Author: Xaviar Xerexes

I helped create Comixpedia and ComixTalk. Currently working on finishing a lot of unfinished comics and novels.
Blog / Comics

SPX In The News

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Comic Riffs blog has an interview up with Warren Bernard, director of Small Press Expo (SPX), on the recent table registration-online crash SNAFU that SPX went through.  To recap – SPX has (d?) Bluehost as a hosting provider and during the crush of demand to register for details the site went down hard. The good news for SPX is it sold out its tables super quickly. This year SPX will be Sept. 14-15 at the (usual) Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in North Bethesda. The special guests include Gary Panter, Lisa Hanawalt, Seth, Gene Yang and Frank Santoro.

Blog / Comics

The Guilded Age is a better title than the Whoring Twenties (Sided Dice)

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Who else reads Guilded Age?  I do.  Phil “KAAAAAHN” Kahn and T “U” Campbell have put out a pretty amusing buddy/group action comedy for a a bunch of years now. Yes it’s set in a medieval, slightly Dungeons & Dragons-ish setting but it’s basically the Wild Bunch (or maybe the Dirty Dozen) stretched out into an AMC length teevee series. It’s a fun webcomic. There’s also a meta-story that intrudes on things now and then — something about the whole of the Guilded Age being part of an online game gone amuck or something. No offense to Phil or T but …

Blog

In Which I Interview Strip Search

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So first Strip Search episode I didn’t actually think much of. The premise of an “interview” challenge wasn’t bad but it felt poorly executed. First off a whole bunch of journalism is done via email these days (or on twitter, dispensing with journalist altogether) so I wonder about the applicability of the whole on-camera aggressive questioning situation. Yes an artist, a business dude, these are roles where you need to handle your public role. But for the most part you are a blip in the vast roiling media sea these days and your skill set here should be based on …

Blog / Comics

Butch R. Mann Send His Regrets

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Lee Adam Herold drew this for me probably back in 2000ish on the anniversary of the webcomic I was drawing at the time: Burnt Dog Radio. Lee’s sense of humor ran pretty dark but it almost always made me laugh. I always appreciated his bravery in pursuing jokes in somewhat dangerous territory. I’d like to see Josh Whedon try and build a show around a psychotic mama’s boy. Anyhow Lee had this amazing sponge and ink technique for his comic. He showed me how he did it once — it’s extremely clever but not necessarily easy to get as much …

Blog / Comics

Rereading Sluggy Freelance

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Early Sluggy Freelance was mind-blowing in a way, particularly because it was RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING of comics on the web and Pete Abrams was way ahead of EVERYONE else at the beginning in terms of ambition, consistency and an actual audience.  And a lot of the chaotic pop culture borrowing and remixing was really fun — in a way that corporate owned comic strips in the newspaper would never do. Somewhere around the early part of the 00’s though it seemed like Pete got bogged down in longer plots, and an indecision over how seriously he wanted to take …