Zuda Team-Up

Check this out! Four vocal Zuda Communiteers (it's a word; I looked it up) come together to provide comic strip commentary on the online comics culture being fostered at Zuda:
Commentary by the Ninth Doctor, Pencils and Inks by Illinest from layouts by Rob Berry, Colors by mpd57

The Knave Interviews Zuda Editor Kwanza Johnson!

The Knave presents both text and comic based interviews with Kwanza Johnson, known to the Knave's Zudite readers as the first man you have to impress:

(Click for full size, art by Rob Berry)


Knave: But seriously, Kwanza, how did you come to work at Zuda?

Kwanza Johnson: Boring short answer; I saw an advert on the Time Warner job Website and applied. Long boring answer; Basically after my stint at Marvel I'd decided that webcomics were the way to go and despite other non-comic employment, stayed focused on the medium. When I found out the position at DC was to edit webcomics, I made it a priority to get the job.

Knave: Could you describe what your job entails?

Kwanza: Basically, I try to find great talent and original stories that people will enjoy. I also try to help that talent make their stories the best webcomics online.

Knave: What kind of editorial discussions occur between you and the talent? Are they limited to on-going series, or do you make suggestions about changes in the contest material as need be? Do you ever say "change this and you're in the competition?"

Kwanza: Sorta. In the competition we request edits for language, grammar and typos. So it is more like, "Take out all the Eff Bombs, check your spelling, cover the naked people and you are in the competition."

Knave: So are you planning on putting in a mature content filter so that content with "eff bombs" and "uncovered naked people" will be allowed on the site?

Kwanza: That's on the list, but it's a technical issue, so Dave could address that better than I. Websites don't build themselves, so with that in mind, it is something that still as to be coded. I can't put a time-stamp on when, but it is a possible feature. We'll surprise you.

Knave: What about with the talent who've been signed to a contract, either through a contest or in an instant winner scenario? Are you a pretty hands off editor? In a year from now will there need to be another "editor" at Zuda to handle the twelve plus additional series you'd presumably have by then?

Kwanza: No editor is hands off. I can't function hands off. Even if I am only complementing someone's brilliance, there is some interaction . I am at least a sounding board for ideas. I will point out what I think is working and what is not, but I also will not rock the boat if things are going well. As for more editors, well I suppose that depends on whether all of the series continue.

Knave: What do you look for in a submission? Any tips on how people can make their entries stand out (in a good way)?

Kwanza: Good artwork and an engaging story. The subject of the comic hardly matters if you can't entertain the reader. How that is achieved is the real trick. Being able to draw decently and write a coherent sentence help (like, a lot), but overall submitters should look at what is out there and try to create something better than that. Before getting in a Zuda competition, you are competing with every other comic, so make sure your work blows them away.

Knave: Bayou is proving to be a very well-regarded "flagship property" for Zuda. Why do you think it's connecting with people?

Kwanza: Jeremy is telling a story that has not been told before. That is what makes it stand out. The subject matter is interesting territory to navigate and I think that intrigues readers. It also helps that Jeramy is great artist. I've been an admirer of his work long before Zuda.

Knave: What are some of your personal favorite webcomics not on Zuda?

Kwanza: Hands down it is Scary Go Round by John Allison. I want to live in that webcomic. I read everything on Transmission X, Act-I-Vate as well as Perry Ellis Bible Fellowship, Penny Arcade, so many others and that one strip that is about video games (sometimes), with the talking cat and the troll... Man! I can't remember the name of it, but it is awesome. ;-)

Knave: Do you think there's much reason for creators of other successful webcomics to move their properties over or create new properties for Zuda? Does the catalog of work here hope to eventually include existing properties with the Zuda licensing agreement?

Kwanza: You'd have to pose that question to a webcomic creator. I would love to work with any of my favorite webcomics, if it were possible. It's really a personal choice. Do you want to manage all aspects of the IP or just draw? That is not an easy decision. Ultimately, that is a business question and my own opinion wouldn't really change anyone's mind if they are set on one way or the other.

Knave: Do you read print comics?

