10/5: End-of-Week News Roundup

Back in the game! Let's get some odds and ends out of the way first.

Happy birthday, Mark Mekkes!
Mike Strang, creator of Platinum Studios' Weird Adventures in Unemployment, now written and drawn by Brandon J. Carr, is still not happy about being squeezed out. His account does make interesting reading, but I'm not sure it's as flattering to himself as he believes.

The new ComicMix is here, and its proprietary reader is here too. I'll leave the interface critique to Joey, except to vehemently second him on the matter of RSS feeds... RSS is a must in today's marketplace: more and more hardcore readers like me are relying upon it. The content of ComicMix is too new to call, really, but I think a lot of it will stand or fall on how thoroughly the creators, as well as their publisher, embrace "this Internet thing."

Simulated Comic Product has a program out called Boxen for the making of panel borders (assuming you only want rectangular borders-- but then, few cartoonists are really pushing those boundaries lately, it seems). Requires .Net 2.0, which means that Mac loyalist Gisele is unlikely to try it out and let us know how well it works. What about... you?

I'm mostly linking this so I can find it later when somebody asks "Did anybody ever do a really extreme animated panel in a webcomic?" (Thanks to Xaviar.)

Great news: How to Make Webcomics now has four authors.

One of those authors, Dave Kellett, had a really great week this week with his "Starbucks sequence" (beginning here.) I'm not gonna be able to declare "favorites of the day" this week but Kellett would almost certainly have made it with Monday's or Tuesday's installment.

Hmm, and this might've done it for Wednesday. Ethan is a lot funnier when not actually ruining the lives of his friends, and here he's almost an underdog.