Just in time for Election Day! David Rees is most recently the author of Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror: 2001-2008. Condition of Mr. Segundo: Struggling to cast his vote. Author: David Rees Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming] EXCERPT FROM SHOW: Correspondent: I wanted to also ask about the use of white space, and often the lack of white space, with some of the panels that have this extraordinarily long rant that one of the characters is conducting versus using the clip art and shifting it to the right hard edge of the panel or the left hard edge of the panel, or what not. What is your criteria in terms of white space and filling up the panel? Is it contingent upon the words you have to deliver for any particular strip? Rees: You probably don’t know this, but the U.S. government allots all political cartoonists a given amount of white space in a year, and a lot of budgetary issues. If you don’t use your white space in a year, you don’t get it back the following year. There’s no rollover white space. Correspondent: Yeah, yeah, it’s the appropriations and the earmarks I’ve heard. Rees: So you have to really challenge yourself every year to use just enough white space, so that they’ll give you more white space next year. You have to submit this form. A white space form. Form JKL-202. And you submit this form. And they will give you more white space. And so as a political cartoonist — I mean, if you’re registered with the government, which I am, which all political cartoonists are supposed to be, if you find yourself at the end of the year that you haven’t used enough white space, then you go on a big rant. So there isn’t much white space around. You know what I mean? Correspondent: Sure. Sure. Rees: Because you don’t want to go over your limit immediately. Because you’ll be penalized. Correspondent: But with all the “fucks” within the rant, that can be very problematic. I know you’ve gotten into trouble based off of that. Because of the specific requirements of this act. Rees: Right. You’re referring to the Left Wing Political Cartoonists Profanity Allotment Act of 2003? Correspondent: Yeah, yeah, I am. The number of “fucks” are quite frenetic. Exactly. Rees: Well, I trade on the gray market. I trade — you know, cap and trade with carbon emissions? They set up the same thing for cartoonists, where you get a given amount of profanity. Fuck, goddam, asshole, shit, cocksucker, bitch, all that stuff. And then if you want to use more, you buy a set on the International Profanity Market. You buy a certain amount from other cartoonists. Correspondent: They come in 200 units, I think. Rees: Right. Well, it’s 200 syllables. You don’t actually buy the profanity by the word. You buy it by the syllable. So “motherfucker” is four syllables. You can use those four syllables to deploy one “motherfucker” or four “asses.” So I usually just buy them from cartoonists like Bil Keane, who does The Family Circus. He never uses his allotment. In a year, he never says “fuck” in The Family Circus more than ten times. So I will buy him out usually at the beginning of the year, so that I have enough to get me through a season. Less

David Heatley is most recently the author of My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. Condition of Mr. Segundo: On the waiting list for a brain transplant. Author: David Heatley Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming] EXCERPT FROM SHOW: Correspondent: I wanted to also talk with you about your “Family History” strip. I mean, it’s probably the closest thing in this collection to a hip-hop montage. You have, of course, the many births with the common images. A mother — one of your ancestors — giving birth with the “UNNNNH!” And you have a marriage with the “I do.” The swathed baby who is being held up by the white hands. And the like. I wanted to ask why repetitive images, or a hip-hop montage, seemed the best way to approach your own particular past. Heatley: It’s funny. I never would have — that phrase “hip-hop montage” is strange to me. But it also rings true. So, yeah, thanks for that. You know, the repetitive thing is about — once I had my own baby, it was a realization that every single person that’s been born in my family history was this baby at one point. And every mother of that baby grunted in the hospital, and pushed it out. So it’s sort of honoring all these faceless women who have been lost. And it’s also — I think that strip is about, if you take any one of those babies, you can make a book this long about them. And so I’m just one of the babies in that book. And here’s my entire story. And I do it with my daughter at the end. Instead of doing one panel for her life, I wind up doing four pages, focusing on that day. So you could do that for any of those babies too. You could focus in on what was happening that day when they were born. Correspondent: How did you settle upon the four Ns for the “UNNNNH?” Heatley: (laughs) Correspondent: I’m really curious. I mean, did you try out three? Did you try out five? Heatley: I did, yeah. Correspondent: Did that just look right? Four Ns really cut that particular verisimilitude? Heatley: (laughs) Yeah, it did. You know, it’s like poetry. It felt right. Correspondent: (laughs) Heatley: That’s a great question though. Four Ns. I didn’t even know they were consistent. Correspondent: Because it’s four Ns in almost every….I mean, we could dig it out right here. It’s four Ns almost every single time. Less