Kwanza: Oh yeah. I am a HUGE Naruto fan. All-Star Superman is the best superhero comic being written right now - THE. BEST. I will fight anyone who says different. Scott Pilgrim is comic book rockness.

Knave: Do you think the web will ever replace print as the primary distribution method for the comics media?

Kwanza: Not it the next few years, but ultimately it will replace it. Paper is heavy and takes up space in your home. It is the reason iPods are so prevalent - no endless shelves of stuff, just handsome, wee devices that carry loads of entertainment. A svelte, color, touch-screen eReader will hail the end of periodicals. Did you read that, Steve Jobs? A svelte, color, touch-screen eReader. I want it now!

Knave: I assume you mean something with a bigger screen than the iPhone. Will the format of such a cool new reader be 4X3? Is the "portrait" aspect of text finally turning over to a "landscape" aspect, like the one Zuda employs, that is closer to film?

Kwanza: Way bigger than iPhone. Honestly it could just be another function on a tablet notebook. The natural screen size would mimic a standard graphic novel or manga, something familiar. At that point content can be portrait or landscape. The only reason Zuda is "landscape" is because computer screens are wider horizontally.

Knave: Well thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview. One final question: what are some of your goals for Zuda, short term, long term, in general. What would you like to see happen with Zuda; where would you like to see it go?

Kwanza: In the short term, my goal is to produce webcomics that people want to read. Nothing outside of that will ensure success. I would like to see the technology of Zuda grow. Aside from being an imprint, Zuda is a website and therefore it needs to continuously improve at the speed of the Internet.

The Knave and the Professor Diverge

Guess what? The Knave of Krypton and the Professor of Kandor had such divergent opinions of the landmark Captain America 34 that it took them two weeks to put together their thoughts in the form of two competing reviews.



And more may be forthcoming because we're not done disagreeing on a pretty fundamental level.

The Knave Reviews X-Men: Messiah CompleX!

With guest artist Neil Dutton, the Knave brings you his take on X-Men: Messiah CompleX. What a surprise... he loved it.

The Professor of Kandor Interviews Illinest!

Fear not, Zuda-Heads, we may be finished with our interview with the competitors for the January competition, but as a parting Zuda shot, our own astute Professor of Kandor has conducted an interview with a staple of the Zuda Message Boards, Illinest.



(click for full size, "Illinest" avatar created by Lina Chen)

The Knave Interviews SuperTron's Sheldon Vella!

And in our final interview of the January Competition, The Knave has a chat with Sheldon Vella, creator of Supertron.



Knave of Krypton: Could you explain the history of SuperTron? I've heard that this series was actually published, in Image Popgun? Is this a story you've wanted to tell for a long time?

Sheldon Vella: Haha, to tell the honest-to-god truth, there's puddles in the street deeper than the history of SuperTron. I was working construction and got sent to a new site on "SuperTron Avenue". Being totally bored with my job, but completely inspired by the street name, I spent all day planning out the SuperTron script in my head, while jackhammering away in 35 degree (Celsius) heat.

More often than not, most of my story idea's come from cool words I'll see out and about, or a line out of a song i like. Idea's come to me easier when I'm not trying to think of them.

And as for the Popgun Anthology, my name was passed on by my good mate Elio ( www.eliohouse.com), and I got invited to contribute an entry. Being my first ever published work, SuperTron seemed like a fairly "all-rounder" story to intro myself into the industry.

KofK: You're utilizing a pretty non-conventional, almost radioactive color palette. Is this something that you chose for the web or do you think this would also work in print?

SV: Even before Popgun, SuperTron was intended for print. But, this being my first published piece, my experience with printing colours was ZERO. If this were a perfect world, everything on screen would look like it does on paper.

That said, my reason for the colour selection was simply a question of mood. SuperTron being a "fun/frenzy" themed comic, one would assume the colour scheme should reflect and support said theme. After some colouring tips (thanks charmaine! xoxo) I went with the acidic/toxic greens and yellows pushing out the baby-ish pinks of the robots.

KofK: What was it about the Zuda model that was appealing to you and caused you to submit this series?

SV: The money.

KofK: Honest answer...

