I’m ecstatic to report that I’ll be a featured speaker at this year’s WebVisions, the Visionary Web Conference that rocks the Oregon Convention Center annually. Past attendees already know the value of this event, and newcomers couldn’t pick a better time to jump on board with keynote presentations by Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing and Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering.

I’ll be presenting Graphic Storytelling in New Media, a look at the compositional and narrative potential of web and interaction design through the principals (and lessons learned) of comics. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss the intersections of my two favorite mediums, and I hope you’ll join me on Friday, May 22nd at 10:30am Thursday, May 21st at 2:45pm for some graphic inspiration.

For more info or to take advantage of workshops and early bird registration, surf on over to WebVisions. Have a question or comment regarding the presentation? Leave a comment or tweet @tylersticka!

Official Session Description:

There’s a reason Google tapped the talents of “Understanding Comics” author Scott McCloud to introduce their innovative browser to the world; comics possess the graphic clarity, visual language and universal appeal necessary to communicate complex stories, ideas and emotions to the largest audience possible. Join interactive designer (and published cartoonist) Tyler Sticka as we infuse the potential of our user experiences with the compositional, narrative and iconic principals of graphic storytelling.

Update (4/27): The presentation has been rescheduled one day earlier in the afternoon, see the correction above.

I was saddened to hear today that after years of sagging sales, MAD Magazine is going quarterly (and all spin-off titles are getting the axe). While Peanuts was my first love in comics, MAD was assuredly my second. It was satirical but not pretentious, naughty but not malicious. With cartoonists as amazing as Sergio Aragonés, Antonio Prohias, Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, Mort Drucker and many more represented therein, MAD ensured itself a dedicated section of my bookshelf that exists to this day.

That being said, the change is understandable and more than a little expected. With the exception of a year or so in high school, I’ve never been a subscriber. I was introduced to MAD through my dad, who enjoyed both the magazine and pocket books as a kid, and encouraged by my mom, who tolerated many quests through used book stores searching for volumes which lay undiscovered. While modern films were being parodied in it’s pages, I was reading older back-issues from the book’s heyday. As great as many of the contemporary artists are, they’ve always felt foreign next to my yellowed, dog-eared copies of Captain Klutz, and parodies of Harry Potter have always seemed less like a private joke between the artist and I than did old satires of the Godfather series, Star Trek and MAS*H.

The more obvious issue is that of online competition. In an age of Pitchfork Media and IGN, it seems absolutely comical that I ever paid for copies of SPIN and Game Informer. I still believe that MAD offers a level of quality cartooning largely unparalleled on the web, but sites like YouTube are overflowing with the sort of irreverence and subversiveness that was once the source of MAD’s immediate appeal.

Mark Evanier is right when he says that the brand and personality of MAD are still too valuable to die quietly. While there are a plethora of well-written comics online, very few of them are also well-drawn. If MAD could capture the web’s attention while maintaining the standard of cartooning readers have enjoyed for over 50 years, we’d be the “gang of idiots” for not reading.