A long time ago (maybe about four years) James Kochalka had an idea for a game. It started with a doodle of a goofy looking alien and his laser backpack. That doodle sprang magically to life, and begged to be the star of his own video game. Kochalka tinkered with gameplay ideas in ink on paper… working out the perfect combination of elements to make a really fun, entertaining game.

They need to raise $10K by mid-March to make this happen — ten dollars at a time. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Kickstarter, but I think it’s really awesome: fans of independent artists help make the stuff they love possible by pledging small amounts of money. In this case, it’s more of a pre-order, since your $10 gets you a copy of the game at the end of the day.

Go now!

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

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/

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

Buttersafe Ensemble

Slow Animal Club

Skeleton Harvester

Photos by Photo by Sean-Michael Rau

Silly Daddy Hits 500 Webcomics. Is that a lot?

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.