Colin White Comix

One Hour Comix: Episode 8

2008-11-12T00:41:00.001-05:00

Another post for September!

2008-09-29T00:42:00.002-04:00

Greetings website reader!

Find below another One Hour Comixcast (Episode 7) in youtube format.

Regular readers will also be noticing some gradual changes happening to the site over the next few weeks. Hopefully you'll appreciate some of the changes.

I hope to attend both Canzine in Toronto and Expozine in Montreal this fall.

August -- a record setting month!?

2008-09-02T00:37:00.002-04:00

According to my website stats I had over 700 unique 'visitors' the month of August. And the amazing this is, they apparently came back TWICE during the month. In January only 350 'people' visited, barely 1.5 times!

One Hour Comix: Episode 6

2008-09-02T00:36:00.001-04:00

Until STEVE gets in there and re-works my site I've gotta post these (increasingly popular) comixcasts here in my news feed. Enjoy Ep 6!

One Hour Comix: Episode 5

2008-08-05T13:24:00.001-04:00

Cool Drawing, Dude (edit)

2008-07-07T23:49:00.002-04:00

An under 10 minute edit of my Cool Drawing, Dude comixcast.

It is hot in Ottawa and I have been spending time on the streets, doing some sketching as well as some viral marketing, passing out mini-comix from the Cool Drawing, Dude series. Welcome to any new visitors who I may have met on the street.

To the "regular" readers of my site... I am hoping to have a new, better organized and better working site SOON. Seriously! Perhaps then I'll even start making bi-monthly blog posts...

One Hour Comix/cast Episode 4

2008-03-11T17:29:00.000-04:00

One Hour Comix/cast: Episode 3

2008-02-05T00:18:00.000-05:00

One Hour Comix/cast Episode 2

2008-01-16T21:57:00.000-05:00

Hello new year, new update!

2008-01-07T20:09:00.000-05:00

Seriously, I'm going to use this "blog" thing more...

To start off the new year, I'm going to post some work I've been putting on youtube recently. These episodes will also upload to my actual podcast.

Here's One Hour Comix/cast episode 1.

Comics On Handhelds... in Korea

2007-07-13T13:36:00.000-04:00

This piece was originally written for the 11th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival.

My experiments with screen-based comics began during my undergraduate years in Montreal, where I read a Wired magazine comic by Scott McCloud that discussed the potential for comics to go digital. This led me to McCloud’s then-current book Reinventing Comics and his already extensive website. A read of Reinventing Comics, a few experimental comix of my own, and a graduate degree later, I received an email from Will Simmons at Clickwheel asking if I was interested in publishing my comics to iPods. I was, despite never having seen a color iPod at that point. Will assured me that my comics looked gorgeous on the small screens, but only when I got ahold of one a few months later did I realize the full potential of handheld digital comics.

It's not surprising that comics joined music and video on handhelds. It was inevitable, given the ubiquity of these devices, the revitalization of the comics medium, and the growing interest in webcomics. And though I have no statistics to support this, I suspect that a healthy slice of the net-savvy, handheld-using demographic is also enthusiastic and supportive of comics, be they digital or printed on paper.

Unlike music and video, comics don't suffer from the need to reduce file size (and thus quality) in order to get them onto handhelds. Quite the contrary; quality is enhanced. It's actually satisfying holding a digital comic in your hand, especially compared to hunching over a monitor attempting to read the small or blurry type that often plagues webcomics. The high resolution of an iPod screen ensures that tiny handwriting is legible, and makes the colors crisper than most laptop screens. Due to the typographic nature of comics, I believe that the quality of other handheld screens will need to meet the standard set by the iPod in order to adequately display comics.

An appealing direction for small-screen comics would be the incorporation of artist-controlled transitions from one panel to the next. Currently, comics can only be viewed on an iPod using its standard photo-viewing interface. The typical transition is a straight cut, which is fine, and the user has the option to select others such as "cube" or "swirl", which are gimmicky and do not enhance reading. Consider, however, the simple gliding panel-to-panel movements used in Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's flash-based Tarquin Engine, which, as an example of an infinite canvas with multi-directional reading possibilities, seems ideally suited for viewing comics on a tiny screen. As touch-screen handhelds become the norm, readers may simply be able to finger tap the next panel in a sequence and see it zoom into focus on the screen.

