While reading the latest “hey-they’re-making-comics-on-the-web-apparently” article (found via DD) I stumbled on yet another interesting comic that’s been running for a while, but which I stupidly missed: Kinokofry by Rebecca Clements. Weird but pretty. Check it out.

The Serendipity of the Web was a selling point in the mid ’90s when most of us starting hopping on. Now, I have a nagging anxiety that for every cool comic I stumble upon, there are another 1,000 I would have liked but will never see.

I love working on the graphic novel, but it’s meant less surfing and less involvement in the webcomics scene. Hoping to jump back in more after the last page is drawn in a couple of years.

The Webcomic Overlook takes a look back at a 9-year-old list I wrote of 10 suggestions for beginning webcartoonists. Won’t quibble with the article’s conclusions (whether I agree or not, they’re reasonable points) but it’s a brief, funny look back at a very different time — literally the Web’s first decade (post-Mosaic).

[via Journalista]

In other news: OMG, even his bees are winning awards now.

It seems almost redundant to link to something that had been featured with a direct link from the Google homepage, but it occurred to me that some of you, like me, may have been too busy with Comic-Con to do much surfing over the weekend and might have missed where that great Jim Lee logo was actually sending people.

Check out some of the very cool themes from indy comics and webcomics greats like Jim Woodring, Rich Stevens, Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, Gene Yang, Derek Kirk Kim, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, Lark Pien, Renee French, and many others.

We’re heading down to Comic-Con early Wednesday morning, and frantically getting ready tomorrow, so blog updates will be spotty at best starting tomorrow. Here are a few distractions in the meantime:

Merlin has a new hypercomic up, The Four Derangements. Gorgeous, inventive stuff as always.

Johanna Draper Carlson offers some in-depth thoughts on our recent Zot! Collection.

The gang at the Human Creativity Project sent along an adorable gift for our family in the mail, possibly in response to our recent discussion of see-through comics. (Thanks, HCP people!)

Our family’s in-depth review of 500 Days of Summer: We liked it. It was good.

Larry Marder has his own convention schedule up. Gotta see Larry!

And of course, for those of you going to Comic-Con you can find me Thursday at Noon interviewing Bryan Lee O’Malley on stage, and otherwise relaxing with the family this year. (Yay! Off years = no pressure). If anything else does come up, I’ll try to post it here, or for more timely updates, you can follow me on Twitter.

Sputnik Observatory launched yesterday. Cool site with lots of video interviews including a few with me from 2006 (note shark in background — it’s my old studio).

Be sure to pass your mouse over their logo once you get there. It made me happy (though I am easily impressed).

One of the cooler mini-comics I got at TCAF last month was The Would-Be Bridegrooms by Shawn Cheng. Looking at it this morning, I noticed a url on the back page and thought maybe I could link to an online version. But the link was to PartykaUSA.com which redirected to a “Daily Drawings” page which featured a number of artists including Shawn, and which, if I clicked at top could get me to a page where I could order Shawn’s mini-comics and the mini-comics of other interesting artists.

Okay. Partially useful.

Still, I wanted to show you guys some of Shawn’s comics, so I found a link to shawncheng.com in a sidebar on Partyka. Unfortunately, when I visited Shawn’s page, all the links seem to be to stand-alone images. Nothing to read, but at least it’ll give you some idea of Cheng’s visionary style.

Oh, and this might be Shawn’s Facebook page. nope.

Some cartoonists excel at promoting themselves online, providing one-stop portals with complete stories and tons of information. Some are more modest (or less comfortable making websites) and require a little more digging. And some may prefer to be elusive and cryptic for reasons they’re unlikely to ever explain.

I guess it takes all kinds, but as a part-time blogger, that first group sure makes my life easier.

Barry Deutsch notes that HarperCollins is now offering the first 100 pages of our recent 576 page Zot! Collection for free online. This is a good thing.

There was a time, not that long ago, when publishers were reluctant to offer any significant amount of published work online for free. Clearly though, it can help spread the word about good stories and art. Check out the comments from yesterday’s post regarding Carol Tyler’s 10-page preview for a demonstration. 

I remember when Understanding Comics was first published in 1993 and Kitchen Sink sent me to a trade show to promote it. We’d sent out mailings, we’d taken out ads, but the best promotion for the book we ever did was simply handing out a thousand copies to retailers.

Covers sell comics. Ads sell comics. But nothing sells comics better than the comics themselves.

Ah, Translation Software…

Catching the plane home from NYC tomorrow, but Heidi MacDonald has a great write-up at The Beat on a lot of the stuff that went on in the last few days, much of which I was able to catch despite only finding out about it at the last minute. So, um… basically, I’m letting The Beat do my work for me today.

Above, a picture of Shaun Tan and me at Books of Wonder on Sunday from the write-up.

“…Goldman started with a definition of what comics are: stories told with words and pictures”

[SXSW “Comics on Handhelds” panel – link via James Burns]

Dan Goldman is, I’m sure, using the above in the spirit of opening minds to comics’ range and flexibility. But under the image of the Watchmen “motion comic” it offers a grim reminder of how our conception of comics now can point us down some dark roads in the near future.

I don’t doubt that a lot of hard work and earnest creativity went into the building of the WMC, but if the future of comics is cheap pseudomovies on cell phones, you can count me out.