Marvel Comics has a Create Your Own Comic tool that lets you put together either a simple 3-panel strip or an entire 22-page comic book. You don’t actually draw anything, but you choose layouts, backgrounds, characters and objects. You can re-size everything and layer objects on top of each other. It’s great for trying one’s hand at designing a layout that tells a story effectively. So write your comic book and start designing!
Smith Magazine has another Harvey Pekar comic with drawings by Sean Pryor. It’s called Searchin’. I buy every book Pekar publishes. His collected editions keep me fascinated for weeks because I try to read them slowly to make them last.
Pekar makes comic books out of the ordinary. Of course they are much more interesting than anything Marvel has published in forty years. He’s actually one of America’s finest short story writers. No, wait, he is America’s finest short story writer.
I don’t think there is a more significant American comic book writer than Harvey Pekar. Now he is making comics on the web. Smith Magazine offers the first installment of what promises to be a series. It’s called The Pekar Project.
The first story is Pekar & Crumb: Talkin’ ’bout Art. It’s drawn by Tara Seibel.
This might be the best thing on the web today.
Robert Berry is adapting Ulysses by James Joyce into web comic form. It’s very watercolory and seems to capture that disjointed free-floating narrative of the novel pretty well.
I found this via Literary Kicks.
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond
This is a book by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden that leads the reader through a full tutorial in writing and drawing comics. It includes many examples and information about what materials to use for your comics. There are 15 lessons in all which cover everything from writing your story, to laying out your panels, to lettering for dialog.
DC Comics picked Neil Gaiman to write the final two issues of their monthly Detective Comics. The two-part series is called Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? It chronicles the death of Batman. This July, both issues of the comic will go on sale in a hardcover version. After a period of no Batman comics, DC intends to reboot the franchise with new stories. That sounds interesting.
The Gaiman story about Batman’s death sounds fascinating and the artwork looks incredible. The issues were pencilled by Andy Kubert and inked by Scott Williams. This looks like Batman comics just the way I like to see them.
Wired.com has a nice lengthy interview with Neil Gaiman about the creation of the story and his perspective on turning great comicbooks into movies.