Tonight on GeekNights we review The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa and inspired by Carl Barks. We also report on a somewhat humorous listener e-mail, and Funimation is suing some bootleggers. Scott’s Thing - The Real Prince of Persia Rym’s Thing - Papa Loves Mambo Less

Tonight on GeekNights we make our contribution to politics in comics month with an episode about political manga. We mostly discuss First President of Japan, Sanctuary, and Eagle. In the news, we are probably finally going to rock Anime Boston ‘09, and Studio Ghibli’s DS game is off the hook. Scott’s Thing - Ghostly Swim Rym’s Thing - Johnny Wander Less

Can't see the video? Watch this video now in a browser or download this video now. Today on Boing Boing tv, we continue our SPAMasterpiece Theater series, featuring author, PC, and minor television personality John Hodgman, whose new book, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE launches next week. Hodgman himself describes this series as the dramatization of "true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you -- what we call SPAM." Today's installment: Barrister Abbey and Diana Khan in "Wuthering Wire Transfers," a tempting tale of financial transactions and naked lust that requires your soonest response. A note from our musical director: The adaptation of Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau: Fanfare" (1735) which opens today's episode was remixed in flagrante 8-bit by Hamhocks Buttermilk Johnson. * Previously on Boing Boing tv: SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol. I Less

Tonight on GeekNights we response to a somewhat fair criticism of one of our panels. In the news, we went to the NYAF, and they’re really making the Lupin Car. Scott’s Thing - Mamboleo Rym’s Thing - Rock and Roll Bomber Less

Gotham Chopra, CCO of Virgin Comics, talks about scouting talented individuals from India to come work with some of the greatest filmmakers in the world. Listen as Gotham talks about his creative inspiration and his future projects. Less

Gotham Chopra, CCO of Virgin Comics, talks about scouting talented individuals from India to come work with some of the greatest filmmakers in the world. Listen as Gotham talks about his creative inspiration and his future projects. Less

Check out part two of Jimmy Aquino's interview of Kyle Piccolo. Remember to rate and subscribe to KYLE PICCOLO: COMIC SHOP THERAPIST and check out Jimmy's show at http://comicnewsinsider.com and his blog at http://www.jaquino.com Distributed by Tubemogul. Less

Jimmy Aquino from the rockin' podcast Comic News Insider interviews Kyle Piccolo about his role in the shop, his views on comics and the psychology behind comic book reading. Will Jimmy's questioning reveal more than he planned? Watch and find out! Remember to rate and subscribe to KYLE PICCOLO: COMIC SHOP THERAPIST and check out Jimmy's show at http://comicnewsinsider.com and his blog at http://www.jaquino.com Distributed by Tubemogul. Less

Web, google, comics Wade Roush wrote: Over the last week, I’ve had several people tell me that the most interesting thing about Google Chrome isn’t the browser itself, but the way Google chose to present it to the world: via a comic book. Indeed, for at least a day or two, Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic—which was accidentally leaked to journalists over the Labor Day weekend, before Google’s official release of the software—was the only information available about the project. Which meant that thousands of Internet users, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives, found themselves reading an extended comic—a genre familiar to millions of adult manga readers in Japan but still mainly relegated to the kids’ sections of U.S. bookstores. I wondered aloud in a column last week whether all that exposure might help put the comic genre back on the map as a vehicle for serious fiction and non-fiction work. On Monday, I got a chance to put that question to Scott McCloud himself. The author of a bestselling trilogy of comic books about the comic genre’s history, future, and practice—Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006)—McCloud is both the profession’s leading theoretician and one of its most versatile practitioners. He’s also a true geek, and has had his eye on the Web for more than a decade, writing and drawing about its potential as the medium for a new generation of comics that would be liberated from the printed page by emerging interface paradigms such as hyperlinking, zooming, and scrolling. At its most basic, after all, a comic is just a sequence of pictures that tells a story. And computers and the Web offer many new ways to create and arrange these sequences and to move from panel to panel—they supply what McCloud called, in Reinventing Comics, an “infinite canvas.” Which helps explain how Google was able to interest McCloud in the Chrome project. McCloud says, as you’ll read below, that one of the aesthetic ideas driving the Chrome developers (though this idea didn’t make it into his 38-page comic about the browser) was to “sweep the path clean”—essentially, to get out of the way of content developers and Web users by reducing the software’s onscreen footprint, as well as its functional bells and whistles, to the bare minimum. That’s music to the ears of an artist like McCloud. Here’s the full text of our interview. Xconomy: Tell me how the comic came about. How did Google get you on board, and how did you do the research and gather the visual materials you needed? Scott McCloud: I was first approached by Eric Antonow at Google. He had actually had me out to speak at the Googleplex in August of 2007, during the tour for Making Comics, my last book. He knew that Chrome was coming up—they had been working on it for a year and a half —and he had a sense that comics might be a good way to help explain the project. But beyond that, it really only took shape when I came up to the campus and we started brainstorming about it. This was Eric, and another Googler, Anna-Christina Douglas, and we were joined by a third, Mark Sabec. In brainstorming we considered a lot of possible forms. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if it would be print or online. We didn’t know what sort of length. We weren’t sure what the focus would be. But gradually we came to agreement on what would be an effective strategy. And then the research was primarily these video interviews that we did with about 20 engineers. These were substantial interviews, running on average about 30 to 40 minutes, some longer. And they had markers and a whiteboard and would occasionally use it, but that was about it for visuals. It was mostly just these explanations, which we then culled through and tried to find a common narrative. I took this sort of raw transcript and pared it down. But [it was] still pretty rough around the edges. And I tried to pound it into a coherent, connected story and then make it visual. X: You must have had to wait around for the developers to finish certain things about the look and feel of Chrome before you could represent it in the comic. SM: There were only one or two visual elements that we were hanging on—one or two icons that changed. But for the most part, its shape was concrete enough that I was able to work concurrently in that last couple of months. For example, they knew the shape of the tabs. I wasn’t drawing screen-shot-level detail. My cartoon version of Chrome was …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

