This is the full 2-Day Workshop (given most recently at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan). 16 full hours of everything I can teach you through lectures and hands-on exercises.

An intense look at the art of telling stories visually.

Here’s the link to SIGN UP. As always, availability is limited. See you in December!

Here’s the latest mutation of the 24 Hour meme, this time from Down Under, James and Hania Lee’s 24 Flash animations completed just this weekend. Lots of funny and creative short shorts at the link.

The listing on YouTube is pretty comprehensive, so I’ll be lazy and reproduce it here:

All of these film shorts were created within a 24 hour period. Flash animation by James Lee. Music composition by Hania Lee.

Members of Newgrounds, deviantart and the web helped bring this film together, by providing ideas while I was broadcasting the whole thing live.

I animated everything in Flash, using some textures which were edited in Photoshop. The idea was inspired by Scott McCloud’s 24 hour comic.

Read more about my work on tarboy.com

I seem to remember that the first 24 hour animation contest (about a decade ago?) involved a single 24-second short. It’s telling that in a post-Flash world, a single animator (and musical partner) would even consider making 24 of the things in a single day, however brief some of them were. Very cool.

Way, way back in the deep recesses of the horrifying guilt-mountain that is my Inbox, I found an old email from one Michelangelo Cicerone forwarding the news of a very cool Historic Tale Construction Kit, which is essentially a Create Your Own Bayeux Tapestry tool. Give it a try if you’re so inclined.

On the night table: Top Shelf’s excellent alternative manga collection AX; Mario and Gilbert Hernandez’s good-old-fashioned twisted comic book adventure Citizen Rex; and Moto Hagio’s lyrical Drunken Dream from Fantagraphics.

To satisfy your weekly Greek webcomic quota, check out the handsomely-drawn Mused by Kostas Kiriakakis.

And finally, here’s an insidious video that’ll burrow its way into your skull forever, courtesy of Warren Ellis. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Have a great weekend.

Here’s a good stemwinder by Cory Doctorow from earlier this year (via Dirk) on the many complex ways copyright control legislation and information access are at war.

A lot of people in comics—writers, artists, publishers—are pinning their hopes on legal protections and new walled gardens like App Stores to restore some sense of stability and control to what looks increasingly like the same leaky boat scenario that’s affecting other creative fields.

It’s important, though, to consider the many ways that the “remedy” being proposed and implemented is far worse than the “disease” of widespread sharing.

I’ve always hoped that a culture of willing buyers and willing sellers, however small, can continue to emerge alongside file-sharing. But the key word was always willing; a concept increasingly at odds with the world Cory is rightly warning us about.

It’s a pretty funny site, and yes, I’ve seen the one with me in it too, though I think the one with Will Smith (above) is my favorite so far.

Mostly, though, I’m posting this because several people a day keep telling me about the site, so I figure I better link to it now or I’ll never hear the end of it!

Kudos to the guy at Microsoft who I’m pretty sure was the first to tell me about this latest collaborative mutation when I was up in Redmond last month.

Oh, you crazy Internet, you…

[Update: Actually today’s is my new favorite.]

Having carefully surveyed the competition, I can confidently say that this is the best comic about collateralized debt obligations you’ll read all week.

A bit under the weather, so real blogging will resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s a thought experiment that crossed my mind this morning: If Walt Disney had been a much better animator, would he have gone on to be a cog in someone else’s machine?

I’m off to New York again this week for a talk at NYU.

Not open to the public, sorry. Just for freshmen within the Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies programs. (Basically, if you can come, you probably already knew about it and have all the details)

But hey, in the meantime, here are two gorgeous music videos with similar vibes: 1 | 2. (via Lori Matsumoto and Mark Siegel).

See you again Sept 6.

A couple of new angles on navigation this week. On the Web side, a nicely-rendered side-scroller by Cody Coltharp, and on the mobile side, a tilting viewer by Karrie Fransman & Jonathan Plackett.

[Via comments: The javascript for the side-scroller viewer was written by Jean-Nicolas Jolivet, originally as a panoramic photo viewer.]

From Mexico, a well-told silent comic by Edgar Delgado, using some extended page sizes and storytelling tricks practically designed to make me happy (and maybe you too).

Finally, a moving good bye from Satoshi Kon, a creative giant of Japanese animation whose work I was still in the process of exploring when I heard the news of his death from cancer. I look forward to finishing my journey through his stories. I regret there won’t be any more.

Tokyo Godfathers arrived in the mail yesterday.

When I was reviewing small press and mini-comics in the late ’80s, I was excited by what I saw as the closest thing (pre-Internet) to absolute freedom in comics.

By going completely outside any traditional markets, and often sold only through the mail and at local cons, these photocopied comics could go in any direction their artists wanted them to, not just what the market would allow.

None of the artists expected to get rich, but we readers knew that whatever showed up in our mailbox was going to be exactly what the artist really wanted to it to be.

Some artists stuck with light gag comics. Some produced one or two minis and vanished. Some went on to mainstream(?) success like Chester Brown. Some like Matt Feazell, John Porcellino, and Steve Willis became mini-comics legends and inspired others to make their own homemade comics.

And then there was Armageddonquest by Ronald Russell Roach.

Warren Ellis said it best:

ARMAGEDDONQUEST squirms and thrashes in a crawlspace it dug out with its bare talons, partway between the early graphic novel and classic “outsider” art. It’s the comics version of the demon-haunted work of the young Daniel Johnston, raw, passionate, demented, electric.

I really enjoyed Ron Roach’s crazy, wonderful comic when it came out, but I never expected to see it again. 900 pages is a massive hurdle for something as idiosyncratic as this. But then along came Kickstarter.

I was delighted to be the first donor. This is a worthwhile project. Please consider joining in the effort.