The Comics Bureau

Check out these fant­astic clos­eups of old com­ics. Really gor­geous stuff.

The fab­ulous War­wick John­son Cad­well posts up his story ‘Gungle Hunt’ that you can read here.

The equally fant­astic Joe List posts up his strip from this year’s Uk Web & Minico­mix Thing antho­logy here. Happy reading!

Although it is only an exert, read through Thomas Wellmann’s excel­lent Der Zie­gensauger.

If you have any other sug­ges­tions for some free com­ics, get in touch and I’ll link ‘em up.

Head over to this flickr group — the Text Mes­sage Com­ics group to get involved with the brand new craze that all the kids are refer­ring to as ‘Text Mes­sage Comics’.

Text Mes­sage Com­ics use text mes­sage con­ver­sa­tions to give you the dia­logue for a comic. Simple as that!

Dis­claimer — I am a co-administrator of this flickr group, along with the very tal­en­ted War­wick John­son Cad­well, whose idea this was. The strip above is by the also very tal­en­ted Jonathan Edwards.

If you aren’t aware of Warwick’s work, read this glow­ing review and head over to his site. Imme­di­ately.

If the word ‘Scan­la­tion’ is a new one to you, head over to Inside Scan­la­tion to find out what it is all about.

Scan­la­tion has always found itself in a moral gray area. While pub­lish­ers and other pro­fes­sion­als tend to see scan­la­tion as copy­right infringe­ment and a threat to sales, fans and scan­lat­ors defend their actions by point­ing out that scan­la­tion helps raise aware­ness of lesser known Japan­ese titles that might oth­er­wise go unnoticed. In some cases, scan­la­tion helps build hype for a pop­u­lar series before its release. Scan­lat­ors often scan­late unli­censed manga, some­thing many fans con­sider com­pletely accept­able. There are even rumors of pub­lish­ers decid­ing which manga to license next based on the pop­ular­ity of scan­lated manga.

The pur­pose of this fea­ture is to provide a (hope­fully) com­pre­hens­ive his­tory of the world of scan­la­tion, not to argue as to the leg­al­ity of scan­la­tion. What you will find here are facts and stor­ies told by people who have been involved in the scan­la­tion scene, some act­ive and some retired. Of course, all art­icles deal­ing with scan­la­tion inev­it­ably find them­selves con­tain­ing sens­it­ive (to some degree) inform­a­tion and links. The pur­pose of this art­icle is to provide a his­tory and over­view of the scan­la­tion world, noth­ing more.

I don’t know about any­one else, but the typo­graphy in scan­la­tions nearly always makes me angry.

There is a spe­cial place in my heart for Kafka com­ics. If you think you may be sim­il­arly inclined, check out The Meta­morph­osis and The Trial and then check out this abso­lute gem over at The Mod­ern World;

“A Little Fable” (“Kleine Fabel,” in the ori­ginal Ger­man) is a paragraph-long short story mas­ter­piece by Kafka. I ran across a won­der­ful mini-comic adapt­a­tion of it by the Amer­ican comic book artist Vin­cent Stall around 2004. I con­tac­ted Vin­cent, who gra­ciously allowed us to re-publish the comic online here at The Mod­ern Word. I was plan­ning to post it when Vincent’s graphic novel, Brass Tack, was to be pub­lished, but when Brass Tack got delayed this some­how fell through the cracks, as well. Finally, again with Vincent’s bless­ing, we present this adapt­a­tion to you.

Head over to the Digital Com­ics Museum, which is run by the very same folk that have been run­ning the Golden Age Com­ics site.

We are the #1 site for down­load­ing FREE pub­lic domain Golden Age Com­ics. All files here have been researched by our staff and users to make sure they are copy­right free and in the pub­lic domain

Want a tip? Check out Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. I’ve pos­ted about Jack Cole before, so if you missed it, have a read.

If you have a twit­ter account, I’m sure that you will have come across Axe Cop recently. If not, drop everything and sprint over to the Axe Cop web­site. Writ­ten by Malachai Nicolle (age 5) and drawn by Ethan Nicolle (age 29), Axe cop is the col­lec­ted adven­tures of Axe Cop;

The AXE COP saga began on a Christ­mas visit to see my fam­ily. My Father, a man with very healthy loins, has man­aged to pro­duce a vari­ety of chil­dren, ran­ging from me, a 29 year old comic book artist, to my 5 year old brother Malachai, a 5 year old boy genius, with four other sib­lings in between. Dur­ing the visit Mal­chai was run­ning around with his toy fire­man axe and he said he was play­ing “Axe Cop.” He asked me to play with him, and I asked what my weapon was… so he brought me a toy flute (actu­ally a recorder). I told him I would rather be Axe Cop then Flute Cop, and he seemed just fine with being Flute Cop. The story that fol­lowed became more and more bril­liant, until I couldn’t con­tain myself and I had to draw the whole thing into a one page comic.

From there the saga con­tin­ued, and over the course of my week-long visit we cranked out the first four epis­odes of AXE COP. I pos­ted the com­ics to my blog and on Face­book and they got great responses. I decided to give AXE COP a home on the inter­net here and attempt to con­tinue the saga as often as I have time to draw them, and I can get Malachai to write them.

The writ­ing pro­cess is basic­ally just me quizz­ing Malachai as he devel­ops the saga. I’ll just try to pry all the details out of him and write them all down until some­thing like a com­plete little story has been formed. Everything in AXE COP star­ted in Malachai’s head, all I do is sort it out and draw it.  Here is a video of the writ­ing process.

From Calvin & Hobbes: Magic on Paper is a col­lec­tion of Bill Watterson’s early strips while at col­lege for Ohio’s Kenyon Col­lege news­pa­per, The Kenyon Collegian.

I don’t think I’ve ever met any­one who didn’t love Calvin & Hobbes.

Flash­back Uni­verse writes up a fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on the illegal com­ics down­load mar­ket. It looks like Long­box has a lot to live up to…

This has been doing the rounds recently, but I thought I’d post it up any­way. From Mon­sters & Rockets;

Nobody who has read Richard McGuire’s 1989 comic stri­pHere has ever for­got­ten it. (Ori­gin­ally prin­ted in Raw: Vol. 2, Num­ber 1, it’s more recently been reprin­ted in Ivan Brunetti’s An Antho­logy of Graphic Fic­tion, Car­toons and True Stor­ies and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. ) A truly mind-bending work, the strip jumps around in time but not in space, show­ing us vari­ous events occur­ring on a little patch of land over the course of bil­lions of years.Here is form­ally dar­ing but also sur­pris­ingly mov­ing, drop­ping us into ran­dom moments in the lives of the people who have called “here” their home.

I’ve been a big fan of the strip for years, but I had no idea that it had inspired a short film. This is appar­ently a stu­dent work, but it’s hardly ama­teur­ish. To say it’s per­haps half as good as the ori­ginal is not a bad thing when the ori­ginal is this great. Still, I strongly sug­gest you read the ori­ginal on this site before watch­ing the film. You’ll never look at your home in quite the same way again.