The first annual Comic Geek Speak Super Show has come and gone.  Follow us along as we work our way through the weekend, interviewing creators, fellow podcasters, and celebrate that which we have in common, comics.  Listen carefully for a very special contest for a very special prize. CGS Super Show M.I.M.E.S RadioWayne Podcast 501st Legion - Vader's Fist Garrison Carida PKD Media Jun Bob Kim Ursula Wilde Steve Bryant Katie Cook Half Hour Wasted Michael Loria Mumblepuss N3RDCast Mouse Guard David Petersen Less

wwwade, comics, google Wade Roush wrote: While the tech-blog world is exhausting itself testing and writing about Google Chrome, the new open-source Web browser released by the search giant on Tuesday, I’m still just having fun paging back and forth through the 38-page Scott McCloud Web comic that Google commissioned to explain the whole project. A lot of Silicon Valley companies, when they’re launching big new products, will rent a hotel ballroom, erect a glitzy set, and invite a bunch of journalists and pundits to a scripted dog-and-pony show. Chrome’s launch may mark the first time in history that a company simply hired a comic book artist instead. Google couldn’t have found a likelier candidate than McCloud, who is the author of Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), and has written (or should I say drawn?) extensively about how the Web is expanding the boundaries of comics as a genre. It’s a perfect pairing to see McCloud—who has done comics on topics as technical as the constraints imposed on digital-comics authors by HTML tables—writing about something as fundamental to the Web as the browser itself. If you haven’t heard the story behind Chrome already, it’s Google’s attempt to update the very notion of the Web browser—which was, after all, invented 15 years ago—to reflect the realities of the Web 2.0 era. These days, if you’re on the Web, chances are you’re interacting with an application rather than simply consuming content. “People are watching and loading videos, chatting with each other, playing Web-based games…all these things that didn’t exist when browsers were first created,” Google software engineer Pam Greene points out in McCloud’s comic. (She’s one of the many Googlers whose words McCloud drew upon for the comic. His drawings of her remind me a lot of the Jodie/Julie character in McCloud’s terrific experimental Web comic, The Right Number .) Chrome is designed to make such applications run faster and more reliably, and to protect users and their computers in the process—in part, by separating the activity occurring on each open browser tab into its own process, as if it were a separate program. (As McCloud explains, current browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox attend to the scripts running in each tab one at a time, moving between them serially—which is why the more tabs you have open, the slower your browser gets.) I won’t go into the real details—plenty of other bloggers and journalists have done that this week. What’s amazing about McCloud’s Web comic is that he’s able to distill some fairly high-level points about things like multi-process architecture, memory fragmentation, rendering engines, virtual machines, hidden class transitions in Javascript, and incremental garbage collection into a few panels in a comic, and make it all feel fun and non-threatening. Take it from a longtime technology writer: explaining a new technology’s significance while getting the details right and keeping it all accessible to your Aunt Mae is a difficult feat. But a lot of us tech journalists could take lessons from McCloud, who doesn’t bring in a concept unless he can clarify through a clever combination of graphics, iconography, and text. So, a lot of what I’m saying here boils down to one craftsman admiring another. Envying, even: the comic medium gives McCloud access to a lot of visual devices and idioms that are denied to us lowly copywriters. One of McCloud’s frequent tricks is to make the Google engineers part of the very diagrams he uses to explain Chrome’s new features. Every time you open a blank tab, for example, Chrome populates it with small, clickable tiles representing your most-visited Web pages (the program figures that you were probably on your way to one of those pages anyway). To explain what’s happening on this page, McCloud puts a couple of Googlers inside the tiles, not unlike those washed-up actors who used to appear on Hollywood Squares. In other places, the Google guides are climbing around on flow-chart boxes or perched on the borders of the comic’s panels. Given how long McCloud has been working on various forms of Web comics and how popular his books have been, it’s odd that his example hasn’t caught on more widely. It’s true that traditional comic publishers like Marvel are finally using Flash and other Web-based technologies to put their classic superhero comics