Top Shelf 2.0 will initially feature 10 new strips by the likes of Jed McGowan, Lizz Lunney, Aaron Navrady, Steve Lafler, Kagan McLeod, Bart Johnson, John C. Ralston, Jessica McLeod and Edward J. Grug III, Chris Eliopoulos and our good friends Sean T. Collins and Matt Wiegle!

New stories will be posted every weekday!

That’s a pretty eclectic group of cartoonists, muchachos! Check it out!

ANYWAY, after yesterday’s call out to the new Zuda competiton, Brendan McGinley was nice enough to send a character sketch from his Zuda competing strip Hannibal Goes To Rome so I thought I’d share.

And there you have it.

However, yesterday I got two e-mails from creators in the business who I know and whose work I generally enjoy, and their sensibilities fall squarely into the camp of stuff we normally cover here, so I thought I’d pass word of their running in the most recent competition. For those who don’t know, Zuda posts a whopping ten trial strips each month, two of which are chosen based on reader votes to continue on as regular web features. I received word of:

ACTION, OHIO

Written by Neil Kleid and drawn by Paul Salvi, this strip seems to be a reappropriation of comic tropes dating from the pulps through the Marvel heyday and set against a modern noir tale. The strip even has its own production blog, which was where I snagged this piece of promotional art:

HANNIBAL GOES TO ROME

This second entry I heard word of is a historical comedy strip that reminded me a lot of what Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey do with Comic Book Comics but with Roman war stuff instead of funny book stuff. It’s by Brendan McGinley and Mauro Vargas, and while I couldn’t pull an image of it so easily, you can access it and Action, Ohio both by going to the Zuda homepage. If you want to vote to keep a strip alive, you’ll have to register, and I should add that if you get in the voting spirit, please check out every strip competing. It’s only fair.

Filled with disturbing non sequitors that are equal parts belly laughs and completely uncomfortable shivers, Truth Serum is like a subtle atom bomb on your funny bone. The new site, City Cyclops, will now feature free, full-color strips every Wednesday for your reading pleasure so give Adams a high-five next time you see him.

Check out the inaugural strip below and click through it for a link to the site for more ridiculous fun! Seriously, you won’t be let down.

In what is probably either old news or news that falls so strongly into the “well, of course they are” category that you probably all figured it was happening, the dudes at Penny Arcade are prepping their own video game. Now, I don’t play video games much if at all, and my interest in the online adventures of Tycho and Gabe is almost totally contingent on my wanting to sound really smart about the web comics business model at comics industry cocktail hour (that and I like it when I see a strip where they mention Deep Space 9). HOWEVER, even I think the idea of a straight up adventure game starring the pair and created with the guys who did The Secret of Monkey Island sounds awesome.

Won’t you please click on this link which contains an interview with the guys from Hothead Games who are bringing this cash cow to pixilated life?

In other weird cartoonist media crossover news, Jeffrey Brown was recently profiled for a Canadian television show call SexTV. I don’t get the title either, but the video looks cool. I found this on the Top Shelf newsletter, which probably means you’ve already seen it. But if you’re not on that list, the easiest ways to get signed up include going to the Top Shelf site, contacting anyone at Top Shelf for any reason or giving Chris Staros a high five on the floor of any convention.

Lastly, I went to the release party for the new issue of Comic Foundry last night thrown by the man pretty Tim Leong and the lovely Laura Hudson. Tim took photos of me looking pale and bloaty next to pretty girls which you can see here. The new issue of their mag looks really slick and is in stores April 9th.

– KP

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

For anyone out there who hasn’t picked up Wizard #198, Dave headed up the super awesome ‘Wizard Edge’ section in the page which presents a dozen pages of news, interviews and reviews of some of our favorite upcoming indie projects.

To spread the word to online folks who haven’t seen the print mag yet, we’ve been posting up some of the Edge features online for folks to read, including…

Dave’s ridiculously cool profile of Jeff Smith and his latest self-published series RASL.

Frequent Wizard contributor Jake Rossen’s feature on Terry Moore’s follow up to Strangers In Paradise, Echo.

And, if insanely beautiful sci-fi comics by some of the greatest creators of the modern era aren’t your thing…well, you suck! But if you already knew about both those books and you’re looking for something new to read, check out our short and sweet story on 5 of the staff’s favorite web comics, including picks from former WU great and web comics guru Brian Warmoth.

Unfortunately for the mag’s readership, there were a few really great things we prepped for Edge that were cut due to space considerations. That’s good news for you interwebs types though, as Dave and I are going to be posting plenty of cool interviews to the blog over the next two weeks. So keep your eyes peeled!

– KP

Here is the first installment of Dave’s new semi-autobio comic strip series “Pancake Lover”. New episodes will be posted on a weekly basis. Enjoy!