The Webcomicker

Moving forward, moving onward.

2007-01-02T16:17:00.000-06:00

One of my New Years resolutions was to take this blog more seriously.

And I've decided that the only way to take it more seriously is to end it.

...And move it to it's own site. So update your links to Webcomicker.com. I figure maybe if I'm paying for my blog, I'll be more motivated to keep it up to date. There won't be any more posts here at Blogger, so please update your links and your RSS feeds, because things are going to be interesting at the new site.

...And a happy new year

2006-12-28T14:14:00.001-06:00

Welp, I'm finally done with college. And it looks like I've got a job lined up, at least temporarily. So it looks like I can finally get back into webcomics the way I've been wanting to. Look for some exciting new things from me in January (I may not have them ready to launch right on the 1st of the new year, but they'll be coming out soon).

Also, I just thought I'd mention that I asked for a lot of webcomic books for Christmas, and it was not the best idea. I thought it'd be a great way to get some books without spending what little money I have left. Instead, it meant about a month and a half of not knowing which books I would be getting and therefore being unable to buy ANYTHING, which was quite annoying.

In the end, I received The Good, The Bad, and the Pugly from Sheldon, and The Blackness Between from Schlock Mercenary. Both are incredibly awesome. Sheldon never ceases to get me laughing out loud, and Schlock has such great layouts and bonus material that it looks beautiful in print.

However, this also means I did not receive
A Brief History of Webcomics from Checkerboard Nightmare
Inverloch Volume 2 from Inverloch
Evil Inc. Annual Report Volume 2 from Evil Inc.
Dandy & Company Volumes 3, 4, and 5 from Dandy and Company

Fortunately, thanks to awesome Grandmas I got quite a bit of money this year for Christmas, so I've already gone out and purchased Inverloch Volume 2 (which is available at Borders and Barnes and Noble as it actually has a distributor: Seven Seas Manga) and while I was there I picked up American Born Chinese, which has been on my reading list. I also ran by a comic book shop and picked up Cowboys and Aliens, which I'll be talking about here soon. The other books will be ordered soon.

Oh, and I also ordered A Well Balanced Meal, since Dave Kellett said he was about to run out. And when someone says you may NEVER HAVE THE CHANCE AGAIN to own something, that almost always suckers me in.

Yeah, yeah, shut up already.

2006-12-06T15:21:00.000-06:00

The ComicSpace logo, from ComicSpace.

I'm really not a big fan of social networking sites. In all honesty, to me it seems they serve no purpose beyond letting people recreate their high school cliques in an online format, where all anyone's worried about is getting into another person's "top 8 friends" or whatever. I've never really cared about stuff like that. Online social networking is just so cheap, in my opinion. Heck, it took me a long time to get into blogs, until I realized that people were using them to post interesting criticism and debate and not just "Today I drank two glasses of orange juice... Hyuk."

That being said, I've created an account for myself on ComicSpace, the new "MySpace for webcomics". Why? Well, first off it's because I wanted to park my name there. I like to park my name on most popular sites just so that some yahoo can't go around ruining my reputation. But secondly, it's because it looks like ComicSpace is going to be much more than just a social networking site. It's going to have tools for tracking your webcomics (although I've always preferred Piperka to OnlineComics.net), and even the ability to add your own comics (and I'm guessing with that, the ability to subscribe to the comics of others).

So it's not just a social networking site, it's also a site full of webcomics tools. And that sort of thing is right up my alley. So I'm signed up, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. You can even request to be my friend, if you like, although I can't promise I won't be curmudgeonly about it at times.

Oh, and in case you hadn't noticed, I've gone back to using images of "the old man of the Empire" for my avatars. I figured you guys were sick of seeing my boring face. Besides, I particularly liked the one I've got on the blog now, which shows me as an angry old man, which is how I feel when I type here sometimes.

Followup to the last post

2006-11-30T16:17:00.000-06:00

So, by taking the hardline stance against Kurtz in the last post, it seems I've generated a lot of discussion, which is good. We fleshed out some more of the details and I've got to say I'm really happy with the results.

First there was a rebuttal to my post over on Wax Intellectual, which made me rethink my stance a bit, and generated a bit of discussion.

Then, I got quoted on the front page of Comixpedia, and that post is where we really managed to hash things out, with me refining my thoughts and Kurtz responding to all the criticisms with some really great explanations. I'm completely satisfied now, and I think everyone should head on over there and read through those comments as they provide an excellent example of how to defuse webcomics drama.

I'd like to thank everybody who participated in the lively discussion, because this is just the sort of thing that needs to happen from time to time to keep everyone honest. Now go sign up for PvP The Series. I did.

Hmmmmmmm....

2006-11-27T18:55:00.000-06:00

Promotional logo for the PvP Animated Series, from PvP.

Ok. Not to rag on Scott Kurtz or anything, but someone's got to say it. We've seen lots of announcement posts, some discussion, and a somewhat tangential piece by Eric Burns on voice acting, and people have been dancing around the topic, so I'm just going to come right out and say it:

Scott Kurtz is a hypocritical man and he's ripping Tim Buckley off.

It's a gross oversimplification of actual events, completely one-sided, and a half-truth at best, but someone had to say it.

When Ctrl-Alt-Del: The Animated Series came out, the general response from the webcomic illuminati was a general "who cares?" I personally figured it was a pretty monumental step forward and predicted that other webcomics would soon follow suit, but no one else seemed to really think it was that big of a deal. In fact, I couldn't even find a decent review of the animated series after it came out, so I had to write one myself. And while the quality of the show wasn't spectacular, I felt it deserved much more than the "ho-hum" it got from the "enlightened" webcomic community.

Now, about a year later, we've got Scott Kurtz announcing that he's coming out with an animated series. Produced by the same production house, no less (Blind Ferret Entertainment). And sporting an eerily similar subscription pricing model. Kurtz makes it abundantly clear that it was Blind Ferret which approached him, and practically hounded him into making the series, but still... Do you think he wasn't suffering at least some animation-envy watching Tim Buckley's characters slickly walking around and interacting while he was playing with finger puppets?

But you know, I can excuse all that. Seriously, who cares? I mean, don't you think Tim Buckley was hugely envious of Penny Arcade when he first started (and probably still is, to a certain extent. I mean, who's not envious of those guys? They're living the dream)? The "I want in on this action" spirit is probably the driving force behind the existence of webcomics, and has spawned most of its greatest works. There's nothing at all wrong with that.

Here's what Scott Kurtz is doing wrong: He's touting PvP: The Series as some spectacular new thing, when Tim Buckley already did it a year ago. I mean, in Kurtz' own words: "Spread the word and help us make this a milestone in webcomics." It's a milestone that's already been past. If anything, the milestone that Kurtz is setting here is legitimizing that Ctrl-Alt-Del The Animated Series was a success, because another successful webcomics artist is following suit. And Kurtz doesn't even mention CAD in his announcement post (although he does address the issue in the comments, it's only because someone else brought it up). The closest he comes is when he mentions that this time Blind Ferret is using in-house animation instead of outsourcing, so it's going to be better then before. Yep, the closest he comes to mentioning CAD is with a subtle jab at the quality. That's class right there.

When I watched the preview for PvP: The Series, do you know what I saw? I saw Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series. The same style of animation. The same level of voice acting. The same pacing on the jokes. The same awkward "we're used to writing stuff with panel breaks" disjointedness. Kurtz claims the animation is going to be a whole lot better because it's in-house this time, but quite frankly, I thought the quality of animation in CAD: The Animated Series was darned good; far from being the low point (which was the poor writing). And he talks about the great voice actors, but CAD had great, professional voice actors as well, and in my opinion, at least from what I've seen so far, I think Tim Buckley did a better job matching his characters with voice actors than Kurtz has done.

So what am I saying? PvP: The Series sucks? No. I don't have enough information for that. I'm going to have to subscribe to it and see how things pan out. I had to subscribe to Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series to see how it was, and it was a show with very high production values and sub-par writing. I fear that PvP: The Series may have similar problems, but it's too early on at this point to tell.

What I am saying is that Scott Kurtz needs to give credit where credit is due, and not pretend to be the trailblazer that he isn't. That's all. Besides that, I wish him the best of luck and I look forward to seeing where this leads. It should be interesting.

My old chess coach was named Sheldon... not that that's relevant.

2006-11-07T01:14:00.000-06:00

The first strip. From Sheldon.

This is not a review of Sheldon. Nor is this a commentary on the latest joke or the ongoing storyline or the overarching societal themes subtly undertoning the seemingly shallow geek humor (yes I did just use undertone as a verb there).

I linked this strip from Sheldon for one very simple reason: it's the first time that I can.

Yep, that's right, Sheldon has slipped from the surly bonds of comics.com and touched the face of, uh, the full archive diety. We shall call him Archivo. I think it's very striking when a comics author that's got a deal with a major syndicate (granted, a crappy deal, but a deal nonetheless) decides that he'd be better off just going it alone. It says alot the sorry state of syndicated comics these days, and a lot about how the major syndicates don't know how to communicate with the internet audience. 30 day archives, poorly designed, ad-ridden sites, no way for the artist to really connect with his audience...

I'm pretty sure Dave Kellett's not going to regret this decision. And when he's making his living solely off his comic strip (and with the quality of his work, he really should be), he's just going to look back at the syndication deal and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

And I, for one, intend to go read his archives and join in the laughter.

NaDruWriNi Wrapup

2006-11-06T02:30:00.000-06:00

Ok, so National Drunk Writing Night was a lot of fun. I showed up kind of late to the party (and then made myself even later by skipping out in the middle to go see a movie), but I still got a chance to chat a little bit with some guys from the Robot Army, so that was a lot of fun. I can't really comment on my personal post except to say that I really rambled on for a long time there and I'm surprised that even while drunk I was remarkably dedicated to proper spelling and grammar. I was going back and fixing sentences like two or three times to get them right while I was writing that post. I really need to learn how to let loose a little more, geez. I blame grad school for this.

Anyways, there's two other webcomics-related NaDruWriNi posts that I know of, so I'll point you to them:

Phil Kahn, Zen Master, wrote for awhile about the future of webcomics. And while he claimed to have lost his lucidity last night amid the various toxins coursing through his blood, I think he's actually pretty spot on. Those of us around here might be "the pioneers" or whatever, but we really are just a bunch of indie artists appealing to niche audiences (although, granted, some of those niches are quite large), and webcomics aren't going to be huge until someone huge embraces the concept in a very real way (not just "Hey, I'll make the last thirty days of my archive available online! Hyuk!")
Andrew Araki of Comics Rock actually experienced his first time getting staggering-giddy-face-to-the-floor drunk for NaDruWriNi. Brings back memories. I remember my first time really letting go, on a New Years a few years back. Good times... In any case, he wrote mostly about the greatness of music, and how it is possible to be a fan of more than one genre. As an avid fan of Pandora, I can say word to that. There are entire genres of music that most people are too narrow-minded to even discover. Up until a couple weeks ago I'd never even fathomed the possibility of a band like The Bob Crewe Generation. Now I can't imagine ever having lived without them. And Araki, I don't think you have to worry about this hurting your career as a teacher. Alcohol has been the steadfast companion of some of the greatest teachers of all time. But yeah, let someone else drive.

So, a good time was had by all! Now I've got to get back to work. Talk to you again soon.

NaDruWriNi - Books and Ducks

2006-11-05T03:52:00.000-06:00

[[Edit: It's got a title now. but no picture. Deal with it.]]

Ok, let's get this party started. I haven't titled this post yet, or added a picture to it yet, although I'm sure I'll think of a demonstrative title and picture and add them in later, thereby making this sentence a bit confusing for later readers. But as of right now I haven't really decided what I'm going to talk about tonight. Having not written a serious post in a few months, I've actually got quite the backlog of stuff to talk about.

My drink of choice for the evening is something I discovered at a Halloween party over the past weekend. It's a mix of Bacardi Big Apple apple rum and Apple Cider (in this case, generic supermarket brand apple cider, because I'm cheap). I got ridiculously drunk off the stuff at the party because it's so darn easy to drink. No burning, just sweet, sweet apply taste. And you can actually add a lot of Big Apple to the mix, making it a pretty strong drink (as the Big Apple is 70 proof. yum). I'll keep you updated as I finish twelve ounce cups of the stuff.

Being somewhat of a fatty, with a high fat diet, my tolerance for alcohol is fairly strong, so I'll be measuring my drinking in twelve ounce cups of spiked cider, each cup with probably about two shots of the Big Apple in it (I'm just mixing at will, no real rhyme or reason to it).

I just finished my first cup.

For chasers, I'm using donuts. Sour cream cake donuts picked up at a local grocery store while I was buying my alcohol. Sour cream cake donuts are the bane of my existence. I swear.

And yes, I know that technically a chaser is supposed to be a non-alcoholic DRINK, not a piece of food. But bear with me here.

But I digress. I actually want to talk about webcomics, since there are so many things that have happened since my blog went AWOL that I've really wanted to talk about. And I can't really think of a better place to start, so let's talk about The Biggest Webcomic Loser (Oh, if any links don't work, I just screwed up copying. Precision mousing is difficult while drunk. Use Google to find the site or something. Geez, lazy bums...). To me, The Biggest Webcomic Loser is almost an archetype of webcomics in general. It's a project that started with a whole lot of interest, lots of support and involvement, but then just very quickly disappeared. I mean, how many webcomickers quit within the first month? First two months? By the end even Edward J. "I make fifteen comics a day" Grug wasn't interested enough to keep updating. Now, obviously some of this can be attributed to failing diets, but in large part it was due to the "bandwagon" nature of the internet.

When something is new and exciting on the internet, everybody is quick to jump on the bandwagon. Look at youTube and MySpace. Had anyone heard of them two years ago? Nope.

...

Ok, so one problem with drinking alcohol is that it makes you very open to suggestion. I reached that post, almost finished with my second cup, and a friend bugged me to go see the Borat movie. So I did. And now, two hours later, I'm back. That's NaDruWriNi for you, I suppose.

Ok, just finished my second cup. Now, where was I?

Ah yes, bandwagons. Anybody remember the Webcomic Hurricane Relief Telethon? Remember what a grand event it was, how tons of people were getting on board and we were making history? It was huge, hundreds of people were involved, tens of thousands were following the site, and all told probably over 30,000 worth of donations for hurricane relief? Why was that such a success while the Biggest Webcomic Loser languished? Because it was short. People on the internet just don't have very long attention spans. Trying to run an event that lasts an entire year is kind of a preposterous suggestion. People don't want to follow you through your struggles and pains, to laugh when you laugh and cry when you cry. They just want their five seconds of humor or drama and then to move on with their lives.

Eh, maybe I'm being too cynical. I'd have to say that in general webcomics fans are the greatest fans in the world. They support their creators directly with donations, emails, and just general encouragement. The reason that some people are able to make their living entirely off their webcomic is not because their work is so great (not to say that it isn't) but because their fans are so great that they want to buy some goofy t-shirt or book from the creator.

And speaking of books... to all webcomickers out there, I've just got to say: Damn you. Damn you all to hell. Seriously. I'm going bankrupt here from buying your books. I'm like a book whore over here.

Actually, I'm not sure what that means. "Book whore". I buy almost every book I see. does that make me like a reverse whore or something? Cause I'm not really selling myself out, I'm more buying in other things, so it's like I'm taking the services of anyone wherever-

Anyways, the point is that I love books. It's as if there is some prehistoric urge within me that can only be fulfilled when I carry the weight of a perfect-bound book into the bathroom for some quality reading. I swear, the bathroom is the natural habitat of reading. I bet when the cavemen first invented wall painting in their caves or whatever, it was in the bathroom caves so they'd have something to look at while they did their business. I mean, it's the perfect activity: you're already sitting, you can't really go anywhere, no one's going to bother you... I've read entire archives of comics in a single trip to the bathroom, and emerged a stronger and more complete man. I mean, I also read in other places; before I go to bed, or just sitting in my desk chair if I'm exceedingly bored, but reading in the bathroom trumps them all in terms of sheer pleasure.

but I'm going to move away from discussing pleasure in the bathroom before everyone thinks I'm a little "off-kilter" and get back to my discussion of how I love webcomic books.

Just finished the third cup. It's becoming clear to me that I'm going to run out of cider before I run out of Big Apple, so I'll have to consider my options at that point. I've got one cup worth of cider left.

Anyways... I love webcomic books. I read a lot of webcomics. Perhaps not as many as some, but more than the average person, I think. And I'm constantly picking up new ones. I get emails from people who happen upon my blog asking me to read their comics all the time. And I always go check them out. I may not read the whole archive (some of them are really, uh, in need of shall we say, retooling (not to say my own comics are that great)), but I always read enough that I get a feel for the strip. And a lot of them I end up picking up, even if I never formally review them or mention them on The Webcomicker. I've got a list of comics needing reviews on my desk, and I'm not sure I'll ever actually get around to reviewing any of them. I also follow links from other webcomics (yes, advertising your webcomic on other webcomics will in fact get people to check you out, at least if I'm any indication), and ever since Piperka added rotating webcomic banners, I've been following a lot of those links and picking up new comics as well. But the point I'm trying to make here is, if I read a webcomic, and even if I really, really like it, I'll read through its archives once online. I don't think I've ever read a webcomic's archives twice online. But if you come out with a book, I'll buy the book, and I'll read through the archives again and again and again in the printed form. And the comics that I feel closest too, the one's I feel most connected to, are the ones I have books for.

I've already got a large collection of webcomic books, and every month I set aside some money to buy more. For example, this month I bought Fragile Gravity books one and two, the HOUSD collection, Evil Inc year one report, Ctrl+Alt+Del volume 2, and the Penny and Aggie book. At least, that's all I can remember. But on to the reason for the damning. The damning is because it seems like a ton of webcomickers are releasing more books for the Christmas season. Here I am at a time when my funds are already ridiculously low from buying presents, and I'm faced with buying a bunch of new books. A Brief History of Webcomics, Evil Inc year 2 report, Schlock Mercenary's The Blackness Between, and some other ones I'm probably forgetting (is Wally & Osborne doing a book? And where the heck is Melonpool Volume 6?) plus all the missing volumes I need to buy - Nodwick and Dandy and Company come to mind (I'm getting too drunk and lazy to link websites anymore), and I'm sure some more will come out for the Christmas season as well. Oh, I just remembered I bought You'll Have That volume 1, and You'll Have That volume 2 is coming out soon. So there's another pair. Oh dang, and the new Penny Arcade book, and the new Inverloch book...

so yeah, I'm basically screwed. Here I am a poor grad student trying to finish his Masters degree and apparently UNEMPLOYABLE (or so the last five companies I've interviewed with have led me to believe), and I'm stuck spending what few bucks I have on webcomic books because they consume my soul. How can you guys be so cruel?

