Tag: webcomics

Three Count | Outlaw’s Apprentice, Forgotten Five, Fireborn theme song

Check out three things to read, to support and to hear today.

To read: Chris Schweizer’s Outlaw‘s Apprentice

You may know Chris Schweizer from his work on everything from 6 Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton to The Creeps series, and he’s back with a tale of swashbucklers and swords. Outlaw’s Apprentice debuted a few weeks back on Webtoon, and it’s as fun as it sounds:

Otis is a teenaged artist-in-training, but when he and the former mercenary to whom he is apprenticed find themselves on the wrong side of the law, they have to make their escape across the country with the law, bounty hunters, and old enemies dogging their heels.

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Cullen Bunn unearths more ‘Deepest Catacombs’

The 2020 webcomic inspired by vintage D&D ads is back with a new arc, new artists and darker dungeons.

The Sixth Gun writer Cullen Bunn has returned to the dungeons for a new arc of Deepest Catacombs, his serialized fantasy-horror comic strip inspired by vintage Dungeons & Dragons advertisements that appeared in comics. The new strips debuted in his Nightmare Fuel newsletter this week.

“When I finished releasing the initial run of Deepest Catacombs, I knew I would return,” said Bunn, “I just loved the characters and the world. I loved how it made me feel like a kid again. And I loved working with so many talented artists! This was, of course, a labor of love, so it has taken me a bit of time to get the ball rolling again, but the story is going to be a ton of fun!”

The original run debuted in 2020 across 25 single-page installments, each illustrated by a different artist, and was released for free in the early days of Covid. The new arc picks up directly where that series ended, reuniting the party of adventurers — Randall, Annalynn, Kezira, Chops and Fingerbones — as they venture into a frozen, haunted castle filled with wyverns, ghosts, dragons and vampires.

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Nominees announced for the Reuben, NCS Divisional Awards

The National Cartoonist Society has announced nominees for the 80th Annual NCS Reuben Awards, which will be presented in August.

The National Cartoonists Society has announced the 2025 NCS Divisional finalists and nominees for the annual Reuben Award, which recognize creators of comic strips, illustrations, comic books and more.

The awards recognize the cartoonist or artists specifically, so you’ll note that the actual comic, the writer and other creators, and the publisher aren’t called out in the nominations. Winners will be selected through a vote open to all NCS members.

This year’s Reuben list includes everyone who was nominated and didn’t win last year: Dave Blazek, Tauhid Bondia, Will Henry and Dana Simpson. Also nominated this year are arguably the two most prominent kids graphic novel creators right now, Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey.

The comic book category features two veterans, The Goon creator Eric Powell and Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai, along with Jackie Musto, creator of Kay and P. On the graphic novel front, Raised by Ghosts creator Briana Loewinsohn, Sunder creator Pierre-Alexandre Comtois and One Path creator Greg Broadmore were nominated.

The winners will be announced in August. Check out the full list of nominees across all the categories for this year:

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Smash Pages Q&A | Jay Eaton on ‘Runaway to the Stars’

With a Kickstarter launching this week, we talk to Eaton about biology degrees, base-8 numeral systems and why a wall clock can take hours to draw.

Jay Eaton describes their path to comics less as a choice than as an inescapable gravitational pull, one they spent years trying to resist before giving in entirely.

After pursuing biology in college and working in horticulture, Eaton eventually committed full-time to the project they’d been building on the side all along: Runaway to the Stars, a hard sci-fi slice-of-life graphic novel about a centaur aerospace engineer, a shipwrecked AI pirate and the unlikely friendship that upends both their lives.

Eaton has been building this story on the web for years, and now it’s coming to print via Kickstarter through Iron Circus Comics. We talked about world-building as narrative, designing for bodies that aren’t human and what a biology degree is actually good for when you’re a cartoonist.

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Anders Nilsen, ‘Precious Rubbish’ + more win at the 2025 Ignatz Awards

The annual small-press awards were given out at SPX in Maryland this weekend.

The 2025 Ignatz Awards, which recognize the best in small press comics, were presented last night as part of this weekend’s Small Press Expo festivities. The event featured a keynote by cartoonist Mimi Pond, which you can watch in the replay of their livestream.

Creator Anders Nilsen took home two awards for his supplemental comic to his Tongues series, while Kayla E. won the graphic novel category for Precious Rubbish. While most of the winners were self-published, Fantagraphics took home two awards and Silver Sprocket received one.

The Ignatz Awards have been presented since 1997 and celebrate the outstanding achievements of independent comics, graphic novels and minicomics. They are named for the brick-throwing mouse that appeared in the Krazy Kat comics by George Herriman.

