I missed this earlier, due to being out of the house and nobody emailing to tell me it was going live today.  I’m looking at you, Greg. 

LADY SABRE is a very entertaining webcomic by Greg Rucka & Rick Burchett.  Sky-sailing 19th Century spy-privateers from Cascadia?  Read a bunch of it for yourself, for free.  The team are Kickstarting the collection, digital and physical versions.  Please take a look at their Kickstarter campaign.  Greg’s a writer I have great admiration for.

Thrillbent, the digital comics portal from Mark Waid and John Rogers, has come up with something interesting.  They’ve made all their comics serials embeddable via iframe.  Just click on the “Embed” link under each of their comics, and it pops up a small page with the code.  Resize the page, and the code will respond, so that the comic’s width becomes exactly what you require.  Below is the first episode of John Rogers & Todd Harris’ ARCANUM, at 640px.

Iframe won’t work in Tumblr, due to Tumblr’s failure to foresee the usefulness of such a thing, which is both a great shame and, I am given to understand, being worked on.  But it should work in most other places.

Whether this functionality is late or early depends on your views about blogs.  And, obviously, I’ve been barely present here for a few weeks, myself.  But it would seem to me, for a still-nascent operation like Thrillbent, that anything that may make it easier to get eyeballs on the work is a good thing.  And if this leads to at the very least some subviral form of syndication for people’s favourite Thrillbent comics, then all the better.

On FREAKANGELS, we had an “RSS Window", a piece of embed code that automagically loaded up the first panel of each week’s new comic with a link to the full episode, inside a Flash widget.  Thrillbent’s thing is much better.  I wish we’d had it then.

Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin have released the first instalment of a new comics serial as pay-what-you-want digital downloads.  It comes in PDF and two standard comics-reader formats, in English, Spanish and Catalan versions.  The page size appears to approximate half of a European comics-album format page.  That gives the landscape orientation you see in the image above, falling in with what seems to be the new standard in a certain wing of digital comic.  I wrote a bit about that last year.

They’ve set up shop at Panel Syndicate, with the strong suggestion that, should this first episode go over well (and five minutes after I tweeted the link this morning, their PayPal back end seized up from transaction velocity, so I’m guessing they’re okay), they’ll be doing more projects through this portal.

There is no reason why any number of comics companies could not have been funding, facilitating and producing this kind of original creator-owned comics work on the net two, three, five years ago.  There is no reason why any of them could not have been absolutely bullish about driving this –- except that they just didn’t want to.  So it remains something that happens in fits and starts, done DIY by the creators.

Brian would tell you that he is absolutely not leaving comics publishers behind, I’m sure.  And, you know, he’s clearly not.  Except that any of the publishers he works with should have come to him with this distribution idea two years ago, because it’s that fucking obvious.  And because they didn’t, he and Marco had to do it themselves.

Brian and Marco suggest 99 American cents for this first, substantial episode of THE PRIVATE EYE – a social science fiction story about privacy, with a classical detective-fiction engine.  But pay what you want, if you like the sound of it.  (I gave them a fiver.)

I’m friends with a futurist named Jamais Cascio, and he had occasion early in 2010 to meet a very eminent scientist and author. As these people do, they got to talking about The Future, and a scenario was described wherein Type III civilisations would have the technology to “boil spacetime,” creating or accessing a new universe for itself or even returning to the beginning of the universe in order to have all of time over again to live in.

Me and all our friends were running around yelling BOILING SPACETIME for several months.

Grant Morrison once described for me – and this is back around 1989 – his experience of discovering, while in the grip of severe entheogenic refreshment, that a comic is an entire spacetime continuum, capable of replay, non-linear access and chronological isolation.

Comics boil spacetime.

This is metatextual gibberish intended to prime your brain for what is next.

Time in comics is completely elastic.

Dialogue can slow down the experiencing of a page. (Frank Miller once said, possibly in EISNER/MILLER, that when he wants to slow the reader down he just starts the characters talking.) But your control of time begins with panelling and space.

Japanese comics read very fast because they have very few panels a page and those panels generally contain little visual information. Occidental comics are often too dense for the Japanese to enjoy. (I was told the same thing by my handlers when I was writing outlines for Japanese animated series.) There’s a thing I love in manga, though: every now and then, you’ll find a panel knocked out to bleed at (say) top, left and right. Leaving the framework of gutter and margins. And it creates a complete stillness, a frozen moment that you live in for a little longer.

