LINKO! – March 20th

March 20, 2008 on 7:38 pm | In Events, Web Comics

Hey gang! Let’s play a game of Linko!

Linko! is a game that’s a lot like that awesome game Plinko! from “The Price Is Right” except it involves me putting up a bunch of links. And there’s no disc that you slide down anything. And it’s heart and soul haven’t been replaced by Drew Carey.

Anyway, I’m still recovering somewhat from this weekend’s Wizard World LA show. I had a fun weekend of sitting in a room typing panel reports and looking out a window to an convention hall no one was using (they put us web guys way far away from the actual action), so there was very little floor shopping for me. However, I did get a chance to talk to a few of the indie creators on the floor, including:

The hilarious and friendly web cartoonist David Malki. If you’ve never experienced his Tuesday and Friday updating Wondermark you should check it out. The best way I can think to describe it is to ask if you remember those old Wendy’s countertops that featured Olde Timey ads for Cotton Gins and Almanacs and the like. If you do, just add some non-sequitur-containing, occasionally vulgar word balloons, and you’ve got the idea.

David was sharing table space with Dave Kellett whose strip Sheldon is something more akin to a newspaper strip but with loads more “Star Wars” references. Dave is also one of the masterminds behind Image’s How To Make Web Comics which hit stored last week and is worth a looksee.

On the more mainstreamy front of independent publishing, I talked to Lee Kohse at Bloodfire Studios who are probably best known for their Kindergoth series, but they’ve actually been publishing for ten years, which in this day and age is a pretty solid accomplishment. And in one of those “microcosm of the bigger comics world” developments, Bloodfire is putting out a prequel to an indie sci fi movie called “The Gene Generation” and had cast members on hand signing books all weekend. This is what it’s like in Los Angeles, folks.

Outside my LA adventures, I was came across a weird web comics connection in my personal life the other day when my buddy pointed me to TOBY, Robot Satan – an online strip by Corey Pandolph now published daily in the Metro paper. For anyone who doesn’t live in New York or other major cities, the Metro is a free paper homeless guys give you when you’re walking around in the morning. If I had to make a blind guess, I’d say the “serialized in alt weekly and freebie paper” route of getting paid is one of the elements of web comics which gets the least amount of coverage in the comics press. I got kind of a chuckle out of TOBY while searching its archives at Go Comics so I figured I’d share.

As a final “read it instead of doing work” contribution to your life, I thought I’d throw up this well-traveled link to a Village Voice review of David Hajdu’s history of comics’ Wertham era, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. I love books on comics history, and the review goes not only into the book (which sounds like a well-researched effort worthy of pick up) but challenges is with a few requests for additional material (although I’m not sure more about Crumb’s generation of underground cartoonists necessarily needs to be addressed in these kinds of things). Either way, good reading.

I’m looking to get an interview and/or review up tomorrow to make Dave look bad, so keep comin’ back!

– KP