Matt Sturges live chat today at 2pm

 Posted by (Visited 5650 times)  Gamemaking, Reading  Tagged with: ,
Oct 132009
 

I don’t know if I have raved about Matt Sturges’ work in comics here before. House of Mystery (available in two collections to date: Room and Boredom and Love Stories For Dead People) has vaulted onto the list of my favorite ongoing series. He’s also involved with the Eisner-award-winning Fables universe, particularly through Jack of Fables.

But I am a bit biased — I knew Matt back in the days when I lived in Austin, when were both caught up in the variously overlapping writers’ circles around Turkey City (the writer’s workshop best known in SF/F circles for its widely-used lexicon). Matt was a member of the Clockwork Storybook collective, from which several writers of note have emerged.

I’m super happy to have Matt cornered on the Metaplace stage today at 2pm Pacific, to get grilled about comics, writing, and whatever else attendees want to hear about!

Edit: the event is over, but the chat log is available here.

Hugo nominees: a great slate!

 Posted by (Visited 5890 times)  Reading  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 192009
 

Hugo Nominations are out, and oof, I don’t think I could pick Best Novel from this bunch! Besides, I know three of the authors, one of them might beat me up if I favor the others.

The comics category is equally tough, with Fables and Y: The Last Man‘s conclusion both up as well as Girl Genius Volume 8, which isn’t actually quite out yet in book form, which means that a webcomic is nominated this year!

Oh, and Dr. Horrible in the Short Form Dramatic category.

Great primer on comic book balloons and lettering

 Posted by (Visited 7537 times)  Game talk, Reading  Tagged with: ,
Feb 082009
 

Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering exhaustively goes through dozens of variations of word balloons and lettering choices in them.

I have often argued that in dealing with chat bubbles in MMOs, we should just steal these conventions, because so many people are familiar with them just by osmosis, even if they are not comics readers (many of these conventions are used in the funny pages too).

We had huge debates on SWG about whether to use “plain chat bubbles” or to invent something that was styled more like Star Wars. Plain won, in the end — and we ended up supporting regular, shout, thought, whisper, musical, caption, and more.