Join Porter Square Books and the Boston Comics Roundtable for an evening with contributors to Inbound #4, A Comic History of Boston. Writers and Artists will be presenting their process and research from the individual stories. Signed copies will be available for purchase.

Location:
Porter Square Books (map)
25 White St
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140-1413

Just a reminder: open house tonight at ComicSpace’s offices. Stop by, have pizza, meet the team and your fellow ComicSpacers, and etc. We’re at 363 7th Avenue, 20th Floor, New York, NY. Doors will be open from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Hope to see you there!

Gingerbread Houses begins its fourth chapter tomorrow at its brand new home on the web, <a href=”http://www.picturestorytheater.com/”>PictureStoryTheater.com</a>.  2010 promises many new trials for the unfortunate family, as we enter into the next phase of our story.  Gingerbread Houses is a self-contained graphic novel, and is now halfway through its two-year run in online serialization.

PictureStoryTheater.com will serve as the primary home for Alexander Danner’s comics inspired by fairy tales, fables, and children’s literature, and is aimed at a young adult to adult audience.  In addition to Gingerbread Houses, PictureStoryTheater.com will serve as the archive for the original Picture Story Theater comics, which were illustrated by Bill Duncan and originally published on ModernTales.com.  Danner’s more experimental, mainstream literary, and workplace-themed works will continue to reside at <a href=”http://www.twentysevenletters.com/”>TwentySevenLetters.com</a>.

Gingerbread Houses will continue to update at ModernTales.com and in Grug’s livejournal, in addition to on the PictureStoryTheater.com website.

In addition, the first two chapters of Gingerbread Houses are now available as a print mini, and can be purchased via PictureStoryTheater.com.

Gingerbread Houses is written by Alexander Danner (“The Discovery of Spoons,” “Five Ways to Love a Cockroach,” “Panel One”) and illustrated by Edward J. Grug III (“Love Puppets,” “Glorious Bounty,” “The Bizarre Life of Charlie Red Eye”).

A new page appears every Thursday at:
<a href=”http://www.picturestorytheater.com/”>http://www.picturestorytheater.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.moderntales.com/comics/gingerbread.php”>http://www.moderntales.com/comics/gingerbread.php</a>

Contact Info
Alexander Danner
alexander@twentysevenletters.com
http://www.picturestorytheater.com
http://www.twentysevenletters.com

Edward J. Grug III
tedprior@yahoo.com
http://tedprior.livejournal.com/

After enduring famine, parental abandonment, forced labor, compelled gluttony, and the brutal death of their wicked captor, Hansel and Gretel made their way home, to the loving embrace of the parents who sent them out to die in the first place.  Now, all that remains is to restore that feel-good familial harmony…

This Thursday, December 10^th concludes the third chapter of Gingerbread Houses, and brings to a close the first year of our somber retelling of Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel.”  What’s more, this brings us to the halfway point in our story; the witch is dead, the children are home, and there’s a bag full of witch’s pearls hidden in the cookie jar.  But what do you do with a deranged little boy who’s terrified of food?

From the start, Gingerbread Houses has been a self-contained graphic novel, with a definite end in sight.  The coming year will bring the conclusion of our story, approximately on the series’ second anniversary.

Gingerbread Houses will resume regular updates on Thursday, January 7, 2010, with the beginning of Chapter Four.

Gingerbread Houses is written by Alexander Danner (“The Discovery of Spoons,” “Five Ways to Love a Cockroach,” “Panel One”) and illustrated by Edward J. Grug III (“Love Puppets,” “Glorious Bounty,” “The Bizarre Life of Charlie Red Eye”).

A new page appears every Thursday at ModernTales.com.
http://www.moderntales.com/comics/gingerbread.php

Well, well, well. What have we here? Just in time for the seasonal shopping frenzy, I suppose, Black Friday, or whatever you call it in your culture and religion, the gang at Buttersafe.com have teamed up with us to make some new t-shirt designs available. Right over here.

Ensemble: Nobody likes to wear a shirt that’s covered in the likenesses of horrible, ugly people, and if you wear this shirt you won’t have to! Here you will find only characters you know and love, ready for action and looking beautiful. Go, look!

