Tag: Melanie Gillman

Three Count | Kamandi, Fungi Feast, Colleen Coover

Here are three things to see, to support and to buy in comics today.

Three Count spotlights, as the title suggests, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. Don’t eat things you find, Scout.

1. To See: Tom Fowler’s Kamandi: Search & Destroy art

If you follow Tom Fowler’s comics work or even just his social media, you know he has a tendency to draw some really wild-looking creatures at times (some of which you can find on T-shirts courtesy of his Threadless store). They are the kind of designs that would be perfect for a world created by Jack Kirby, so it’s no surprise that his concept art for a Kamandi series is simply awesome:

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Cartoonists go all out for Hourly Comics Day 2024

Check out comics by Karen Czap, James Chapman, Mel Gillman and more.

It’s February, which means its time for the annual #HourlyComicsDay, where cartoonists commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day.

That’s certainly a different task than 24-Hour Comics Day, where a creator will try to make a complete comic in a day. Because of the fast nature of trying to post a new comic every hour, most hourly comics typically fall into the “autobiography” or personal journal category, as participants detail their day in comics form.

Here are a few I saw this year. You can also find them by searching for “Hourly Comics Day” on your social media site of choice, be it BlueSky, Tumblr, Instagram or the site formerly known as Twitter.

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Sunday Comics | NASA’s STEM comic lifts off with a second issue

Today we look at webcomics by PJ Holden, Grant Snider, Melanine Gillman and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best and most interesting comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

NASA launched a digital comic back in 2021 about a fictional astronaut named Callie Rodriguez, the first woman to walk on the moon. Now the second issue has made landing on their website, where it can be read or downloaded.

The story is meant to inspire “the next generation of explorers,” which NASA has dubbed the Artemis Generation, as they work on a real-life project to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.

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Sunday Comics | 24/7 Comictober Fest

Check out comics from Melanie Gillman, Ryan Cody, David Lopez and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

October not only brings a change in the weather and the spooky Halloween season, but also a plethora of art challenges and events. Although there’s a bit of shadow over Inktober these days, that hasn’t stopped artists and creators from taking whatever prefix they want, sticking it in front of “-tober” and running with it on social media.

So yes, the fun continues all throughout the month, whether it’s Batober, Jacktober, Comictober or, yes, even Inktober. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

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Sunday Comics | 24-Hour Comic Day, Inktober and more

Check out recent comics by Melanie Gillman, Derek Laufman, Elsa Charretier and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

I mentioned Swordtember in a post earlier today, and it’s far from the only online challenge aimed at creators going on on social media right now. Yesterday, in fact, was 24-Hour Comic Day, the “annual celebration of comics creation” where artists attempt to create an entire comic in 24 hours.

As the Crow Flies creator Melanie Gillman once again took up the challenge, creating a comic called The Night-Mother. It’s a horror story, and Gillman includes several content warnings at the beginning, including violence and miscarriage. But it’s a very well-done comic, especially for one they created in just 24 hours — or almost, anyway. Gillman still has a few pages left that they were hoping to finish today. Here’s the first page:

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Comics Lowdown | Zunar is in trouble again

Plus: A new graphic novel looks at Japanese Americans who resisted internment.

Zunar’s cartoon critiquing the minster of the state of Kedah, who canceled the festival of Thaipusam. The cleaver says “No Thaipusam” and the caption on the right reads “Kedah’s inhabitants lived in peace until he came.”

The Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar is in trouble with the law again. Police in the state of Kedah have summoned him to appear before them on May 7 (the original date, given in the linked article, was May 2 but it was rescheduled) for violating the country’s sedition law, a much-criticized relic of its colonial past, with a cartoon criticizing the Kedah state minister’s decision to cancel the traditional Tamil Hindu festival of Thaipusam.

Zunar got into lots of trouble during the tenure of Prime Minister Najib Razak, whom he mocked endlessly for his corruption; Razak was not amused and his government repeatedly raided Zunar’s studio, confiscated his books, banned him from traveling, and brought charges against him that could have led to lengthy prison sentences. The pressure eased once Najib was voted out.

Ironically, Zunar’s latest skirmish coincides with World Press Freedom Day, which was Monday; several national and international groups have criticized the Malaysian government for its repressive stance.

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Sunday Comics | A round-up from Hourly Comics Day

Cartoonists dedicated last Monday to making and posting new comics every hour; check out the results of their hard work.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

Every February comics artists wake up and just start drawing for #HourlyComicsDay, where cartoonists commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day — or whatever frequency they chose. Most hourly comics typically fall into the “autobiography” category, as participants detail their day in comics form, but some will share fictional stories as well.

