Thursday, October 16, 2008

Thursday Thingamajig - Grouchy Poker Man Tells You About Zuda Comics and Darkhorse Presents

I can't believe that guy called with nothing better than Ace high.

Anyway, I've been real busy trying to get back into playing poker online for a living, which is why I didn't update yesterday, and why this one is short. And why I am Grouchy Poker Man.

And it was his only overcard! Three outs!

Ahem.

So I'm going to tell your briefly (if I can forget that last hand) about Zuda Comics and Darkhorse Presents.

Zuda is something you absolutely must read. It's an online comicking competition run by DC. Each month, fans vote for their favorite comic from the many awesome submissions. The winner gets some kind of deal from DC comics. (I'm not sure if it's a good deal, and whether it's just for them to host your comic online and get you tons of readers or if you get actual dead tree publication.) But the comics on there are from people I've never heard of. I ought to have, if there were any justice in the world, because I've never seen a collection of better (and more diverse!) comics on one site. In the current competition, you've got a postapocalyptic world of undersea living, a photorealistic fantasy tale, a superhero story about a girl with prehensile feet, and... several others. I'm still reading them! And you can too!

So then after the turn, he only had a 7% chance that Ace would hit.

Dark Horse Presents is another collection of polished comics, the difference being that many of them are well-known and established comickers. Once a month, you can read comics by creators like Joss Whedon, Tony Millionaire, Peter Bagge, Mike Mignola, Gilbert Hernandez, Steve Niles, Evan Dorkin, Larry Marder, and Chris Onstad. And those are just the people on the list that I know! There's no competition here, and it's much less webcomicky, but these are still some fantastic comics on the web, which makes them webcomics!

So of course, he hit the Ace on the river.

3 comments:

Jackson said...

The Webcomics Weekly podcast warns repeatedly about comic creator competitions like Zuda. Basically, with very, very few exceptions, these deals are a bad deal for the creator, in terms of the rights they give up to the publisher. Once you win the competition, they win the rights to your ideas: all you get is an opportunity to draw and write for them, working on your ideas that are now their ideas. By all means go ahead and read the contenders up at the Zuda site, but if you're a comic creator, I'd strongly caution you to know exactly what rights you concede if you win, and whether that's something you can live with.

Ari Collins said...

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I'm a big believer in creators maintaining as much of their rights as they can.

Now I think I might feel bad just about reading the comics, though. Curse you, Jackson!

Jackson said...

I complicate everything.