Webcomics

As a tribute, of sorts, to the deceased musician everyone has been mourning this week, Top Shelf has posted I Think About Whitney by Liv Strömquist. It was originally published in 2010 and collected in the Top Shelf/Galago anthology FROM THE SHADOW OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS, vol 2.

While this doesn't look like it will quite get to the amazing funding levels of of the Order of the Stick Reprint Project (nearly $650K with 8 days left), there's another webcomic with an even more modest goal that's making some serious coin at the crowdfunding game, this week. R Stevens is about to hit 3000 strips in his Diesel Sweeties webcomic. All he wanted was $3K to buy him some time to compile the entire run of the strip into ebook format. Right now, he's got a bit over $22K pledged for the project.

Read it all here.

Given that she was the Person of the Year for 2011, and enjoyed a bestseller with her Hark! A Vagrant collection, it's no surprise that Kate Beaton has been getting lots of offers lately, ranging from children's books to television work. Thus it will also come as no surprise that she's going to be spending less time on her webcomics to work on some of these opportunities:

Another birthday being celebrated today is the web collective ACT-I-VATE which launched six years ago. Meaning a baby born that day would now be in school. Yikes. Founder Dean Haspiel celebrates here. It's been six years of some outstanding comics and memorable parties; THE ACT-I-VATE PRIMER is a really gorgeous book well worth tracking down if you don't have a copy.

In honor of his birthday yesterday R. Stevens released a DRM-free ebook of his very first Diesel Sweeties collection.

The video game company behind the popular PROTOTYPE series -- NOT the comics company. Dark Horse will create a three-part story bridging the gap between the original Prototype and PROTOTYPE 2 which comes out this year. The series will be released digitally, starting February 15th. Creators include Paco Díaz, Chris Staggs, and Victor Drujiniu.

The acclaimed Portland-based Study Group 12 anthology is starting up a web comic portal for several of their contributors, with regular series & one-shots...

This interview with Chris Onstad about his hiatus from ACHEWOOD could almost have come under our previous belt-tightening post.

Bruce Handy and Dan Goldman give us the lowdown on the ongoing War on Christmas via a webcomic at Vanity Fair. --

A war on Christmas? A harrowing and real thing, if you ask the values police. So we sent leathery war correspondent Bruce Handy and grizzled war cartoonist Dan Goldman to record the frontline combat for posterity, in the manner of their Civil War–era Harper’s forebears. Where we lay our scene: a suburban mall, its Santa’s village defended from invaders by his little helpers. (What follows may contain graphic elf violence.)

The Romanian webcomic Fredo and Pid'jin, has been a big success for its creators Eugen Erhan and Tudor Muscalu, this piece at Next Web tells us, if by success you mean lots of links on Reddit and Digg. What emerges is the story of two guy with a dream and a webcomic about two evil pigeons out to conquer the world. Things looked low, but then a guy who works on the Simpsons came and told them they were on the right track, energizing them to carry on. But...questions remain:

Piskor has a new strip up at Boing Boing that examines the similarities between these two American artforms.