You thought you were the only one out there? Join the club, stand (or recline) proudly with your brothers and sisters, and tell the world, “I… am… a… slow… animal!” We’re waiting for you here.

Sure, wearing this shirt will provide your skeleton with some extra protection, but that’s not really something you need to worry about in the first place. Everyone knows that you’re safe with Skeleton Harvester, right? Right?

Photos by Photo by Sean-Michael Rau

I wrote this press release to the tune of the Terminator theme song.

The comic series, “Silly Daddy,” posts its 500th online cartoon November 9th, 2009. Started as a print comic book in 1991 with the birth of his first child, Chicago area cartoonist Joe Chiappetta has received much award recognition for the series, including Harvey and Ignatz nominations. When his story arc combined science fiction with real life family drama and humor, he won the Xeric Award.

Since 2004, Silly Daddy has also been a webcomic with an emphasis on one panel cartoons. Here are five reasons why you should take note of Silly Daddy’s 500 webcomics milestone:

1) Silly Daddy is one of the oldest autobiographical comics still releasing new material. It’s definitely the longest running autobiographical comic about family by a father.

2) While the all-ages webcomics are drawn on a variety of media, Chiappetta is one of the only cartoonists to regularly complete comics on a Pocket PC (handheld mobile computing devices with 4″ diagonal screen or less, running Windows Mobile operating system).

3) Many of theses webcomics (74) were created entirely on a mobile phone. Chiappetta is the first cartoonist to pioneer in this field of phone-made webcomics, calling it “telephomics.”

4) The Silly Daddy website is one of the few cartoonist sites wherein all the comics are fully accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Every webcomic posted has a described narrative that assistive technology software (such as JAWS or ZoomText) can read to the viewer.

5) Roughly half of the 500 comics are works on paper and the other half were drawn entirely on some type of computer device. It took 5 years to make these webcomics and cost $2000 in materials to produce.

About: Silly Daddy, the all-ages family webcomic by cartoonist Joe Chiappetta, updates at least once a week and can be read online and also on the Internets at www.sillydaddy.net.

There’s a nice article about educational videogames that includes a brief interview with my friend and colleague Alan Gershenfeld of E-Line (he sits two desks over from me, so I almost feel like a star myself, in his glorious PR radiation) about our upcoming videogame releases and general plans, here. Not much about the comics side of the business — that stuff is still actually under wraps, more or less — but for those who are curious about the bedfellows we’ve made for ourselves here at ComicSpace, it’s worth a read.

All this week, Graphic Novel Review’s Derik A. Badman will be cooking food from the culinary manga series Oishinbo, as a sort of alternate means of reviewing the book. Today: an overview of the entire meal. Tomorrow: Miso soup!

If you’re looking to get in on the iPhone/Android/Kindle mobile digital comics gravy train, you’d do well to read Alex de Campi’s post today over at Bleeding Cool, where she lays out the specific formatting options and size restrictions in place for display of your comics on each of the currently popular handheld devices. Nice tutorial!

I created some comics at about the same time! I did! They were mostly stupid, but also a little bit bad. I was young, what can you do? This was before webcomics, of course, so I had to xerox them and send them by mail to my comic-creating friends, all of whom I met through classified ads in the Comic Buyer’s Guide (all of whom also sent me their xeroxed comics by mail). My mom still has copies. Maybe I will get them and scan them someday. I’d have to find the co-creators, though … Dean Webb, Mat Kramer, Bill Anderson, Jerry Foley, Filthy McNasty, Dan Taylor (not the one who created that comic about superheroes at a bar) … are you guys still out there? Anyway, if, instead of making stupid and bad comics (stupidly and badly written … my co-creators, the artists, were great), I had been creating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I would be 60 million dollars richer today! Talk about a V8 moment! D’oh! Kind of puts the success of even the most successful current webcomics into perspective, dunnit? On the other hand, with capitalism’s speedier ways these days, I doubt it will take so many decades for some webcartoonist to have a similar payday.

But which one? I dunno.