Oh, and I'd just like to take this time to once again re-affirm that I'm standing strong against purchasing the Ugly Hill book. Seriously, Southworth. Ugly Hill is nothing without the colors. I demand the colors! Linework does not do it justice! I will pay the ridiculously high price for print-on-demand colors!

It seems a little odd to me that I would be so demanding of having webcomics in print. I mean, I was never a reader of print comics. Go read my "A Firm Grounding in the Basics" post for more on that if you care. And I never really intended to buy print collections of webcomics when I first started reading. The idea seemed kind of silly to me, especially since my first exposure was really from a Scott McCloud lecture (and those comics ain't never making it to print, unless we figure out some way of printing like three mile long single sheet scrolls). But then when I actually saw the print collections available (I think the first site I saw this on was PvP) I was reminded of my childhood days spent reading Peanuts and Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes and I knew I just had to buy those print collections. And I've never looked back.

And that's why Platinum Studios purchase of Drunk Duck is so interesting. This is the other topic I've really wanted to talk about. See, here's the thing. I don't know a lot about Platinum Studios. But they appear to be a comic book publisher (are they big? Are they small? *shrug*), and they bought Drunk Duck. And they took a lot of flak from the webcomic community for all their press releases that they were going to have "comics on the web! Wow!" and everyone pretty much wrote them off as being late to the party and not really understanding the world of webcomics. But has anyone been following their premiere release webcomics, Cowboys and Aliens and Hero By Night Diaries? This isn't your typical comic book publisher saying "Let's put up an issue of the comic every month or two, in some unnavigable flash interface or something!" Nope, each of those comics is releasing a page a day, every weekday, like your typical webcomic, with space underneath to comment and post rankings just like every other webcomic on Drunk Duck. Platinum isn't trying to take webcomics and shove them into some print comics mold. They've embraced the webcomics model, and they're working with it. When issues of Cowboys and Aliens and Hero By Night hit the stands, they won't be as some new small-time comic competing for shelf space. They'll be as printed collections of already existing webcomics that have developed a fan base that wants to support them. And that's what's truly revolutionary about Platinum Studios. They're a publisher that actually understands webcomics. And I'm very interested to see how the partnership with Drunk Duck works out. And I'm reading both Cowboys and Aliens and Hero By Night with much anticipation.

...And I'm done with the fourth cup. And I'm out of cider, which means I should probably wrap this thing up. There's enough Big Apple left for a few more shots but it's late enough in the evening and I think I've got enough logged here already to satisfy myself.

I guess I'm just a serious drunk, what can I say? Over the course of this post I've drunk more than three-quarters of this bottle of Bacardi big Apple, and I'm still trying to address "serious webcomic issues", so I guess maybe I'm just not all that exciting while drunk. Or maybe I'm just supremely single-minded. Or maybe all this typing helps me keep my mind clear... I don't know. In any case I doubt my post is as amusing as many of the other posts on this fine night, but at least I managed to talk about some things I've been dying to talk about, and hopefully you enjoyed it. We'll reconvene tomorrow and I'll link to some other NaDruWriNi posts with my thoughts.

I had a good time, anyways. Now I've just got to finish this stupid thesis and find a freaking job.

November

2006-11-01T16:37:00.000-06:00

Ernest Hemmingway, patron saint of National Drunk Writing Night.

Things in my life are beginning to take hold. Like a dandelion blown by some innocent child, the pieces of my life have been aloft in the wind for the past month or so, but some of them are beginning to find their new ground and take root, which gives me hope. Give it a couple more weeks and perhaps I will find myself firmly rooted enough to beginning writing about and producing webcomics. You may not realize it, but I have sorely missed being able to update this blog. Something interesting happens and my id literally screams for me to open a new tab to Blogger.com, but the super-ego and ego put it in its place by firmly reminding me that I simply don't have the hour or so that it takes me to write an average post.

But soon. Soon I will return.

In the meantime, November means that once again it's NaNoWriMo time! Now don't get me wrong, I have no intention of trying to write a novel; I tried that last year when I actually had free time and only got a few thousand words in, but I do seem to recall an event from last year affectionately termed National Drunk Writing Night (NaDruWriNi, to be proper). And this year, I'm in!

Special thanks to Phil Kahn for cluing me in (via his blog) to the actual date of the event. I hope we can get as many webcomic critics as possible involved. I plan to be on instant messenger (a rarity for me) the entire time I'm writing, so be sure to stop by and say hello. I'll use Trillian to log in to AIM and MSN messenger, and I'll also have Google Talk open. Heck, I'll even pull out Skype for the occasion. My accounts in all places are simply GileadPellaeon (perhaps with appended @hotmail or @gmail), so it should be pretty easy for anyone who wants to chat to chat with me. I've been told I become very lucid when drunk.

See you all on Saturday!

I had to mention this.

2006-10-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

"Gracefully" bowing out, from Yirmumah.

I do apologize for the lack of updates in the past month, but the crushing grip of reality has me wriggling in her ice-cold hands. I've got things in the real world which must be done, so my entire internet life has gone on hiatus. I still take the time to read my webcomics (I'd go insane if I didn't), but I don't have time to write about them, or make my own.

That being said, this warrants comment. D.J. Coffman has dropped from The Daily Grind. Why is this important? Because of out of any member of the Grind, past or current, D.J. Coffman was the most arrogant, jerkiest, and yet also biggest promoter of the event. Do you think the Grind would have gotten half the attention it's gotten if D.J. hadn't been constantly raising hell about it? I doubt it.

That being said, his attitude when dropping out was "It's not really important anymore, I've got better things to do with my time." And it's probably true. In many ways the Grind has become a contest of egos more than a contest of dedication to the craft. But I'm also of the opinion that this phase of the Grind will pass (you can only be sustained by ego for so long) and when we get down to the top ten, it will be the people who have been truly striving to create quality work, not those who are just "in it to win it", so to speak, that will remain. Then things will get interesting again.

The main reason that D.J. Coffman dropped, of course, is to focus more on his new project, Hero by Night, with Platinum Studios and DrunkDuck. Now, I have a lot to say about the whole Platinum Studios/DrunkDuck thing, but as I mentioned earlier, no time. So suffice to say for now that I'll be following Hero by Night with interest, and I'll have something comprehensive to say "soon".

As for The Daily Grind, I will continue to follow it as well. I'm actually a long-time lurker at the Daily Grind message board, so I'm pretty familiar with all the drama there. And my money's on the people who have raised themselves above the drama. If I had to bet, I'd say the winner's going to be either Ali Graham, Brad Guigar, Paul Gadzikowski, or R. Smith. These are people that proved to be rock solid 7 days per week updaters long before the Daily Grind even started. I'm pretty sure it would take a Chris Crosbyesque blizzard/blackout to knock them out. Outside odds to Brandon Lewis and Jennie Breeden, who have shown a commitment to keeping the quality of their comics high throughout the grind.

It's fun AND educational!

2006-09-26T03:15:00.000-05:00

A still image of the fabulous Phil Kahn from the first I'm Just Drinking Podcast.

Phil Kahn is an amazing man. A good way to describe Gabe and Tycho is "Webcomics Gurus". A good way to describe Scott McCloud is "Webcomics Experimentalist". A good way to describe Eric Burns is "Webcomics Critic". A good way to describe R. Stevens is "Webcomics Golden Boy". Etcetera etcetera etcetera.

But when you try to describe Phil Kahn, pretty much the only way is call him what he is: the quintessential "Webcomics Enthusiast". He's not just a fan, definitely not a fanboy, and not exactly an illuminati. He's simply a guy who is very actively involved in just about every facet of the webcomics community. He's got a webcomics criticism blog (currently on hiatus/finished/change of focus), ran a webcomics collective, and has various webcomic projects, both retired and current. He's one of the voices behind Digital Strips, a video editor for Clickwheel, and his latest project is a nice little wiki for webcomics inspired alcoholic drinks named I'm Just Drinking.

Which brings us to the topic of this post: The all-new I'm Just Drinking Podcast. Not satisfied to just have a vast repository of mixed-drink recipes for webcomics, Kahn has actually started recording short videos in which he demonstrates to us exactly how to actually make said recipes, and then shares the drinks with his friends, who give their thoughts on the taste, texture, and general experience of each drink. You really ought to check it out by clicknig on the picture to go watch the first episode.

I must confess that I'm somewhat biased toward this particular podcast, as it feels a lot like a cooking show, and it's about mixed drinks. I love cooking shows. If you asked any of my friends they'd definitely tell you that Food Network is my favorite channel. Good food is just one of those rare things which is perfectly enjoyable, perfectly social, and perfectly wholesome, and watching people who enjoy food as much as I do and know how to make it much better than me is quite a pleasant experience. I also love alcohol (who doesn't?), and mixed drinks are my favorite form of imbibement. So really, I love this podcast. Heck, I even think it's a great idea for a Food Network show. If any producers are out there looking for a potential show to connect with the younger audience, you might want to consider sending Kahn checks for thousands of dollars, eh?

One of the best things about the show is how Kahn uses it to promote webcomics. In this first episode the crew tries some drinks inspired by Fragile Gravity, and Kahn takes the time to actually talk about Fragile Gravity a bit and even highlight their book. Add the fact that he's selling advertising space to webcomics within the podcast itself (this episode was Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal), and you've got a lot of promoing going on, and in my opinion promotion can never be a bad thing.

I look forward to seeing how this show progresses. With Phil Kahn at the helm I'm sure we'll see some special guests and "con editions" from time to time, and this show really has the potential to be quite a lot of fun and very good for the webcomics community, so keep it up, Kahn!

Now I think I've got to take this weekend and have a little party of my own with my friends, and create some drinks for Birdsworth.

Oh, and if I had one wish, it would be to see the crew try out some drinks from Girl Genius. Especially the Sparkbuzz.

So true.

2006-09-24T20:22:00.000-05:00

An oversized portion of humor, from PvP.

Ok, enough pseudo-intellectual comics art critiquery talk. Time to get back to what this blog was purposed for: commenting on webcomics.

The funniest thing about yesterday's PvP is how true to life it is. I imagine Kurtz himself got the idea for the strip while sitting in an Applebee's, perusing the menu and realizing how ridiculous it is to sell an item named the "Apple Chimicheesecake". One of my favorite humor writers of all time is Dave Barry, and he's won a Pulitzer Prize for doing exactly what Scott Kurtz did in this strip: poking fun at the little absurdities that surround our everyday lives. The things that if we didn't laugh at, we'd just have to cry, because the whole world is just so cheap and fake and stupid sometimes.

Funny people know how to say absurd things, do absurd things, and make a general mockery of life. But truly great comedians know how to find the absurd which already exists and highlight it just enough that their audiences gain and understanding of just how silly we all really are. Well done, Scott Kurtz, you really had me laughing at this one.

Oh, and by the way: "Honey I Fudged the Kids". CLASSIC.

Scott Kurtz, I owe you a beer.

He's Baaaaaaack!

2006-09-23T02:10:00.000-05:00

The cover from Scott McCloud's latest work, Making Comics.

Ladies and gentleman, Scott McCloud has returned. The cover of Making Comics proudly declares "From the Author of Understanding Comics". Notice it does not say "From the Author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics". And rightly so. Scott McCloud the comics-deconstructionist has returned. Scott McCloud the comics-theorist has moved to the background for this book. In a perfect book, this would have been the second book McCloud wrote, and Reinventing Comics would have been the completion of the trilogy, if it were written at all.

So let's forget about Reinventing Comics for the moment. Forget the bitter arguments about micropayments and infinite canvas and remember Understanding Comics, the one who made people realize the incredible complexity of comics and what an amazing storytelling device they are. The one that has become required reading for any serious art student and every comics enthusiast. That's the vein Making Comics is in.

Making Comics is an incredible deconstruction of the process of making comics. As McCloud himself says in the book: "There are no rules, and here they are." It takes you every step of the way, from creating characters (both in personality and in look) to writing stories to deciding how to break up the story and dialogue into panels. He even covers different art supplies for doing the actual drawing and the different effects they will give. I've never seen a book this complete on the process, start-to-finish, on any topic, much less comics.

Of special note are the first chapter and the special topics in the back. The first chapter talks about "Choice of Frame", meaning exactly what you want to put in each frame. In my opinion, this is ultimately the most difficult part of the comic making process, and the one which deep-sixes the most comics. You can have the greatest story in the world, but if choice of frame makes it hard for people to follow what's going on, they're not going to enjoy it. You may have well thought out, well developed characters, but if your choice of frame never highlights the unique aspects and quirks of your characters, your readers won't connect with them. It's a matter of choosing the camera angle, the exact moments of time, and the intensity level for every panel, and Scott McCloud covers the options for each choice in great detail.

As for the special sections in the back, they are the most likely to generate controversy and are the least useful for the actual process of Making Comics, but are still an interesting read. McCloud devotes one section to talking about manga and its influence on American comics. We are already seeing a lot of blending of manga with traditional American and European comics (especially in webcomics), and manga itself has become such a major industry outside of Japan that it simply cannot be ignored any more. McCloud also spends a section talking about different types of comics creators (perhaps you remember the preview of this section over at The Webcomics Examiner) in which he divides everybody up into four categories: Classicist, Animist, Formalist, and Iconoclast. Frankly, these divisions are probably too sharp, and McCloud himself admits it in the book, but it does give those of us who always thought R. Crumb was a nut some common ground for appreciation, which is always nice.

As for actual drawing tips, the book spends a great deal of time talking about making believable characters, good facial expressions, and what tools you might want to use, but doesn't really try to teach you how to draw. After all, there are already hundreds of books out there on that topic, and besides, it's the sort of thing you only learn with practice anyways.

Perhaps the best thing about the book are the extensive notes and exercises at the end of every chapter. After all, this book wasn't meant just to be a heady theoretical experience, it's supposed to actually help you make comics. Anyone looking to improve their skills would do well to practice all the exercises at the end of each chapter.

All in all, I'd recommend this book to anyone. It makes you think long and hard about how you make comics, and inspires you to make better comics. I for one was inspired to hit the sketchbook and really try to develop my drawing skills. Others might be inspired to go back through their work and think about how they could have framed it better, or to really rethink their storylines and enrich their characters. There's something for everyone to learn here.

And of course, Scott McCloud being who he is, he plugs quite a few webcomics in the book (even Templar, Arizona!). This book is going to lend a look of respectability to webcomics, and I'm all about that.

So why don't you go out and buy it?

A firm grounding in the basics.

2006-09-20T05:19:00.000-05:00

So, I took a little break from webcomics. Not from reading my daily trawl, of course. The daily trawl is to me the equivalent of picking up the newspaper and reading the headlines, it's just something I do every day. But I took a break from reading new stuff and from writing commentary, because I felt I was lacking some necessary grounding.

See, I read webcomics. In fact, I read a lot of webcomics. Not as many as some people, but still, a lot. I've been reading webcomics for three or four years now, and I've gotten to know the community fairly well in that time, even feel like I might be on first name basis with a few creators. But here's the thing: I've never read print comics.

Never.

As a kid I was actually pretty much banned from reading comics (a result of a very conservative upbringing), except the comic strips in the newspapers. And I was a big fan of those. I had over 100 Peanuts books. I had every collection of Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. At the library, I checked out all the Far Side books, and also stuff like Hi and Lois, Dagwood, Fox Trot, Dilbert, and Close to Home. But as for comic books, alternative comics and graphic novels, no sirree.

Then came college, and all those comic strips got left at home. I didn't get a newspaper anymore so I couldn't keep up with them. And there was no way I was going to get "into" comic books at this late of an age. My new obsession was the internet, and the vast possibilities that the college broadband connection had opened to me. I wasted all my time playing online games, talking in chat rooms and posting in forums.

One semester I took an art class to fill some hours in my schedule. The class was actually on bookmaking, which was pretty fun. And one day in class my teacher mentioned that some guy named Scott McCloud was coming to visit campus and give a lecture on comics on the internet. Being the internet junkie that I was, I thought this sounded interesting. So I went to his lecture, was intrigued by what he had to say, and checked out some of the websites he had mentioned (including Penny Arcade).

And it was all downhill from there.

But the important thing to glean from this entire story is that I came to webcomics basically from nowhere. Sure I had my knowledge of newspaper strips, but really, who doesn't? And that didn't give me a very broad background at all - I'd only seen one very specific type of comic, and a really narrow subset of that type even. When I started The Webcomicker it was because I felt I had something to say about webcomics. I'd read quite a few (although the list has grown substantially since I started this site), and even made some haphazard attempts at creating my own. I thought I had some idea of what webcomics were good, and even what made them good, and in any case I had an opinion and some writing skill and that's all that really matters, right?

Well, I found that I always felt like I lacked some of the necessary perspective to be a proper critic. I read essays by Eric Burns and Gary Tyrrell and realized that they knew a lot more about comics than I did. I know a lot about webcomics, and I read most of what are widely considered the best, but webcomics are still considered somewhat of a fringe, or at least a subset of comicdom. I'd never read what general society considers to be the greatest comics of our time. The comics which won Pulitzers, Hugos, and Eisners. The comics which were considered groundbreaking and influential. The comics which had great respect even amongst the greater artistic community. And I felt that as a result I was seriously lacking in perspective.

So I decided to change that. I decided that it was time to build myself a firm grounding in the basics. And so I took a break from webcomics and read a bunch of graphic novels. I borrowed them all from a couple of friends and voraciously tore through them, consuming them in a way I usually consume webcomic archives. Some of the novels on the list I read in a single sitting, sometimes a sitting of upwards of eight hours.

Here's the list. I don't consider it to be the "end all list of every great comic ever printed" but I do consider it to be a strong representative sample:
-Watchmen
-Maus
-Ghost World
-Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
-Blankets
-To the Heart of the Storm (by Will Eisner)

And then I read Making Comics (I already read Understanding Comics, after Scott McCloud's lecture). More on that in another post.

I really enjoyed reading these books, and I could definitely see when reading them what makes people think they are so great. I was also very happy to see all of the books referenced repeatedly in Making Comics, which validated the choices in my mind. I know there's about a hundred more books that I could read to expand my vision even more, but I'm happy with these for now.

And so I return to you a more informed critic with a wider perspective. Will it make me any better of a critic? We'll have to wait and see. Am I happy I did it? HECK YEAH.

Sweet Mother of Mercy.

2006-09-12T06:43:00.000-05:00

It's baaaaaaaack! From Elf Only Inn.

I've taken a bit of a break from webcomics recently in order to give myself a more firm grounding in the classics (more on that later), but I just had to mention this.

