Here’s a short illustrated story for you: Steve Lieber is a comic book artist. He drew Underground, a graphic novel (written by Jeff Parker, drawn by Steve, and colored by Ron Chan).  The story follows Park Ranger Wesley Fischer as she tries to save Stillwater Cave – and then has to save herself. On Sunday [...]

Ariana Osborne is credited as “Chief Mechanic” on the FreakAngels(1) web-comic/graphic novel series (written by Warren Ellis, artwork by Paul Duffield). In practice it seems that this means she’s the web designer/maintainer and general “make the crazy idea work in practice” person. One of the things that she and Warren Ellis are doing is using [...]

…which I think can work equally well for the visual arts:

There’s an interesting discussion going on at TechDirt about the evolving business model being used by musician Amanda Palmer. One commenter, Kevin Stapp, sums it up perfectly: The more I hear about ‘new business models’ for musicians the more I’m reminded of a very old business model: patronage. Throughout much of history artists (painters, composers, [...]

Every week I seem to read some nonsense spouted by ill-informed journalists regurgitating a press release from the music industry.  This week it was Dan Sabbagh in The Times condemning “…the traditional net libertarian nonsense that feels good if you want to live in a world in which there are only pub bands with pages [...]