There’s a scene in Bryan Talbot’s LUTHER ARKWRIGHT where the protagonist slows down the time perception of a group of men in order to kill them more efficiently. He breaks each page down into a couple of dozen panels, showing movement in staccato increments. The sequence is entirely silent, but because there are so many panels, with actual information in each, you experience the sequence almost as slowly as do the targetted men in the story.

I’ve seen comics that have run two different timestreams on the same page. Recursive comics. Pages containing flashbacks to three different timeframes as well as moving forward in the present while making complete sense. Chris Ware did a famous short comic in RAW that featured several different historical periods in the same room in the same page while maintaining a linear story flow. Kevin Huizenga will turn a suburban stroll into a multi-linear history tour and then tie all the lines back together without losing you for a moment.

The point being: you’re not locked to one minute per page, like a screenplay. You can make time run so fast that the reader thinks that your comic has been injected into their eyeball, or so slow and heavy that the reader feels like you’ve boiled a doorstop novel into some condensed informational substrate.

Which is a pulp-style Weird Crime comic by award-winning creator Francesco Francavilla.

Click through here for full size.  Click over here to learn more.

This is a grid of covers from i-D magazine.

I took this screenshot off the i-D magazine website.  It’s not a great way to display their covers.  And it’s obviously a little bit reduced here.  They cropped the damn covers into squares themselves, so the logo is truncated in almost all images.  That said, this is their own website, so they’re not trying to tell you what the magazine is or anything.  But have a look at that, and then have a look at this:

Front page of Comixology on the iPad.  The cover images are actually bigger than the ones in the i-D screenshot.  I shot this at random, having thought about it while flicking through the new releases.

Now, how do these covers work, reduced to smaller size and mixed together like this?

On the understanding that none of these images have been optimised for the Comixology shopping UI.  And, therefore, that if anything works here, it’s by dumb luck.

In tiny little box form, many of those i-D covers are more visually legible/parseable than the comics covers.

I can’t even make out some of the logos here.  Thank god for the handy text underneath each one.  Although I’d have to click through to discover what those CHAMPIONS OF TH are actually champions of.

EVIDENCE: nobody optimises their covers for Comixology. 

Why?  God only knows.  My presumption is that big important publishers can’t spare a person to do the cutting or create a workflow that creates a thumbnail image suitable for the Comixology app.  A zoom-in on part of the cover, or even clipping a bold image from the inside, and getting an optimised version of the logo on it…. apparently that’s too much work.  Most publishers simply don’t want digital sales enough.  It’s the usual assumption of “if you build it, they will come."  Which is why digital sales on monthly books are still (I am told) no more than a fifth of print sales.

LESSON: five minutes’ work will get you a thumbnail that works better in the Comixology store than 95% of the covers around you.

You’re welcome.

Yes, very good, Grant and Darick.  Very good.

I’ve mentioned Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL here a couple of times over the years.

2nov10:

I loved the idea of SPACEGIRL. Newspaper humour strips transferred to (and were exploded/deconstructed by) the web, but the old drama strips… not so much. SPACEGIRL was just the daftest thing in the world to do – revive the newspaper science fiction strip serial, and not even do it on a daily basis — and I loved it for that.

If I knew anyone who’d fit it and would do it for free, I’d do one here on the site like a shot. (Or at least as soon as I thought of one.) Give it its own category. It’d still be nigh on impossible to read back effectively. But, you know, what the fuck. You do it for the idea. It’s nice when ideas are pretty and so simple the cat can operate them. But it’s not always necessary.

I did actually talk to a friend, in 2010, about trying just this.  I think I wrote 15 panels to be going on with.  That friend’s life got crazy and difficult soon after, and it never happened.  (I never pushed, either, as they had quite enough going on without adding this to it!)

24apr10:

So I’ve been thinking about the newspaper adventure strip, that superquick blast of art spectacle and an idea. Which, as I said on Whitechapel, didn’t seem to convert to the web so well because it’s a form that finds it harder to capture eyeballs than the humour form.

And then I thought, on the other hand, if something like that was nested, as it was in a newspaper, inside a blog that already had a daily audience…

And then I thought, well, a proper and useful newspaper-width strip is actually a bit wide for a blog, which tend to containerise inside 600, 700 pixels or so. And maybe it’s the concept and intent of the thing that matter, not slavish replication of the physical object, because this is after all the web and we don’t have no laws or wear no stinkin badges and all that. Maybe your "strip" is the size of a card CD sleeve, or a horizontal half of a manga page, or (name your own).