Elf Only Inn is back. After a two year hiatus, one of the classics in webcomics, and perhaps one of webcomics' most underrated strips, has returned.

The promotional image that Josh Sortelli put up seems to imply that the gang is going to be moving from it's original location on a chatroom to the realm of MMORPGs. Which makes sense, really. MMORPGs have become today what chatrooms were five years ago: a place to hang out, make friends, and pretend that you are cool. What better place for the motley crew of Elf Only Inn to be?

There is one thing that worries me, though. For those of you that have been fans of Elf Only Inn for awhile, do you notice anyone conspicuously absent from that picture?

Woot! Where is Lord Wootsayediditagyn?! I can only hope that this is just a tease by Sortelli, because an Elf Only Inn without Woot would be a sad thing indeed. In any case, I look forward to seeing where this goes.

Because art can be cool too.

2006-09-01T02:50:00.000-05:00

A line from a "color sonnet", from Graphic Poems.

In any medium, there will always be artists who want to play. Whether it be Christo and his obsession with wrapping stuff, or the crazy sidewalk chalk art of Julian Beever, if there's a medium, there's an artist who will try to push the limits.

And webcomics are no exception. In fact, webcomics are really more of the rule. Since their inception, webcomics have been a medium where artists can come and play, and push the boundaries of what it means to be a "comic". Scott McCloud has been the impetus of some of this work, what with Reinventing Comics, and he's definitely helped spread inventions and ideas by linking to them from his site and constantly talking them up at his conventions and university talks. Heck, as I've said before Scott McCloud is the person who first introduced me to the concept of webcomics, and I owe him incredibly just for that.

So it's always fun to find people who are pushing the envelope, trying new and different things, not so much "alternative comickers" who are encorporating radical art and storytelling styles into comics, but people who are really testing the boundaries of comics and inventing new concepts.

So I'm really fascinated by the work of Derik Badman and Grant Thomas. Now, before people start yelling foul, yes, Grant Thomas is the artist behind Birdsworth and yes, he and I are actually very good friends in real life. But I think he's got some interesting stuff going on here beyond my potential vested interest due to friendship.

Both of these guys run more "traditional" webcomics as addition to their deviations. Badman did a comic called Maroon which in my opinion did an excellent job of capturing the essence of loneliness and is currently working on what appears to be a relationship drama called Things Change. Thomas is working on a quasi-biographical story very similar in feel to Blankets but different in tone called My Life in Records. But it's the experimental stuff they've produced which I want to discuss today.

Basically, what these guys have been trying to do is transform literary forms into comic forms. Badman got things started by first experimenting with comic hiakus. Basically the idea was to convey the feel of a hiaku, which as Badman describes it is "Three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. A season is mentioned as is nature, and some emotion is conveyed indirectly," in comics form. And by using varied panel widths, I think he's done a really good job.

Well, Thomas latched on to this and wondered if it would be possible to transform other literary forms. The results thus far have been the color sonnets, the art show, and NOW (pivotgrams).

The color sonnets, like Badman's hiakus, are an attempt to transform the literary form of the sonnet into comics form, and Thomas has created the purest form of it, using only gradients of color in his panels to convey meaning. I didn't really "get it" at first when looking at the pretty squares, but eventually I realized that each page is actually only a single line in the poem, and then it becomes clear as you see the flow and "rhyming" from line to line. I especially like the twist in line 13, which is typical of English sonnets, and so it's the image I thumbnailed in this post. I'd really like to see either Thomas or someone else develop this form further by using iconic artwork or even full illustrations, but at it stands it's a great proof of concept.

I think in order to understand "the art show", you've got to read NOW first. This will give you an understanding of what a pivotgram is. I'm a big fan of pivotgrams and slip poetry myself (in fact, I once wrote a biography of my life in slip poetry), so I had a hand in inspiring NOW, but I like the direction that Thomas has taken it. After reading NOW, go take a look at the art show. do you see the pivoting? Sometimes it's literal (as in from panel 1 to panel 2) and sometimes it's more iconic (as in from page 1 to page 2), but you can feel the comic pivoting from one point to another. Now, I think this is a technique that has been used by comics before, but creating a comic which enforces a pivot in every panel and still tries to tell a story is pretty neat in my book.

So check them out, and try some experiments of your own! I'd love to see interpretations of how other literary forms such as anagrams, acrostics, and palindromes can be converted into comics. There's a huge world out there to explore.

And our collective might grows! And swells!

2006-08-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

Ok, I've got some new additions to the Robot Army. By the way, some people have asked me recently where the whole "Robot Army" name comes from, and it refers the to incident last year in which Scott McCloud and Penny Arcade got into an argument about an upcoming documentary on webcomics, which was dubbed "Penny Arcade vs. Scott McCloud's Robot Army". I figured most webcomic critics would be more likely to take Scott McCloud's side, so I started calling the webcomics criticism community in general the "Robot Army". So there ya go.

Wax Intellectual - Started by the guys from Terror Island (who I still owe a review), this blog is pretty new, but my only real qualifying criteria for being on the list is that you write about webcomics and you are actively updating. They're trying to get a Fleen-like structure over there, with a bunch of different writers submitting stories, so if anyone's interested in joining I suppose you could just send them an email.

Zhi - Scott Thorton seems to be much more interested in manga webcomics than the average webcomic reviewer, which is great. The world needs to see that more than just angsty high school nerds enjoy manga, and the world needs to be introduced to good manga online, since so much BAD manga exists online. Thorton is able to highlight the differences in both artistic and storytelling style, and he's got some nice writing chops too. This is a blog to keep an eye on.

Mr. Myth - Somehow Mr. Myth has been actively commenting on The Webcomicker for quite some time without me ever remembering to add his blog to the Robot Army. I am ashamed of myself. Mr. Myth's blog is a fun read, and he actually reminds me of me in posting style (not to say that I'm any great thing, but, you know).

So be sure to check these guys out.

I KNEW IT. Well, ok, I can't really back that up. But still.

2006-08-29T02:25:00.000-05:00

Intrigue! From PvP.

I've discovered a rule of life. And I think it's a hard and fast rule (it certainly is in my life). And that rule is as follows: "The less you have to do, the less you will do."

When my life is full with schoolwork, my various jobs, and my extracirricular activities, somehow I find time to make everything fit in, and still write on this blog and produce Birdsworth and MiSTEam comics. But over this past summer, I've had pretty much nothing but time on my hands. In fact, in this past week I've had roughly zero committments. And I've managed to drop the ball on a lot of things. The blog and Birdsworth have been sporadic. MiSTEam has disappeared. My thesis work has languished.

Well, the new school semester has started, and it's time for change, dangit. And I'm getting my life back on track, starting right now. I know I've said it before and then disappeared (last week is a testament to that), but this time instead of making empty promises, I'm simply going to say that GileadPellaeon is back at work. I'm punching in the timecard for my life. I can't promise smooth sailing from here on out, but I can promise that I'm not going to be phoning it in anymore.

But enough about me. Let's talk PvP. PvP is one of those strips that lives in what I call a "static dynamic" world, which actually requires a great deal more willing suspension of disbelief from its readers than a purely "gag-a-day, characters never change" or "realistic, evolving storyline" strip. In many ways it is reminiscent of The Simpsons in its storytelling structure, with various things about the world changing over time, such as Apu getting married or Maude Flanders dying, or the obvious changes in pop culture references, and yet through it all Maggie remains a baby, Bart and Lisa stay in the second and fourth grades, and the whole town of Springfield stays in a somewhat static equilibrium. In PvP we've seen characters get together and break up. We've seen Max take over PvP magazine. Characters have had cathartic moments and matured. But through it all, Francis has remained the sixteen year old computer nerd. Brent has remained the younger-middle-aged hipster. It's obvious that time flows in a different way in the world of PvP.

But this strip represents a fundamental change in PvP. In fact, it's pretty much the most fundamental change since Brent and Jade broke up a few years back. This strip is not just Brent trying to "out-romance" Francis. This is Brent taking advantage of a fortuitous situation to do something he's been planning for a long time. Anyone remember this strip? Also notice this strip. Brent didn't just get this engagement ring. He'd been keeping it in his desk drawer at the office. He's been waiting for the right time to ask. In fact, he wasn't even planning on asking her on this date. Notice how he had to make Skull go back for it? If the proposal had been planned, surely Brent would have brought the ring with him rather than having to rely on the bumbling Skull. So that makes it pretty clear that this isn't just some "let's show up Francis" stunt.

But here's the thing that makes it so great, and the reason why Scott Kurtz is winning Eisners while the rest of us are just making "dick and fart jokes", as it has been so eloquently phrased: This little proposal has been built up to for almost a year now.

Did anyone else notice how Brent has slowly been changing over the past year or two? First he gives up coffee, and in spite of a few hilarious mishap s, when he finally does decide to reintroduce coffee to his diet it's tempered with, er, responsibility. Brent's the one who is willing to go to Max Powers to save PvP magazine. And he seems to be pretty well ok with it. And of course, let's not forget the storyline where Brent thinks Jade is pregnant. He has a pretty stunning dream about the whole idea of fatherhood, which culminates in his realization that he's really not averse to the idea, then ends with the reveal that he's seriously thinking of marrying Jade. There's more progression too, but you get the idea.

Scott Kurtz has been laying this out for quite some time, and yet he still managed to sneak it by us by putting the proposal into what was supposed to be a classic "blow up in your face" scenario involving a hidden bet and both sides playing against each other. And I've got to say, that's pretty impressive.

We'll probably have a few strips after this one with some confusion as to whether this a genuine proposal or just an attempt to win the bet, but the fact of the matter is that the proposal is now on the table, and whether or not Jade chooses to accept it, PvP will be changed forever. In Simpsons terms, this is roughly on par with Marge and Homer getting a divorce (a real one, not like the ones they've solved in the span of a single episode), and that's pretty impressive.

So keep up the good work Scott. Go win some more Eisners.

New Webcomic-related goodness!

2006-08-18T02:42:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since I've updated my Robot Army and the "Webcomic Related Stuff" links, and there's some a-changing that needs being done.

First off, some cuts. It seems Eyeballing It and Writing About Webcomics have gone the way of the dinosaur. So I must bid them adeiu. If they ever decide to come back, they can let me know, and I'll add them back in. I also reordered the blogs in what I would consider "importance level", although obviously that's somewhat debatable. Oh, and if anybody out there has a webcomics critical commentary blog (I'd prefer a blog which talks only about webcomics, but something in the Websnarkish vein is fine as well) can feel free to pop me an email and I'll add you to the robot army. Soon we commentators will strangle the life out of these creators and bend them to our collective wills! Woo hahahahaHAHAHA!

*Ahem*

As for some neat new webcomic related stuff, I never did get around to adding a link to the Webcomic Crossover & Cameo Archive, which is a superfluous site for keeping track of trivial information, and therefore is of vital importance to webcomic fandom. Rock on. That site is lots of fun for Easter Egg hunters.

The guys at Terror Island illuminated me to Webcomic Battle!, which is a ridiculously awesome idea. I think the concept has been done before, but the execution here is so simple and so clean that it really just sparkles with ingenuity. Basically the idea is that a bunch of people submit a comic they have made, and the comics compete with each other, one-on-one in a series of competitions. Every day your comic is paired against another random comic. When a random person visits the site they are shown a random one of the battles, and they simply click on the comic they think is funnier. If your comic is voted funnier than that comic at the end of the day, you survive and the other comic is "retired". The longer you keep winning battles, the more people will see your comic, and if you make it long enough, you may even get into the Hall of Fame. It's a great way to promote your comic, a fun way to kill a couple minutes if you're a webcomic reader, and a good way to get some feedback on your comic's quality all rolled up into one! The more people we can get participating in this, the better.

Oh, and let's not forget I'm Just Drinking, the Webcomic-inspired mixed drinks wiki, brainchild of Phil Kahn. This site needs a fair amount of work, as the many of the drinks on there now are just ripoffs of actual mixed drinks with the names tweaked. I just checked it when making this post and it's made a lot of progress since its inception, but it still needs creative people inventing totally new drinks that have a strong connection to the webcomics they are being mixed for. I myself plan to make a few entries for Birdsworth in the near future.

And lastly we have Arbuckle. Arbuckle is the result of a lot of webcomic-types speculating on how Garfield could be made, well, funny again (some say Garfield was never funny. But in my opinion is was one of the funniest strips out there for about ten years, and then Jim Davis ran out of jokes and passed the buck to a committee of cartoonists). It began with the Garfield Randomizer (which has since disappeared thanks to Cease and Desist letters), which took random panels from Garfield strips and threw them together in a dada-esque, mish-mash style.

Then came the idea to have a strip which showed the world from Jon Arbuckle's point of view, because technically according to Garfield canon Jon cannot actually hear or otherwise ascertain Garfield's thoughts. The original version just had people remaking the strips by removing Garfield's thought bubbles. Of course, that got Cease and Desisted pretty quickly as well. But the latest incarnation actually has people redrawing the strips in their own styles, keeping Jon's dialogue the same but removing Garfield's. And I think that actually adds more power to the concept because many people draw Garfield as a very normal looking cat, and we begin to see the truth in Jon's life.

Arbuckle shows us that Jon is really a very sad and pathetic man who tries to somehow cope with his depression and loneliness by talking to his pets and imagining them to be his best friends. Some strips are pretty funny, some are a bit surreal, and some are just downright depressing. But in all cases, it's taken Garfield, which was essentially a soulless "fat, lazy, and sarcastic gag-a-day" strip, and given it a huge amount of depth and soul. Anybody who wants can create and submit an Arbuckle strip, and this is yet another website that will just continue to get better the more people get involved. And since it involves both alterations to the script and original artwork, Arbuckle is well within the realm of parody and protected from copyright law. So we shouldn't have anything to worry about cease and desist on this one.

It's sites like these that really highlight both the innovative spirit and the strong community of webcomicdom, and I'm proud to link them from this site and partake of their goodness. Heck, I'll probably even contribute something to them.

Ratcheting up

2006-08-16T13:37:00.000-05:00

Ok, let's get things rolling here again. First of all, you'll probably notice that the big list of links to webcomics I read is gone, replaced with a link to the actual list of webcomics I read on Piperka. I did this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I doubt anyone is really seeing any increased traffic to their site from people clicking down the links on my blog. Secondly, that list was becoming way too big and fluid for me to update manually. Thirdly, this gives me yet another chance to plug Piperka, which is a fabulously useful site for keeping track of your comics that everyone should use. Seriously.

Now, I still plan to make periodic posts updating everyone on new stuff I've picked up, so don't worry about getting blindly added to my reading list and never discussed here. If I start reading your comic, you'll at least get one link from me. Speaking of which...

Here's the new stuff I've picked up in my absence. Now, I haven't actually gotten around to reading all of the comics I got interested in at Comicon, so some of them may yet make the list. But as it stands right now:

Bug Bash - A new comic by the creator of Where the Buffalo Roam, which is a tome in the world of webcomics. Bug Bash is about geeks when they grow up and get jobs at huge software corporations. It's like Dilbert if Dilbert actually had real technical knowledge and then characters acted like real people instead of overblown stereotypes. Not that Dilbert and its overblown stereotypes are bad, mind you. Just different.
Dresdan Codak - Dresden Codak reminds me a lot of Copper in tone, except with a lot more experimentation in the art style. It's a very beautiful strip to look at, and each strip often takes quite a few twists and turns and ends up in a different place than you expected. I especially liked this one.
Evil Inc. - Yet another Blank Label comic drags me in. Evil Inc is just good, plain and simple. It's got a clever premise, colorful characters, and it manages to never take itself too seriously. But I'm not going to go back and read the Greystone Inn archive. Not een if it provides useful context for the current comic. Not gonna do it. Nope. *hand drifts toward mouse*
Joyce and Walky - I talked about this more extensively in the post immediately preceding this one. Soul ownage.
Multiple x - A webcomic about people who work in a movie theater. I'm pretty sure that's been done before, but Multiplex never gets over-the-top with crazy situations and unbelievable circumstances. It's content to simply poke fun at the foibles of movies and the people who watch them, and the people who dispense the tickets for that allow the people who watch movies to watch their movies. Yeah. It's kind of like the "Dave Barry" of movie humor strips.
Rob and Elliot - The classis roommate strip. Both Rob and Elliot are a little wacky and a little psycho in their own ways, and it plays off well against each other. Sure the "wacky roommates" strip has been done a million times before, but it's more of a "tried-and-true" mechanism than it is a cliche, not unlike the workplace comic. As long as the jokes are fresh, it's cool.
Terror Island - It's the photocomic that's not a photocomic. Somewhat reminiscent of Irregular Webcomic, the photos seem like more of a means to an end than the end themselves. It's not like A Softer World, where the photos focus you in and the text provides poetic juxtaposition, where it had to be done using photos. It's just like using photos is the chosen art style for the comic, much like using sprites or using black and white lineart. Terror Island is still pretty early on, but already we can see that the humor is very much of the "obsessive compulsive characters who obsess far too much over simple things" variety. I'm going to write a full review of this at some point.
The Order of the Stick - Somehow I managed to read the entire archives, follow the comic strip for a couple months, buy all three of the collected volumes, and reread the entire strip in the collected volumes without ever mentioning it once here. Weird. So, uh, yeah. I like Order of the Stick. I like it alot. Heavily D&D themed humor without requiring you to have a Players Handbook handy to get all the jokes. And characters whose colrfulness is only accentuated by their simple designs. Sometimes it's better to leave things to the audience's imaginations.

Ok, there's also some neat webcomic related sites that need plugging, but I'll get to that in another post.

David Willis is the owner of my soul.

2006-08-16T04:15:00.000-05:00

Ok, sorry for the big "lack of posting" thing. I'm now officially back, and will try to get the posting pace back up to the "near daily" schedule I was keeping a few months ago. I've got the time, it's just a matter of overcoming inertia now.

So, I just finished reading through the Roomies/It's Walky/Joyce and Walky archives for the first time. In one day. That's over 2400 pages. Took me basically an entire 24 hour block of time. That's how frighteningly addictive and amazing It's Walky was/is. And then, I was still jonesing for more so I reread the entire archive of Shortpacked. And I am so paying the monthly fee for more Joyce and Walky. That's how hooked I am. Scary.

David Willis has now been added to my list of people who are not allowed to die, ever. We can only hope that cybernetic implant technology moves fast enough for this dream to become a reality.

Damn my pathetic lack of funds!

2006-07-27T17:15:00.000-05:00

Teaser image from the greatest auction of all time.

So all of the Blank Label Comics guys who were at the San Diego Comicon got together and made quite possibly the coolest con mashup drawing ever. and now it's being auctioned on Ebay.