SV: Haha, well that AND the fact that I saw so many hardcore critics on there slaying and praising the other entries, I just couldn't wait to get my share of those sweet sweet comments. I'm a total whore for attention.

KofK: Okay. So who are some of your artistic influences?

SV: Like I mentioned before, I get alot of my drive from things outside the comic industry like graff/urban culture, tattoo art, heavy metal music, porno e.t.c. But as far as PICTURE artists go i'm a big fan of Geoff Darrow, Katsuhiro Otomo, Frank Frazetta, Simon Bisley...blah blah blah. Name dropping influences is boring.

KofK: Sorry I asked! I particularly enjoyed the diagram cut-away on page six. It really adds to the industrial/technological feel of the series. Are there any bigger ideas you'd like to make with SuperTron or is it mainly for entertainment?

SV: Haha that panel was a total fluke, but I'm glad you liked it. I needed something to make Spinbot's little "talking-to-himself" moment a little more exciting. And i think because i made the design of the characters fairly simplistic, i wanted to show that they still had all those awesome moving parts underneath their shells. And i pretty much just referenced car parts for Spinbot's insides, it was a lot of fun to draw.

So i guess the next time the comic starts to "slow down", I'll come up with something to make it entertaining.

KofK: Do you think it's a challenge to make dynamic characters out of robots? Do you look for ways to humanize them?

SV: "Challenging", not really. "Fun", oh fugging definitely. You could be drawing any kind of "mechanical/inorganic" object, so long as you give it the flair and the fire, it'll jump right off the page. And given the assumption that their faces are made of metal, giving the mouth that slight bend or twitch to an eye-brow expresses that tiny little hint of emotion and, I think, gives them all the humanity they need.

KofK: Anything else you'd like to add?

SV: Just my love and appreciation to my entervoid.com crew, and all my other freinds old and new, home and abroad who have supported me this far (not just in Zuda either) and have brought me to where I am today.

The Knave Interviews Pieces of Eden's Seth Sherwood and Diego Tripodi!

Next, an interview with the creative team behind Pieces of Eden.



Knave of Krypton: Your series is one of many Zuda competitors this month that are less traditionally narrative. Why are you presenting your story in this way?

Seth Sherwood: As soon as Zuda released their format guide I was exited by the possibilities. It looked like a Sunday comic strip, and yet I couldn’t shake the notion that this was DC, and that they might be wanting what boiled down to an online comic book. If these panels were going to be one-a-day though, I’d hate to break up the narrative. To me, each panel would have to stand on its own in some way. The traditional word bubbles and runs of dialog wouldn’t work. Of course, since I initially thought that, a ton of Zuda strips have done it just fine. What I did though, was to come up with a few different formats and styles that would work one-a-day. My favorite was a stream of consciousness confessional of sorts. That struck me as perfect—so the form came first. From there I came up with a character who might think like that—and the broken Eden just came to life from there.

Diego Tripodi: Once we decided where we wanted to go with Eden's story, our working process for this comic went something like this: Seth would send me the text of what Eden is thinking about. Based on that, I would draw what I thought was fitting to Eden's words. Being a character whose point of view and reality are broken, it just seemed fitting to be as fragmented as possible. The cue to all of this is on page 3, where we see Eden in a fractured mirror.

KofK: Your artwork is very engaging. Care to tell us about the process at all?

DT: I usually start by drawing very rough layouts of what I have in mind for each page. Once I arrange the panels in a way that I thought would tell Eden's story while also allowing me to doing cool graphic stuff, I started penciling. Due to the tone of the story, I wanted the inking to be grittiest thing I had ever done in terms of texture. Once I was finished with the first round of pages, I sent them to Seth, who tried a color approach that was different to things we had tried on projects in the past. Early on he came up with the color style that the pages now have. It was a collaborative process.

SS: VERY collaborative! When Diego sent me the inked panels I had been planning to do low key, matte colors. The inking though… it was SO moody and had his controlled chaos to it that coloring it traditionally, even in muted colors, killed it. It took a bit of experimentation, but eventually I settled on this red palette, with the occasional spot colors that really looked cool. When I made it all noisy though, that’s when it seemed to really match the art. It’s funny, Diego’s art made me color as grainy as I could—and yet when I sent them back to him, he responded by making his inks even noisier. We were trying to out grit each other I think. I also felt like this time out our roles intermingled. Diego certainly directed the story by working based on Eden’s words alone and not a script, and I had some influence on the art with the color. It’s like we handed it back and forth until it came out nicely sculpted.