SPACEGIRL, in some ways, is a pure descendant of the likes of FLASH GORDON. A single beat of plot or action in a beautiful science fiction illustration. And on a daily basis that’s really all you need to provide in a single instalment — something lovely, that frames a nice little idea. Makes pleasant electrical things happen in your brain for a moment. So you come back tomorrow to get that button pressed again. And, if the creator(s) is (are) lucky, you stick around long enough to see that this cascade of little sparkles are actually strung together with auctorial intent, and it assembles into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

SPACEGIRL publishes at a width of 860px, which is why it looks a little squashed here.

As I may have mentioned – I know I mentioned it on Twitter – a couple of friends of mine are planning a newspaper-adventure-strip for the web, and I’m sick with jealousy.  Not least because, as noted above, I Had A Plan Damnit, years ago, and I don’t get to play.

Warren can be shouted at about being crazy or cryptic @warrenellis or warrenellis@gmail.com

But, honestly, wouldn’t it be nice if a bunch of people started to bring strange ideas and new thinking to the dramatic form, in a low-impact serialised form like this?  What if, just for the hell of it, the next 18000 webcomics weren’t about funny animals or core nerd wanking?

On second thought, hey, that’s not going to happen.  And webcomics are a very important venue: as George Burns said about vaudeville, it’s the place the kids go to be lousy.  It’s a learning space, and a play space.  It’s important that it remains that way.  But no-one could change that if they wanted to, and but it shouldn’t be just that.

Wouldn’t this be a demented, lovely, quixotic thing?  If a bunch of people said fuck all you people who do nothing but newspaper comedy strips on the web, we’re going to do newspaper dramatic strips and do crazy stuff.

Obviously, that’s what my friends are going to do.  But I wish more of you would join them.  I’d dearly love a bunch of new panels to read every day, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

As I mentioned previously, Jonathan Hickman, who was an actual graphic designer before he got into comics, has done the lion’s share of the most striking recent use of infographics in comics. Check out his first series, THE NIGHTLY NEWS.  This, which I think was his second or third book, dials their use back – but it’s worth looking at how he uses them here, folding them more sparingly, but more effectively into the service of narrative.

There’s a real fusion starting to happen here.  He could have done this with Google Maps screenshots and some clipart, but the connective marks are clearly from infographics.

I don’t think I have a lot to say about this, as such: it’s more about looking at how he does this, how he creates graphical associations.  It’s easier when you clip out things and place them together.

In this single image, an army is being sent back in time.  The story to this point, and the narrative panels on either side of it, contextualise it so that he can do this work in a single panel.

(There’s probably a whole other conversation to be had about Hickman’s use of colour, too.)

And then, there are the maps.

(larger)

I love books with maps.  One of my favourite things about CRECY was getting to put maps in it.

This map gets repeated later in the book, changed, but that’s a spoiler.  I mention this only because I want to get across that this is a narrative element.  It repeats, with changes, in service of the story.

And then there’s this:

(much larger)

Note how the art element, the jagged stream, associates with the time-travel panel above.

I clumsily whited out a balloon here because it felt like spoiler.  But, again, see: narrative element.

Everything connects, everything reflects something else, and the book develops its own smooth language.  He doesn’t use these elements to jar.  Except when, in my favourite bit of infographic fun in the book, he does.  This still makes me smile.  And, yes, it’s a mild spoiler, but fuck it, it’s glorious:

It’s a single panel, less obviously impressive than many of the pieces above, but this is the audacious bit: it’s beautifully presented, utterly playful superfluous information that yet somehow enriches the panel.  This is the audacious bit, that harks back to Chaykin and Bruzenak, or Talbot in ARKWRIGHT: there is no need for it to be there, but it’s pretty and it adds something artistic and it makes me smile.  There’s a little bit of baroque nuttiness in Hickman’s otherwise clean-lined designer’s mind that I greatly enjoy.

Use of infographics in comics is hardly new, of course.  And, in the work of people like Jonathan Hickman, still current.  But I was interested in the way, in Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations of the PARKER books for comics, he uses them to compress information.