It must be mine. And yet, after the con I'm almost completely tapped of funds, and I can tell already that this bad boy is going to go for quite a pretty penny. So all I can do is look on with my sad little college student income and pine.

Oh, I'll put in a bid, believe you me, but the extent of my resources is very limited, and with more than six days left the price of this particular piece is already approaching my maximum, and I think any hope I have of winning it is pure futility.

But in any case, someone cool needs to win this, so lets see some bidding, eh?

Ok, I am sufficiently humbled.

2006-07-27T00:39:00.000-05:00

Gary Tyrrell is the man, and I suck, apparently. Just compare my coverage of the Comicon with his coverage of the Comicon (1, 2, 3). Of course, there's really no comparison. His stuff is detailed, fully fleshed out, and well presented, with quotes. My stuff is sort of haphazard "I remember so-and-so said something like this" slapdash the whole way through.

I think we've established that I'm a pretty crappy reporter now. I think I'll stick to reviews and commentary.

Eh, and maybe I'll try my hand at interviewing.

But reporting? Not my forte.

Submitted without comment.

2006-07-26T13:37:00.000-05:00

For those of you that haven't been keeping up with my San Diego Comicon blogging over at Comixpedia, why not? You can feel like you were a part of the experience even if you weren't there!

Submitted without comment, here's a list of all the new webcomics (in alphabetical order) I now have on my list to read either as a result of attending the Comicon or as a result of my blogging at Comixpedia. I will read them all, but I can't promise I'll get around to reviewing them all.

Looks like I'll be keeping myself busy! Oh, and by the way for those of you interested I did not in fact finish my Masters thesis and will be in school for another semester. Yay.

Best Con Sketch. EVER.

2006-07-25T13:03:00.000-05:00

David Willlis is a man who can feel my pain. From Shortpacked.

This is probably one of those "You had to be there" sort of jokes, but let me just tell you that everything in this comic is the absolute truth. If I had to pick one thing about the San Diego Comicon that sucked it would be the freaking San Diego trolley "service".

My hotel was maybe five miles from the con, but it was three different trolley lines to get there. First I had to catch the Green line, then hop to the Blue Line, and finally get on the Orange line. And of course, none of these lines have any semblance of coordination, so you end up waiting for at least fifteen minutes at each of the switchover stations, vainly hoping for your train to come. Oh, and after about 7PM, you had to wait even longer, because the trains run half as often.

And then there was this mystical, legendary "Red Line" which supposedly went directly from the hotel all the way to the convention, but seemed to exist only in legend. You'd hear about it when you stopped to talk to the wizened old man who was rumored to have been sitting in the trolley station for upwards of fifty years, waiting for his train to come. He'd lean forward, eyes flashing like lightning, and regale you with stories of the "Red Beast" emerging on the tracks only on a night with no moon, coming from out of the mist and stopping only for a scant three seconds before once again vanishing into the inky blackness. It makes no sound except for the wailing of souls which it uses for its trolley bell.

Seriously, though. The trolley service sucked. It always took us at least an hour to get to and from the con, and one night it took us two and a half hours! Trains kept pulling up to the station, only to have the driver announce "This train is no longer in service" and then literally back up down the tracks away from us. The only thing missing was the sadistic laughter. One time a train came and was so full of people that we literally could not squeeze any more on, but the trolley man assured us that there was another train "about three minutes behind me". More than a half hour later, that train finally arrived.

And it wasn't just the lousy running times. It was the little things as well. None of the trolley stations had seating for more than about three people, so you were standing the whole time you waited, with your arms heavy laden with con swag and your legs aching from running back and forth between Hall H and the panel rooms. And in another great piece of San Diego charm, the Orange to Blue switchover station had a convenience store which was conveniently located right next to the tracks, but was unconveniently only open from like 9 to 5. So all you could do while waiting for your trolley was stare at the glittering array of salted snack treats from behind the large plate glass windows and curse the man who would be so cruel as to operate a much needed convenience store and then have the gall to close it before the convention hall had even closed. It takes a truly sadistic individual to hate humanity so much that he's willing to throw away that many potential sales.

So yeah, David Willis pretty much hit the nail on the head here. I can literally think of no good thing to say about the San Diego trolley, and if there is any sort of justice, someday there will be a terrible vengeance wrought upon them.

Strike while the iron's hot.

2006-07-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

Hello out there to anyone visiting from Starslip Crisis or Comixpedia, and welcome to The Webcomicker. This is my blog for writing about webcomics, the whole webcomics, and nothing but the webcomics.

Yes, I am quite the huge fan of webcomics, and my list of comics I read seems to be ever-expanding. If anybody out there has a comic they think I might like, feel free to email me and I'll give it a good, hard look, and most likely a review. I can't always promise the most timely reviews because I'm as mortal as the next man, but I will try.

I've really enjoyed dressing up as Memnon Vanderbeam for the Comicon this year, with my roommate playing Cutter. It's been great having people come up and ask me for pictures, and I've been able to tell quite a few of them about Starslip Crisis, which has been fun. I really should have gotten like a stack of Starslip flyers to hand out as I've been walking around, as there have been a lot of interested parties. It's been really great getting to talk to Kris Straub himself and getting to know all the Blank Label guys a little more. They really are a class act group of guys.

I've been blogging about my experiences at the con over at Comixpedia at the request of Xavier Xerxes, so be sure to head on over there and take a look. I think the con has given a lot of indicators that webcomics are taking over in a major way, and I comment a lot about that in my posts at Comixpedia. So be sure to check them out.

And after the con, I'll be back here at Webcomicker, faithfully blogging away whenever I have a free moment. I hope you all keep me in your feeds and check out what I'm writing, and leave some comments. After all, community is always a good thing.

Oh, and if you get confused about the whole "What's my name" thing, my real, legally binding name is Matthew Young. But I've honestly never liked that name and I try to go by Gilead Pellaeon whenever possible. I think it just fits me better.

You heard it here second.

2006-07-17T06:36:00.000-05:00

So, if you haven't already seen the news somewhere else, the winners of the WebCartoonists' Choice Awards have been announced. Looks like the ceremony is still upcoming, at least as of this writing.

Let's break them down, shall we?
Outstanding Comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship - This was actually the dark horse candidate, with Achewood coming off a critically acclaimed year and both Inverloch and Scary Go Round giving out a lot of the good stuff. Still, it's nice to see Perry Bible Fellowship finally getting some acclaim after toiling in obscurity for so long.

Outstanding Newcomer: Gunnerkrigg Court - In my opinion this award really should have gone to Wally & Osborne, but they didn't even make it to the final nominations round. All I've got to say is, how did Starslip Crisis not win this award? I mean, Gunnerkrigg Court does look like a pretty cool webcomic, but Starslip has been fabulous. I think this is just an example of the awards committee being somewhat biased toward more artistic strips than more mainstream ones. But that's just conjecture.

Outstanding Artist: David Hellman (A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, design for OhNoRobot) - I don't think anyone's going to question this one. The art in A Lesson is absolutely stunning.

Outstanding Black and White Art: Digger - Digger wins this award, like, every year. I think it would have been nice to see it go to someone different this year, but really, Digger is the best.

Outstanding Character Art: Ugly Hill - Nice to see Ugly Hill win this one, as Paul Southworth truly has created a unique, distinctive, and utterly perfect character style for Ugly Hill.

Outstanding New Character Design: Templar, Arizona - Not much competition here. And the characters in Templar are among the most vibrant and utterly alive that I've ever seen.

Outstanding Environment Design: Copper - You've gotta throw Copper at least one bone every year, and this one's not a bad bone to throw. The thing which most sets Copper apart from the rest of the webcomic pack are the lavish environments that Kazu Kibuishi manages to throw Copper and Fred into on every page.

Outstanding Layout: A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible - A Lesson really wasn't competing with anyone here. The other entries were Inverloch and Copper, and none of them is nearly as layout intensive as A Lesson.

Outstanding Use of Color: A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible - This one's kind of a toss up. I mean yes, A Lesson has a really wide range of mood-setting colorwork, but I've never seen anyone who can do subdued colors the way Kazu Kuishi does in Copper, and that's a heck of a lot harder than bright colors or dark colors, or even contrasting colors. I probably would have given this one to Copper.

Outstanding Use of Flash: Alpha Shade - See also: Only use of Flash in a meaningful way. And even they don't do it well.

Outstanding Use of Infinite Canvas: Five Ways to Love a Cockroach - Actually, this one should have won best use of Flash, too.

Outstanding Web Design: Applegeeks - I'm going to assume Applegeeks won this one because professionally designed sites like Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del were disqualified. Otherwise I think one of them would have been a shoe-in. Oh, and if the category had been "Website with Outstanding Functionality", Starslip Crisis would have won hands down. Unfortunately, the actual design of the Starslip website looks somewhat cluttered, thanks to all the functionality (and advertising).

Outstanding Writer: Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Whispered Apologies) - This is a tough category, and honestly I would have given it to Megatokyo (which had a fabulous year), but I think Fred Gallagher is in general on the outs with the webcomic community. Among the actual final nominees, it's hard not to choose Achewood, which really had some awesome stuff going on with the Great Outdoor Fight. Looks like Chris Onstad really got the shaft this year, with Achewood not taking home any awards at the end of it all. And I think Dinosaur Comics really had a subpar year, overall.

Outstanding Character Writing: Templar, Arizona - This was a tough category, with a lot of heavy hitters in terms of great characters (Order of the Stick, Questionable Content, Scary Go Round, Something Positive...), but I honestly think Templar deserved this award. Those characters are pretty fantastic.

Outstanding Dramatic Comic: Something Positive - Something Positive certainly did bring the drama this year, and without any other serious contenders in the category, it was a shoe-in to win.

Outstanding Comedic Comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship - Eh... you already gave Perry bible Fellowship Outstanding Comic, shouldn't that preclude it from winning the Outstanding Comic's little brothers? I would have given this to Shortpacked, which consistently had me in stitches this year.

Outstanding Long Form Comic: Inverloch - At last Inverloch wins one of the awards it was nominated for! And honestly, it deserves it. Inverloch is a classic example of a long form comic, with the story slowly unfolding and growing, rather than playing out in episodic format, which is what we so commonly see these days. A long form comic should feel like a movie, not a TV show.

Outstanding Short Form Comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship - Again taking a sub-category to an award it's already won, I would have instead given this to PartiallyClips, and actually I'm surprised it didn't go to Overcompensating, which seems to be popular among the webcartoonist crowd.

Outstanding Single Panel Comic: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - This is kinda like choosing the best dish at a mediocre restaurant. Chopping Block used to be great, but it's really lost a lot of its edge of the years. There still hasn't been anyone from the webcomic ranks that's really mastered the single-panel comic.

Outstanding Story Concept: Girl Genius - Girl Genius certainly does manage to have the most uniquely frenetic storyline generation of any comic out there. It goes to crazy places, and yet somehow it all ends up making sense.

Outstanding Anthropomorphic Comic: Digger - Digger wasn't really competing with anyone in this category. Feral Calf is interesting, but the other nominees aren't so much anthropomorphic as they are normal humans trapped in different bodies.

Outstanding Fantasy Comic: Order of the Stick - Inverloch could have taken this, but D&D fans will always carry the day in any sort of online competition. And Order of the Stick is worthy.

Outstanding Gaming Comic: VG Cats - VG Cats didn't really impress me this year, what with a lot of missed updates and half-conceived comics. This category Order of the Stick actually deserved to win. After all, a gaming comic doesn't have to be a video gaming comic, you know.

Outstanding Slice-of-Life Comic: Devil’s Panties - This one I think could have gone to Candi, which didn't get nominated. But from among the nominees, I think Devil's Panties was a good choice.

Outstanding Romantic Comic: Questionable Content - Questionable Content is practically a shoe-in to win this category every year, despite it being more of a "Romantic Tension" comic, as there's very little actual romance that occurs. Still, Questionable Content had a heck of year, and it deserved to win something.

Outstanding Science Fiction Comic: Nine Planets Without… Starslip Crisis - Nice to see Starslip finally win something, especially in such a tight category. Science Fiction is a pretty popular genre for webcomics, and there's some very good ones out there. It was also interesting to see Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life come basically out of nowhere and get the tie against some much heavier hitters.

Outstanding Superhero/Action Comic: The Green Avenger - Let me just say this: When the winner of a certain category is hosted by Comic Genesis, there's some serious deficiency in that category. Superhero comics are probably even worse off than single panel comics in webcomics, most likely because most people seriously interested in making a superhero comic prefer to go the traditional comics route, where there is already a majorly established market.

So there you have it. The big winners were Perry Bible Fellowship and A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, taking home three awards each. Templar Arizona and Digger both managed to snag two, which serves to highlight that most of the winners this year were the more artisitically done webcomics, rather than the more mainstream oriented ones. Inverloch and Starslip Crisis, with 11 and 6 nominations respectively, each managed to only pick up one award. Achewood, in spite of being nominated for four categories, didn't win anything! And that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose.

I look forward to seeing the actual award ceremony, which is always a lot of fun. Definitely be sure to check it out.

2006-07-09T17:39:00.000-05:00

Me. From Piled Higher and Deeper.

I'm consistently amazed by how eerily accurate Jorge Cham is in his depections of the grad student life in PhD. I mean, yeah, I know the guy suffered through a PhD of his own while doing the comic, but I figured every grad student has a pretty much unique and different perspective on graduate school. So I'm always pretty surprised when Cham posts a strip that has me looking over my shoulder, expecting him to be standing there with a notebook, sketching what I'm doing.

But I must say, today's strip is the most accurate depiction of me I've ever seen. Unnamed Guy is doing exactly what I've done every single night of this summer while trying to write my thesis. And here I sit, three weeks from publication deadline, knowing full well that next week (not this coming week, the one after it) is shot because of the Comicon. And what am I doing? Dutifully plugging away, getting data and writing about it?

Nope. I'm rewatching the second season of Rurouni Kenshin (which, by the way, is quite possibly one of the greatest pieces of anime ever made. Now, I'm only talking about the second season, mind you. The rest of the series was only average). Why am I doing this? Beacause I am the Unnamed Guy. And I imagine very many grad students have had this exact same experience in their lives. It's just something you won't understand until you've been one of us. It's just how we operate.

But right now, I need to go to the video store, and rent more volumes. Because I've finished the ones I have.

Wally & Osborne

2006-07-03T17:49:00.001-05:00

The new banner from On the Rocks- er, Wally & Osborne.

So, on its one year anniversary, On the Rocks changed its name. And along with the name change comes a snazzy new website design that puts Wally & Osborne with one of the best looking websites in all of webcomics.

You should definitely go check out Tyler Martin's post on the front page explaining why he changed the name, it's a great look into the strategy of marketing your webcomic. The name "On the Rocks", while clever, is mostly associated with mixed drinks and rough times in life, whereas Martin's comic strip is clearly intended to be an innocent, fun romp. Also, it seems that a lot of the fans of the strip are kids, and if Martin wants to continue to build a fanbase in that demographic, the name "On the Rocks" might make some parents wary. He also makes the point that naming your comic after your characters provides an instant association whenever someone mentions the comic by name, which can definitely help with trying to spread the comic by word of mouth.

It's been fun to watch On the Rocks grow as a comic even in the short time I've been following it, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Martin will take it in the future. It's a very marketable strip (even I broke down and bought a "Penguins is Serious" shirt. They were just too cool), and it consistently brings a smile to my face, even if it doesn't very often make me laugh out loud.

Oh, and I stick by my prediction that Wally & Osborne is going to become a member of Blank Label Comics in short order. Perhaps the new name and new look are another step in that direction?

Back

2006-07-03T16:11:00.000-05:00

The return of Dandy & Company. From... uh, I think you can figure that part out yourself.

So once again I fell silent for about a week, but I feel justified by the fact that I have a Masters thesis due in less than one month's time which I've barely scratched the surface of. Yikes. Not to mention that I'm losing 5 days of this month to Comicon.

But in other news, today we finally saw the return of Dandy & Company. This is a day I've been awaiting for quite some time, as I've missed the cartoony flavor of D&C from my daily reading, with its lush backgrounds and expressive characters.

I like the way the Derrick Fish decided to reintroduce us to the strip, with the implication that the characters have been continuing in their wacky adventures, we just haven't been lucky enough to see them taking place. But it does raise some questions concerning some plot points that were left hanging when Fish went on hiatus. Is Maryweather still soul-searching? Is Bernard still trying to be cool? In this first strip back, Maryweather, Audrey, and Mistake are conspicuously absent, presumably not having been involved in this latest adventure with Bernard, Dandy, and Koko. The ambiguous nature of today's strip leaves me begging for the next episode. And that means it's doing its job of hooking the audience back in. And that's a good way to come back from hiatus.

O'course I'm still tryin' t'figure out the

2006-06-26T07:25:00.000-05:00

Vore and Zillion return! From Starslip Crisis.

Most of you probably don't know this, but I really don't like posting more than one thing on my blog per day. I've never been a big fan of the concept of the "blog dump", when you just post up a huge amount of things. That just results in a lot of stuff getting lost in the shuffle. I like to let a post sit at the top long enough at least for people to find it, read it, and post any comments they may have before the post gets pushed on down the page. Also, limiting myself to one post per day helps me pace myself and get fewer of these "droughts" between posts (not that it seems to be helping much).

Well, some days there's just too much going on to not talk about it. Today is one of those days.

Starslip Crisis has been on a rather serious storyline of late, with the reveal of the crisis and the "death" of Jovia. We've gotten to see some new depth from Vanderbeam as he struggles with loss and grief, and learned a lot more about both Jovia's father and Obdrath. The humor has been there throughout, as it should be, but it's been more subdued as the drama has taken a more central role.

And then we get today's strip. At the beginning of a new week, Kris Straub presents us with a radical paradigm shift from the Fuseli and its crew to Vore and Zillion. These two have been sitting on the back burner for quite some time, waiting to re-enter the strip. And I'm glad to have them back, as they're two of my favorite characters (especially Zillion. Love that crazy slang). But it begs the question of why? Why are they back? Are they going to be at all related to the crisis? Does one of them have something vital to add?

A younger me would be racking my brains over these questions. But I am much older and wiser now. I've been through the Chronomantic storyline, puzzling and puzzling to try to see how it was going to fit in with the main plotline. And it never did, except possibly for this one strip. By the way, that's a strip everyone should file away in their memories for later. Who might the greatest time offender be? I've got my guess. But the point is that it was a fully complete storyline that was entirely independent of the Fuseli and it's crew. The last storyline with Zillion was Fuseli independent as well, so this one might be too.

