Monday, December 17, 2007

Web Comickery

Added "Order of the Stick" to the list of links, it's a cool D&D-oriented webcomic. To call it that, though, is to damn it with faint praise.
My most interesting recent webcomic moment was back in October, when I went to the Small Press Expo in nearby Bethesda, MD. I had a nice chat with Kristofer Straub, the impressario of Starslip Crisis, and got a cool sketch in my copy of his book, Memnon Vanderbeam saying, "In the postmodern era, it is no longer possible to change the subject." This was a thrill, I've been a Kristofer Straub fan since the Checkerboard Nightmare days, and I remember when it used to be called Starshift Crisis. I grokked Straub before it was cool.
The quote is from a Laurie Anderson installation I saw years ago in a Hugo Boss prize exhibit on one of my all-to-infrequent trips to New York. I believe the line was delivered by an articulated wooden parrot, but I wouldn't swear to it, although there definitely was an articulated wooden parrot in the piece.
SPX (that's what we cool folks call the Small Press Expo) also featured a panel discussion, one of which was moderated by Josh Fruhlinger of the Comics Curmudgeon, which was nominally about formats, but inevitably wandered into the fields of comic economics, the merits and demerits of syndication, and how to judge quality. It was an interesting, necessarily inconclusive discussion.

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