KofK: How did you guys meet up and decide to collaborate on this series?

DT: I first contacted Seth in mid/late 2006. He had placed an ad on Digital Webbing and was looking for an artist interested in working on a "Jack Kirby meets Ed Wood" type of project. I thought that sounded interesting, so I emailed him with a link to some comic pages that I had recently finished working.
(http://diegotripodi.deviantart.com/art/SMA-Chapter-I-Page-1-of-6-37482730),
The pages starred a Mexican luchador called Diávolo. Later that same day, Seth e-mailed me back telling me about the project he had in mind. It turned out his story shared some of the elements that I had drawn in my pages (a wrestler, a car, the desert, etc.). So we took it from there, pretty much mixing what we had done on our own and added new stuff. Looking back, it could be seen more like an experiment than anything else, really, but it was a good learning experience. After that, we worked on some other comic projects, and we've tried different approaches every time, doing what we thought was the best for each of the stories we were creating. When we learned about Zuda, we already knew that we worked well together so we started talking about creating a new series for the format.

SS: I used to really abuse Digital Webbing’s classifieds. Sometimes I get an idea, and throw an ad up before I really know what I am doing. Diego responded to more than one of them. Not because he was just he was one of those people who respond to any ad—but because we have the same taste. Midgets, luchadores, zombies, dirty clowns, Ed Wood, demons, one-armed hookers… really the weirdest stuff I can come up with Diego has already doodled. That first project which he mentioned—I was so excited. He was literally drawing stuff I thought I just made up. From there, we had an open dialog.

KofK: Why did you choose to submit to Zuda?

SS: It’s run by DC. There’s an open submissions policy. They pay. It’s really the best of multiple worlds. I was excited for it from the first press release. I know Zuda has some serious detractors, who tell me I could put a webcomic up on my own site, and maintain the IP rights. That may be true, but we’re newcomers here—and it’s not that easy to get people to know my website even exists. Even if we lose, it’s great exposure considering that the top 3 slots in both competitions thus far have tens of thousands of views.

KofK: Is this series something you developed for Zuda or something that you'd already been working on?

DT: We started developing this series right after we learned about Zuda, purely to submit it to them.

KofK: Who are some of the influences you're looking to as you develop this series?

DT: That's hard to say. Our working method usually begins by building up a story by talking about the things we'd like to do, and discussing why they would or would not work. I guess the readers are probably more able than ourselves to detect influences. I think anything-- comics, movies, music, books, etc., can become an influence and show up in our work even if we don't realize it. That said, some of the things Seth and I talked about while working on Pieces of Eden included Jack the Ripper and David Lynch's movie Blue Velvet. I remember having mentioned to Seth a video by Guns N' Roses for "The Garden", which I thought that, visually, was something that could be part of Eden's world.

SS: Visually I took a step back on this one. In the past I have ideas of how things should look, but this time I let Diego do it all. I wanted to just write her thoughts, and let him imagine the world. Tonally, we talked about things like Lynch films, noir classics and a lot of trashy 70s and 80s heavy metal, Hollywood hooker stuff. I suppose you also can’t really do anything about serial killers without invoking Seven in some way… no mater how hard you try not to. Narratively, I looked to some of my favorite books from the fragmented, stream of consciousness field. Kathy Acker in particular. Then I filtered that through the lens of the horror genre.

KofK: Thanks for the interview, guys, anything else you'd like to say?

DT: We really enjoy reading the comments that people leave. We appreciate that somebody would take the time to write about what they like and don't like about Pieces of Eden. We have many ideas about where Eden's story is heading to, and are looking forward to developing this project. Last, but not least, a BIG thank you to all the people that voted for us!

SS: Definitely a big thanks to everyone who voted for us. I know that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but we really hope we get to continue developing the tale. It’s been a fun experiment for us.