictures I've been showing in the blog or the TopWebcomics voting incentives, but have always been too lazy to add. So check it out, because there's probably some artwork that you've missed at one time or another. On the links page, you'll see that I've updated my banners, so if you're linking to Calamities you might want to think about using one of these shiny, brand new ones. Also, as you go through the comic archive, I've set it up to show the corresponding old blog posts along with each comic.
So how did all this come about? Well, to tell you the truth, about 2 months ago I was completely burned out on Calamities of Nature. As the artwork continued to get more complicated (see The Big Little Problem story line in particular), the updates were taking me longer and longer to finish. Some of these pages would take me 4 long nights to complete. And although I felt that my work was continually improving, I wasn't very satisfied with it any more. It was especially depressing that I was thinking about throwing in the towel when the books hadn't even arrived yet. To take a break from the website I bought a sketch book. I decided to scratch out as many gags as I could, and not worrying about whether the jokes were good, or politically correct, or anything. Some of the first sketches were pretty raw, autobiographical stuff. But soon I really started hitting my stride. Over three days I finished about 30 comics. I then realized I wasn't burned out on Calamities of Nature at all. I still had plenty of gags and stories to tell with these characters. The problem was the time intensive full-page format I had chosen. So I started taking some of the sketches and turning them into finished strips (like the ones you'll see this week). I found I could do a newspaper style comic so much faster than before, and it was invigorating to not have to spend 3 days on something that would be read in 10 seconds. At this point I knew that the only way to keep Calamities going was to alter the format. So I hope you don't mind the changes too much. I'm hoping that having 50 percent more updates per week will offset any ill feeling toward having shorter comics (and as I mentioned above, when I feel like telling something longer, the format is flexible enough to add a few more panels). If you consider that I was at the point of going to one or zero updates a week, three is pretty sweet!
