Tagged: Washington

The Mighty Motor Sapiens Roar To Life

Rowdy.com has partnered with Insight Studios Group to offer The Mighty Motor Sapiens, a new online daily comic strip that combines high speed action, fast cars, humor and the entire planet being taken over by lizard people.

With new installments appearing every weekday beginning September 3, 2007, the story begins 18 months after the world has been taken over by a race of the Morisoni, lizard people from the center of the Earth. Despite the odd change in circumstances, life has continued and things seem disturbingly okay. Sure, they took out Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Paris, but on the other hand they took out Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Paris. And for some reason they wiped out everyone’s credit histories, too.

Now the Morisoni control the world and their military bases are everywhere. The Lizards live among us, but this new arrangement seems to be working. Four teenagers, Cam Corman, Hannah Barbario, Gigs Brewster and Maddie Brewster, haven’t seen much of an impact from the changes. Yet.

Springing from the minds of writer-artist Daniel Krall (Oni’s One Plus One), writer-artist Mark Wheatley (Frankenstein Mobster), and writer Robert Tinnell (Feast of the Seven Fishes), The Mighty Motor Sapiens was created as an exclusive feature for the Rowdy.com web community.  The strip will be written and drawn by Krall with additional material by Wheatley and Tinnell. All three creators are veterans of both print and online comics. They are joined by inker Craig Taillerfer (The Chelation Kid), with colors provided by Krall’s studio and lettering by Matthew Plog. The strip is produced by Insight Studios.

State of newspaper cartooning

Via Tom Spurgeon, The Tacoma Daily Index’s Todd Matthews examines the current state and status of political and editorial cartoonists, with an emphasis on the Washington state papers.  Quotes like "The state of newspaper cartooning nationally is not a happy one" and "Political cartoonists are a dying breed" do not seem to bode well.

Similarly, via Heidi, Lev Grossman at Time Magazine also observes that "Comic strips in newspapers are dying. They’re starved for space, crushed down to a fraction of their original size. They’re choked creatively by ironfisted syndicates and the 1950s-era family values that newspapers impose."  and like Matthews, Grossman is hopeful that the new media will be the savior of editorial cartoons and strips, taking a more in-depth look at webcomics.

ComicMix will continue to follow the death and rebirth of these well-established artformsm, to see how well newspaper features can still flourish without being in the newspapers themselves.