This is from the most recent book, THE SCORE, and, in fact, is pretty much the only place in the book he resorts to the idea:

He kind of defeats his own point by describing the guns in the text, and really just gets a pretty picture out of it.  But that is close to being very useful.  It sometimes feels like he’s champing at the bit over his own inventions, not quite able to run with them. He does it better in the previous book, THE OUTFIT:

Some of these elements had been introduced before, but not all of them.  Here, he’s done the work the comics adaptation of a novel needs.  A novel radiates more information from a single page than a comic does.  This sort of graphic action makes the comics page informationally denser.  He’s working on a page size that’s smaller than standard, too, closer to prose-book size, so it’s a concern. 

Cooke does a lot of work with maps.  Each of the books has at least one map, used either to bridge scenes or quickly distil exposition.  This and the page below are again from THE OUTFIT, the book richest with infographic practise (as well as shifts in illustration style).

It’s hard to make out (even in the original print object!) but the box marked MACE contains an explanation of that criminal term – “a stolen car with clean plates and forged registration.”

He’s trying to construct an infographic idiom using the available cultural tools of the period, while also trying to remain conscious of the narrative requirements of the comics page.  And trying to do it all in a fairly holistic manner – there’s no diegetic breakdown, in these pages.  (Cooke throws his hands in the air in a later chapter and does a sequence as magazine-typeset prose with a couple of spot illos.)

Again, he’s telling a little bit more than he’s showing – I don’t venerate “show not tell” to the death, but it’s a handy yardstick unless you’re after very specific narrative effects.  But the page has a beautiful balance, and does the work of comics narrative – your eye is led in pretty much the way it needs to be, and you end up in the bottom right corner as you should.

It’s interesting to see him try and work this out for himself on the page over three books.  Or, perhaps, two books, as it’s almost entirely jettisoned in the third book.  We’ll see if he returns to it.  But I wanted to get these samples out in front of me and think about them a little bit.  It’s something that’s currently of interest to me – writing a couple of longer novels has got me thinking about pages and information.

This comic, as you can probably make out, was released in 1977.  I bought it the week it came out.

And I don’t remember thinking twice about the cover.

You’d think I would.  I had persons of colour as my closest friends in infant and junior school, male and female, but this was the 1970s in south-east England: we’re not talking about a densely integrated area, and we are talking about a culture that was still very much casually racist.  My dad, once a soldier and a sailor, was extremely well-travelled and didn’t have a racist bone in his body, so I probably have a lot of attitudes inculcated in me from such a young age that I didn’t even notice.  But I’m not about to say I was colourblind, because I cannot possibly have been.

But I don’t recall this cover causing me to even blink.  And, believe me, my memories of 2000AD, and much of the culture I consumed as a kid, are still vivid to me.

Going back and looking around at comics of the time, this cover seems to me like a remarkable thing.  Totally understated, and yet saying a thing very clearly.  Quietly, but firmly.

An early Trev Goring piece, I think.  A marvellous object to find again.

Basically, it’s like this: people can see your public activity on Twitter.  Yes, even when you use your publisher’s official account.  And while you yourself might believe that book publishers go around publicly supporting tweets that denigrate authors from other publishing houses, I have to tell you that that’s not really the way it is.

13 AUGUST: EDITED TO ADD:

@warrenellis We saw this warrenellis.com/?p=14289 and were mortified. Purely a slip of the finger. How terribly embarrassing!

— Fantagraphics Books (@fantagraphics) August 13, 2012

@seanvanderm @warrenellis @mollycrabapple Certainly – we also plan on emailing an apology. Re: twitter.com/fantagraphics/…

— Fantagraphics Books (@fantagraphics) August 13, 2012

Yes, of course other countries have their own adventure strip tradition.  But I’m British. And this has been stuck in my head since a friend of mine told me he was going to have a try at doing one on the web.  Moving newspaper strip traditions to the web isn’t new either, naturally.  But the great majority of such instances have been in the mode of the comedy strip.  I don’t remember too many instances, and even fewer successful ones, of trying something like this:

Written by Peter O’Donnell, and, in its classic era, illustrated by the magnificent Jim Holdaway.

Newspaper strips were where the great comics artists lived.  GARTH, which I think was originated by Stephen Dowling and Gordon Boshell (some places cite only Dowling), rejoiced in the linework of legends like Frank Bellamy and Martin Asbury.

