To celebrate the one year anniversary of Electric Puppet Theatre we made a video showcasing our favorite art from the first two chapters.
By way of Fleen, an inspirational post from David Morgan-Mar and a really good talk on writing for comics from Angela Melick.
To fund reprinting costs, Angela Melick is having a 33% off sale on the first Wasted Talent collection -- We are the Engineers.
Tony Cliff is wrapping up the final chapter of Delilah Dirk and The Turkish Lieutenant. If you like swashbuckling adventures drawn in the lavish colors of the Flight anthology, now is a great time to hop over and read the full story.
We submitted our movie page to Boing Boing and Cory Doctorow was kind enough to post it.
To give you an idea of the kind of cartwheels we're currently turning, this is a picture of the laptop that EPT is drawn on, circa 2008:
If you're not already familiar with Cory Doctorow, his books are all at his website. Little Brother is a great place to start, as is Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, a comics adaptation of some of his short stories.
To celebrate EPT's second issue, we made a one minute animation of all 24 pages being drawn. You can watch the movie and see how it was made here.
Congratulations to The Introvert Manifesto on hitting strip #200. The drama has been ratcheting up recently, so good time to jump in if you're not reading it already.
Happy Groundhog's Day!
This month, buy any Skin Horse collection and get the original art for one strip (artist's choice). How good an idea is this? This good:
Also, the launch of the new King of RPGs webcomic coincides with a contest to win signed books.
New comic from John "LitBrick" Troutman!
Perhaps you don't think nuclear physicists have rivalries. Perhaps you are a fool.
And, we're back up. There was a massive show of support for the blackout from the webcomics community. If nothing else, that so many could mod their sites on such short notice is a testament to the power of controlling our own means of distribution.
Here's a quick and incomplete list of what we saw: censored comics from Randall Monroe (xkcd) and Joey Comaeu and Emily Horne (A Softer World); blackout pages from Aaron Diaz (Dresden Codak), Zach Weiner (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal), Matthew Bogart (The Chairs Hiatus), Dirk Tiede (Paradigm Shift), (and a blackout drunk from Ambs Myers (Killer Spoons)); banners from Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), the gang at Not Invented Here, David Willis (Shortpacked), Dan Shive (El Goonish Shive), Danielle Corsetto (Girls with Slingshots) and Dave Kellet (Sheldon); words of support from Dave Shabet (Dead Winter), Sandy Debreuil (Crowbar Benson), Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie), Joseph Hewitt (Atrexia Theatre), Scott McCloud (Zot!), Jamie Noguchi (Yellow Peril), and Tycho (Penny Arcade) (plus an episode of Penny Arcade TV).
As usual, Otter (A Girl and Her Fed), nailed the commentary:
...Don't spend all your fury on this one fight just because it got a lot of media attention. Recognize that even if (when) these bills fail, the next bill might not roll by with a huge bandwagon attached to it...
We're joining these fine folks in blacking out our site on Wednesday, January 18th in protest of the SOPA (H.R.3261) and PIPA (S.968) bills pending in congress.
The site will be back up late Wednesday night when we post page 21 of Henson ex Machina. In the meantime, here are some SOPA related activities that you may enjoy:
We thought that, living in a hippie city in a hippie state, our representatives would already be doing the right thing on this one. No such luck -- our senators are co-sponsors of PIPA. If you vote in California, let senators Boxer and Feinstein know what you think of the bill (be nice, they've supported a lot of good bills as well).
The basic premise of bills like SOPA and PIPA is that art is created by the few, under the aegis of the RIAA and MPAA, and consumed by the masses, who can not be trusted to consume without paying. We believe that we live in a world of artists, weaving culture through the exchange of our creations, regarding art highly enough to nourish it, intellectually and financially, of our own accord.
So go ahead, put something new into the world.
After three years, Darths and Droids has finally arrived at the good trilogy.
And, in related news, here's an update on Skin Horse's ongoing Jedi showdown.
The Marginal Prophets show on Friday the 13th will feature Stark Raving Brad! The last time we saw them, this was the guy doing backflips while banging on an eight foot tower of cymbals. Not to be missed!
Val Aurora says that, without financial support, the Ada Initiative may have to shut down in early 2012. If you believe in a world with 50% female participation in open source projects, please consider donating.
Our Web Comic Secret Santa comic is up on IDGet! You can see the full set of Secret Santa comics here.
Check out this sweet take on the puppets by Neal Skorpen, our 2011 Web Comic Secret Santa. Be sure to check out The Introvert Manifesto and Neal's other comics.
Keith Knight's band, the Marginal Prophets, will be playing at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco on January 13th, 2012. The MPs kill live -- if you're in the area you should totally check it out!
