Cafe Press has also partnered with MGM allowing fan created products for the much anticipated Hot Tub Time Machine:
Here's my t-shirt design inspired by the greatest movie of 2010:
Occasionally Cafe Press, home of Otter Disaster Designs, partners with certain media outlets to create fan portals allowing Cafe Press Shop owners to create designs based on existing media properties. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a fan portal had been opened featuring the much beloved Schoolhouse Rock!
I put together this design based on my all time favorite School House Rock! song, No More Kings:
Yesterday at comics guru Scott McCloud's website he posted a link to this video at Pixton.com, and asked creators their opinion. A pretty interesting debate ensued in the comments thread, from haters, lovers, and the indifferent alike. Bitstrips developer BA (you'll notice in the link to his profile that he is user 3!) jumped in to defend Pixton and Bitstrips as simply another tool with which to enjoy comics. I threw in a few opinions as well as Bitstrips super-user and all-around nice guy BoomMike.
One commenter left this response to BA and mentions lo-fi web sensation XKCD:
BA: “accessible to everyone, rather than an elite few with the rare combination of talent and patience”
Yes, the elite world of webcomics, where there are absolutely no barriers of entry. Give me a break. Have you ever heard of XKCD? It has stick figures and gets like 40 million hits a month. That’s because he is a funny writer and knows his audience. I’m sure you know that, but the whole “access” angle is part of the sales pitch for your website.
If Pixton 2.0 allows people to scan in their own drawings and work with those, that might be something worth noting. This is just lame.
Jesse, isn’t XKCD exactly the point? That it doesn’t necessarily matter what tools you use if the ideas, writing, and execution are solid, and you communicate effectively?
Bitstrips and Pixton are as capable of conveying a message in comics form as XKCD. It’s the user of the tools and the message created with them, not the tools themselves. If there were 10,000 stick figure strips out there (and there may be) would that diminish XKCD? I could also mention Get Your War On and Dinosaur Comics as strips with a simplified artistic approach that communicate really well.
As BA mentioned there is a high signal to noise ration on these sites, but that is largely because they serve as a clearing house offering both a creative platform and storage/hosting for the strips. Maybe not everyone wants to get a blog or develop their own site and deal with hosting/coding/etc. These sites/services do lower that particular barrier to entry.
There are are probably more bad webcomics out there than good ones created using ‘traditional’ methods, but that is no reason to question the tools used to make them.
I’ve read some really good stuff at Bitstrips (among a lot of bad stuff), and there are some extremely creative and clever creators there. I’ve watched people start simply, and become more sophisticated in their approach to their strips in both the writing and the art. I hope I’ve made some enjoyable stuff there myself., and as I mentioned I’ve learned a lot about comics from making them that I wouldn’t have learned simply by reading them.
I’ve also seen a large sector of the user base push the tools in directions I’m not sure they were initially intended and I’ve witnessed the developers respond to the needs and desires of those users. Bitstrips continues to improve, and I hope there will come a day when I can use my own custom art as part of the experience.
I work to make my characters and scenes as distinct as possible to put my own stamp on them (a constant challenge for me). And believe it or not, there are certain creators who have a ’style’ and I can often pick them out of the crowd, even with the homogenized ‘house style’ that Bitstrips currently offers. BoomMike, who commented above is one of them. These sites are really in their infancy at this point, but they will increasingly become customizable and eventually you will be able to personalize the art to the point of making it uniquely your own.
A few shameful puns in this strip. I apologize in advance:
Bitstrips runs a Theme of the Day on occasion, and this was my entry for today's theme, Consternation:
Mrs Disaster and I are out walking in a couple of strips. This is a true story:
This is not:
Last week I posted about a cool Photoshop Filter that creates Kirby Dots. After playing around with it for a while it inspired a new comic book themed T-shirt design for Otter Disaster Designs called the Power Cosmic:
Atari offers several of it's classic arcade and Atari 2600 games for play in your browser. Choose from Asteroids, Crystal Castles, Battlezone, and even Yars' Revenge! There is also a new online version of one of my all time favorite games Missle Command:
Play fun multiplayer games
You can play online in a cooperative mode with others or create your own match which provides an invite link so you can play with your pals.
Game company Octopus Motor, has created a really great Photoshop filter that allows you to create Kirby Dots! Here's a quick image I worked up using my avatar from Bitstrips:
I posted last week about British Metal fans trying to get 'Heavy Metal' recognized as a religion in the 2011 UK Census.