A crucial step I'd like to see for small-screen comics is a simple way for readers to subscribe to their favorite comic and have it download automatically to their handheld. Accessibility and ease of use will be essential in maintaining the momentum of small-screen comics.

March, er, April update

2007-04-02T19:02:00.000-04:00

Haven't uploaded much comix the past week or two due to a few other things I've been working on. The first was completing a submission to the Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival. More details on that eventually. Now I'm working on preparing some digital fabric prints of drawings for another show near Ottawa this May. I've also been helping my father drywall and tile his house, which has been paying my bills more than comix/art/illustration lately.

Press here

2007-02-07T17:12:00.000-05:00

Last week I was pleased to find I'd gotten a nice and pithy write up about my comixcast work on the drawn.ca blog. It can be found here.

For the record, here are the other write-ups about my comix I'm aware of so far:

Agressive Experiments by Neil Von Flue on the Webcomics Examiner. A longer review of my 48 Vignettes work, as well as other experimental webcomix.

Four longish and fairly critical reviews, also of 48 Vignettes, over at the Webcomics Book Club.

A bang on review of a few of my (now older) comix by Sahsha Andrade at Comixpedia.

Classy and altogether flattering write up by one of my shipmates, Joe Alterio. It was xMas.

Subscribe to my Pod-er-Comixcast in iTunes

2007-02-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

I now have a "real" podcast which you can subscribe to using iTunes or other software. The first episode is Cool Drawing, Dude.

Subscribe to Colin White's Comixcast by copying and pasting this link into iTunes.

http://colinwhite.ca/comixcast/feed.xml

Comixcast: Cool Drawing, Dude

2007-01-15T22:32:00.000-05:00

I've made the Cool Drawing, Dude strips into a comixcast...

Youtube version:

Google Video:

Download a quicktime version.

Download a iPod ready version.

Creative Commix

2007-01-03T18:05:00.000-05:00

After watching Larry Lessig's fantastic talk about Creative Commons this morning, I've decided to go ahead and do something I've been considering the past year: publishing all of my comix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

If you want to republish my comix on a website or magazine that doesn't earn you money... go right ahead. If you earn money from your publication or from using my comix somehow... I'd at least like a part of it.

As I'm still so far underground at this point I'm sure there won't be many or any people actually using my comix, especially for print stuff. But if that is the case, please email me and I'll send you a 300 dpi (print ready) version of the comix you want to print. If you want to republish comix on your website you can just grab them from mine, or from my Flickr set.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Happy xmas

2006-12-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

Seasons greetings and best wishes for the new year to all. This comic is the xmas card I mailed out this year. If you'd like a paper copy send me an email and I'll put one in the post for you.

More Beaves

2006-12-07T21:17:00.000-05:00

The beaver strips are back in The Watering Hole... for how long, I can't rightly say. Current strips updating here.

Detail of xMas card

2006-12-01T13:44:00.000-05:00

This is a zoomed in screenshot of an xmas card I'm currently trying to finish up. If you'd like me to send you one, email me a postal address.

EhBay pictures

2006-10-16T18:20:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be selling some original sketches on ebay. First picture is up for auction for ten days, listed here.

Revised Site

2006-10-05T00:25:00.000-04:00

It doesn't look like much has changed but this site has just been revised as a ruby on rails site thanks to Steve. Updates will hopefully be lots more regular, as the drawings come.

Behind Preston St.

2006-08-30T16:58:00.000-04:00

behind preston st., originally uploaded by second_toughest.

Living with Shock and Awe

2006-07-03T17:49:00.000-04:00

"...this is about exchanging ideas... it's about getting a message out. It's about empowering people by giving them a voice. I know not everyone believes what I say is what they think. But like I said before... ya know... red and blue is not black and white. We're all together. It's a record about unification."

- Neil Young (4/18/06)

After listening to Neil Youngs new album Living With Wa r solidly for about 3 weeks and emerging from reading Young's biography Shakey, I threw together a video.. made kind of like the album... quick and raw. The video can be seen here... Living with Shock and Awe.

Sketchbook blog

2006-06-27T16:36:00.000-04:00

Sketchbooks are often more interesting than anything that results from them. With that in mind I'm going to start trying to post select pages every few days here on my website (also linked under "other projects" on the right menu).

The Watering Hole

2006-06-21T16:35:00.000-04:00

Finally a name has been chosen for my newest comic (thanks Hedge!) and there's now a collection of the first two weeks of strips... hopefully it will continue to increase!