Groening = Plato

The Simpsons as Philosphy on the BBC.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our age. So great, in fact, that it not only reflects and plays with philosophical ideas, it actually does real philosophy, and does it well.

Link to article.

ComixRadio 2

I've been working on an experimental project called ComixRadio with Constantin Demner. The second beta episode has been finished and is now available for viewing or download at the ComixRadio blog (www.comixradio.blogspot.com). At the core of this project is the conflation of comics and music, which Will Simons writes about in more detail on the Clickwheel blog.

Here's a youtube enabled sample of the first 10 minutes of ComixRadio episode 2, "Brighton". Enjoy!

New serve by Greg

I laughed out loud for ten minutes at Greg's latest comic for me. Check it out.

Features on iTMS

Recently Clickwheel has started comissioning it's artists to create comics that work with the Apple iTunes music store. This means creating m4v podcast ready files. This also means that the user does not control the speed at which comic panels can be viewed (and some might argue, are no longer comics, but some kind of hybrid of comics and animation).

In whatever case, I've got work up there. The first episode is a Jan/Feb showreel which collects three strips drawn during those months. It's about 10 minutes long and can be seen here. The second piece is "Comics On Small Screens" and has music by Wayne&Wax and can be seen here. Will Simons at Clickwheel also wrote up a nice little article about the latter piece and it's use of Creative Commons music here.

The Rainbow Trout book

While in the UK in March I read about a company called Lulu.com which allows people to self-publish their own books at no cost the author. This means anyone with a computer and the internet can publish and sell a book. And if only 5 people want to buy that book? Then Lulu will only print those 5 books. Publishing on demand... now that's hot shit.

Of course this brings the price per book way up from a traditional large print run, but, for people like me who arn't likely to sell more than a handful... it's perfect. I tested out the quality of the printing and binding and it's fairly good for digital. So, I decided to put together a little compelation of work... The Rainbow Trout & Other Comix.

It's selling for $13.99 US, and it costs something like $12.03 to print, per book with another 0.25 going to Lulu's comission. Oh, and it's full color.

Colin Vs Greg, Round 2!

Greg and I are starting up Comics Tennis again with another back and forth duel of comics pages. This work will appear regularly here on my site or on our new blog, comicstennis.blogspot.com. Here's the first serve below.