Anime/Comics

Black and white and red all over :)

Oh, I see there's a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic:

http://pbfcomics.com/251/

Two Lumps is doing a fun little version of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" using some of their own characters. If you're a fan of the strip and familiar with your Poe it's a fun read.

It starts here: http://twolumps.net/d/20111014.html

We also carry the feed here at Uncensored in a hidden room called "Two Lumps"

It's full of goosh!!! That was funny

Matthew Inman ("The Oatmeal") is being interviewed for a documentary called "Stripped"

[ http://goo.gl/JZblG ]

The film is about how the comics page is becoming a victim of the dwindling readership of dead tree newspapers, and it looks like it may have some discussion about the future of the industry. A lot of the tired old hacks of the Sunday Funnies appear in the trailer (Jim Davis etc)

I think that comics are alive and well. Newspapers are dying. This is all good. It means that comics don't have to play the game of syndication with newspapers. It means that readership is self-selecting and the best strips rise to the top on their own, irrespective of what syndicates and publishers are doing. There will be no more hacks like Jim Davis endlessly cranking out the same tired old garbage and getting paid big bucks for it.

Comics are on the fast track going where we want music and movies to go: fully independent with no big-media pigopolists acting as choke points and gatekeepers.

[ Side note: the feed for Inman's strip is carried here on Uncensored in a hidden room called "The Oatmeal" ]

As a side note, I just learned that Bil Keane died last week. Now that there's no one around to get upset by the existence of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, will Spinn revive the strip?

The guy that does Pearls Before Swine has made some pretty harsh commentary about the current state of comics and the practice of handing off classic comics to relatives to just keep recycling ad nauseum.

I wouldn't exactly call User Friendly alive - unless there's been a change of status in the last six months I'm unaware of.

The guy that does Pearls Before Swine has made some pretty harsh
commentary about the current state of comics and the practice of
handing off classic comics to relatives to just keep recycling ad
nauseum.

In that respect, we might have reason to believe that the best days are ahead of us.

In the newspaper world, stale old comics get handed down, and the syndicates keep running them, because they are reliable old moneymakers. Meanwhile, fewer people even bother reading them every day because most of them are lousy.

In contrast, the readership of online comics is self-selecting. When a strip stops being entertaining for whatever reason, people stop reading it, and if the author was depending on it for income, it probably goes away. Fresh new strips can come out of anywhere and gain readership by word of mouth instead of having to score a big break with a syndicate.

Think about a strip like xkcd. There's no way any mainstream newspaper would have ever published something with stick figures. And yet xkcd is one of the more popular online strips -- popular enough that Randall Munroe to make a modest living off of it.

I doubt DFC will return. Spinn has really been in a decline for a while, sadly. He's just not motivated.

I doubt DFC will return. Spinn has really been in a decline for a
while, sadly. He's just not motivated.

I know how he feels. It's hard to stay motivated when you pour so much effort into creating a really cool web site but it gets ignored because all anyone wants to do anymore is screw around on Facebook.