[click image to see the site]
Starboard comics, a new collective with a new beginning! For any of you who have been following my work and/or the work of my fellow TNPPresser’s you may be wondering why in the world I would be starting another collective. Well, there are many reasons, but most of them come down to the simple answer: simplicity. Originally TNP Press’s single focus was on humor based comic strips, but over time the demographic of readers and overall content of work started to expand. As we’ve grown through out the last year we started having more graphic novel based works start to show up (including my own comic Anhedonia Blue) either on the collective, or applying to the collective. After many discussions with Ali of SSWestern and Scott of Motokool we decided that it would be in the interest of these comics to separate them from TNP as to not loose the power of cross trafficking similar work. If people were to be coming to TNP to find some light-hearted humorous jokes, that don’t require their minds to dive deeply into a story that is going to be lasting years, then they would find themselves disappointed when they clicked a link to find SSWestern or ABlue. At least that was our overall consensus after looking through traffic reports and such.
Another reason for the new “brand,” other than trying to produce like minded work, is reduce the responsibilities on us as far as getting together for conventions and cross promoting, yet, in a strange way also increase the responsibility. Let me explain; After running TNP for quite some time now, I’ve started to find that it’s far to hard to coordinate and correspond on a regularly bases with each of the collectives members once you start to have a larger number of them. That being said, the sole purpose of this new collective is just to promote one another both online and in real life. In a sense it’s just have a few good friends hang out together, via the internet, conventions, and now our new Podcasts and getting some serious work done at the same time! That being said, member acceptance for this collective is going to be rather limited. We by no means are going to attempt to be some asshole elitist group that doesn’t accept anyone, but we will be having major prerequisites that will have to be apparent before membership will be gained. The way we are planning on scouting members is basically by attending conventions in the next year or so and meeting other artists along the way. Once we’ve developed strong friendships with other comics artists and we find that we have really like minded ideas about the seriousness of the business then and only then will we be inviting new members. This way we can always maintain a strong work ethic between the members and still have a good time; a key element in running a successful collective. A strong example of this concept can be seen is the popular collective, Dumbrella, not only are they a group of great artists but they’ve also all been friends for quite sometime, I believe a couple of them have even known eachother from Highschool (don’t quote me on this, but I believe that’s what i heard at their panel last year at San Diego Comic Con).
SO, blahblahblah, What can you expect from the new collective? Well, at the moment, we have three comics: Anhedonia Blue, SSWestern , & Motokool! We plan to do a podcast every other week, which will probably be released on Wednesdays, if they go over well we will start doing them once a week. We’ve already launched a sample Podcast to sort of give you guys an idea of what to expect… but, that particular one wasn’t on any topic, we just through it together from a phone call we had. Future casts will each have a set topic which will very from techniques, comic reviews/discussions, and the occasional guest artist.
I’m pretty excited about the future of this collective and will be doing what i can to start promoting it at the cons this year. I hope you guys enjoy it and would greatly appreciate your feed-back and thoughts about this whole new endeavor. Thanks!
I don’t blaim you for starting a new collective, it’s posative descrimination – recognising that differentent sorts of comics attract different audiences. The website looks good.
Thanks for the comment! I didn’t realize you kept up with my work. :]
You’re also a member of Webcomic Planet as well, correct? I’m in no way trying to downplay the hardwork that Phil went through to build that collective nor the work that Byron has now inherited from Phil’s sudden retirement from the collective, but I feel like collectives who don’t have a very strong guidance from the beginning aren’t going to go too far as a collective. The individual comics may do stellar and occasionally transfer some of their readers to other comics artists but that cross traffic won’t help if the new readers are interested in the other work because of how different it is. I haven’t checked in over at WCPC in a while, but i know that Byron’s been working hard to shape things up, and I have great respect for him to take over something as developed as WCPC at the point it is in its development. For me, obviously, I’d just start a new collective. haha.
Anyway, thanks for checking out the new collective, we’ll see if any of my ideas actually translate into a successful collective as time unfolds then eh? lol
I think I may have suggested at some point sub-divising WCPC comics up into sub-categories/genres. Not sure if that’ll fly – we’ll see.
To be completely honest, I think It would be a good idea, but i know as far as managing, that in itself is more work. Creating this new collective in its self took us extra time we barely had. At least with WCPC there is more resourcing (as in more members), but who knows, like you said, if that would fly. I’d back you on it though if you even posed it in a formal manner to the collective. :]
Not to overly critic, but why this semi popup thing?
It takes forever to load (>5 seconds = forever, when ablue loads in less than 1) and it if you visit a comic it does not show the url so bookmarking is difficult. I know you offer several other ways to store the page for later, but imo nothing beats a good old fashioned bookmark.
I didn’t think about it that way, I guess I figured it would just be easier for people who are reading my blogs to be able to stay here at the site by seeing the site as a pop up so they know what I’m talking about, then they could get back to reading. Didn’t occur to me that someone may want to bookmark the linked sites. Thanks for pointing that out. When i get a chance later I’ll just have them open up new tabs rather than pop up in screen. Then you can open them and jump right back to the blog and have easy bookmarking access. I’ll keep doing it for images though and anything on the main page of the portfolio/store.
Thanks again, I don’t know peoples preferences unless they let me know, you know? lol
Yeah I totally agree re. the annoyance of the pop-up window.
haha, well then… I guess I will be swapping the links out. When more than one person tells me they don’t like something I start to believe it. [I'll get to it sometime tomorrow most likely]
Yea, I dont like it when they do that sorta thing.
Just in blogs, for things like website links, or even for something like a portfolio where you scroll through several images at once? Cos the advantage of Shadow Boxing like that is that once it opens one image, site, document, you can navigate through all like content from the shadow box itself. Even in this blog you can press next and then go through all the sites I listed all at one time. My initial thought was that that would be easier for people to look through the sites.