I'm entirely positive that at some point all of the separate plotlines in the comic will unify. How could they not? But I don't know when that's going to happen, and quite frankly I've given up guessing. I'm just going to sit back, grab a nice tall glass of iced tea, and enjoy a couple of my favorite characters re-entering a strip that I love. And that's a pretty good feeling.

There are some things you've just got to steal.

2006-06-26T06:43:00.000-05:00

Pure, distilled humor at it's highest proof. From Killer Robots from Space.

Killer Robots from Space is quickly becoming one of my new favorite comics. It makes me laugh out loud in almost every episode. The dialogue in Killer Robots really reminds me a lot of hanging out with my research group at the university, a bunch of grad students who are so embroiled in their own brilliance that the only way they know how to make a joke is to sound out a bit of wittiness with as much elocution and grandiloquence as possible.

Today's Killer Robots strip works on so many levels. But it was panel three (pictured in this post) that really got me laughing. I mean, that line is funny in so many different contexts. I still laugh every time I read it, and I laugh because it sounds so much like the cries of frustration I hear from my fellow researchers when something's just not going right.

And yet, they're talking about bread. I've just got to make that the new tagline for this blog. I've simply gotta. So, thanks and apologies for stealing it, Adam Greengard.

I owe you a beer.

Quickcast

2006-06-25T22:31:00.000-05:00

Melonpool having some trouble while interviewing a kid from the Melonpool Quickcast.

So, once again Steve Troop is managing to be ahead of the curve in webcomics. Melonpool is one of the grandfathers of all webcomics, first appearing on the web in the olden days of 1996. Before PvP. Before Penny Arcade. Before... well, before just about everything! Steve Troop saw a new medium, and he grabbed it.

Well, he's doing it again. The hot new technology this time is on-demand streaming video on the web. It's gaining a huge amount of steam with Google Video and the upstart new boy-dandy of the webwide world: YouTube. There are several folk out there that have already managed to leverage the concept of a "vodcast", short video clips once a week or so, into popular online features (such as RocketBoom and the ever-amusing Ask a Ninja). And we've begun seeing some webcomickers provide video-on-demand service, most notable Kris Straub, ever the innovator, with his highly entertaining Slipcast, in which he answers questions and discusses all things Starslip. But Steve Troop has taken it to a new level. He's the first webcomicker to use video on-demand services to bring his characters finally and fully into the real world.

Obviously the puppets have been an integral part of Melonpool for its entire history. The Melonpool Movie existed before the webcomic did. If you went and visited Steve Troop at a convention you probably got entertained by a puppet in one form or another. But actual video content from Melonpool was sparse. After all, video was not in terribly high demand on the web, and the bandwidth costs would have been immense (take a look at some figures from Homestar Runner sometime, which keeps almost all its files under one megabyte). But at the end of last year, accurately gauging how the winds of the web were blowing, Troop put the Melonpool webcomic (which was taking a huge amount of time to keep up every day, and wasn't seeing any appreciable increase in traffic) on hiatus and decided to focus on his puppeteering skills, going out every day and practicing, practicing, practicing, knowing that the most popular thing on the web right now, the thing joe average surfer is most likely to be looking for, are silly short videos.

And then, last Friday, he launched the Melonpool QuickCast. It looks like the gist of it is going to be Melonpool and company interviewing people, probably a combination of random people on the street and fan-famous people at conventions. We'll see if it evolves into more involved adventures in the future. The first episode was Melonpool interviewing little kids, and it had a very "Sesame Street" vide going to it, except for the part where one little like five year old kid said his favorite cartoon was South Park. That part made me shake my head in disgust at parents these days. But I digress...

Interestingly, rather than encorporating the QuickCast as a part of the Melonpool site, or the Melonpool Video Blog, Troop joined up with fan legend Kevin Smith to launch the Melonpool Quickcast as one of the premiere features of Smith's new entertainment website: Quick Stop Entertainment. I don't think Troop could have possibly found a better person to partner with. Kevin Smith like unto a god in fan circles, so you can bet this new website is going to get a lot of traffic. And chances are it will be the perfect kind of traffic for Troop: people who have both never heard of Melonpool and who are likely to be interested in it and keep following it.

So go, check it out, and experience Melonpool in a way you've never experienced Melonpool before. And good luck, Steve Troop! Way to stay on the cutting edge!

Wicca? Wecca? Wokka?

2006-06-21T05:12:00.000-05:00

Title banner from the Webcartoonists' Choice Awards (as if you didn't know that already).

So let's talk about the Webcartoonists' Choice Awards for a moment, shall we?

Personally, I'm a fan of them. I think that having an annual set of awards determined by an independent counsel of judges with a very well defined set of rules and bylaws is a good thing. It gives a lot of webcomics increased exposure (I mean, jiminy crickets, look at Inverloch!), it gives recognition to those that excel, it provides an event where fans from all walks of webcomics can come together and share in each other's goodness.

I especially love the awards presentation ceremony, with different webcomics stars actually presenting the awards in comic strip form. That's just so perfect I think I owe a beer to whoever thought up the idea. Last year's ceremony was tons of fun, and with Chex hosting this year, it's gonna be just like Billy Crystal hosting the Oscars. Only better.

All that being said, there are a couple things I don't like about the WCCAs, some issues which I feel need to be addressed for this annual event to truly become a crowning achievement in webcomics. In my opinion, the real problem with the awards is that they just feel so darn AMATEUR. Does anyone else get this impression? I mean, this is the sixth year they've thrown the darn thing, and while I admit I haven't followed the past years with terrible scrutiny, everything this year seems so thrown-together-at-the-last-momentish.

First off, the new website looks nice and snazzy. Great job guys. But after about thirty seconds clicking around the site, you realize this snazzy look is just a thin veneer covering a void of information like the skin of a balloon. They've got a nice announcement that things are underway, a statement of purpose, a much needed but hardly prime content set of rules, and a set of categories for the awards. What they don't have are the pieces of information that people are likely to come to the site looking for: the nominees and the judges. Not to be overly critical here, but without those pieces of information, who cares about the rules and the statement of purpose? I know the nominees have been announced elsewhere on the web, but that's hardly an excuse to not have the information readily available on the WCCA site itself. I mean, come on. And I see a promise of a judge list, but no actual list. Is it really that hard to make a list of people? That's like twenty minutes of HTML work. Tops.

Another frustrating thing about the WCCAs is that there's no real prize for winning. You get a little bit of recognition, I suppose. But in general I don't think you'll see a huge spike in readership from getting nominated for or winning a WCCA. I truly believe that everyone nominated for an award has truly earned their nomination, and has put their heart and soul into their webcomic. And I think those that win are those that truly went above and beyond in the past year, and they deserve to be rewarded with more than just a pat on the back. Now, I'm not saying we should set up a prize fund (that could be rather tricky), but wouldn't it be neat if the winner of each category got an honest-to-goodness, physically real trophy they could put on their bookshelf? I'd donate into a fund to pay for that. There's 27 categories, and guessing on 20 dollar trophies (although I'd bet you could get them cheaper than that) you'd only have to raise 540 dollars, and for an event with exposure like the WCCAs, that wouldn't be too hard! I think a little added incentive would make the awards that much more special.

And now, if I may get a bit snarky, there are a couple of pet peeves I have with the awards. First of all, why is the URL for the site www.ccawards.com ? It obviously should be www.wccawards.com , which is actually available, by the way... I know you don't want to change sites, but is it that hard to put up a redirect? Keep both domains for the extra twenty bucks a year and I'll be a lot happier. Secondly, the awards need a better abbreviated name. The Wiccas just isn't working out for me, and I don't think it's the best idea for our biggest annual event to be associated with the practice of witchcraft. But that's me talking. That being said, I'm not sure I can think of a better abbreviation (as evidenced by the title of this post), but hey, the Academy Awards get shortened to the Oscars, so maybe we can think of something completely unrelated. *shrug*

In any case, I encourage everyone to follow the WCCAs as well as you can, and definitely show up for the ceremony when it happens. It's already a good thing, it just needs some legwork to become a truly great thing, and I'm guessing that the sort of thing that will only happen with audience support.

Updates!

2006-06-14T17:14:00.000-05:00

Man, it's been awhile since I've had an updates post. And boy am I behind. I've got a lot of new comics that I've been reading. So let's dive right in, shall we?

Fallen - I keep looking around for good comics drawn in the manga style, mostly because I enjoy manga a lot more than I enjoy American comic books (this is referring to published works, not webcomics). But the vast majority of webcomic manga out there is just fan service junk. It really is. Fallen, however, is not. It's got a different tone than most comics I read, very depressing and beaten-down. But it's an interesting story and and even more interesting world, so I picked it up. Of course, it hasn't updated since last September, so that's a bummer.

Full Frontal Nerdity - An absolute treat by Aaron Williams, of Nodwick fame. I've been reading this one for a long time, I guess I just forgot to actually mention it here. Aaron Williams manages to perfectly capture the essence of the geek without going over the top. The guys in this comic aren't parodies of gamer stereotypes. They're gamers. To me, reading Full Frontal Nerdity feels just like I'm sitting around the gaming table with my buddies.

Joe and Monkey - I don't know if I've mentioned Joe and Monkey here before, but it's another one I've been reading for awhile. This is another webcomic that reads like a newspaper strip, and is consistently on the same humor level as any newspaper strip I've ever read: it'll almost always make you smile but rarely make you lose control with laughter. And that's not a bad humor level to be at. The thing about Joe and Monkey that really stands out to me is the quirkiness of it. The characters aren't over-the-top, theu're just a little off-kilter. They're afraid of ducks, obsessed with getting a bucket down from the ceiling, and generally jusy quirky. It's a fun read.

Radioactive Panda - I honestly don't know what to make of Radioactive Panda. Is it a serious strip with subtle humorous undertones, or is it a humor strip with a thin veneer of seriousness on top? I'm inclined to think the second. But one thing that Radioactive Panda will never fail to be is whimsical. The artwork is almost pulpy in its brightness of color, but the bright colors are contained within very pronounced linework, which gives it kind of a unique flavor. And of course the current storyline, a parody of webcomics drama, is incredibly well-done. It's rare to see subtlety done well, but these guys know how to do subtlety. I'm impressed.

Templar, AZ - This one I just picked up yesterday after listening to the Digital Strips podcast about it (I'm not a big fan of Digital Strips, but I do listen when they cover a topic I'm interested in). It's amazing to me how much acclaim this strip has gotten when it's really still in the very fledgling stages of its development. I guess that's what happens when you have a good comic with a slow update schedule. Templar has been nominated for quite a few Webcartoonists Choice Awards, but the ones I think it really deserves to win are "Outstanding New Character Design" and "Outstanding Character Writing". While many people, including Spike herself, emphasize the town itself as a key part of the comic, it just doesn't read that way to me. What's a key part for me are the diverse characters which make up the town. Even the bit players in the background are obviously the product of a lot of thought and work. This strip is all about the characters, and the characters are quite unique.

The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World - I kind of read this one on and off for awhile, but now I've finally added it to my permanent list. The Angriest Rice Cooker is actually a really good fixed-art comic strip despite being even more fixed than most by having only one image, which is repeated three times. It's basically just a short rant by the rice cooker every day, but Connor Moran still manages to keep it funny and fresh. The only weird thing is that it's like barely a comic. Like Moran could just replace the little images with like a "rice cooker blog" and it would work just about as well. Which is an interesting idea, actually...

Unshelved - Here's another nice newspaper style comic. And, in fact, I'm actually a bit surprised that Unshelved doesn't run in newspapers, because it's really not a part of the greater webcomics community, it's tone very closely mirrors newspaper comics, and the type of readers it appeals to are much more likely to read a newspaper than to read comics on the web. If I had to make a pick out of all the webcomics I read for one "most likely to succeed in newspapers", Unshelved would be it. As a side note, the weekly summaries of interesting books to read that Unshelved provides are really annoying me, because they're rekindling my love affair with books, and I simply don't have time to fall off that cliff again.

So that's the latest that I've been reading. Links to all the comics have been added to the sidebar!

This is actually a really good idea.

2006-06-13T20:02:00.000-05:00

A Candi Street Team poster, from Candi.

This is the sort of idea that really makes you want to smack your head and say "Why didn't I think of that?"

I mean, we all know that the only really way to promote your webcomic is through viral marketing. There's no way you can afford to take out a bunch of ads on TV, or even on really popular websites, for that matter. You've probably got like 100 dollars to blow on your entire advertising budget if you're lucky. You could spend it to run a banner for a few days over at PvP. And maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. But really, wouldn't it be better to get Scott Kurtz to notice you by himself and link you from his blog?

Pretty much everybody in webcomics already relies on viral marketing techniques: telling all your friends, bumming around forums with a link to your comic in your signature, asking those of us that run webcomics review blogs to read your work and throw up a review. And it's rare to see a webcomic site that doesn't have a page with some link banners on it, encouraging people to put up a link back to you on their sites. You pretty much rely on word of mouth to spread your comic and hope that you can find your audience.

So if viral marketing is already your chosen method for advertising, why not make use of some of the more powerful viral marketing techniques? Now, I'm not talking about the more subversive techniques where you go around creating fake accounts on forums, fake websites, and fake blogs all preaching your glory. That may get you some initial curiosity popularity, but eventually it's going to catch up with you and you'll end up with more critics than fans. But I am talking about honest-to-goodness, tried and true, old-fashioned viral marketing techniques where you leverage your fanbase to do the promotion for you. And the best way to do that is with a street team.

The concept of a street team finds its roots in punk rock. Webcomics could actually stand to learn a few lessons from the rise of punk rock music, which was another relatively unknown, niche-appeal type of media until the bands started to come up with really clever ways of marketing and merchandising themselves and the whole scene exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry. Basically the idea behind a street team was that you have all your fans sign up to be on the team, and then whenever you have a show, you look up all the fans in that city, send them all a bunch of flyers to hang up, and after they hang them all up you give them free front row tickets to the concert, or maybe some swag like a poster or something. Another variant was that if people on the team invite their friends to come to a concert, they all get in for free. It's an absolutely brilliant idea, because the fans get what they want (more awesome stuff from the band they love), it costs the band practically nothing, and it introduces a lot of new people to the band that might not have heard about it otherwise. And best of all, because of the grassroots nature of the campaign, it's perfectly natural and fun.

Well, this sort of thing translates PERFECTLY to webcomics. And I'm really surprised I haven't seen more people doing this. In fact, Starline Hodge is the first person I've seen who's really tried to organize a street team in any sort of meaningful way. Here's how it works: Print out one of the flyers off her website, post it up somewhere (after getting permission first, of course) and then email her a picture of the flyer, happily advertising Candi comics, and she'll send you a free button or sticker and a sketch! Super fun!

But I say, why stop there? There's already tons of webcomics out there that give readers little bonuses for donating a buck or two via Paypal, such as exclusive wallpapers (see Dominic Deegan and Girl Genius). Derrick Fish came up with the great idea of having a raffle for someone to be drawn into Dandy and Company: donate and your name's in the hat. Kris Straub, ever the innovator, has a system in place over at Starslip Crisis that gives you stuff just for reading. And let's not forget the infamous animations by Tim Buckley for Ctrl+Alt+Del. I say, why not make these little extras a part of the street team?

You could set up a street team area of the website, where people have to log in with their username and password. Then they can post up stuff they've done, like posters they've hung around town, flyers they've handed out, maybe fun displays they've set up or events they've organized. They could even put up links to where they've mentioned the comic or written about it. And then either you the creator or a small group of hardcore fans could assign people points for things they've done. As they get more points, they get more free stuff, like exclusive strips, wallpapers, sketches, animations, making-of videos, and maybe even eventually physical media like stickers, buttons, signed sketches, prints and posters. I think this would be an absolutely awesome way to market your strip, and I think more webcomickers should give it a try!

If you do try it, be sure to let me know, and I'll for sure spread the word about it. After all, that's all the fun of it!

I think the best way to sum up Piro's expression is: "D'oh?"

2006-06-12T22:47:00.000-05:00

From Megatokyo.

The love/hate relationship with Fred Gallagher continues. We've gotten missed updates, Dead Piro Days, and even a dreaded Shirt Guy Dom strip in the past few weeks, but at the same time, the actual plotline of Megatokyo has been moving along briskly, and it's been good.

Really good. "Fist shaking in the air at Gallagher for his inability to update consistently" good. If this kind of inconsistency is what it takes to get such quality material, I'll take it, but it really leaves me wanting more, wishing I could count on Gallagher for an update three times a week.

*sigh*

But I digress. Let's talk about Megatokyo itself. For those of you not caught up, in the current plotline Nanasawa has become something of a phenom amongst the Japanese fanboy culture. And she's learning that this means a lot more "downside" in terms of her personal life than "upside". Turns out most of the fanboys in Japan really are perverts with no lives. While perhaps they are deserving of compassion because they're really just socially maladjusted young men and women who desperately need an escape from their pathetic little lives (which all of us need, to a certain extent), they're still perverts with no lives, and this makes it a lot easier to defend them on a radio show than to actually live with.

But really, Nanasawa's little catharsis is nothing compared to the change we've seen in Piro. He went from the weepy "no girl could ever like me, I'm just useless, guess I'll just read shojo manga and wallow in pity" Piro that we've all come to know and love to: "let's really make a difference and help Nanasawa out." He really performed a selfless act in coming to the diner to help out. Piro's not the conniving type who would come just to look better in a girl's eyes. He really just knows how fanboys act and wants to truly help Nanasawa get through the situation.

And at first, Nanasawa was thrilled. She was in over her head, and was about to completely lose it. Then Piro showed up to help and she looked genuinely relieved, surprised, and happy. And I started thinking "All right, we're really going to see some nice advancement in the Piro/Nanasawa romance storyline. Sweet."

But then things started getting bad. Really bad. Piro tried his best to stave off the fanboys, but they proved too much for him. And Nanasawa finally lost it. And in her cathartic moment she saw the essence of fanboy at its worse. She was having an emotional breakdown, trying to get them to understand that she was a living, breathing human being who had feelings which could be hurt, and what did the fans do? They scrambled for their cameras at the opportunity for a panty shot. They completely ignored her feelings.

And in the end, Piro came up big, confiscating the cameras and saving Nanasawa from a great deal of public embarassment. An all-around fine performance by Piro, start to finish. He went above and beyond this time, and really deserves to be rewarded.

Which brings us to today's strip. And the icy glare. And Piro's understandable shock. After all, in his eyes, and in the eyes of the audience, Piro's been the big hero of the day. The other waitress from the diner gives Piro the encouragement that we would give him: "good job, you really helped out, and revealed those creeps for what they really are. Go have fun with Nanasawa now."