Congratulations to the sympy team on a very successful Google Summer of Code: 9 completed projects! If you're looking for an open source alternative to Mathematica, you should totally check out sympy.
Nick Montfort has been robbed -- of his poetic impulse!
If you have language to spare, you can donate here.
One of our programming heroes left the net last month. As far as we know, he's fine, just ready for more privacy, and who can blame him? Fortunately, he had the foresight to release his words and code in a form that others can care for, so they are still free to scatter and take root.
If you have an active, publicly accessible, non-sprite webcomic with at least 20 pages/strips, you're eligible to participate in this year's Web Comics Secret Santa guest strip/fan art exchange -- looks like fun.
Thanks to Joseph Hewitt of Atraxia Theatre for pointing this out.
Richard Hughes is taking pre-orders for his new invention, the ColorHug, an open-source USB device that generates an icc profile for calibrating your monitor. On the one hand, our inner biologists giggle at the idea of matching a single RGB spectrum to the diverse response profiles of real human cone cells (fun experiment -- mix a pair of monochromatic red and green light sources to match a monochromatic yellow source, then ask a friend to do the same and revel in the perceptible difference), on the other hand, our inner control freaks think this is the coolest thing since sliced bread. If the voices in your head think this would be a cool toy, head over to the pre-order page to help make it a reality.
Kicks have started for Sanitarium, a new game featuring art by Dirk "Paradigm Shift" Tiede. The "cards-as-board" motif reminds us of Mystic Wood, one of our all time favorite games.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, go check out the Kickstarter page.
We just stumbled on a great trove of interviews/movie recommendations on the Adult Swim blog. Especially good:
...it's just that some of them are really badly misprinted.
If you're a fan of Jorge Louis Borges xor Markov models (or, more likely, a fan of Jorge Luis Borges and Markov models) you must check out Shaenon Garrity's new short story Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel.
Go ahead, it's not that long...
...and you'll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you.
We were too unhip to remember Ada Lovelace Day this year, so instead we point you to Matthew Garrett's excellent tribute to Margaret Dayhoff. A staggering amount of our knowledge of molecular evolution stands on the shoulders of Dayhoff's PAM matrices. Why not celebrate by taking them out for a spin?
We just received the first print copy of Electric Puppet Theatre chapter 1 and it looks great. We've put up some photos here.
Because we will jump at any excuse to animate a foul-mouthed koala:
Seriously, go read A Girl and Her Fed -- it is uniquely milk-out-the-nose funny.
Check out our fan art on Lit Brick. For those not in the know, Lit Brick is John Troutman's MST3K-ish jaunt through the Norton Anthology of English Literature (or, as it is known to the literati, The Chronicles of She-Jesus).
In the late 90s, Jason Thompson drew a 5-part comic adaptation of HP Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. It is a beautiful piece, full of painstakingly detailed linework whimsically rendering reptilian moon-men and eldritch horrors from the unfathomable depths. If you've ever yearned for a Winsor McCay with a little more ichor, this is the book for you, and you'll be pleased to know that Thompson is reviving it as a graphic novel, complete with three additional Lovecraft stories. Find out more on the project's Kickstarter page.
We were lucky enough to score a copy of Primus's latest album last week. Read our review in comic form.
Matthew Bogart just finished drawing his beautiful short story, The Chairs Hiatus, and is offering it as a "pay what you like" cbz/pdf download. If you liked Scott McCloud's Earth Stories or Charles Snow's Sordid City Blues, you must check this out.
Ignorance of your own culture is not considered cool.-- The Residents
Aaron Diaz's computer just died. If you want to see more Dresden Codak (and who doesn't) go do science to it.
To celebrate EPT's first issue, we made a two minute animation of all 24 pages being drawn. You can watch the movie and see how it was made here.
Tragedy's A'Comin', the first single from the new Primus album Green Naugahyde (out 9/13/11) is live at Spin.com -- it's in a similar vein to Rumble of the Diesel from Of Whales and Woe with nice solos from Les and Ler.
And as long as you're in a head banging mood, check out We are the Lamb and Empires (part 2) from Kittie's new album I've Failed You (out 8/30/11).
Today's strip owes a huge debt to David Benson's awesome book Music: A Mathematical Offering -- a whirlwind tour through the math, physics, and biology of music with a healthy dose of synthesizer programming -- go check it out!
We just saw the Howl exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum. Amazing huge non-photorealistic 3D renderings of stills from the animation, tons of concept art and story boards (including, surprisingly, work from The Norm's Michael Jantze), and photos of beat poets taken by other beat poets. Totally worth checking out if you're in downtown San Francisco.
(Fans of the poem will also want to track down the Kronos Quartet's Howl USA, featuring avante garde string music over recordings of Allen Ginsberg, I.F. Stone, J. Edgar Hoover, and more).
