Sunday, July 26, 2009

God Comics

A few months back, I mentioned my excitement -- nay, my child-like glee -- at the web toy, Infinite Monkey Comics. Now shortened to simply Infinite Comic, all you do is type in a word and the algorithm grabs a relevant flickr image and twitter post to generate you a personal comic. I played with this for longer than anyone rightly should and I discovered the secret words that yield the best comics. The key is to choose a word that's charged - a lot of people might have tweets with the word "groceries" but "i need to go buy groceries now" isn't fodder for great comics. Profanity works decently well, so do emoting verbs and intensifiers. But the real secret to getting the best out of the site is to choose words that also require context. "Hate" might give you some interesting tweets, but images tagged with "hate" are going to be fairly homogenous. So which words did I have the most luck with: bleed, fucking, but most especially: god.

Well, now I have a confession to make. I have a bookmark on my toolbar specifically set for Infinite Comic to make me a "god" comic and I've been clicking it one to twenty times a day. Thrilling. Sometimes it fails, but sometimes you get to peer right through people's secrets into something transcendental. And sometimes it's merely hilarious.

Below is a collection of my favorites. I'll note again that I didn't create these. I just typed the word "god" (and occasionally "omg" or "goddess) into the generator. I'm the curator of this exhibit.













http://www.infinitecomic.com

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Dollars and Cents.


Yesterday saw the release of the first issue of Wednesday Comics by DC. And like most of the second-place company's decisions lately, it is both exciting and dissapointing.

Positive: The content is great. DC assembled top-shelf artists to create a stunningly beautiful collection of "Sunday comics" on a weekly basis. The "one page at a time" format creates an interesting storytelling challenge, that each writer seems to rise to in this first issue. It's successful since I want to see where all of these stories are going.

Massive Negative: $3.99 is a terrible price point for this title. Absolutely terrible. As beautiful as the results are, the book is published on oversized newsprint and only 16 pages long. Ideally, this book should boast a $1.99-$2.50 cover price. In the current marketplace this is essentially an experimental title. And If DC wanted to draw new readers in they shot themselves in the foot by pricing it like a big event title (next weeks 48 page Blackest Night #1 is $3.99). Despite the rave reviews of the content, the cost will hurt the in-store sales of this book. And many readers will miss out on one of the more interesting mainstream comic projects of the year.