The polymathematic Joey Comeau has started a series of interviews with people important to him: i am other people. The series begins with the illustrious Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. Best part? Joey and Ryan are friends, and the interview reads like a conversation half the time, both of them ending up being questioned.

New interview with the explosive Kate Beaton up at Girls Read Comics. Beaton got big by mixing history and awesomeness, but everything she does is pretty rad. Case in point below.

© Jenny Heiskell

Top Shelf 2.0 - new webcomics initiative from Chris Staros and all the cool people at Top Shelf. There is a good batch of comics up right now (read: Leaning Rabbit, Love Puppets pt. 1, etc.), and more on the way every day, Monday to Friday.

Oh, and be sure to set aside extra time on Thursdays:

Thursday will be Archive Spotlight Day — each week, we’ll pick a great story from Top Shelf’s library of previous webcomics, polish it off, and give it a new chance to shine in front of you guys.

I do not know the inspiration behind this, but I can see Top Shelf wanting to throw a spotlight on the creators outside the graphic novel game. Top Shelf gets a ton more traffic, the creators get eye balls ogling their work, and fans get a great collection of new webcomics. Either way, free comics are always great, and, well, Top Shelf has always held a warm place in my heart, so I wish them the best of luck on this.

(thx to activate)

Television Tropes & Idioms is a “a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction” (in wiki format, of course).

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to play with tropes, not to make fun of them.

Examples include E equals MC Hammer (see above), better than it sounds (with the related I am not making this up), slap slap kiss, and the untwist.

TV Tropes is definitely worth bookmarking and looking around, but be careful. It will steal all your time and ruin your life.

(via the subversively troperific Ryan North)

A Softer World: 301

Dark Horse and MySpace have teamed up to bring back Dark Horse Presents the comic company’s long-running anthology which had ended in September 2000. Started in 1986, Dark Horse Presents was the first comic published by Dark Horse, and was notably the first appearance of Concrete and the Sin City stories.

The inaugural issue is spectacular, but not groundbreaking as far as the creators go. Future issues, available exclusively on MySpace for the first week of every month, “will include a mix from both established, successful, comic creators as well as talented amateurs.” In this first issue, definitely check out Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon on Sugarshock, and Ron Marz and Luke Ross on Samurai: Heaven and Earth. The other two comics are also good, but, I mean, Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon…swoon.

DC is also entering the webcomics business with Zuda Comics, set to go live in October 2007. Unlike Dark Horse Presents, Zuda Comics will be entirely user generated, with anyone able to submit a sample of their comic. Then, each month, voters will decide the month’s best comics, and the winners will be given a one-year contract to publish their comic on Zuda. The exact contract is still unreleased, but according to DC president and publisher, Paul Levitz, “The copyright for each comic submitted to Zuda will be owned by its creator. DC will publish the winning/chosen comics under fairly conventional publishing agreements: initial payments for the work that is done, with royalties from revenues based on other uses, such as books, merchandise and movies/television shows.”

Zuda is a pretty great win/win situation. Some lucky creators get their comic published by DC (albeit through an online imprint), and DC gets a bunch of comics they know people will like (and, assumedly, a ton of ad traffic). And Dark Horse Presents isn’t too shabby either. Much more conventional than Zuda, it is still bound to showcase a lot of unknown creators, just as the original series did. (And it’s free!)

A fine time for the little guy, I’d say.