It has taken me two full days to get to (blah) a work conference–complete with two canceled flights and a flat tire–so let’s hit this week’s highlights!
Jim Zub on the Changing Creator-Owned Comic Market
The MUST read this week for anyone interested in the economics of the publishing industry and creator-owned comics. Jim Zub breaks down the changes over the past five years in creator-owned comic market after the recent release of his comic Wayward, and it’s fascinating to read how things translate to dollars and cents for the creators. It’s exciting to see that the independent market, fueled by Image’s boom in the past few years, may be more and more viable for creators.
Creator Interview on New Series Headspace and Getting into Killers’ Heads
It only takes a quick look through the true crime genre to realize how many people are fascinated by the nature of evil and what drives people to commit awful acts. Headspace, a digital comic from Monkeybrain that is coming to print via IDW, is about a sheriff who slowly begins to realize that his life–and the whole town–is actually in the mind of a serial killer. I don’t even know how one starts to come to that hypothesis, but the concept (plus an undying affection for Jennifer Lopez’s The Cell with a similar idea) is unique enough to get me to check it out.
EI8HT and Rafael Albuquerque’s Coloring: A Lesson in Storytelling
This article from ComicsAlliance does an awesome breakdown of the use of color as a means of storytelling in EI8HT, a sci-fi comic done by Rafael Albuquerque and co-written with Mike Johnson. The use of coloring theory to set mood and inform a comic’s storytelling is so often glossed over, so getting to delve into this is a real treat. (Spoilers for EI8HT’s debut issue!)