Couple of news-less days make Case a wacky boy!
Well, I’ve had a good old-fashioned stomach flu over the past couple of days which sort of kept me to the basics, resting and sleeping a lot. Which kind of pissed me off since it hasn’t quite been two months since my back’s been able to manage me getting back to a normal life. Having to return to a horizontal position and do nothing was incredibly frustrating.
Anyhow, in better news, my Australian pal Dan Beeston has opened a brand new website named Brushing Off Invisible Spiders, showcasing all of his different creative aspects and realisations, including his NEW WEEKLY WEBCOMIC (fear my use of caps!) entitled Hootie And The Alien. It’s just kicking off, two strips in, and considering the plans he has for the comic (which he’s been working on since Fall last year!) I think it’ll be something special. So visit, ye mongrels! I mean, um, friends!
In closing, I followed a link which had been supplied by BoxJam earlier this week about a program called Comictastic which, essentially, grabs your favourite comics from the web and displays them within the program’s browser frame. It’s causing quite a stir in the comic community, basically because the program is allowing users to view comics without visiting the comic’s web page. As you probably realise, this can keep comic artists from certain forms of financial gain, such as those who run ads on their site and depend on page views, or advertise different types of merchandise. Unlike I, some folks do the webcomic thing and try to make some sort of living off it, hoping that it will pay off in the long run, and you have to respect that. You have to respect the fact that what you find on the Internet is generally an alternative to what you find in comic books and newspapers, so if you appreciate the choice that webcartoonists give you, you have to understand their desire to be rewarded in the long run.
I have to echo Jeff Rowland’s (the WIGU guy, which I’m apparently not reading enough of) comments on this one, where the minute people rip off our comics in scripts they distribute to sell and make profit from, it becomes unacceptable. It’s common knowledge that a lot of tech-savvy fans create scripts that grab our comics and get automatically downloaded to their hard drives for easy viewing, and personally it doesn’t bother me. But in the case of Comictastic, the designers are charging 15$ for the full version; no compensation to the creators included on their list.
Don’t be fooled. True fans of webcomics support their favourite comics by visiting the websites.
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