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Via gilada's Titter feed: Joe Mande's THE ANDY ROONEY GAME!

LOVE COMICS: Can't We All Just Get Along FTW!

To get this you must understand that there is no love lost between the creators of Ctrl-Alt-Del and PVP.
Now that you know this, you will also know that arcana_j and I laughed our asses off at the most recent installment of Electronic Tigers:




P.S.: "prima donna"

HURT COMICS: See Why You Don't Sign Away Rights?

DJ Coffman splits with Platinum over non-payment.  My bad, he has NOT split from Platinum, he has suspended publication of Hero by Night over "financial issues."

This was the same tireless champion of Platinum two years ago, right after he won their contest. The contest which required he sign away rights in order to be a winner. Not unlike the TP Pilots/Rising Star of Manga deal.

While I don't hear TP creators complaining of non-payments, I do remember Amy Kim Ganter (at the Pseudome' boards) not being too pleased that TP exercised is right to present her work in other media. ("Why didn't anyone ask the creators for feedback?")
In that case, it was TP's wretched manga pods, which were audio book presentations of  the work of OEL authors. (I did try to go to the Mangapods page and it no longer exists.)
(Incidentally, at the TP blogs the most recent post relating to mangapods was over 200 days old, and a post asking if mangapods still existed was about a year old.)

I was then, and still am, astonished that anyone would sign a shared copyright contract (Ganter certainly didn't seem to need the leg up). Amazed that after seeing how quickly, and without creator input or consent, TP made derivative works, that anyone would defend TP's business practices. Or that they would cling to the idea that, in the end, TP would come through for them.
But you have to when you've made the contractural investment.

In 2000, Image had a block of booths. Let's leave it at "I wasn't too pleased with many things" because all the problem people at Image have since moved on, and today I wouldn't have trouble leaving my table and punching someone in the kidney. I was frustrated and angry. I was upset that Image, which had seen a turnaround in the community opinion of their "indy" books because of the work of myself and others, was being so...dickish.
I called Kurt Busiek. And complained. I might even have cried. "But I worked so hard! I said lots of nice things! I defended the indy line and told people there were lots of different Image books!"
Kurt said, "You can't expect a company to look out for you."
Luckily, I was not obligated to stay with Image, and Image did not own any part of my work. I left unhappy, but on relatively good terms in 2002.
I'd go back to Image with a GN in a second.

I can't say it enough: companies look out for themselves. It's their job. They don't have to be treacherous reamers and grab rights. You're, and I'll say it, taking foolish risks if you sign such a contract.

Companies look out for themselves.
SO BE YOUR OWN DAMN COMPANY.

In related news: Anime News Network announces that TP has rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic and laid off 39 people. When companies looks for ways to increase their catalog and pay creators as little as possible, there's trouble.

MAKE COMICS: Colors! for the Nintendo DS

This is some seriously great shit. Colors is a FREE homebrew program that is run on an DS cartridge that uses a miniSD card to run apps.

Colors allows for pressure-sensitive painting, making the DS a teensy Cintiq running something like a very simple version of Open Canvas. It has no undo, no layers. Straight additive painting with control over brush size, hardness and transparency, plus a color picker and up to 4x zoom.
Like Open Canvas, Colors has a playback feature. You can go to the Colors community and watch playbacks, or download files of drawings and play them back on your DS.

My first uploaded Colors! picture. Crude, but I like it.



You can see the playback by clicking this link.