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Yale cartoonist Ngozi Ukazu's CHECK PLEASE a young gay hockey player (who bakes)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
OMGCHECKPLEASE!FANART_EMMYBREESE
http://emmybreese.tumblr.com
emily | 19 |
just a normal girl
with an
evergrowing list
of obsessions
http://emmybreese.tumblr.com/post/159354203094/dex-literally-went-through-the-first-4-stages-of
http://emmybreese.tumblr.com/image/159354203094
(also see: http://wingedwarbler.tumblr.com/image/159472716989
http://wingedwarbler.tumblr.com/ )
FROM: http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/tagged/main
NOT SO SOFT nurseydex:
fuck acceptance.
APR 09 2017 1,325 NOTES
#CHECK PLEASE #OMGCP #MY ARTS
#DEX #WILLIAM POINDEXTER #NURSEY #DEREK NURSE #NURSEY AND DEX
#LARDO #LARISSA DUAN
#LOVEABLE FOOLS
CellarDweller:
:laugh:
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: CellarDweller on April 14, 2017, 10:07:44 am ---:laugh:
--- End quote ---
;)
http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/tagged/main
http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/episodes
https://www.patreon.com/ngoziu
and main site (new!) http://checkpleasecomic.com/
SEASON 3: JUNIOR YEAR (#18)
SPRING (2016)
Family Skate
MAY 17TH 16:36 9,377 NOTES
http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/tagged/main
Aloysius J. Gleek:
OMGCHECKPLEASE!QUESTION_TIME_FROM_NGOZI
Bitty’s Birthday
Fun Fact: Bitty’s birthday was originally supposed to be the same as my sister’s, May 4th.
But I didn’t want Bitty’s day to be filled with “May the Fourth Be With You” jokes–so I shifted his birth date a day over.
To Cinco de Mayo. Total accident.
#rambling
Digital commissions for the Kickstarter! A first pie in a new apartment, a rainy day, and hanging out..
#kickstarter #sketches
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/11/527821553/with-check-please-a-comics-creator-rewrites-the-rules-and-scores
BOOK NEWS & FEATURES
Heard on All Things Considered
With 'Check Please,'
A Comics Creator Rewrites The Rules — And Scores
By NEDA ULABY
May 11, 20174:36 PM ET
Eric "Bitty" Bittle takes to the ice in "Check Please," one of the most popular hockey webcomics (yes, that's a thing).
Ngozi Ukazu
The creator of one of the most popular hockey-themed web comics — yes, that's a thing — does not even know how to ice skate. Ngozi Ukazu created "Check Please," about a sweet-natured Southern hockey player who's short, loves baking pies and is completely crushed out on his hunky team captain. ( http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/ )
The success of "Check Please" shows how a new generation of storytellers are refining the 21st century tools that help them attract and retain fans and earn a living with their work. A recent Kickstarter for "Check Please" raised about $100,000 in an hour. (It eventually cleared about a quarter of million.)
"I would say my estimated readership is at least 120K," Ukazu tells me in an email conversation. "10k people check out [my] updates whenever they're posted. And it might be more interesting to talk about the 5000 fanfictions that have been posted on the fanfiction site AO3." ( https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Check%20Please!%20(Webcomic)/works )
Ukazu grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and the kind of kid who got into both Harvard and Yale. While attending the latter, she became fascinated by hockey culture, fraternity culture — in general, by bros. "Maybe it's my need to see these things [where] I could be seen as the enemy," she says, half-jokingly. "To see it and then learn about it, infiltrate it and then subvert it.
Ukazu says she became fascinated by hockey and fraternity culture in college, and felt the need to "infiltrate" it.
Ngozi Ukazu
"I don't want to other them too much," she adds. "Which is like, as a black woman, who am I to say I'm othering a bunch of white guys who play this sport. But it was like I was doing this anthropological study."
And Ukazu has also come up with a brilliant strategy for keeping fans on the hook, something that's made her comic an internet sensation, says Gary Tyrrell, who writes about the world of web comics on his blog Fleen ( http://fleen.com/ ).
"'Check Please' has absolutely exploded," he says. Even he, not normally the type to go for a gay college hockey romance, is a fan. Partly because he finds it adorable, and partly because he admires how Ukazu keeps the story going across multiple social media platforms even during the weeks when she's working on the comic and isn't putting new panels online. For example, the characters have their own Twitter and Tumblr accounts that drop hints about upcoming plotlines. And Tyrrell says Ukazu lets her fans listen in, so to speak, on what's happening backstage.
"There's almost daily process updates," he says. "Here are some sketches, here's a little piece of story that didn't make it in. Here's what these other characters were doing while the story was happening on panel."
Ukazu has been writing and drawing "Check Please" for more than three years. The print version of Year Two officially debuts this week at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, (May 13th - May 14th http://www.torontocomics.com/ ) and she says at the end of Year Four, when the characters graduate, she'll be done. In the meantime, she views "Check Please" as something close to a playful exercise in collegiate hockey-centric cultural appropriation.
"I'm not so much appropriating this culture as saying, like, 'Here's a culture and this is how it could be in an ideal world where someone like Bitty could thrive," she said.
Someone like a talented outsider, who figures out the rules, who breaks them knowingly, and with nerve. And who makes things more interesting for everyone. Like creator, like creation.
Correction
May 12, 2017
In the audio of this story, the main character of Check Please is referred to as Bitty Bidwell. In fact, the character is Eric "Bitty" Bittle.
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