The webcomics blog about webcomics

Dammit, I Knew I Forgot Something Today

Oh, yeah — I update the blog every weekday. Right.

  • Missed it, but Dirk Deppey caught it: DJ Coffman‘s got the latest on Platinum/WOWIO non-payments. Key bit that jumped out at me:

    [Platinum head] Scott Rosenberg use to say to me a lot “Perception is reality.” He showed a lot of passion for promoting Drunk Duck and letting the creators do their own thing there and not interfere with the site. But now the PERCEPTION is that he did, or somebody there did, see this place as a mine for young creators. Many roped into contracts with that mobile side, not paid … lied to, as the above email suggests. The truth though is that Platinum Studios is poorly, poorly managed. And right now, there’s just no money to be had. They’re holding on for that big deal to come through, and it just might. And that’s ALL they care about. But at what cost?

    So we at Fleen are forced to ask again: have any creators been paid by WOWIO for Q2 yet? Answers on a postcard.

  • Okay, whose heart skipped a beat at the sight of photo-rendered “Dark” Esther De Groot? Look for Esther & Sarah’s ‘zine to be all fumetti-stylin’ SGR for the rest of the week.
  • A philosophical musing now, prompted by an email from a reader who identifies himself only as “Andrew”, regarding a videogame that I had not heard of (I have no game appliance in my home, and confess my interest in the medium is mostly sparked by new Civ iterations):

    I know this is old news, but I’ve barely seen any notice in webcomicsland — Penny Arcade plugged Braid, but no one’s pointed out that the art bears the unmistakable stamp of David Hellman from A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible.

    Unmistakeable stamp indeed, Andrew — the screens I’ve now gone and looked up for Braid are a welcome breath of ALILBTDII-style goodness from Hellman.

    The question occurs to me, can videogames of an episodic nature (like On The Rain-Slick etc., or BONE) be considered a branching or outgrowth or form of webcomickry? Considering that a webcomicish (and yet … more) enterprise like SBEmail is also almost a game-lite (what with all the hidden things to find), we’ve got a really blurry line.

    Looking back to last year’s Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, the backlash against Steve Purcell was, as far as I can see, motivated more by the extraordinarily sporadic and slight updates, and not by the fact it was essentially an on-rails version of the Sam & Max game. We’ve already established a consensus that webcomics and indy (print) comics have largely merged into one entity — how much broader can the category become? Your thoughts, please.

No WOWIO payment yet, sadly, but we just made a comic about it in celebration of our 700th SORE THUMBS comic: http://www.sorethumbsonline.com/d/20081015.html

[…] up on our thoughts about the blurring line between webcomics and episodic games, part two of On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness drops […]

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