online. And in the non-Web world, comics and graphic novels are still in the midst of a renaissance that’s been underway for more than a decade now, even crossing over into film (e.g., 2003’s American Splendor, based on the comic books of Harvey Pekar). But I don’t have the sense that many comic artists are creating the kinds of new Web-based experiences McCloud was hoping they would back in 2000-20001, when he published “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” a series of Web comics that continued the themes in Reinventing Comics—especially, his speculations about the future of digital comics. In one great strip from “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” for example, McCloud examined how the endlessly scrolling nature of a Web page—he called it the “infinite canvas”—might allow comic artists to play with reader’s expectations about the sequential nature of comics, perhaps by connecting panels via unconventional types of lines, links, paths, or trails. The Right Number used a unique zooming interface to get from one panel to the next—and this idea has found an unlikely reincarnation in the form of Seadragon, an experimental Microsoft program that uses zooming to ease the navigation of massive amounts of graphical information. But while software engineers and information architects may be busy experimenting in these directions, I’m not aware of a lot of artists who are. Perhaps Web comics aren’t flowering (outside of McCloud’s opus) because drawing well is simply harder than writing well. Or perhaps it’s because we still equate comics with Superman and Batman. But a blogger at the Dublin, Ireland, Web design company iQ Content noted this week that the usual association between comics and low-brow superhero stories is a Western thing. “In some cultures, notably Japan, comics (or Manga) are not only an accepted form of entertainment for people of all ages, they are used as product instruction manuals and even on government tax forms,” iQ Content senior analyst John Wood wrote. That sounds pretty smart to me. There are some cases where you just have to RTFM, as they say—and I think we’d all be happier if the M stood for Manga. Not everyone is enchanted by the McCloud comic. It has already inspired a savage (but amusing) parody over at the website of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which argues that the comic simply panders to Google’s geeky constituents, and that some software concepts are so arcane that they don’t lend themselves well to illustrations. And there have been a few complaints that at 38 pages, McCloud’s comic is too long. But I’m with Wood, who writes, “Personally, I’d rather wade through a 30+ page comic than 15 pages of technical detail, randomly salted with marketing bumpf.” In short, the comic leaves a stronger, clearer impression than any writeup could have. Now we get to see whether Chrome is really as shiny as it seems in McCloud’s drawings. Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail Less

In this special episode of The Stack Alex talks with 2008 Eisner Nominee Rafael Grampa. First Rafael talks about his origins in motion graphics comics and the journey to creating his own comic book. Next he and Alex talk about his recent Eisner Nomination for Best Anthology. Finishing off Rafael talks about the unique qualities of international comics and why he thinks they're better than ever now. Be sure to check out Mesmo Delivery! Less

They call themselved The Speakers of Geek and they host Comic Geek Speak and are producing the Comic Geek Speak Super Show 2008 .  More than a convention, the Super Show is a gathering of the community of comic artists, writers and fans in a venue unlike any others.  Ken and Art talk about their expectations going in, who's going to be there, and why it's going to be the best con of the year.  CGS Super Show Alternate Reality HHW Presents: Who Reads the Watchmen Less

Alex talks with Grant Morrison about his new web-series Mahaberata (MBX) with Virgin Comics. Morrison tells us that this new project is not a comic book, but a web-based animated series. Currently there are 32 episodes scheduled. Morrison talks about why he chose to do this interesting project with Virgin Comics, and the ancient sanscret Indian epic poem that the series is based on. Next we take a brief look at the MBX trailer. Finishing up we hear about Morrison's ideas on his future with DC Comics and life after Final Crisis. Don't miss it! Be sure to watch The Stack three times a week, and look for our bonus episodes on Thursday's! Tell us what you think. You can comment below or email us at tips@pulpsecret.com Less

In this special episode of The Stack Pete talks with Hellblazer writer Andy Diggle. Andy talks about discovering comics through Alan Moore and his initial run on Hellblazer. Then Pete and Andy talk about Andy's take on John Constantine and Hellblazer. Don't miss it! Less