Prompted by T. Campbell's invention of the cruciverbacomic, we are pleased to present the Electric Puppet Crossword Generator, a free program for automatically generating crossword puzzles from a starting grid and a dictionary.
Read more, and download the program here
The Kickstarter drive for the two volume omnibus collection of Narbonic has begun. It's a steal at $50 for six years of one of the funniest, certainly the best plotted, comics on the net.
Congratulations to Dead Winter on reaching page #400!
S. Dave Shabet's really pulled out all the stops for the limited animation this time around. Check it out here.
Google Image Search can now take actual images as queries. Try it for yourself (but do take a look at Google's statement about storing uploaded images first).
Our fan art has been posted on King of RPGs (you'll need to scroll down past the awesome tattoo-style rendering of role-playing monsters). If you're not familiar with King of RPGs, you can find the original mini-comic here or check out the sample pages from the shiny new books.
Primus will be releasing Green Naugahyde, their 11th disc and first studio LP in 11 years, on September 13th, 2011. You can read the press release here.
If you haven't heard Primus before, They Can't All Be Zingers is a Rhino-quality best of, but for the full psychedelic polka experience we recommend the EP/DVD Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People, featuring the claymation masterpieces Southbound Pachyderm and The Devil Went Down to Georgia. For a preview of new/old drummer Jay Lane, check out Live Frogs: Set 1.
Electric Puppet Theatre is pleased to announce the release of our comics under a Creative Commons attribution non-comercial share-alike license (cc-by-nc-sa). Full details are in the FAQ.
Of course, when it comes to stylish licensing notices, no one can hold a candle to A Girl and Her Fed:
"You are free to share, distribute, copy, and transmit this work under the Creative Commons License but that dude who writes for Fringe should really knock it off."
Well, this has been a long time coming.
BeamItDown Software, makers of the iOS based iFlow Reader, are going out of business. According to their website:
The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some.
The full statement is worth reading, as is this CNET interview. Artists and entrepreneurs take note: if your success depends on the good graces of a monopoly, you will eventually get screwed.
On a more positive note, from Jonathon Coulton:
Here are some things I do differently from some other artists: I own all my music 100%, which means I have complete control over how I sell it (or not). I can give it away, I can bundle it on a USB key or in a zip file, I can allow people to make and post music videos, and I don't have to deal with lawyers or labels to do any of that. I also get all the profits.
Again, the full post is worth reading.
Shaenon Garrity, magnificent human being, has posted our fan art on Skin Horse today. In the unlikely event that you aren't already reading Skin Horse, you can start here (and then you'll be wanting to check out Smithson and Narbonic).
Fabrice Bellard, transcendental constant of cool things, has done it again! His JavaScript PC Emulator emulates a 486 well enough to run a Linux operating system (including vi and "emacs", plus a C compiler) inside of your web browser (Firefox 4 and Chrome 11 are recommended due to W3C Typed Array support, but it works for us with Firefox 3.6). Enjoy!
Today is the second annual Dialog Free Comics Day (not to be confused with last week's Free Comic Book Day, which did feature Jim Woodring's dialog-free Weathercraft and Other Unusual Tales). By happy coincidence, pages 10 through 16 of Electric Puppet Theatre are dialog free, and we are thrilled to unwittingly take part.
You can check out the rest of the comics at Noel Curry's site.
Nukees just hit its 2000th strip. Congratulations, Gav! This makes over 14 years of consistently funny comics, which you can start reading here.
(We note in passing that King Luca must be unfamiliar with that most venerable of relics, ucthesis.cls)
Booker T. Jones plays Green Onions and talks about learning to play the Hammond B3 at NPR today.
Check out the sweet layout in today's Dead Winter.
Check it out -- Dirk Tiede has posted our fan art on Paradigm Shift! If you aren't already reading Paradigm Shift, why not start at the beginning? Come for the backgrounds, stay for the banter!
(Of course, the acme of Paradigm Shift gift art is due to Shaenon Garrity).
And the movie based on Bradley Denton's Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede inches one step closer to reality with this development teaser trailer. If this doesn't strike you in immediate and Pavlovian fashion, it's probably because you haven't read the book. Easily remedied -- Denton has made the book available in all its stranger-than-Buckaroo-Banzai glory in myriad formats at ManyBooks as a free (by-nc-nd) download. Enjoy!
Legendary Berkeley comic book store Comic Relief closed recently, three years after the death of founder Rory Root. The inventory has been purchased by Dark Carnival owner Jack Rems and will be used to open a new comic book store, The Escapist, on March 15th (opening night details at the store's website).
Electric Puppet Theatre by Mark V is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://eptcomic.com/faq.htm#licensing.