Re-subscribing to Webcomics.com

As we near our one-year anniversary in January, I wanted to take a moment to mention a few things about your Webcomics.com subscription.

First of all, THANK YOU. This has been a phenomenal experiment -- and a wildly successful one. And a huge part of that success is thanks to you for your investment, your participation, and your promotion. I'm eagerly looking forward to making this bigger and better in 2011.

Next: A question I've gotten from time to time that needs to be cleared up. Your subscription is for twelve months -- not the calendar year. So, if you signed up in July, your subscription will be live until next July.

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Healthy Hands

This piece was kindly submitted by J.R. Faulkner, and is sourced by Katherine Shanta Wehrli, Certified Yogini and Wellness Coach. 

Ages ago there was a string on the forum asking for tips on keeping healthy hands. Not being a fitness professional myself, but knowing quite a few excellent ones, I went to Katherine, (a friend and trainer at my gym) looking for some advice to share. After giving her some generalities about the worst of the artist/writer lifestyle, (long hours of sitting, drawing, typing, excessive caffeine, deadline driven stress, frequent late nights and let’s face it, some pretty unhealthy snacking habits) Katherine put together this terrific little program to help us get a little more activity into our daily lives, reduce our stress, amp our creativity and strengthen our most important tools – our hands!

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Humor me, learn some grammar

Writing humor is impossible to teach. Funny is indefinable.

But, as I've said before, there are some strategies you can use to help guide your writing towards finding your own Funny.

Here's some great advice I picked up a long time ago: If you want to write better humor, learn grammar.

Think about it.

Behind all of the talk of participles and gerunds and infinitives that made your eyes gloss over in grade school, lies grammar's sole purpose: Clear communication.

In other words, grammar is there to make sure you don't mean one thing and say another.

But... meaning one thing and saying another is one of the purest, simplest, most common forms of humor. It's called misdirection. It's when you indicate a Zig to your readers and then you Zag.

Here's a grammar rule that, once you understand it, can be warped to write humor.

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Print vs. Web ... vs. App?

As you know, Ted Rall was not present for the Kurtz vs. Rall debate at New York Comic Con last weekend.

So instead of retreading the tired Print vs. Web debate, Scott Kurtz and I discussed the future of print publishing and Web publishing with Comixology co-founder John "Johnny Storm" Roberts.

During the course of the discussion, I had a thought that -- honestly -- kinda scared me. I'm going to share it here and open the discussion.

As I've said before, "Print vs. Web" is misleading nomenclature. Almost every webcartoonist uses print sales (usually self-published books) as a central revenue stream for his or her business. 

The real debate is Corporate vs Independent.

So, if Print is Corporate and Web is Independent... which is "App"?

And where does the crest of app-comics leave us in the Corporate vs. Independent debate?

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The Slate's series on collaborations

The Slate has been running a fascinating series about collaborations.

From the intro:

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? On one level, these are obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful, and it's natural to try to understand it. On another level, looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk ofself-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history...

But a burgeoning field has shown that, from the very first days of life, relationships shape our experience, our character, even our biology...

It's not an accident that this new work is ascendant at a time when the Western world no longer identifies itself in opposition to collectivism, and where the Internet and social media have offered an obvious metaphor for webs of connections. "We're ready for a Copernican revolution in psychology," Cacioppo says. If it comes, the era of the self will yield to something that may be much more interesting.

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