Tag: webcomics

Sunday Comics | Legendary Lynx, lie detectors, horses and elbows

Check out recent webcomics by Alex Segura, Sandy Jarrell, Lisa Hanawalt, James Kochalka 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.

Readers of Alex Segura’s novel Secret Identity — a murder mystery set in the 1970s comics industry — have probably been wondering, “Hey, do you think maybe they’ll do a real The Legendary Lynx comic?” Well, wonder no more, because Segura has launched a Lynx comic via Zestworld.

The Lynx, of course, is the faux comic made up by Segura for the novel — which actually includes pages from it as part of the story. While the credits stick to the in-story names for the creators, the comic is actually being written by Segura, with Sandy Jarrell providing the art, Grey Allison on colors and Jack Morelli doing letters, all under the watchful eye of editor Allison M. O’Toole.

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Sunday Comics | ‘Webcomic Name,’ ‘Let’s Play’ and more

A round-up of news items from the webcomics world this past week.

Typically I use this space to recommend interesting webcomics I come across, but this week I’m going start with some recent news topics in the webcomics world.

The first is the ongoing effort by Alex Norris to reclaim his rights to Webcomic Name, his popular online comic. Even if the name doesn’t ring a bell, more than likely you’ve seen his fun, blobby characters in your social media feed at some point:

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Sunday Comics | Opening the ‘Gates of Hell’

Check out recent webcomics from Dennis Culver, Yuki Saeki, Will Tempest, Grant Snider, Ryan Cody and Joshua Barkman.

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.

Dennis Culver and Yuki Saeki launched one of my favorite new webcomics back in October — Gates of Hell, which is available on Webtoon. It’s about a teenage girl, Jennifer, who is dealing with the grief of losing her mom. As a result. she ends up opening a portal to the underworld to say all those things to her mom that she meant to say when she was alive.

But instead of finding her mom, she instead meets a hunky devil lord:

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‘Planet Divoc-91’ comes to print

The webcomic funded by several UK science organizations arrived in the early days of the pandemic.

An early webcomic inspired by COVID-19 is coming to print later this month, courtesy of Velocity Press.

Back in July of 2020, in what could still be considered the early days of the COVID pandemic, several UK-based scientific organizations funded the creation of a sci-fi satire that drew its inspiration from what the world was going through at the time. Planet Divoc-19 debuted on Webtoon and featured stories and art by Charlie Adlard, Alex Paknadel, Marco Finnegan, Matt Kindt, Hannah Berry, James Devlin, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Elsa Charretier and more.

“Although the topics we’re discussing in the series are incredibly serious, Planet Divoc-91 is full of humor and is occasionally ridiculous,” said Sara Kenney, who wrote the first chapter. “We’re aiming for more of a District 9 or The Good Place feel than, say, Star Trek.”

The print edition of Planet Divoc-19 is a not-for-profit publication, with 100% of profits go towards helping young creatives in South Africa, India and UK. It arrives in UK bookstores today; those of us outside the UK can order it directly from Velocity.

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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 | An AI-generated comic about conservation and the apocalypse

Check out comics from T. Kingfisher, Katie Skelly and Ben Fleuter.

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.

T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, is a multiple award-winning author and comics creator, whose books include The Hollow Places, The Twisted Ones, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and many more. She’s also the creator of the award-winning webcomic Digger.

Her most recent work, though, is A Different Aftermath, a comic she posted to Twitter that she made with the help of th Midjourney AI. When I first scrolled by the post and saw the artwork, I never would have guessed it was AI generated, and the story itself is very lovely — it’s about what happened to the wildlife, like bees and such, after the collapse of society.

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Sunday Comics | A closer look at the Ignatz Awards nominees

Check out some recent award-nominated comics by Adam de Souza, Mars Heyward, Evan Dahm, Reimena Yee and Amy Kurzweil.

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.

The nominees for the 2022 Ignatz Awards came out a few days ago, with five webcomics being honored in the “Outstanding Online Comics” category. So let’s take a look at them!

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Three Count | Major Sun, SDCC panels, Sequential Scholars

Here are three things to support, to listen to and to follow in comics today.

1. To vote for: Major Sun on Webtoon

Webtoon is currently running a Call to Action contest, where various creators compete for a spot on the site — as well as for cash and other prizes. The submission period will end July 31, and then voting will take place throughout the month of August.

