| Robert Balder | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1969 Detroit, Michigan [1] |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Webcomics, filk music |
Notable works | PartiallyClips Erfworld |
| Awards | Pegasus Award |
| http://www.robbalder.com/ | |
Robert T. Balder is a professional cartoonist and singer-songwriter. [2] He graduated from Roanoke College with a major in English in 1993 and, after a variety of jobs, entered a seven-year career in IT, starting as a manager of database development, which he left for his current career. [3]
As a comic author, he was first published in Scene magazine in 1998. [4] In 2001, he started PartiallyClips , a social commentary clip art webcomic also featured in the Anchorage Press , Cleveland Free Times , Concord Mirror, East Bay Express , Houston Press , Manchester Mirror, Metroland , Nth Degree, Salem Observer and the Other Paper . [4] He is also the writer for the Erfworld webcomic, which was listed as one of Time magazine's "Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007". [5] As of October 13, 2019, Erfworld has been discontinued for personal reasons.
Balder is well-known within the webcomic creator community, as evidenced by his writing of guest comics for other webcomics: Fragile Gravity, [6] Goats , [7] Order of the Stick , [8] Sluggy Freelance , [9] and Wondermark . [10] In 2006, he partnered with Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance, to create a retail market card game themed around Sluggy Freelance called Get Nifty . [11]
In August 2010, he co-wrote a 24-page comic called A Duel in the Somme , based on a story by the science fiction author Ben Bova and illustrated by the syndicated cartoonist Bill Holbrook. The comic was released on its own website under a Creative Commons license at a rate of one page per day and used a reward-driven donation model for revenue. [12]
Balder writes and sings comedy songs, and has recorded two CDs. [2] The title track from his first CD, "Rich Fantasy Lives", was co-written with Tom Smith, and won the 2007 Pegasus Award for Best Filk Song; they had been nominated the previous year for the same award. [13] He was also one of the seven founders of the FuMP, or "Funny Music Project", along with Devo Spice, Luke Ski, Tom Smith, Possible Oscar, Raymond and Scum, Spaff, and Worm Quartet, in which they present new songs released under a Creative Commons license. [2]
His comedy music has received national airplay in the United States on the syndicated Dr. Demento Show . His song "Gamer Funk" was the #1 most requested song on the Dr. Demento Show in both September [14] and October [15] 2009, and was the third most requested song for that entire year. In February 2009, Balder began a collaboration with ShoEboX of Worm Quartet called "Baldbox". [16] The duo released one CD (The Dumb Album) and several follow-up songs, which have also been played frequently by Dr. Demento and other terrestrial radio shows. [17]
Balder is a frequent guest and program participant at science fiction, comic, gaming and anime conventions, participating in as many as 20 events a year. [18] Several conventions have invited him as Guest of Honor, including Capclave, [19] CoastCon, [2] I-Con, [20] MidSouthCon, [21] and OASIS. [22]
Bill Holbrook is an American cartoonist and webcomic writer and artist, best known for his syndicated comic strip On the Fastrack.
Barret Eugene Hansen, known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and strange or unusual recordings dating from the early days of phonograph records to the present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at the Pasadena, California, station KPPC-FM. After he once played "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus on the radio, DJ "The Obscene" Steven Clean said that Hansen had to be "demented" to play it; this event inspired his stage name. His weekly show went into syndication in 1974 and was syndicated by the Westwood One Radio Network from 1978 to 1992. Broadcast syndication of the show ended on June 6, 2010, but the show continues to be produced weekly in an online version.
Dinosaur Comics is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in three collections and in a number of newspapers. The comic centers on three main characters, T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus.
Keenspot is a webcomics/webtoons portal founded in March 2000 by cartoonist Chris Crosby, Crosby's mother Teri, cartoonist Darren Bleuel, and Nathan Stone.
Tom Smith is an American singer-songwriter from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who got his start in the filk music community. He is a fourteen-time winner of the Pegasus Award for excellence in filking, including awards for his "A Boy and His Frog", "307 Ale", and "The Return of the King (Uh-huh)", and was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2005.
Doctor Fun is a single-panel, gag webcomic by David Farley. It began in September 1993, making it one of the earliest webcomics, and ran until June 2006. Doctor Fun was part of United Media's website from 1995, but had parted ways by 2003. The comic was one of the longest-running webcomics before it concluded, having run for nearly thirteen years with over 2,600 strips. The webcomic has been compared to The Far Side.
PartiallyClips is a webcomic, created by Rob Balder, which ran from 2002 to 2015. At the start of 2010, Balder handed authorship of the comic to Tim Crist, the comedy musician behind Worm Quartet.
Ookla the Mok is a filk band fronted by Rand Bellavia and Adam English (b.1970). The two met as undergraduates while attending Houghton College in 1988, and the majority of their performances have been at science-fiction conventions or in their hometown of Buffalo, New York. The band is named after a character from the Ruby-Spears Productions cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian, created by Steve Gerber.
Jeffrey J. Rowland is the author and artist responsible for Wigu and Overcompensating, two popular webcomics. Originally from Locust Grove, Oklahoma, Rowland now lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where he continues to work on the two projects, while running TopatoCo, a company which sells merchandise based on his and other artists' comics.
Chris Crosby is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Keenspot, a company providing a platform and network for webcomics. They are also a comics writer and artist, with works including Superosity, Sore Thumbs, and Snap The Punk Turtle.
Wondermark is a webcomic created by David Malki which was syndicated to Flak Magazine and appeared in The Onion's print edition from 2006 to 2008. It features 19th-century illustrations that have been recontextualized to create humorous juxtapositions. It takes the horizontal four-panel shape of a newspaper strip, although the number of panels varies from one to six or more. It is updated intermittently.
Erfworld was a story-driven fantasy/comedy webcomic and independently published graphic novel about a master strategy gamer summoned into and stuck inside a wargame running from December 2006 to its abrupt cancellation in October 2019. It featured contemporary memes and pop culture references.
Sluggy Freelance is a long-running webcomic written and drawn by Pete Abrams. Starting in 1997, it is one of the oldest successful webcomics, and as of 2012 had hundreds of thousands of readers. Abrams was one of the first comic artists successful enough to make a living from a webcomic.
Worm Quartet is a comedy music project created by Timothy F. Crist who uses the stage moniker ShoEboX and performs fast, synth-driven, pseudo-metal punk/pop. The band was formed in 1991 and its name is a reference to cartoons Crist used to draw.
The history of webcomics follows the advances of technology, art, and business of comics on the Internet. The first comics were shared through the Internet in the mid-1980s. Some early webcomics were derivatives from print comics, but when the World Wide Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized.
Notable events of 2002 in webcomics.
Notable events of 2001 in webcomics.
Notable events of the late 1990s in webcomics.
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