But Nanasawa does not. And that's the genius of Fred Gallagher. He's able to put himself into the minds of each of his characters. Most good writers can present their character with a situation and know how each character will respond. Only the most talented can actually view a situation through the eyes of their characters and see how they perceive it, see how it is processed through their lens of reality, and then play out the reactions as the natural result of that processing.

Of course Nanasawa is going to be pissed. She's probably just experienced the worst night of her life. The very people she tried to defend have just proven every negative stereotype ever spoken about them. Not only have the fanboys harassed her and violated her privacy, they've destroyed her idealistic outlook and basically proven wrong all of her beliefs about the goodness of mankind. She hates fanboys right now. Loathes them. She may get over it after having some time alone to think, but as for right now? She's righteously ticked.

And she knows that Piro is a fanboy. She even said it herself earlier in the day. That's why he gets the icy glare. There is literally nothing he could have done this night to make himself look good in her eyes, because tonight when she looks at him, all she sees is "fanboy", and she immediately ascribes every last character flaw of the fans that ruined her life to Piro, simply because he has that label in her mind.

Is it fair? Of course not. Piro's nothing like those pervs in the diner. Is it consistent? Oh yeah. We were all hoping for the Hollywood ending, Nanasawa embracing Piro in thanks and maybe even a bit more... But when you think about it logically, there's no way that would happen. She's just been to hell and back, and it's "his people" that sent her there. And so he gets the icy glare.

And that's just some damn good writing. That's allowing yourself to get immersed in your story and writing real reactions, not forcing your characters to see things the way you want them to see things. And the results speak for themselves.

Fred Gallagher, I owe you a beer.

In related news...

2006-06-09T03:22:00.000-05:00

Forgot to mention this earlier, but I have another article up over at Comixpedia. Basically I took my old Press Start to Play review, spiced it up a bit, added some nice commentary about video gamer comics in general (as this month is the gamer comic issue).

I'm still trying to get the column I want to write going over there, talking about some of the more techie stuff going on in webcomics (since that's really my bag), but that involves doing interviews, and I'm notoriously bad at getting into contact with people in any sort of meaningful way over the internet.

Continuing along the vein of Comixpedia news, it appears that I'm going to be the official Comixpedia correspondent (or possibly one of several official Comixpedia correspondents) at the San Diego Comicon. Woot. So that means I'm definitely going to be haunting the webcomic tables quite a bit this year, as opposed to last year, when I only waded in to buy merchandise, then faded back into the mist of the many, many panels that Comicon offers (although I did attend all three webcomic panels last year, and they were stellar). This year I'm doing it smart, coming in on Preview Night to buy all my merch, which should leave me with a lot more free time for socializing.

So if you're a webcomicker and you'll be in attendance at Comicon, BEWARE. Because I'll probably hound for an interview. Or a sketch. Or something. Anyways I'll be around, and I'll be blogging all my adventures for Comixpedia.

It should be fun.

Giving it up: Everything Jake

2006-06-07T23:33:00.000-05:00

Everything Jake being, well, Everything Jake.

Let me preface this post by saying that I tried. I really did. I spent a lot of time reading through Everything Jake, trying to connect with the characters, learn to love them and care about their problems, really connect with them, the way you need to connect in order to enjoy a relationship based comic. I swore that I would get through the archives and by the end it would all make sense, it would all be tied together and it would be yet another comic to add to my list.

Well, I just can't do it. I can't. It seems disjointed, half-thought out, and the characters really take themselves far too seriously. Most of the time, right when I'm getting into a storyline it just abruptly ends, with one character or another telling how it ended.

And don't get me started on the random interjections of like five pages of text. I'm guessing that rather than laziness this is supposed to actually be something stylistic by Mike Rosenzweig, intended to draw us into the heads of the characters a little more, maybe better explain their deeper motivations and shortcomings. But it's not working for me. It feels discombobulated and actually leaves me feeling slightly more distanced from the characters, rather than drawn in.

Everything Jake is a psychological tale which isn't nearly psychological enough. It's a relationship drama that doesn't have enough drama. It's a "crazy college" strip that just isn't crazy enough. The one thing that it's got going for it is that Everything Jake has moments which are almost jarringly true to real life. But this is mixed in with fantastical elements, alternate realities, and who knows what else. And I just can't get into it.

So, I'm dropping it. I just don't want to force myself to read a comic I don't enjoy. I wish you all the best, Rosenzweig, and I don't think the strip is necessarily bad (I drop bad strips a whole lot faster), but it's just not for me.

More catch-up: Book Reviews

2006-06-06T05:20:00.000-05:00

A slightly "up-the-nose" shot of the most recent incarnation of my webcomics in print shelf.

I've previously mentioned in this blog how much I love print collections and given a list of all the stuff I've got, so I'm not going to rehash it here. I'm just going to talk about the new books I've gotten in the past month or so: Goats, Dinosaur Comics, Silent Kimbly, and Schlock Mercenary.

First off, we've got the books that are new to me, but not to the public as a whole: Goats Vols. 1-4 (That's four volumes in three book collections, for those of you keeping score). I've got to start by saying the guys over at Goats are some class acts. I ordered the book bundle, and they accidentally sent me two copies of all the books. Naturally, I offered to return the extra copies. And not only did they send me a postage paid envelope to return them in, they also sent me some free stickers. Classy. I've had much worse experience dealing with Ebay types in the past.

As for the books themselves, you get a lot of Goats for your buck. There's not really any extra content beyond some extremely funny forewords (Jon Rosenberg is a master wordsmith), but what you do get is Goats strips printed nice and large, and you get well over 200 of them in each volume. These are some nice, big, weighty books which can compete with any Calvin and Hobbes collection you've got on your shelf. They're black and white, but guess what: so was the strip during the time period they cover. I really hope that when the strips turned to color the books will turn to color as well, because it would be a shame to lose that sublime colorwork.

But in terms of sheer content, the Goats books have got nothing on The Best of Dinosaur Comics. One nice feature of this book is the printing of each comic's alt tag below the comic (hadn't noticed that before? If you hold your mouse over any given Dinosaur Comic on the website, you'll be rewarded with an extra "throwaway" joke). Beyond that and a foreword, there's not really any extra content to this book, but this book's got like 230 or so Dinosaur Comics strips, and that's a lot of Dinosaur Comics. This is like the perfect bathroom book. You can pick it up, flip to a random page, and read five or six Dino comics. No need to read it in any sort of order.

I was a little disappointed at first when I heard it was a "best of" book rather than the whole archive, but when I realized that you really can't tell with Dinosaur Comics when a strip gets cut out, and I honestly couldn't think of any strips I particularily enjoyed which got cut, I got over it. I did notice that Ryan North seemed to cut out pretty much all the strips where he messed around with the template of the strip (such as the mirror universe strips), and I'm guessing this is to enhance the effect when you show the book to a friend and say "check this out:" then flip through all the pages and show them that they are all exactly the same. In any case, no big loss.

Silent Kimbly: Play Time, as opposed to being the perfect bathroom book, is like the perfect book for a coffee table. It's probably the shortest book out of any of the four I'm reviewing today in terms of total strips, and each strip is just a single panel, so it reads pretty quick. But the humor is pretty accessible and the lavish, cartoony artwork is very pleasing to the eye, so it's the perfect book to leave lying around for your guests to peruse if they have a few spare moments. Ryan Sias' artwork is really pretty unique for the landscape of webcomics with its Nickelodeonish feel, and it's a good way to show people how webcomics aren't all just geeks, anime, and gamers. So even though you can read the book quickly, it's a lot more pleasant to appreciate the artwork of each strip and let it sink in before moving on to the next. Plus if you order a book Sias will draw a free sketch in it for you! I got a really nice looking one of Kimbly in my book.

Oh, and by the way, I've loved having Kimbly in color the past few weeks. It's just absolutely beautiful, and it keeps getting better and better. The latest strip (with toast) is awesome. I know it's gotta be tough to try to color in all those strips, but man, that adds a whole new level of vibrancy and life to the world of Silent Kimbly.

And speaking of great colorwork, Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management proves yet again that when a webcomicker takes the plunge and prints his work in full color, it pays off. I think all webcomickers thinking about making a book need to secure themselves a copy of this beauty. It's worth the extra cost for the added value. I would gladly pay the extra money for a colored printing of a color webcomic than save a few bucks and get it in black and white.

The book is a suprisingly long 80 pages (there's a lot of strips per page) and reads more like a graphic novel than a collection of strips. It includes a lot of the typical Schlock-type commentary in the form of historical notes and explanation of scientific jargon, which is nice. The book has a very nice layout, with strips surrounded by lots of sketches, designs, and other artwork spashed around the pages. Again, this is something a lot of other webcomickers could learn from, putting some extra thought into their layouts.

The Schlock book also has the most bonus content, with an added story at the end explaining how Schlock got his infamous plasma cannon. All in all: quality.

So if I had to pick a winner from the bunch, it would be the Schlock Mercenary book. But honestly, none of them are losers. They all have a slightly different method of displaying their work, but they all give you a lot of good comics offline for hours of reading pleasure, and a great way to share your favorite online comics with your friends and get them hooked too.

The really big news about Birdsworth: Talkies!

2006-06-03T15:04:00.000-05:00

Talkies! Click on the link to watch the very first test episode of the Birdsworth Comics Talkies.

Ok, it took me all week to get it up, but it's finally ready: The first Birdsworth Comics Talkie is on the air! The dialogue is based on Print #4.

This first episode was really just a test for me to learn how to use Flash. In the future, episodes should be somewhat longer and probably won't strictly adhere to the text of the comic like this one. I'm hoping to make this a regular feature of Birdsworth, and therefore give you guys some fun extra content, hopefully on a weekly basis (although I doubt I could keep that up).

Some notes on the format of the Talkies:

The music was provided by The Walter Boyd Band, which is headed by the artist for Birdsworth, Grant Thomas. But I totally screwed up the link to their website in the credits. It should be: www.walterboydonline.com
The other voices in the cartoon are my roommate and his girlfriend. I chose them because they're always around the apartment, so it's easy to get recording time in.
The style of limited animation I used was directly inspired by Blamimation. In fact, I learned how to use Flash from reading the tutorial on their website. Thanks, Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz! You guys are fantasticians of the finest order.
You'll also notice in the credits that under "Hosted By" it says "We'll see..." This is because I don't really want to put up the animations on my own site. I don't have any advertising, so it's not like they'll be helping me that way. What I really want is to present Birdsworth Talkies as a vodcast through Clickwheel. I think Clickwheel is a fabulous idea, but obviously their content delivery method for webcomics isn't that great. However, iPod does natively support videos now through vodcasts, so that would be a whole lot more seamless. I haven't actually officially gotten on board with the Clickwheel guys yet though, so I didn't want to put in anything too official.

So let me know what you think of the talkie! Any constructive criticism you have is more than welcome! I especially need to know tips and tricks on working with Flash! Just making that one episode took me forever.

It's not just a comic, it's a genre. A review of Banished.

2006-05-31T13:33:00.000-05:00

Ah, Timbo. Poor, naive Timbo. From Banished.

Let's see if I can get this trainwreck moving again. I've got a lot of writing in the queue, so let's get on it.

With the rise of internet comics, we've seen a lot of crazy strips come into being that probably wouldn't have been successful if they had begun their journey in any other medium (Goats and Dinosaur Comics come to mind). These strips show a high level of innovation in terms of content and storytelling style.

But even more interesting to me than the cleverness of a few extremely talented individuals is the rise of new genres of comics through the webcomic world. Some of these genres were wholly non-existent before the web (like the ubiquitous gaming comic and the infamous sprite comic), and some of them existed in some small form but have been greatly expanded by the web (such as the journal comic) and one of these genres is the realm of the science fiction comedy.

Science fiction comedy is, obviously, a science fiction story told in the comedic style, or alternately a comedy set in the realm of science fiction. This is a genre which has existed for quite some time. Most of the efforts in this realm have been simple parodies of well-known sci-fi works (such as Spaceballs, or Mars Attacks!), but some of them have been legitimate bodies of work in their own right (such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Futurama, although the latter is really a post-webcomics invention). However, I honestly can't think of an example of a sci-fi comedy strip in traditional comics. While the genre did exist in film, TV, and books, I'm not sure it ever crossed the gap to comics.

Boy, did the internet change that. Now we have a number of very good strips that not only fit the genre of science fiction comedy, they basically define it. Among the strips I read there's Freefall, Starslip Crisis, Schlock Mercenary, and Melonpool (and possibly Zap, although that one I'd tend to file more under "general"). And I don't read some of the major ones, like Sluggy Freelance, It's Walky, College Roomies from Hell, or Narbonic. Honestly, there's so many quality strips in that list that these guys really should get together, form a collective, and release anthologies every year. That would be awesome.

Which brings us around to the point of this post: a review of Banished, which is yet another strip in the genre of science fiction comedy. In my opinion, it says a lot about the strength of a genre when so many people can produce work in it and not be tripping over each other's toes. I mean, everybody loves a good gaming comic, but it's really hard to read more than three or four of them, because they're all treading on the same ground. But with the science fiction comedy strips, while they all fit in the genre, they cover a wide variety of styles and storylines, with many different takes on the future. There's art museum spaceships, mercenaries, alien invasions, mad scientists, and just a huge amount of potential which continues to be tapped for more quality works. It's pretty exciting.

But I digress. The point is, Banished is a science fiction comedy strip which does a good job being science fiction and comedy without feeling like it's stealing jokes from other strips. It's being written by Ryan Smith of Funny Farm fame (who actually has a book coming out... Maybe I should secure a copy. I am a sucker for a good book.) and drawn by Jamie Anderson, who may or may not be the man behind Jamie and Nick and The Destructive Tendencies of Us. *shrug* The story thus far takes place on Strix 13, a desolate planet of deserts, monsters, and mammazons. The main character, Rak, has been banished to this planet for generally making a nuisance of himself. He's the type of alien who only really cares about what's in his best interests, and what's in his best interests right now. This makes him not only an arrogant, self-absorbed jerk, but also a very poor planner. Not a good combination for staying out of trouble. On the planet he meets Timbo, a robot explorer whose desire to meet new people is equally matched with a complete naivete about how those people are going treat him.

At the moment, the series doesn't really have a cohesive plot. It's been hinted that the series is headed toward a major event which will set into motion a much more directed plot, but for the moment we've just got Rak and Timbo reacting to situations as they arise. I think some of this is Smith and Anderson still "discovering" their characters and the world they live in. The best way to learn something about your characters is to throw them in panic situations and see how they react. And the best way to flesh out your world is to think about how you're going to create interesting and consistent panic situations. It's not such a bad thing to have a long introductory period, which allows readers to become familiar with the characters and begin to develop a sense of attachment to them, so that when the plot starts heating up you've got a vested interest to stay involved.

Right now the story has a lot of energy. Rak acts very impulsively, and while he doesn't plan well, he does adapt well, which is why he and Timbo are living inside the carcass of a giant worm monster that had an unfortunate allergic reaction to eating Rak. Timbo has a bouyancy and an inquizzative mind which drives him to find new and exciting experiences. The plots are typically kept short and consist mostly of action of the "running away" variety. The humor is sharp and to the point, and in general the whole strip just feels well put-together. I've been enjoying the various random twists and turns the strip has taken as everything's being set up.

The breaking point for Banished will be in the transition from its current shortform storylines to the planned long plot, which based on my reading looks like it will be more than just an major storyline but actually the overarching plot and therefore a part of the premise of the strip itself. the question is whether Smith and Anderson will be able to keep the energy level high and not get bogged down in the minutae of storyline development. This is a very difficult thing to do. With only four panels to work with and a thrice-weekly schedule, setting up a plot can result in quite a few "wasted strips", strips that are heavy on dialogue and background without much in the way of action or a joke. And that can take the wind right out of your comic's sails. So that's something to watch out for.

Banished as a strip is almost a microcosm of the science fiction comedy genre as a whole. Its fresh, its new, its funny, and its got a huge amount of potential to be tapped. It's been set up well, and it's ready to move on to the next stage of development: full, and broad-spectrum deployment.

So good luck, Ryan Smith and Jamie Anderson. And good luck, science fiction comedy comics. I wish you all the best.

Happy Birthday!

2006-05-24T01:12:00.000-05:00

Hey all. My free time this week is so small you could only view it with a microscope, so no writing until the weekend. But I did want to give a quick shout-out to my peeps over at Blank Label Comics, who are celebrating a hugely successful first year of working together.

Congrats, guys, and many happy returns.

When I have the chance, I'm going to write up a detailed post detailing some reasons why Blank Label Comics is such a success story, and some lessons that other webcomickers can learn from it.

Be sure to check out the official announcement on the Blank Label site and throw your name in the drawing for free books. I'd enter myself, but I think I already own basically every book they have to offer, so I'll let them share the love rather than trying to hoard it.

Coming up next week: Book reviews, Webcomic reviews (I've been sitting on a couple for far too long), and hopefully some exciting news about Birdsworth (crosses fingers)

See ya.

This post is not about PvP. Really. It's not.

2006-05-17T11:45:00.000-05:00

Freaky-looking Cole and Brent, from PvP.

So I'm having a little trouble adjusting my sleep schedule. I'm taking a morning class this summer which starts at 9 AM (and is a twenty minute walk from my apartment), but with the way CUSP is set up to release comics, I have to go in every night at 2 AM and run a script to put the comic "into production", so to speak. I could set that up to run on a cron job, but my web hosting doesn't give me that much access. And not to mention the fact that I've got to enter the OhNoRobot transcription every time I release a comic.

I know some people out there are perfectly fine with 5-6 hours of sleep a night, but not so much with me. I'm a bit tired. I may have to start taking afternoon naps until I get the comic releasing thing resolved.

So this post is going to be somewhat "stream of consciousness". I blame the tiredness.

First off, yesterday's (today's? Kurtz has been updating so late it's basically like he's uploading early for the next day) PvP features some rather scary looking head-on shots of Brent and Cole. I know some people criticize Scott Kurtz for only drawing his character from one angle, but in my opinion he's found an angle which really works for his characters and fits well with the tone of his strip in the three-quarter view. I know that makes it a bit more difficult to portray talking to the audience, but Brent and Cole in panel one just look downright freaky. Maybe it's just one of those things you've got to get used to. Kurtz is always saying he should develop his art some more, and I suppose I should encourage it.

Still. Freaky.

In other news, while I've been light on reading new stuff lately (I'm still working through the archive of Everything Jake. I haven't given up yet!) I did take some time last night and ripped through the archive of Radioactive Panda. It's some good stuff, and I'll definitely give it a full review when I have the energy and I'm caught up on my reviews (still in the queue: Toyzville and Banished).

