Because every webcomic critic has to try this at least once.

The very first comic, from Birdsworth Comics.

Ok, I'm proud to announce that my new project has finally launched! This is a moment of great excitement for any webcomicker, when they launch a new webcomic.

This is something I've actually been working on ever since I made it little post about fixed art comics about five months ago. In that post, I made the following comment regarding Indie Tits: My suggestion to Jeph Jacques is this: If you want Indie Tits to be more interesting and be able to do more with it, extend the length to 4-6 panels, and have different birds, with some birds flying in and out in different panels. Then you should be able to do some good things.

After putting up the post, I thought to myself: "You know, that's a really good idea. And Jeph Jacques is probably not going to go for it, since he seems to be happy enough with the way things are." So I decided to give it a shot myself. The first thing I did was email Jeph Jacques and let him know what I was planning to do, and asked him if he'd like to draw the birds for me (I offered to pay him, obviously). He never responded to my email, so I figured: "At least he doesn't care enough to out and out tell me I'm a jerk who's ripping him off."

So I went ahead and asked a good friend of mine to do the artwork for me. He's a fabulous artist whose forte is painting, but has been looking to get into the digital realm recently, and fortunately my request for five panels of birds would give him some good practice, so he was happy to do the drawing for me. He does a fabulous comic called My Life in Records which is still in its early stages but will accomplish great things before its run is done, I'm sure.

He produced the birds you see above, and I was thrilled. He based his pictures on old Audubon plates, which fit perfectly with my idea of wanting to name my birds after Romantic poets and have them be flowing with old poetry every week.

I intend to be very professional with this project. There will be a new Birdsworth comic every day, seven days a week, until I flat out run out of ideas, which I'm hoping will never happen. I was smart enough to set myself up with a 28 day buffer running into this thing, so I've got plenty of ahead time to work through writer's block or to take a vacation without a break in the strip.

But while I'm keeping things professional on the comic side, I'm going to be wildly experimenting on the administration side. I intend to use Birdsworth to experiment with a variety of different comic management scripts and archiving features, and pass on my gained knowledge to The Webcomicker readers. At the moment the site is powered by CUSP and I'm running the archives with Oh No Robot. You can be sure you'll hear more about the quality of these programs and others as I try them out. I also had a friend of mine set up RSS feeds for both the comic and the news on my site. I'm not much of an RSSer myself, but some people appreciate it, I guess?

So go, read my comic, add it to your daily links, and enjoy!

Oh, and add a link to Birdsworth on your website. Please? *smile*