These all issue, of course, from a time when people read a newspaper every day: by which I mean reading through an entire and single disposable compendium of information.  And once you got through the news and features, you reached the entertainment part of the object, where these lay.  And you did that every day.  So it was possible to do a flavour of serialised storytelling.  Especially when, as in the Bellamy example above, the single strip was a little bit of art in its own right.

Sydney Jordan’s JEFF HAWKE (with, in its classic period, writing by Wiliam Patterson) helps me emphasise something: these strips tended to be a bit weird.  MODESTY BLAISE was, as spy/crime dramas go, a bit baroque and quirky.  GARTH was a time-traveller. JEFF HAWKE was a space pilot who ended up as a sort of unofficial ambassador for Earth in a universe gone mad.  Because British popular culture supported that even in the days of black-and-white.  HAWKE and BLAISE, particularly, were relatively sophisticated stuff.

In the modern day, it seems like a hard thing to pull off.  It’s not just there in your chosen news and information provision.  You’ve got to go out and select it, and you don’t get a big chunk every day.  It actually brings me back to the thinking about webcomics I did back in May, because of the obvious comparison between these shapes above and:

The example above being from Rucka & Burchett’s LADY SABRE.  The above is a single piece.  Each new episode of LADY SABRE is in fact the rough size of two newspaper strip episodes.  But it’s not daily.  It’s Mondays and Thursdays.  In theory, then, one weekday of LADY SABRE provides four days’ worth of newspaper strip content.

The fact that they use the larger block, roughly commensurate with half a US-standard comics page, does let them do things like this:

And that is also suggestive of the larger-sized “weekend” episode you’d see in the States.

This all circles around, really, to the nature of serialised fiction in the contemporary: also, I think, there’s something in here about the ways in which serial drama comics lost their hold on the mass audience by moving into the monthly form.  Weekly and daily is how television does it.  Books and films have their own special nature.  Monthly kind of flops down with magazines, which are disposable in a different way to newspapers.  They’re not a constant heartbeat presence in our lives.

A newspaper-style strip has long been on my list of Things To Do One Day.  I did, after all, get to scratch my Weekly Science Fiction Comic Serial off that list.  It wouldn’t necessarily even have to be in classical strip format.  But a daily strip in that general mode.  Story as pulse.

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The title still sounds liked ORGANICALLY REARED BEEF or FREE RANGE EGGS to me, and I swear there should be a hyphen in there, but you have to smile at the team putting their statement of intent right up front.  No fucking around.  These stories are owned by the people who originated them.  I can’t help but support any team that bullish about putting that message out.

CREATOR OWNED HEROES features two comics serials – AMERICAN MUSCLE by Steve Niles and artist Kevin Mellon, and TRIGGERGIRL 6 by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray with artist Phil Noto.  It also includes eighteen pages of magazine content, featuring an interview with Neil Gaiman.  It’s out in comics stores on June 6 or thereabouts.  The team have been kind enough to send me the first issue, and, after the jump, I’d like to show you a few pages from it.

(more…)

Both Mark Waid and John Rogers have commented that the thing that bugged them most about FREAKANGELS was that you had to scroll the pages, on most screens.  Also, that we just posted print-ready pages.

The idea, you see, was to Keep It Simple, as much as possible.  We missed a few tricks, but it was mostly about ease of experience and ease of transition to print (where the money was).  Yes, you had to scroll.  On the other hand, you have to scroll most everything you want to read on the internet. Even on a tablet, unless the content is specifically designed to page-turn-swipe only.  (FREAKANGELS was developed pre-iPad, of course.  And I still get a lot of content on my iPad that scrolls.)

That’s why I developed the two-tier structure of FREAKANGELS pages.  You go left to right, then down and left to right again.  The two-tier structure makes it easy to scroll down to and easy to figure out, without elaborate coding.  On my iPhone, I found that one regular-sized panel (the page was usually quartered) filled a screen nicely.  

(The example page I use above does of course give the lie to that.  But it’s one of my very favourite pages by the artist, the brilliant Paul Duffield, and the amazing colour artist Kate Brown.)

But, anyway: easy.  FREAKANGELS was an experiment, but I was mindful that Avatar were gambling money, so I usually erred on the side of frictionlessness.

The full page bugged some people, is what I’m saying.  As did scrolling.  So the new crop of high-profile webcomics projects are all about eliminating the scroll.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m acquainted with, like and respect all the writers here, am impressed by all the artists, and think that all three projects are fun and worthy works.  Indulge me as I take a look at something about them that struck me earlier this week.

