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Chris Ware releases iPad-only comic via McSweeney's app
Chris Ware is an amazing cartoonist out of Chicago, and he's done a lot of work with McSweeney's, the literary journal run by novelist Dave Eggers and his company. Now, Ware has released an iPad-only comic, released inside the McSweeney's app, and co-developed with Spaces of Play, the studio behind the recent iOS game Spirits. The comic is called Touch Sensitive, and it's apparently 14 pages of art and animations by Ware, featuring his great style and pace. The piece itself is a 99 cent purchase inside the McSweeney's app, which is a free download available now. There's a lot of other content in there, too, including a month long subscription to their service called The Small Chair, featuring stories, essays, interview, and other works from the McSweeney's stable. If you haven't checked the app out yet, you should definitely pick it up. And the Ware comic is a great first purchase in there, too -- it's completely exclusive to the iPad, so this is your only chance to read it.
McSweeney's revamps iOS app, now universal with a bookstore
I've said before that I'm a huge fan of McSweeney's, the publishing group founded by author Dave Eggers. The company has had an iPhone app for a while, but it recently updated to a universal version, so now all of that great content (from daily posts to various blogs, books, and the eponymous quarterly) is available to read on the iPad any time you want. The app is set up on a subscription basis, so the original purchase of $6.99 gets you access to six months of daily content from the company, plus "semi-eternal delivery" of material from the website (which is publicly available anyway). There's also an ebook store in the new version of the app, where you can buy any books the company has published, at prices from $6 to $15. All together, that may sound like a little much compared to some other apps, but compared to actual print books, that's still cheap, and all of McSweeney's ebooks are manually designed and typeset for the format, which is pretty cool. Good to see that McSweeney's is improving its iOS presence -- the App Store's a great place for smaller publishing houses like this one to find a bigger audience, I think.
World of Warcraft vs. my girlfriend
I'm a big fan of McSweeney's, the web home of Dave Eggers' McSweeney's publishing house (and whenever I can, I try to help out 826 CHI, the Chicago chapter of their writing center) -- they offer up quick little humor pieces every weekday in addition to various events and shows around the country. And the other day, as a few readers have kindly informed us, they focused their literary light on World of Warcraft -- writer Tyler Curry has a fun piece about how he was forced to choose between the game and the woman he loved.It is very funny to hear WoW locales and situations stuck in between the usual patter of a couple in a relationship, and though this is, we presume, a fictional account of something that Dr. Phil claims happens all the time, it's well-written. Plus, the dig at "role-players" made us chuckle, too.But we do have one nit to pick, one issue in here that we just can't ignore and/or laugh casually at as we're obviously meant to. Seriously, with the leveling changes since 2.3, why would anyone run Gnomeregan anymore? If he doesn't know that there are much easier and more profitable ways to level through that range, maybe he deserves to be dumped anyway.
McSweeney's offers up some more
McSweeney's is, generally, a publication that you either 'get' or dislike. I am usually very entertained by the various trips into the absurd that McSweeney's affords readers, so I was quit tickled when Eric sent us a link to this. Tom Batten offers up 3 ideas for new 'Get a Mac' commercials. I don't think they would sell any more Macs, but they made me chuckle.
McSweeney's open letter to Paperboy residents
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the online iteration of the "semi-quarterly" literary journal of the same name, publishes a feature called, "Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond." They recently tackled video gaming's often nonsensical narratives with "An Open Letter to the Occupants of a House on the Nintendo Game, Paperboy."The letter begins, "I am writing to apologize for causing damage to your property on "Tuesday," when the newspapers I was attempting to deliver accidentally broke two of your windows, overturned your garbage cans, and, most despicably, unearthed a gravestone in your front lawn..."For more Paperboy nonsense see:Mega 64's Paperboy sketch[Thanks, Liz]