Peter David is most recently the author of Tigerheart. Condition of the Show: Investigating claimed nemeses of Goliath. Author: Peter David Subjects Discussed: On being prolific, producing work quickly, writing stories set in expansive universe, reacting to a universal construct, working with mythos, the Fallen Angel universe, the Star Trek: New Frontier books, Joseph Campbell and Star Wars, Willow, fundamental tropes in storytelling, whether or not all stories are derivative, retinkering the Peter Pan formula for Tigerheart, the advantages of pastiche, James Barrie, Don Quixote, the Great Ormond Street Childrens Hospital’s litigious actions towards Peter Pan adaptations, emulating Barrie’s voice, the unproducable nature of Barrie’s Peter Pan play, the advantages of dream narratives, the conversational nature of the comic book script medium, cameo appearances and throwaway side characters in Tigerheart, verisimilitude, managing numerous characters in a universe, story elements that originate from the protagonist, speculative double entendres to George Bush, adjusting comic storylines as sales figures come in, spicing things up in Fallen Angel, keeping a comic book marketable and other commercial demands, David’s twelve-year run on the Hulk, boosting sales, the role of the comic book editor, David’s exclusive Marvel contract, Tennessee Williams, unique stories and salable stories, and coordinating storylines on other comic books. EXCERPT FROM SHOW: Correspondent: I’m wondering though if there has ever been an instance in your comic career, in which an editor has come to you and said, “Hey, Peter, the sales for this particular title are flagging. What can we do to raise things up?” Has this ever an influence? David: Sure. Of course it’s an influence. I mean, look, when it comes to — particularly my work-for-hire material — my job at the end of the day is to do two things. As far as the publisher is concerned. This is purely my job as far as the publisher is concerned, okay? Number one: Turn in a publishable script. And number two: Do everything that is within my power to write a book that will sell. Okay? Because I could turn in absolutely kickass scripts that aren’t going to sell for crap. But I feel to a certain degree that part of my job is to try and do everything I can to keep the book marketable. I’ve been doing that my entire comic book career. When I was writing Hulk, during my initial twelve-year run, I regularly had access to sales figures ahead of time. Three, four months ahead of time. Because that’s how far ahead we were soliciting. And they were incredibly instructional. Because what would happen is, I would be aware of a sales drop months ahead of time. Months ahead of time. So that I would have the Hulk in a particular incarnation going through a particular series of events. If I saw sales starting to flag, I’d say to myself, “Okay. That incarnation of the Hulk seems to be running its course. Time to come up with something else.” So if you want to have an idea of when sales were starting to drop during my twelve-year run, at any particular time, look to a point where the Hulk undergoes some kind of transformation, backdate yourself about six months and that’s when I was looking at the sales figures, going, “Okay. We have a drop.” The problem nowadays is that we don’t know sales figures until after the book is already on the stands. So instead of having a three to four month early warning system, so that I can course correct ahead of time, we are always behind the curve by three to four months. Because we don’t know the sales numbers until at least two months after the book has come out. I mean, you know, we see the sales numbers on ICv2 or whatever it is. That’s when I see the sales numbers. We see those sales numbers come out two to three months after the book is on the stands, plus we’re soliciting three months down the line. So you can find yourself in free-fall before you’re aware of the fact that you’ve got any kind of attrition problem. Because every book’s always going to have attrition. Every book. Every book. There’s no stopping it. There’s always going to be. You’re going to get a build. And then it’s going to level off. And then it’s going to start to drop. Always. No matter what the book is. Always. The thing I was able to do on Hulk is, when I saw it start to drop, I would say, “Okay. Time to do something different.” And I could come up with a new angle on The Hulk that would boost sales. Because we’d have people going, “Oh, they’re doing something new and different with The Hulk? Let’s see.” As it is, I can’t course correct. And it’s incredibly frustrating. Correspondent: But I’m also wondering if some of the stuff that you do with, say, Fallen Angel — I mean, you had a post on your blog recently in which a gentleman couldn’t purchase it from his neighborhood comic store. Because he was the only person purchasing the issue. David: Buying it, yeah. Correspondent: So for something like this, is Fallen Angel more of an unfettered territory to write in? David: It’s unfettered territory. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see sales be brought up. Less

Tonight on GeekNights we discuss The Surrogates from Top Shelf. In the news, we’re doing lots of panels at ConnectiCon, Otakon, PAX, and some other conventions. Also, Viz is bringing more Urasawa, and Neil is writing some Batman. Scott’s Thing - Mainichi Apologizes Rym’s Thing - Not AMVs, JMVs! Less