The official Hourly Comics Day was last Monday, and I thought I’d dedicate this edition of Sunday Comics to spotlighting some of them (with a big thanks to Brigid Alverson for sharing a long list of the ones she found).

So here we go:

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Sunday Comics | ‘Amelia Shadows,’ 24-Hour Comics and more

Check out recent comics by Matthew Dow Smith, Noelle Stevenson, Melanie Gillman, Keith Knight and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

We kick off this week with a new comic from Matthew Dow Smith, who created and posted the comic Johnny Chaos on Twitter earlier this year after the pandemic hit. Alex Dueben spoke with Smith back in July about getting work done during the pandemic; like a lot of other creators, when pens went down at various publishers, Smith started working on his own comics.

This newest, Amelia Shadows, can be found on Tumblr, or, if you’d like to see it a day early, it’s on his Patreon as well (along with a lot of other cool stuff).

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Cartoonists go all in on Hourly Comics Day

Check out comics by Becky Cloonan, Kate Beaton, Celeste Woods, Faith Erin Hicks and more.

It’s early February, which means its time for the annual #HourlyComicsDay, where cartoonists commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day.

Most hourly comics typically fall into the “autobiography” category, as participants detail their day in comics form, but some will share fictional stories as well. Unlike Inktober, which has prompts and structure (and, apparently, legal issues now) Hourly Comic Day is just a fun challenge that artists choose to take.

Here are a few examples from this year:

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Comics Lowdown: New player in town: Graphite digital comic subscription service

Plus: Steve Morrow passes away, New York Times stops editorial cartoons, and more!

The New York Times reports on a new digital comics service, Graphite, that operates on a subscription basis, like ComiXology Unlimited. Graphite will offer a free version with ads, and their premium ad-free version is priced at $4.99 a month, a buck cheaper than ComiXology Unlimited, but their real selling point is automated recommendations:

On other platforms, recommendations are typically offered by editors, said Tom Akel, Graphite’s chief content officer. “Ours takes into account your user behavior, what you’ve watched before, what the pool of people around you liked and cross references that the same way a Netflix algorithm will,” he said.

The real test of a digital comics service, of course, is content. Graphite’s lineup will include BOOM! Studios, Tokyopop, Dynamite, IDW and the children’s publisher Papercutz, but not Marvel or DC (both of whom have their own subscription services). This is a choice that seems to make sense for the smaller publishers; as BOOM!’s Filip Sablik commented, “We’ve had free content available for multiple years, and it hasn’t cut into our Comixology business. In fact, it has continued to grow.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Melanie Gillman

The creator discusses ‘As the Crow Flies,’ now available from Iron Circus Comics, as well as the upcoming ‘Stage Dreams,’ Colorado, colored pencils and more.

Since it launched in 2012, As the Crow Flies has been a webcomic beloved by many people. Drawn in colored pencil by Melanie Gillman, the comic tells the story of Charlie, a black queer 13 year old on an all-white Christian youth backpacking trip. It is not just a striking beautiful comic that looks like nothing else, but it tells an important story in a thoughtful, nuanced way. It is a story of identity and religion, community and discrimination with a cast of real, relatable and beautifully drawn characters.

Gillman just finished writing a run of Steven Universe comics for BOOM! Studios and has already announced their next project, Stage Dreams, a graphic novel that Gillman described as a “queer western romance adventure story.” The first half of As the Crow Flies was just published in a print edition by Iron Circus Comics and Gillman was kind enough to talk about writing, life, Colorado and colored pencils.

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Comics Lowdown: ‘Rurouni Kenshin’ creator arrested on child porn charges

Plus: The Cartoon Art Museum gets a new home, the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the largest X-Men collection, and much more!

The manga world was rocked on Tuesday when Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki was charged with possession of child pornography. Police didn’t target the 47-year-old manga-ka; they were investigating someone else when he turned up as a possible purchaser of child porn, and indeed he has been charged with possessions of “numerous” DVDs containing footage of nude girls in their early teens. In a deposition, Watsuki, stated that he “liked girls in late elementary school to around the second year of middle school.”

The penalty for possession of child pornography in Japan is up to a year in prison and a fine of up to 1 million yen, if convicted, but for Watsuki the consequences are already grave: His publisher, Shueisha, said it is taking the news very seriously and it has suspended his current series, Rurouni Kenshin: Hokkaido Arc, which he is co-creating with his wife, Kaoru Kurosaki; it has not decided yet what to do about the volumes that are already in print. Rurouni Kenshin started in 1994 and has over 60 million volumes in print; Viz has the U.S. license and has been re-releasing the original series in omnibus format, and is publishing the Hokkaido Arc simultaneously with the Japanese release.

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