Comments on: Get Funky

By: Tad Sketchy

Tad Sketchy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:08:51 +0000

Check out the darkgate comics slurper: http://darkgate.net/comic/

– T

By: Idle Speculator

Idle Speculator — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:58:43 +0000

Wait, there is still a daily (or at least weekly) Funky Winkerbean strip? I hadn’t seen it for years. The art looks nothing like the strip I remember. I like the new look for familiar characters. It reminds me of the character design from Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost: like they finally got someone who new how to draw.

By: Tribune Media Goes Bankrupt

Tribune Media Goes Bankrupt — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:59:46 +0000

[...] they need to read Andy Ihnatko and get a clue as to how to differentiate and add value to their [...]

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:19:18 +0000

“[L]imited range of soybeans smeared across mashed-up trees” — Sounds like you may not have actually seen a printed version of the Sunday comics in a while. Newspaper printing and color reproduction techniques have gotten good enough that the shading and gradations seen in this “Funky Winkerbean” strip really do reproduce faithfully.

Which is why it’s such a damn shame that Sunday comic strips are at such a small size in this day and age. If currently active cartoonists such as Patrick McDonnell and Brooke McEldowney were being given a full page, everyone’s minds would be consistently and repeatedly blown; between the improvements in printing and the things that are possible with Photoshop and other modern technologies on the artists’ end, they’d be able to do things in the Sunday comics that Winsor McCay and George Harriman could only dream of.

By: Skwid

Skwid — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:01:19 +0000

a helpful but inobtrusive Flash player that takes me through all of my favorite strips[...]and makes it easy for me to send people to their site by blogging about today’s “Funky Winkerbean” or emaiing a link to last week’s “Peanuts” to a friend

You realize that you’ve described two almost mutually incompatible mechanisms, there, right? I mean, the latest versions of ActionScript make it theoretically possible, but I haven’t seen anybody implement any of that anywhere other than in a tech-demo type of situation…

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:56:50 +0000

I’m a bit confused; I went to the link for Seattle PI, and it just linked to comics.com; I didn’t find any “build your own comics” page like Houston Chron has.

Although, having said that, comics.com has recently gone through a major upgrade, and DOES have a custom comics page, although the comics offered is somewhat limited. Nice thing they have is a good search tool and extensive archives (I was able to find Arlo & Janis’s Puss ‘n Boots series on there quite easily)

Houston Chronicle is by far the best comics site, if only for numbers of comics. I have a bookmark to a huge comics page there where I read most of my comics.

As for how I read them, I used to use the Morning Coffee add-on for Firefox. It worked well, but when I started using Foxmarks to keep work and home in sync, it proved less useful (because Foxmarks doesn’t sync Morning Coffee’s configuration, and also because Morning Coffee didn’t work with TabMixPlus (least not for me)).

Now I have a series of folders of bookmarks organized by “daily”, or individual days, and have everything therein tagged, and use the “Open Today’s Bookmarks” experimental add-on to open all my comics (or the ones updated on that day) easily.

As for the comics I read, I have my Houston Chronicle page for most, and a comics.com page as well. Then I have a smattering of other ones (some linked from gocomics.com or Washington Post). I read the new xkcd in my RSS reader, but put the random link in my daily comics as well, so I get an xkcd fix every day). I can also tag columns I like to read on the day they come out, so read that, too.

By: Wes Chamness

Wes Chamness — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:15:50 +0000

I do the same as Norman Ferguson, I have a comics folder set up in my browser as well and utilize the feature open all in tabs. Then close each tab as I’ve read the comics.

I used to follow more strips in my RSS reader, but I got frustrated with the comics that didn’t place the strip within the feed and had me go to the site. What’s the point of offering the feed if I’m still going to the site (Penny Arcade, PVPOnline, VGcats, CAD). The main reason this annoys me is that I spend time reading my comics RSS feed on my iPhone and it’s highly bothersome when the app closes to open the comic in Safari, then having to close safari, reopen NetNewsWire, wait for it to re-sync, and finish reading my other strips.

Also I might have to follow Andys lead and start reading the Houston Chronicle online. I grew up in Houston and reading the funnies in the daily paper was one treat I loved. The Chronicle is, to me at least, the best daily city paper. And I’ve not been able to find another equal to it.

Oh well, enough ranting about comics. Great post Andy.

By: Roger D. Parish

Roger D. Parish — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:30:55 +0000

I use the Daily Comics widget in Dashboard. It comes (free) from New Planet Software. It has a vast catalogue of comics and editorial cartoons.

By: joecab

joecab — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:19:39 +0000

John Byrne was helping out on the trip for a while. Doesn’t it look like he’s still involved?

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:12:40 +0000

Now, I may be something of a snob, but if a site doesn’t have an RSS feed I won’t remember to check it with any regularity. I don’t mind clickthrough feeds so they still get the site traffic or feeds with embedded adds, but without a feed it may as well not exist for me. As a geek with a rapidly-growing collection of comics I follow I have been saved by http://www.comicalert.com/ which will create an RSS of all those newspaper sites that post the strips but don’t RSS. As for resolution they publish in, well, there the only option is to hope a different nespaper does a better job…

I supose this makes me more appreciative of Dark Horse’s http://www.myspace.com/darkhorsepresents site which does publish comics beautifully (albiet very inconvenient for linking-purposes or archiving!!).

I was having a similar conversation with the Northampton Comic store owner the other day. I still believe that the web is a much more powerful distribution medium for comics, but it needs to be done thoughtfully with a solid interface, various rss options, and some form of archival access and ideally physical print versions for collectors. I think that the webcomics are way ahead of the traditional newspaper comics here.