In other other news, I know I just launched Birdsworth, but I'm not content to just sit on my laurels (since I don't have any yet), and there's going to be something exciting and new coming soon, hopefully next week. I don't want to give it away yet, but I will tell you that it involves The Walter Boyd Band.

Lastly, I don't think I announced this yet, but I will be in attendance at the San Diego Comicon again this year, for the full time (Wednesday night - Sunday), and definitely looking forward to actually meeting some webcomic types this year. I bought merchandise, attended panels, and got sketches last year, but I never got the chance to really talk to anybody, and I'm hoping to remedy that this year. So let me know if you're going to be there.

Oh, and I will be owning up my beer debts at the Comicon. So if I owe you a beer, you can be sure that I'll at least try to buy you one.

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

2006-05-15T03:03:00.000-05:00

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*

Call me a skeptic.

2006-05-14T18:24:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm breaking the rules and talking about something not directly related to webcomics. I'm going to talk about Network Neutrality.

Here's the thing. This has become a hot issue online lately. I've seen a lot of webcomickers link to stuff like Save The Internet and a lot of talk about the "evil telecom companies" that are trying to control our content.

You know what I haven't seen? Evidence.

This is not to say that I don't believe all these people. It's just to say that if I've learned anything from my time on the internet, it's to take everything said with a grain of salt. If there's one thing the internet is, it's a gigantic rumor mill. So-and-so said this, and so-and-so said this, and the story gets passed around so quickly no one bothers to check their sources.

Here's what I do know: The government has taken a pro-network neutrality stance in the past. The FCC regulates telecom companies and has been shown in the past to actually enforce network neutrality. In fact, they have a policy statement which seems to support network neutrality.

Now I hear about this new bill called the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Efficiency Act of 2006". And everybody's saying that this thing is going to eliminate network neutrality and let telecom companies slow down or even block certain websites. But you know what? I haven't seen anybody quote the section of the bill that does this. I haven't seen someone pull up the text and say: "Look here! There it is!" I haven't even read any quotes from these supposedly "evil" congressmen hinting that this will be the case.

So I did some research. And here's what I found. First of all, here's a link to the actual bill itself. (Note that this particular copy is before the bill had a name. For a history of the thing, check out this page). The vast majority of the bill just has to do with new regulations for creating "franchises", that is rules on how to become a cable provider and set down your lines and whatnot. At the end there's some discussion of Voice Over IP services and how the government can't show favoritism to any provider. That's all well and good. Now, the part that we're interested in is pages 25 and 26. Go ahead and read it.

Go on.

Ok, not too exciting, right? All it does is give the FCC the right to enforce their "broadband policy". Which policy is this? Well, at the bottom of page 26 it tells us: the term ‘Commission’s broadband policy statement’ means the policy statement adopted on August 5, 2005, and issued on September 23, 2005, In the Matters of Appropriate Framework for Broadband Access to the Internet over Wireline Facilities, and other Matters. Ok, fine. Whatever. So I go ahead and pull up this particulr document as well, and here it is. Now, this document is much more interesting, because it outlines exactly how things are going to change.

Here's where it starts getting weird. That FCC document outlines the FCC's new policies to support their policy statement. The policy statement is this:

Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and
Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

This sounds a lot like network neutrality, doesn't it?

Or does it? Notice that nowhere in that statement is there any assertion that all content be provided equally, only that it must be provided. And that's the distinction.

HOWEVER, this does not mean the government is eliminating network neutrality. If you read the FCC report (and you should, it gives a pretty interesting history of the government's stance on these issues), you see that the real truth is that the FCC is no longer going to enforce network neutrality. The stance of the FCC is this: by enforcing network neutrality, we basically force all broadband internet companies to provide the exact same content. By forcing them to provide the same content, we eliminate any possibility of competition between telecommunications companies. By eliminating competition, we eliminate the drive for new technology and better services. If we stop regulating so harshly, not only should new and better technology emerge, but the market should also converge to some sort of new "network neutrality" driven not by government force but by competition.

Are they right? It's difficult to say. Look at it from the telecom companies' point of view for a moment: They are, in terms of physical reality, the internet. They provide the actual wires, routers, switches, and solid infrastructure on which the internet runs. They don't own the servers, but they own all the transmission lines and are responsible for the maintenance thereof. And as the internet grows by leaps and bounds, that structure is becoming increasingly taxed. The average user demands far more bandwidth these days than they used to, and providing all that bandwidth is neither easy nor cheap. How do you recoup the loss? You can either charge the user more, which isn't going to work because then they'll flock to your competitor, or you can charge the content provider who is using all your bandwidth. And what's the only incentive you can give a content provider to pay you money? Offer to deliver his content faster. Only, you can't do that under the current system of network neutrality!

So you can see the predicament of the telecom company. But at the same time, you value the principle of network neutrality. So what are you going to do?

My advice: let the legislation pass and see what happens. I think it's funny that people are usually so opposed to government regulation of things, but in this case, when the government actually wants to regulate less, everyone's up in arms. And honestly, I don't think it's going to result in the mass-blocking of websites that don't pay so-and-so telecom company money. If companies start blocking sites they will only reduce the amount of content they have available to their customers and therefore become less desirable. Competition should drive the companies to try to increase their content in any way possible, and the costs levied to content providers should only be applied to those companies which are a massive drain on bandwidth, such as high volume multimedia providers (like, say, Google Video).

In the words of Fred Upton, one of the supporters of the bill: "Finally, I want to briefly mention the net neutrality provision in the Committee Print. While there is virtually no evidence of actual bad behavior in the marketplace, I believe that authorizing the FCC to enforce its Broadband Policy Statement -- on a case-by-case adjudicatory basis -- is a better framework to ensure that the public Internet remains open and dynamic versus alternatively adopting anticipatory regulation, which would have a dramatically chilling effect on broadband deployment and the development of exciting, new services."

Look, I know there are also good arguments out there against letting the telecom companies regulate themselves, especially since it's been shown in the past that companies are more likely to collude than to compete and generally are more interested in driving other people out of the business than improving their services and content. But all of the arguments being made on the internet are so incredibly one-sided and based more on assumption than fact, that I really felt like I had to present the other side of the issue.

Above all else, I urge you to actually read the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Efficiency Act of 2006 and the new policy it is going to put into effect, then make your own decision about the issue. If you end up disagreeing with me, that's fine. But please, disagree with me using an informed opinion rather than because of "what you read on some guy's blog". Don't believe the spin. Look at the facts.

Can I get an Amen?

2006-05-13T00:53:00.000-05:00

Simple, yet brilliant: Applegeeks Lite.

Is anybody else out there loving Applegeeks Lite like I'm loving Applegeeks Lite? Can I get a witness?

I SAID, CAN I GET A WITNESS, Y'ALL!?

The more Applegeeks Lites that Hawk and Ananth produce, the better, in my opinion. Now, this is not at the expense of the normal Applegeeks strips, mind you, because the Lite strips are only really funny in the context of the normal strips, but the Lite strips really give you an excuse to check the site more often, and if those two post Lite strips during the off days from the normal strips, they might find themselves with a full time job when they get out of college.

Maybe this will get him to start updating again: Review of Killer Robots from Space

2006-05-12T02:24:00.000-05:00

Two robots angering each other over at Killer Robots from Space.

Man, it's been a while since I've posted a full-out review here... ...and that's all the incidental commentary I have to give out right now.

Killer Robots from Space is a strip I found when it got linked from Dinosaur Comics. Now, let me say that while I tend to check out most of the strips that Ryan North links, the vast majority of them don't make my reading list because most of them I honestly can't make heads or tails of. I don't know if they're engaged in many-layered subtextual ironic humor or what, but they lose me pretty quickly.

Killer Robots from Space, on the other hand, caught my attention and never let go. Killer Robots from Space is basically a webcomic about what robots do when they're not destroying humanity, or battling aliens, or whatever. And as it turns out, they're doing what most humans do when they're "on break". They stand around shooting the breeze. The comic has a very dry sense of humor, which is right up my alley, and the format suits the subject perfectly, but more on that later.

The first thing that I noticed about Killer Robots was the robots themselves, obviously. Each robot is clearly a duplicate of all the others, with just it's colors changed. While this may seem like laziness on the part of the artist (and I'm sure that played at least partly into the decision), to me it comes off as genius. You see, each strip has an entirely different cast of robots. There's no "characters" in the comic, so to speak, just an endlessly shuffling array of robots without names, distinguishable only by the colors on their chassis. On the surface level, you can say it's only natural that all the robots would look the same because presumably they're all produced at the same factory from the same set of parts, why should they be any different? But it you ply a level deeper, you realize that by making all the robots on the same model, what Adam Greengard has done is created a sense of continuity in the strip, a sense of identification and familiarity in the readers without having any specific characters. People don't identify with any particular robot, but they will identify with the "killer robots" in general. It's not unlike the familiarity that Gary Larson was able to create in The Far Side. There were never any specific characters, but when you saw a Far Side cow, you knew it was a Far Side cow.

The second thing I noticed about the strip was its infinite canvas format. People, this strip is a hallmark example of how infinite canvas should be used. It might be fun to create crazy twisting and twirling non-linear comics, but it's really not valuable to anyone beyond the level of "hey, that's neat." It'll take you about a billion hours to work it all out, and you'll post it and a bunch of people will visit your site once, and that'll be the end of it. Killer Robots from Space demonstrates an understanding of the true value of infinite canvas: it allows you to create a continuous line of storytelling, as long as you like, with no breaks in it. In short: with infinite canvas you never have to turn a page. Greengard allows each Killer Robots strip to run as long as it needs to run. He never worries about trying to set up a joke in three or four panels, he never has to be concerned with "fitting something in". In many ways, Killer Robots is the exact opposite of Dinosaur Comics in terms of form (maybe that's why Ryan North likes it so much). Whereas Ryan North has to somehow wrap his writing style around the six panels he has given himself, Adam Greengard gets to wrap his panels around however he wants his conversations to proceed.

On a side note, another neat application of infinite canvas in Killer Robots from Space is its ability to turn space into time. Greengard creates long pauses in the conversation with long black portions between the panels, which is illustrated perfectly by the strip I thumbnailed a portion of above. Click it!

Killer Robots from Space is a great example of a creator constructing the artistic style of his strip to perfectly match the content. the cookie-cutter robots perfectly suit the mundanity of it's tone, and the no-panel-limit approach perfectly mimics the rambling pace the most conversations take. The humor is pretty dry, but if that's what you like (and I certainly do), then Killer Robots from Space is the strip for you.

Samurai and pizza without the cats? Genius!

2006-05-08T19:37:00.000-05:00

You MUST click on the picture to enjoy the brilliance of No Need For Bushido.

If there's one thing I love about No Need For Bushido, it's the little side projects. Now don't get me wrong, I like NNFB simply by itself, but it's certainly nothing so amaznig that it single-handedly distances itself from the pack. It's just another decent webcomic with a nice blend of action and humor. One reason I picked up NNFB was because it has more action than most; the majority of webcomics these days are highly dialogue driven because in general action plays out too slowly in page-a-day release format for you to keep an audience engaged. When you're doing action sequences you can blow ten or twenty panels for about ten seconds worth of "real time", and this makes for very slow progression in the audiences mind when they only get to see a small chunk of the action at a time.

But I digress. This post is about No Need For Bushido's side projects, most notably their alternate scripts (although I do greatly enjoy No Need For a Player's Guide, especially this strip). I think every serious webcomic (meaning a webcomic with serious themes, not a webcomic in which the creator is serious) needs to publish alternate script pages on the side, because the juxtaposition of humorous text with serious images provides no end of humor. It really makes you look at each page in a whole new way, and allows the author no end of self-parody. And quite frankly, Joe Kovell does a brilliant job with the alternate scripts. Now, since I follow my webcomics using Piperka, and Piperka doesn't always catch updates, sometimes I'm late in finding an alternate script (as I was with this one), but I always make sure to catch myself up and read them all.

When I read the one thumbnailed above, I almost wet my pants. Each panel just adds another layer onto the humor with all the assassins toppings suggestions, and the final line had me rolling: "And may Buddha have mercy on them if they don't have stuffed crust". Oh man, that is so entering my daily lexicon. It sounds especially funny if you say it out loud with a very deep and menacing voice.

Alex Kolesar and Joe Kovell, I owe you a beer.

Now THIS is cool.

2006-05-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

This site is a ridiculously useful resource for anyone who's a big fan of webcomics: The Webcomic Crossover and Cameo Archive. Wanna know any time someone's taken a shot at Penny Arcade? Now you can (sorry I linked out of the frameset there. You'll find your way back).

Not only does this site have an incredibly huge archive of crossovers, it's got a feature where you can report your own. So anytime a favorite comic of yours makes a clever reference that you think everyone else on the web missed, you can add it up there and revel in your own deductive ingenuity.

It's actually surprisingly fun to look up some of your favorite webcomics off the list and take a look at how other webcomickers have spoofed them and slipped them into their stories. Sure it's got an archive of the full-blown crossovers as well (such as Melonpool/It's Walky, and Goats/Bobbins), but if you're a follower of a strip which does a major crossover, you're obviously going to know that crossover already. It's a lot more fun to see all the random, off-the-cuff references your favorite comic has garnered over the years in the cameo section.

So check it out, add your own contributions, and enjoy!

Yay! Wait, I mean, Noooooo!

2006-05-06T13:50:00.000-05:00

Some people doing something at Dominic Deegan.

Ok, now that I'm finally clear of schoolwork for the semester, it's time to catch up on some webcomic reviewing. I've got SO much to talk about.

But let's start with Dominic Deegan. Dominic Deegan is one of those comics that I've been considering dropping for quite some time, not because it's bad but because most of the time I have NO idea what the HELL is going on. No offense to Mookie Terracciano, but Dominic Deegan has FAR too many characters, who seem to come at will and never really go away. Combine that with long, twisted, winding storylines and post it all in a daily format with no Cast page to speak of, and you've left me standing in the middle of a maze, completely lost.

I seriously just can't keep track of all the characters in Dominic Deegan. I don't know if anyone can, without constantly going back in the archives and refreshing their memory. A few days ago we had this strip, in which an infernomancer comes along and gives a bunch of characters the stabby-death. And in that strip, I really can't tell you who any of the characters are beyond the infernomancer, who I know is associated with the orcs somehow. I'm pretty sure the goal of that strip was to envoke some sort of emotional response in the reader, but I really have no emotional attachment whatsoever to a bunch of random characters, so instead I just found myself cheering: "All right, Mookie's finally going to thin the cast!"

Only, he didn't. Now here we are two days later, and pretty much everybody's ok.

What's the only thing worse than having an overload of characters in your strip? Having an overload of characters and never being willing to kill any of them off. I mean, Terraccino could kill off a great many of his support cast and I honestly wouldn't give a rip, and with all the violence in recent strips, he'd be well justified in doing it. It would get us back down to a nice core of characters that we could actually relate to and sympathize with. Instead, we get a miraculous healing of someone we didn't care about to begin with. Whoopty-doo.

It would be hard for me to give up on Dominic Deegan, because I do greatly enjoy the long-form story, and it's very difficult to do, especially in a webcomic. But it's a drama strip, and the key to drama is tension, and it's just impossible to build tension if the viewer doesn't care about the characters. There's no getting around that point.

I'd like to hear from some real hardcore Deegan fans, though. Are you guys following all this? Is the delicate interweave of so many characters just another example of Terracciano's brilliance? Am I just completely missing the boat? Let me know.

A Brief Note on Drama

2006-05-01T03:40:00.000-05:00

So, if you haven't heard yet, there's been yet more tension between Tim Buckley and "the rest of webcomicdom", by which I mean Scott Kurtz. I wish I had more time to elaborate on this clash of egos, but I'm deeply embroiled in finals. If it's still going on about a week from now, I may say something more salient.

As it stands, I think you can read some viewpoints on the controversy in this forum thread. And I think the entire argument can be summed up in this single sentiment from that discussion: "there are worse webcomics than Ctrl+alt+del, but I dont think it's deserving of its popularity."

That pretty much sums up the attitude of Scott Kurtz and his merry band. Anytime Tim Buckley bashes anything, they'll come down on him because of this attitude they have. I don't care how much they may deny it. This is the underlying emotion which drives them. I'm not excusing Tim Buckley. I happen to disagree with him about the quality of Aaron William's work (The Spawn of Santa thing had me in stitches). But, quite frankly, he does have a right to express his opinion, and it seems there are a great deal of people who agree with him.

Obviously there are more complicated issues at hand here than I can address with a short post. But remember this: the shortfallings you see in others are most often a reflection of similar shortfallings in yourself. Why does Scott Kurtz get so mad when he sees Tim Buckley declaring Aaron William's work as undeserving? Because in it he sees Buckley accusing Williams of being essentially on the same level that Kurtz sees Buckley as being on.

There is no right or wrong here. There is only opinion. Never forget that.

You know, I always wondered this myself.

2006-04-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

The creepy world of photo development, from Tweep.

If you haven't been following Tweep the past few weeks, we've been mired in a fairly long storyline in which one of the characters undergoes a fairly mundane task, which is pretty much par for the course in Tweep. Nothing too exciting ever really happens in Tweep, it's pretty much a "slice of life" strip. This doesn't mean it's not good, mind you. Tweep does "slice of life" extremely well, with characters that manage to be colorful and fun without being over the top. Basically everyone in Tweep could be the guy or girl next door, and that's really part of the charm.

Anyways, this storyline has been focused on Julie, and she's going to get pictures developed. It took quite a few strips for her to actually get to the photoshop (slice of life, remember), but now she's finally arrived, and we've been introduced to Brigitte and Phillip, a delightful couple of characters that I've totally enjoyed. They're both so full of energy, but in a real way, not like the hyperactive Robin of Shortpacked or the childlike Skull of PvP. No, Brigitte and Phillip just resonate, like your favorite aunt and uncle.

But I especially liked today's strip. And not just because of the great interplay between the characters and the absolutely spot-on expression on Brigitte's face in panel two. I liked it because this is the sort of thing I've always wondered about, too. Do the people at the photoshop really look through all your pictures and check them? Like, not necessarily in the freaky-stalker way like Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, but still...

See, back in the day I used to work as a camp counselor. And one week I had this really awful bratty terror of a kid. And one of his hobbies was to steal people's cameras. I tried to keep mine locked up, but he got his hands on it anyways and claimed that he took a bunch of pictures of the other kids in our cabin in their underwear. Now, when I got the film developed, there were no such pictures. Nothing even close. And I always wondered if the kid was just messing with me, or if the camera shop just kept those pictures and now I'm on the FBI watchlist. They'll probably resurface if I ever run for Congress or something.

Ah well. At least Tweep made me laugh.