Via the always awesome Neatorama comes this item from the UK Telegraph:
Fans campaign for heavy metal to be recognised as religion
From the article:
They are being asked to officially register their faith as ''heavy metal'' while filling in the next Census questionnaire...Rock magazine Metal Hammer launched its campaign last week and has already attracted nearly 10,000 followers to a Facebook group...
It has even gained the backing of a metal figurehead, Saxon frontman Biff Byford, whom the magazine says will become the proposed faith's ''world metal peace ambassador'' if the campaign proves successful.
"Rising from darkness where Hell hath no mercy and the screams for vengeance echo on forever. Only those who keep the faith shall escape the wrath of the Metallian... Master of all metal."Sounds biblical, in a metal sort of way...
There is much anticipation of Apple's big announcement this Wednesday, with pretty much everyone expecting them to reveal some kind of slate or tablet style computer. As someone who gave up on reading monthly 'floppy' comics in 2006 because of ever-increasing prices, the notion of a digital comics reader is somewhat intriguing.
I'm sure the comics industry will have some sort of app/reader for comics available for the device when it finally ships (if they are smart).
One key here for me is pricing. If the price of the iSlate/iTablet/iDunno is reasonable out of the gate, or falls to a reasonable price in the next few years I'll consider getting one. I'll probably be in the market for a laptop in a few years anyway, and all the apps that will be available will just mean added value. If Marvel/DC (or any other publisher) wants to recapture lost readers (and entice newer ones) they will have to price their digital comics reasonably. They will have an opportunity here to win big, or shoot themselves in the foot.
The print version of Fantastic Four #575 will be in stores on the same day as Apple's announcement and is cover priced at $2.99, which is now pretty typical, with some titles hitting the $3.99 mark. I stopped when most titles hit $2.25-$2.50 an issue. I was reading anywhere from 10-15 titles a month at that point and spending about $35 a month on my comics habit. My choice was to cut back on titles, which I did for a while, or spend more money, which I couldn't afford to do. Ultimately I decided to pick up the odd trade paperback, OGN, or collection, and get a complete story for my comics dollar. This of course took me out of the shops regularly and my comics consumption has dropped accordingly due to the price of the books.
If an iTunes style, digital comics service could deliver a title for $.99 per issue (or less), I'd seriously consider reading them monthly again. At that price, I could afford 10 regular titles a month and the ability to sample newer releases or limited series without breaking the bank. Additionally if I find a series or story arc worth hanging on to, then I can always purchase a collected print version when it becomes available.
Another obvious key factor will be how these comics read on the device, and if the portability can help with the loss of that tactile experience of the printed page.
As a guy who digs t-shirts so much I started to design my own, I'm a big fan of the geeky shirts worn by Sheldon and Leonard on the CBS comedy 'The Big Bang Theory'. I'm not the only one. The folks over at Sheldonshirts.com have catalogued and located many of the shirts worn by the guys on the show. They've even determined which shirts are no longer available, and tracked down several of Howard's belt buckles. I myself have Leonard's Cassette tee! :
I was looking for some retro audio at the Internet Archive and stumbled across this amusing gem from the early days of Cable Television:
Actor Peter Sarsgaard has been cast as Hector Hammond in the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie. I've always liked Hammond's freakishly large skull, so I mocked up a Sarsgaard-Hammond in Photoshop:
Well, the A-Team Trailer has been available here and there today:
If that one gets taken down, which seems likely, check out this fake trailer from 2007. I kind of like the idea of them keeping the team as Vietnam veterans, acting as aging Soldiers of Fortune. Morgan Freeman as B.A. seems oddly inspired:
The University of Nebraska has a pretty cool collection of Government Sponsored Comics.
Many are available for download as PDFs, including one on the Operation and Preventative Maintenance of your M16A1 Rifle illustrated by comics legend Will Eisner.
As a high school headbanger I had no internet for keeping up with my favorite bands and the town I lived in was so small it didn't have MTV, so there were few ways to find out about new bands or even what was up with the bands I followed. I actually used to bring videotapes when I visited my sister Traci in college because she had MTV, and I'd record Headbanger's Ball to see videos of my favorite bands. I'd play those tapes over and over.
With no access to MTV, and living in a part of the country where the odds of hearing my kind of metal on the radio was impossible, I had two outlets remaining for learning more about 'my' bands. The first was the very reliable 'word of mouth'. If you had a buddy who liked a band you could always borrow the records and sample their music for yourself. If a group was good, you could then go out and buy the cassette or you could fire up the dual cassette deck and do a little peer to peer music sharing, analog style. The other information outlet I relied on lived on the racks of the local grocery and convenience stores, the heavy metal magazines. They had names like Rip, Circus, Creem, Metal Edge and my rag of choice, Hit Parader.
