Little Bobbo Lost
Bobbo’s sudden disappearance in the simian universe closely mirrors my own recent plunge into the endless abyss of online gaming when I picked up World of Warcraft last Friday and proceeded to fall into a rabbit’s hole of time suckage.
There I am at 3 a.m. trying to level my Dwarf Hunter “Oakface” up to level 5 on the Dark Iron server.
It’s as goddamned dorky as it sounds. I blame Brian over atVGN Radio and of course Penny Arcade for stoking this particular geek fire. When am I gonna get my life back?
My own site Terribly-Happy (no link and you’ll see why) is currently down because of a mistake I made with Network Solutions. (Arguably using Network Solutions in the first place was my biggest mistake.)
This company had the balls to call me and ask why I was transferring my domain to another registrar, then offer to match the $8.95 price, down from their robbery-like $34-a-year. To which I asked the nice lady on the phone why I wasn’t offered that price in the first place. That would have kept me around.
So then she tells me that they can get me back up and running immediately if I stay with NetSol. Or, she says, I can wait a week until they approve my transfer and then another day or two until my new registrar gets me going.
Now, I ask you this: If they can look up my phone number and call me and try to sweet talk me into staying into the fold so quickly, can’t they also just flip a switch and approve the transfer just as quickly? Can the buttons for these disparate functions be that far apart?
Nope. They’d rather my site twist in the wind for a week. Which is exactly why I’m letting the transfer go through. I can put up with a week of no site if it means getting out from under their assy weight.
Terribly Happy should be back by this weekend or early next week. Somewhere down the line this domain will move out of there, too.
Seeing you outside the funny pages
Well.
I’m not sure what to make of this New York Times article.
I’m sure people much smarter than me about Web comics will have plenty to say about the author’s apparent lack of understanding about online comics, their history or their appeal (for readers and authors).
What keeps getting repeated in the article is the whole “Feel of the page” bullshit that frankly I just don’t get. I love books and I love comic books, but when it comes to my daily comics, I’d much rather see them in color online than in their shrunken, black and white form as they appear in most newspapers (mine included).
And while the article touches briefly on payment structures online, she fails to note how much more convenient it is to find your favorite comic online (and to follow it over time through its archive) than to hunt for old newspaper issues or to go to the comic book store and buy a book of them.
I’m not even going to start about how much easier it is to create and publish a comic online than to try to get your comic into a newspaper or independently print publish.
So… I dunno. This feels like a review of an entire genre of art from an outsider, and while it’s interesting, it really isn’t particularly insightful or relevant to the comics community.
What do you think? E-mail us if you have any thoughts.
World Wide Web-based Comical Strips
I love actual comic books and strips as much as the next guy, but I’d have to agree with Omar that and Mr. McCloud about the future of comics being online. Any issues a reader has with being able to see the comic on the website comfortably are the artist’s fault entirely. The issue with going online with a comic is that either the artist or someone very close to them has to know some web design. We’re lucky in this respect that I happened to have a bit of thirst for code when I first started out blogging.
I think there are a lot of neat things that people could do with their comics just based on a few things that I’ve seen. There was this Hellboy comic which I thought was really cool with its interactive qualities. I’ve seen some comics that use animation in minimal ways like here and here. If I remembered how to use Flash effectively, you could be sure that we would experiment a little more here at Space Monkeys!
I’m just very optimistic about the future of webcomics. I got to reading a thread on the Buzzcomix forums about whether it’s likely there’ll ever be another webcomic phenomenon like Penny-Arcade or if the medium will ever be more recognized as a staple of entertainment along with film, television, and books. I think that its accessibility and the fact that for the most part people are doing this free of charge just in hopes of having their stuff seen are things that are really going to help down the line. Most webartists that I know of are very cool people and I think the community as a whole has very good intentions. So we’ll just have to see.
Oh yeah…
Just wanted to remind you we do comics around here. And by “do comics,” I mean we draw them sometimes. Right now I’m working on one so it seems like it’ll be a late Friday comic.
Discussion ¬