Here’s a “page” from Rucka & Burchett’s LADY SABRE AND THE PIRATE OF THE INEFFABLE ETHER.

And one from Waid & Krause’s INSUFFERABLE.  This comic is quite ingeniously coded.

And from Spurrier & Barreno’s CROSSED: WISH YOU WERE HERE.

Each “page,” each screen as Waid thinks of them, is roughly half the size of a regular comics page.  Creating a future print object, then, involves assembling two screens into one page.  Fitting them together, basically.  Which is not as easy as what I did, but pretty easy, and there are any number of ways to skin a pixellated cat.

What else do we notice about these three screens?  Two-tier storytelling.  Isn’t it strange how all three teams have gone to two-tier, independent of each other?

Maybe not.  You’ve cut the print page in half.  If you want each screen to make sense as a discrete entity, you have to respect the cut.  If you want each screen to contain enough information to make it worth reading, you need a strategy to maximise your panelling.  And if you want to be able to stretch out and get a big picture in there while still maintaining storytelling coherency, you’ve kind of got to go wide on the page.

I’m not saying OMG NO-ONE HAS EVER USED THIS FORMAT IN TEH WEBCOMICS BEFORE.  I’m saying it’s interesting how all three went to it.

They all break two-tier occasionally (just as I occasionally, for strong effect, broke the FREAKANGELS method).  INSUFFERABLE more than the others.  I don’t want to be accused of cheating – the most notable breaks in INSUFFERABLE, for instance, tend to constitute a spoiler to my mind, so I didn’t use them.  But I don’t think it’s unfair to say they all default to two-tier.

And it would seem to be an inevitable consequence of the comics “screen”.

On a full page, that is obviously four-tier work.  Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is a four-tier, or 16-panel, book.  Hitch made the early decision to put THE AUTHORITY on four-tier, and here’s a page of it that I just yanked off Google:

You can see how that would work as two screens.  But the lower half becomes serious use of real estate, an entire screen in an episode that’s only ten or twelve screens long.

The other argument that I made with FREAKANGELS was, basically, if you don’t like it, then I refer you to the fact that I’m not charging you money for it. That was my license to do what I liked with the storytelling.  Which, for me, meant that I could take the story at whatever pace and in whatever tangents I desired. That obviously also holds for the three webcomics I’m talking about, too.  Going forward, I like to think that that is what will eventually differentiate webcomics from paid digital comics, which will have to be structured to deliver instant and weighty bang for their iTunes buck.

So, losing an entire screen to a single shot probably isn’t so bad.  It may, however, reinforce the imposed limitations of the format. 

Last year, I had the interesting experience of an artist attempting to re-panel an entire comic to get rid of the double-page-spread I’d written.  When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that he’d heard from a friend with an iPad that it was hard to view a DPS on them, and that since that was Teh Future, we should get rid of the DPS.  I explained that the book was written for print-first, and that in this instance digital readers would just have to cope with going to landscape and zooming.  If I’d been writing the book for digital, I very probably would have agreed with him, and found a way to do the image as a single full page image, or even enquired about coding the digital object to give me a swiping/tapping slippy screen in landscape, not unlike the recent “Marvel Infinite” object.

Accepting and exploiting new limitations is always part of a new format.  These three projects, though, can’t produce even a full-page spread without some serious scheming and dancing.  That bottom half of that AUTHORITY page is as big as a single image will get in this format.  That’s a lot to give up for the sake of “free” and notionally “more readable.”

Looking at these three comics this week, I’m wondering this: will we be able to tell the popular mainstream narrative comics of 2011-2012 by their slightly homogenous look?  Is this the aesthetic that will stick enough that we’ll be able to point at a page and say, “four-tier – must’ve been a webcomic first”?

I look forward to seeing how all this works out.

An experimental comics-like thing by Olivia Fox.  Start at the bottom.

Stokoe is apparently drawing a GODZILLA comic for IDW – a different one to the one Simon Gane’s drawing. 

And if you think that’s just a little demented, look at this.

Via his blog.

Beautiful piece at WhatNot by one of comics’ most admired cover illustrators, Dave Johnson:

Mondays do seem to have become for comics art.  Fil Barlow’s cover for an upcoming issue of PROPHET, via Brandon:

I just found this on the Flickr of the brilliant comics artist Philip Bond.  I love it.