And wow, are there a lot of submissions — more than 100 pages, with 20 submissions per page. I of course would encourage you first to find one you like to support, as these things should be, but I couldn’t help but note that one of my favorite webcomics cartoonists has entered the fray.

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Sunday Comics | Looking at recent awards nominees

Check out the online comics nominated for both the NCS Divisional Awards and the Nommo Awards.

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.

Award nominations for both the NCS Divisional Awards and the Nommo Awards came out in the last week, so let’s take a look at what webcomics earned nods from each of them.

I’ll start with the National Cartoonist Society’s annual awards, which are given out every year in conjunction with the Reuben Award. While their categories range from comic books to graphic novels to advertising to greeting cards, they have two categories focused on online comics — a long-form category and a short-form category. Let’s start with the long-form nominees.

First up is Emily Flake, a very prolific cartoonist with comics appearing in places like The New Yorker, The Nib and others (she’s also a comedian/performer). Based on the image on the NCS site, it looks like she’s nominated for her comic “Visions of the Post-Pandemic Future (Revised),” which appeared on the New Yorker website in April of last year.

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Nominees announced for the 2021 Reuben, NCS awards

Winners will be revealed in September.

The National Cartoonist Society has announced the nominees for the 2021 Cartoonist of the Year, commonly known as The Reuben Award, as well as the many divisional awards they give out each year.

Keith Knight, Edward Sorel, Bill Griffith, Hilary B. Price and Mark Tatulli are all up for the Reuben the year, with several of them being nominated in years past. Last year Curtis creator Ray Billingsley won the award.

The divisional awards cover everything from comics and graphic novels to comic strips, editorial cartoons and even greeting cards. They also nominate the cartoonist or artist, vs. the work or the entire creative team. I’ve included the nominations that are relevant to the world of comics below, but you can see the full list on the NCS website.

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Sunday Comics | Where there’s a Wilbur …

Check out recent online comics by Karen Moy, June Brigman, Dave McKean, Ryan Bodenheim 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.

So have you been following the Mary Worth drama online? Those aren’t words I ever expected to type, but here we are.

If you aren’t familiar with Mary Worth, it’s a long-running, soap opera-style newspaper comic strip. And “long-running” is no joke; it’s been consistently appearing in newspapers and now online since 1938. And it’s origins go back even further than that, to a strip called Apple Mary that started in 1934. So kudos to the creators, Karen Moy and June Brigman, because here we are in 2022, some 80 years later, and the strip is getting all sorts of attention, kind of akin to Days Of Our Lives having Marlena get possessed by the Devil again.

(And yes, June Brigman, the co-creator of Marvel’s Power Pack and all-around awesome comics artist, is the artist of Mary Worth. Alex spoke to her about the comic Captain Ginger back in 2019).

So the attention the strip is getting centers on a character named Wilbur, who I’ve seen described as “miserable,” a “dingdong” and “a giant mayonnaise sandwich” online. Ryan Bradford, who writes for San Diego CityBeat and Vice, wrote about the last few months worth of strips on Substack, where he talks about how Wilbur is dating Estelle but hates her cat, so he kept making death threats against it. Eventually Estelle broke up with Wilbur, but eventually they got back together, and Wilbur proposed to Estelle while on a cruise. That’s where the story really gets interesting.

[SPOILERS WARNING for recent Mary Worth strips, something else I never thought I’d type]

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Smash Pages Q&A | Shaenon Garrity on ‘Willowweep Manor,’ ‘Skin Horse’ and more

The editor, web cartoonist and writer discusses her latest graphic novel and the end of her long-running webcomic.

For 12 days, we’re looking back at the 2021 that was in the world of comics, with interviews, commentary and more. Check back often!

Shaenon Garrity has been working in comics for years. An editor at Viz Media, she’s a longtime web cartoonist starting with Narbonic, which she launched in 2000, and she’s been a comics critic for nearly as long in the pages of The Comics Journal and other publications.

Garrity currently makes the webcomic Skin Horse with Jeffrey Wells, and this year saw the release of the graphic novel The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, which she made with Christopher Baldwin. The book stars Haley, a lover of gothic romances who finds herself in a gothic romance. Except it’s not, and she has to find a way to navigate her way through a very different kind of story. The book is wildly inventive and laugh out loud funny, which are two things that I always expect from Garrity’s work.

We spoke recently about gothic romance, mad scientists and ending her long-running strip Skin Horse next year.

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