Congratulations to this year’s winners:

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NASA removes two digital comics featuring diverse astronauts from its website

The comics were meant to inspire “the next generation of explorers” when they were posted just a few years ago.

Two digital comics that once lived prominently on the NASA website have now been scrubbed from it in the wake of executive orders to remove all traces of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, from government websites.

The two titles were First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity and First Woman: Expanding Our Universe, which were posted to the site in 2021 and 2023, respectively. The first features the fictional story of female astronaut Callie Rodriguez as the first woman to walk on the moon. The second showed a diverse crew of astronauts exploring the moon. The comics were written by Brad Gann and Steven List, with artwork by Brent Donoho and Kaitlin Reid.

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Hourly Comics Day 2025: One day, countless stories

Check out comics by Ethan Aldridge, Mike Dawson, Mel Gillman, Hannah Templer and more.

Cartoonists worldwide picked up their pens this past weekend for #HourlyComicsDay, the annual challenge where creators commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day.

Hourly Comics Day has a different rhythm than 24-Hour Comics Day, where artists try to create a complete comic in one day. Due to the quick turnaround of posting a new comic every hour, these pieces typically take the form of autobiographical or personal journal entries, with participants documenting their day through sequential art.

You can discover this year’s entries by searching for “Hourly Comics Day” or “#HourlyComicsDay” on various social platforms like BlueSky, Tumblr, Instagram, Patreon and more.. The diverse range of artistic styles and daily experiences shared makes for fascinating reading.

Here are a few I enjoyed this weekend:

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Sunday Comics | Nightwing’s Butt takes center stage on DC Go

Plus: Crucial Comix, Poetry Comics Month and more!

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

In the lead-up to the New York Comic Con, DC announced DC Go, their Webtoon-esque scrolling comics addition to their DC Universe Infinite digital comics. They’ve now posted four chapters of their original comics featuring Harley Quinn, Raven and Nightwing’s butt, as well as several “vertically reformatted” DC and MAD Magazine classics, including Batman: Hush, All-Star Superman and the Court of Owls storyline that kicked off Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s New 52 Batman.

And what’s great is, everything they’ve posted so far is available for free.

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Comic creators launch ‘Stop Project 2025’ webcomics site

An A-list group of talent have created webcomics to educate Americans about the highly controversial Project 2025 plan.

A group of comic creators have come together to explain the agenda behind Project 2025, the 900-page policy “wish list” created by the think tank The Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for the next Republican president.

“…we’ve made comics to explain some of that agenda, and move you to vote against it,” their site reads. Their website currently includes 16 comics on topics like immigration, libraries, taxation, health care and extreme weather, among others, with the promise to add more over time. You can read them on the web or download a PDF.

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Three Count | Secret Steward, Heart Acres, Who Killed Sarah Shaw?

Here are three comics to experience, to get addicted to and to binge today.

Three Count spotlights, as the title suggests, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. I’ve got more secrets than you’ll ever know.

1. To Experience: Secret Steward by Sanshirō Kasama and Hikaru Uesugi

If you’re planning to hit the Viz Manga app later this week when the global crossover manga Ultraman: Along Came a Spider-Man arrives, let me point you to another digital manga you may want to check out while you are there — Secret Steward by Sanshirō Kasama and Hikaru Uesugi.

Yeah, I know — you’re probably looking at the images I’m sharing here and thinking, “I’m not sure this is really for me.” But trust me — this first chapter is worth a read.

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Sunday Comics | Read these 2024 Eisner nominees online

Check out webcomics by Joe S. Farrar and Guilherme Grandizolli, Jared Lee and Cross, Evan Dahm, Haley Newsome, Cam Marshall, Velinxi and more.

With the Eisner Awards less than two weeks away, I thought I’d highlight some of this year’s nominees that you can find online.

Let’s start with the “Best Short Story” category, where Joe S. Farrar and Guilherme Grandizolli’s “The Lady of the Lake” is nominated. It originally appeared in BUMP: A Horror Anthology #3, which Farrar funded through Kickstarter and now sells on his ko-fi site. But in celebrating the nomination, Farrar posted the short story in full on Twitter, which I think is always a brilliant move, as it’s hard to vote for something if you haven’t read it.

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Sunday Comics | ‘Wayne Family Adventures’ returns for a third season

Check out new webcomics by Derek Laufman, Leigh Luna 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.

Wayne Family Adventures, the Webtoon comic that features Batman and all his kids, has returned for a third season. The comic first debuted back in 2021 and has also been collected in print.

Writer CRC Payne and lead artist StarBite are back with more of tales that fall into my favorite Tumblr sub-genre — “BatFam eats dinner together”:

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