The Setup

2006-04-20T02:11:00.000-05:00

Rising tension, from Starslip Crisis.

Let me preface this post by mentioning that the website I use for tracking my webcomics, Piperka, lost track of Starslip Crisis after Kris Straub redesigned the website, and since I pretty much rely solely on Piperka for my comics browsing, I lost track of Starslip for a few weeks, which means that I actually read the last twelve or so strips as a block rather than in their usual daily format, and that might be coloring my viewpoint somewhat. But still...

Am I the only one who thinks Straub is building to something huge here? I mean, over the course of the strip we've seen the introduction of a number of characters who have been at best indirectly related to the main plot: Zillion, The Chronomantic, and let's not forget Lord Katarikis. They've popped in and out of the strip in a somewhat episodic manner, but if I know Kris Straub (and I don't), he's not writing Starslip in sitcom format, where each storyline is entirely separate from the last. These guys are all going to show up again. And they're going to show up in more direct contact with the crew of the Fuseli.

And now we have the latest storyline. The Fuseli is throwing a party. A big party. A party for the largest manufacturer of starslip drives in the universe. And we've been introduced to Archcount Obdrath von Lucifuge, a man who manages to be both good and evil at the same time. Other attendees at the event include Jovia and her father, and a member of the ever-ominous Directorate.

Is Kris Straub going to let all the most important people in the universe gather on the Fuseli and not have something extreme happen? Not a chance. This isn't just an opportunity to make some riffs on high society and ambiguously evil CEOs. Something's about to go down. Something major. You can almost taste it, as each strip adds another layer of setup. Straub took pains to make sure we understood that Mr. Jinx and Plox were on security. That Jovia's father was there, and does not like Vanderbeam. That Obdrath can't seem to help being evil. The pieces are being carefully arranged. And I would not be surprised at all if suddenly we see the reintroduction of one of those old fringe characters and the whole thing explodes.

Will it be Zillion and Vore, come to rob all the high society folks blind? Will it be the Chronomantic, come to seduce Jovia? Will it be Lord Katarikis, come to exact vengeance on Mr. Jinx? Your guess is as good as mine. This plot could literally go anywhere, and that's what's so good about it.

This is an example of trying to build tension by running an extremely long and elaborate setup, a technique which is often attempted but only occasionally pulled off well. And Kris Straub is pulling it off well. He's got me waiting on the edge of my seat, and maybe after reading this post he'll have you on the edge of yours, too.

Updates + A quick note on minor coincidences... of awesomeness.

2006-04-16T03:47:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you've been following The Biggest Webcomic Loser (you should be), but it recently switched to an automated script for putting up comics, which makes Philippe Gaboury's life a lot easier.

Anyways, it was my turn on Friday, so I dutifully posted a comic, and it just so happens my comic ended up being big number 100. This has caused me no small amount of personal pleasure. 100 comics has always seemed like a fairly major benchmark in terms of legitimacy for webcomics (like, if the comic makes it to 100, that means it's been at least good enough to keep the creator's interest). So even though it's not a huge deal, it means Biggest Webcomic Loser is moving along, and I've been an active participant. So that's cool.

Now, as for what I've been reading. Some new comics to add to the list:
I've mentioned Goats, Banished, Silent Kimbly, and Press Start to Play before, but somehow they never actually made it onto my "official list" here at the site, so they've been added.

Killer Robots From Space: What do killer robots from space do when they're not actively killing? Stand around the water cooler and shoot the breeze, just like everyone else, of course! This strip is very much the Seinfeld of killer robot strips. I'll probably post a full review at some point.

Toyzville: A comic strip about the town where unwanted toys go to live. This strip has kind of a "Toy Story" feel going on, except without the annoying "we've got to act normal when humans are around" plot device. This is another one I plan on giving a full review at some point.

I'm still wading through the archives of Everything Jake. That strip has occasion to get weird. I've also added to my reading list the delightful comic Unshelved. I'm sad to say that Pilli Adventure got dropped without comment because I didn't care for it.

I suppose I ought to save at least SOME money to live on...

2006-04-14T03:54:00.000-05:00

I got paid today.

What does this mean? Turning in a rent check? Possibly buying some food for my dog-bone bare pantry? Replenishing my deplete supply of Smirnoff Twisted?

Nah, of course not. The first thing I did was buy some webcomic books. My purchases:
The Ultimate Goats Paperback Bundle
Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management (Preorder)
Dinosuar Comics: Your Whole Family is Made Out of Meat (Preorder)

And man, I can barely contain myself with anticipation of the upcoming Inverloch: Volume 1.

Hmmm, now might be a good time for me to get Ugly Hill: Eyes of Liquid Rage as well... But I'm still a bit bummed about the whole black and white thing... Meh, I should just take what I can get.

A Prediction.

2006-04-12T23:49:00.000-05:00

Ok, time to flex my prognostication muscles again. I predicted at the beginning of the year that there would be some copycat style animations made with the release of the Ctrl+Alt+Del animated shorts and I was right (twice, actually). I also predicted that we'd see some people helping webcomickers better manage their content and really move webcomic sites into current technology, and now we've got RSSPECT helping in that regard.

Now I'm going to make another prediction, a much more specific one. And I hope this doesn't ruffle any feathers, but I just wanted this prediction to be on record, so that if it happens I'll have legitimate proof that I saw it coming. Of course, if it doesn't happen, I guess I'm not as in-tune as I thought.

My prediction: By the end of the year, On the Rocks will be a member of Blank Label Comics.

Now here's the evidence which has led me to this conclusion:
-First of all, On the Rocks is a fabulous new comic which has gained quite a bit of noteriety in it's short run. In my opinion, it's a shoe-in to win "Newcomer of the Year" in any webcomic awards contest. I can't speak for exactly how many readers it's got, but I'm sure the number is not insubstantial. His stuff is already appearing on two other sites (here and here), which means he's probably enjoying at least a reasonable amount of popularity, and they'll only help him grow faster.
-Secondly, I've seen a lot of ties between On the Rocks and Blank Label. Tyler Martin was/probably still is a consistent poster over at the Blank Label Comics forums, and he's known over there. He's done a guest strip for Ugly Hill (and, in fact, he was the only non-Blank Label artist to do a guest strip that week) and a guest strip for PvP (and although Scott Kurtz is not a member of Blank Label, he's made it clear that he is a sympathizer, at least).
-Thirdly, his artistic style is very similar to all the Blank Label Comics, and I know one thing that the folks over at Blank Label Comics value is the fact that there is some cohesion in their comic's art styles. The most striking similarity is the use of strong black outlines around the characters, which can also be seen in Starslip Crisis, Schlock Mercenary, and Real Life Comics, to name a few...

There are some other points, such as Tyler Martin proving himself to be a consistent updater (although Blank Label does tolerate Greg Dean) and has a very well-designed website with neat features like the current weather in Antarctica (although Blank Label does have some subpar site designs, which I'm not going to link for fear of incurring someone's wrath). But I think the three main points fairly concisely sum up my reasoning, beyond my general ability to tap into the ether of this here Internet of ours and recognize the patterns that emerge, not unlike the Oracle of Matrix fame.

Now we'll just have to wait and see if I've given you all a spoiler.

And once again, I owe someone a beer.

2006-04-10T21:49:00.000-05:00

Wiki addiction, from Shortpacked.

I've gotta say, David Willis is probably about the funniest man in the entirety of comics. Maybe not "overall funniest" in terms of setting up some monumentally huge joke and then blowing the entire audience away in a bout of spasm-inducing laughter, but in terms of consistently making me uncontrollably laugh out loud in front of my computer, regardless of the circumstances, Willis is definitely #1.

Look at today's strip. First of all he sets up the perfect situation. We already know Ethan is over-the-top obsessive about Transformers (he's really just a mouthpiece for Willis himself in this respect). And most of us have at one point or another known the addictive power of a wiki. For me its the countless hours I've spent clicking from subject to subject in the Wikipedia. For others it could be The Homestar Runner Wiki, Lost Wiki, or possibly the Wookieepedia. So we know the setup for the joke is that Ethan is hopelessly addicted to the site. And his description of its effect on his life only ramps up energy level. And we just know the comic is going to end with someone pitying how pathetic Ethan is. So we're just waiting to see it.

Then, in the second to last panel we have what we were expecting: "He needs to get laid." But after that there's the extra, snarky comment which adds a bit more humor: "Yeah, by Optimus Prime." Most people would have ended the comic here, allowing the audience to chuckle at the witty banter of the two girls.

David Willis is not most people.

He adds one last panel for the final over-the-top joke which just explodes the humor to full-out guffaw level: "I can get a costume." It's so in fitting with Robin's character and yet still so outrageously unexpected that it hits you like a ton of bricks. A ton of humor bricks.

David Willis, I owe you a beer.

I guess I'll have to send Ryan a post. Get it? A POST?! Eh?!

2006-04-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

Just one of many, many puns from Silent Kimbly.

First of all I want to just give a heads up right now and let everyone know that I have NOT forgotten about my promise to post a review of Banished. However, Banished is so young right now, and has so much more development to undergo before we even reach the premise that I thought it would be unfair to review it until things have at least progressed a bit. So I will be reviewing it, but possibly not for another month or so.

That being said, this post is a review of Silent Kimbly. Silent Kimbly is a webcomic by one Ryan Sias, who (based on his website) seems to have more experience as an illustrator and animator than as a comicker, but that's peas and carrots.

Basically Silent Kimbly is a one panel comic (and therefore technically not a comic, at least by Scott McCloud's definition) about a little girl named Kimbly and her various adventures. There are several other recurring characters, most notably Tenderness, who is the big fluffball in the comic above. The webcomic is called Silent Kimbly because none of the characters ever talk. Each installment is just a single drawing accompanied by a caption.

But unlike most single panel comics, each installment of Silent Kimbly is very lushly drawn, vividly detailed, and surrealistic. The sense of humor in Silent Kimbly is very subdued (more on that later), and as such it stands in direct contrast to most other single panel comics which tend to use strictly utilitarian art and go for the joke hardcore in the punchline (such as with Inside the Box). In Silent Kimbly, the art is everything. If you really want to go for it you can read the whole roughly 200 comic archive in about 30 minutes, just glancing at the picture and chuckling at the punchline, but then you'll be missing quite a bit of the enjoyment of it. Now, this is not to say that the artwork in each comic is so densely packed that you have to carefully examine it all. It's not like that at all. It's just that the artwork is the central point of this comic, and Sias draws all the characters, objects, and backgrounds with so much energy that you've gotta just sit back and bask in it a bit. Otherwise you're really missing the enjoyment of it all.

As for the humor, I must admit that after reading a few strips I was predisposed to enjoying the comic as a whole just because it relies almost entirely on puns. The strip I chose to display up top is pretty much par for the course. Ryan Sias thusfar has demonstrated a mastery of the art of punning which I can only describe as approaching godlike, and only time will tell if he can keep up the pace or whether there really is a limit to how many clever puns one can make with the English language before things start to get absurd. And each pun is worded in the absolute simplest way, which in my opinion matches the artwork and maximizes the overall impact of each strip. You end up with a strip that reads like snapshots of an incredibly vibrant and exuberant world, with representational emotions, surrealistic creatures and one light-hearted little girl in a bunny-suit interacting with it all. It seems only natural that a world like this would lend itself to being described by puns, almost as if Sias were inventing the puns to match the pictures rather than the pictures to match the puns. And that sense of whimsy is what bouys this strip.

Of course, it is much different than most webcomics and newspaper comics. And you could interpret the overly energetic artwork and simple puns as juvenile rather than whimsical. And you could go back to the cynicism and sarcasm that we've all come to know and love. But in my opinion, you'd be missing out.

I mean, come on! It's a SEAT in the SHOWER!

2006-04-07T01:07:00.000-05:00

Truer words have never been spoken. From Real Life.

This is why I read Real Life. This is why I've stuck with it through the server issues, website crashes, hiatuses due to moving and culinary school. I read Real Life because deep down, I can relate to Greg Dean.

I'm pretty sure Greg (at least, the comic version of him) and I think very similarily. He tends to get excited about the same quirky things I get excited about. In fact, I think the last time I put up a post about Real Life here it was for much the same reason as this post, except at that time it was in relation to 80's residential architecture.

This time, it's about seats in the shower. And I am one-hundred percent in agreement with Greg in this comic. Having a seat in the shower is AWESOME. I don't know why. And it's not really because of the convenience of being able to sit down while you get clean. I've never really been a fan of baths or jacuzzis or anything. But there's something about sitting in the shower, letting the water fall on your head and run down your body that's just so soothing, so relaxing...

Sometimes I sit on the floor in the shower, but it's just not the same. If you want to change the angle of the showerhead or the temperature of the water, it's this huge long ordeal to struggle to get back up to standing again, and then to get back down on the floor without breaking your neck.

I also tried buying one of those "shower stools", but they're all of cheap quality and break pretty quickly, plus they're not very comfortable to sit on. At one point I was using a metal fold-up chair, which actually worked pretty well except I needed some place to store it or I'd have to explain to everyone who ever used my bathroom why I had a folding metal chair in my shower.

But a shower with a built-in bench for sitting. Man, that'd be sweet. When I buy a house, that's going to be like the first remodeling job I undertake.

I'm jealous of you, Greg Dean. You'd better take advantage of that seat while you've got it. I know I'd be taking like five showers a day.

Congrats and Good Luck!

2006-04-05T16:41:00.000-05:00

In case you missed it, Jon Rosenberg announced today that he is quitting his job and going full-time as a webcomicker. Then, in a surprise move, Ryan North decided to piggyback announce (scroll down to see the announcement, if it's still up. I haven't figured a way to tap into North's newsfeed) that not only is he a full-time webcomicker, he has been for over a year now!

I've gotta say, this is pretty exciting. It's amazing to me how many new people we see every year becoming full-time webcomickers. And while most of them are members of this-or-that collective, in general these collectives are just a promotional tool, and the webcomickers themselves have no real commitments they are required to make as a result of being in the collective. No obligations to the collective itself, persay, it's more of a "you get out of it what you put into it" sort of thing. Which means they're basically making it on their own. They're taking the thing they love and making it their life's work, supported solely by their fans, and owing nothing to anybody except the fans.

Seeing more and more people making webcomickry their full-time job is extremely encouraging for the rest of us. It means the field of webcomics must be broadening, it must be getting more and more attention from the world at large, there must be increasing numbers of people reading. And seeing Rosenberg and North go full-time is especially encouraging because both of them do strips which don't have any strong fan subculture to draw on.

You see, almost all of the extremely popular webcomics draw on a subculture for the vast majority of their popularity. Sure, once they achieve a large following they start to get fans from all walks of life, but their initial fanbase, and the most hardcore fans who will buy up all the merchandise and keep the strip afloat through the hard times have come from a very hardcore fanbase. Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del built from gamers. PvP started with gamers, then moved to the nerd/geek/comic book culture. Megatokyo rings true with anime/manga fans. User Friendly got the Slashdot crowd. Sluggy Freelance... ok, I'm not so sure about Sluggy. Questionable Content appeals to the indie rock culture.

But here we have Goats and Dinosaur Comics. What's their fanbase? Goats is pure absurdist humor, with every adventure getting more off the wall and insane than the last, while at the same time resonating a very familiar cadence. That appeals to people who like a certain type of humor, but those people certainly don't categorize into any homogenous group. Dinosaur Comics began as an experiment into the fixed art form. Relying entirely on the strength of North's writing skills to carry the comic. I imagine almost all of its readers initially found the strip and started reading just because of the uniqueness of it, and those that stayed did so because they liked the writing style and the sheer silliness of it all. But that's certainly not a homogenous group either.

No, both of these comics have been building their readers on a one-by-one basis. Sure they depend on word of mouth and advertising around online and at conventions like any other comic, but they don't have the "if you're a gamer you need to read this" or "if you're a manga fan you need to read this" sort of mantra spreading their work. It all got to be "Hey, this is a cool strip. I think you might like it". You might like it. The individual you, not the collective you. And that's a much more difficult road to travel to success. But they've done it.

This gives hope to all the little guys, no matter how off the wall their comic is, that if they really keep at it, make a commitment to quality and consistency in their work and just keep tirelessly promoting and spreading the word, they too might be able to make their passion into their full-time job.

I wish both North and Rosenberg the best of luck, and I look forward to seeing how they advance in the future!

Now we just need to have Eric Burns quit his job and go full time as a webcomic critic. That would give a lot of hope for the rest of us out here!

Well worth the wait.

2006-04-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

A classic Kimiko take, from Megatokyo.

Fred Gallagher is up to his old tricks again. Sometimes I wonder if these missed days are on purpose just so he can build up his audience's "OMG When's he going to post the next installment?!" factor, and then hit them with a strip like today and just completely blow us all away. If so, then Gallagher is an evil, evil man, because he does such a great job of it that I'm completely hooked.

I made a post about Megatokyo a few months back in which I expressed some concern with the way things were going, as it appeared Piro was going to degenerate into the "I'm not good enough to be with Nanasawa-san role" and it really looked like the strip was going to get all soap opera-y, and I was worried.

Well, Gallagher couldn't have proved me more wrong. From that point, things have been nothing but uphill. We saw Piro and Largo gain new strength. we saw a return of the zaniness. We learned yet more interesting information about Miho. We got the classic Megatokyo humor. I think we can all agree now that Largo and Hayasaka are perfect for each other. We've seen Kimiko learn that there are consequences to her actions, and sometimes living with them is nigh impossible.

But most importantly we've seen a radical change in Piro. Check out this strip. In the first strip we see something in Piro that we've never seen before. An expression we've never seen cross his face in the history of Megatokyo: resolve. Piro has always been the kind of person to run away from his problems. Heck, that's pretty much the whole premise of the storyline. Piro didn't want to deal with his problems after getting kicked out of E3 and Largo got drunk. And throughout the story we've seen Piro not dealing with problems. He apologizes to people, he backs away, he tries to portray himself as stupid and incompetent as much as possible. He never tries to solve anything. That's where Largo shines. While Largo is impulsive, dim-witted and clearly mentally unbalanced, he's a problem solver. To him, every problem's got a solution, and dangit, he's going to find that solution! Piro never showed that kind of resolve. Until that strip. And now we're up to today's strip, with him surprising Nanasawa at work and demonstrating to her that he's here to help, he's here to get her through this, he's here to faces problems. And it's been great seeing all the characters evolve and grow, rather than being stuck in an endless rut.

And through it all we've had the same old unreliable Fred Gallagher, with Dead Piro Days, filler art, and the dreaded Shirt Guy Dom. He's missed days, weeks, even a full two-week period leading up to today's strip. These past four months have been a microcosm of the strip as a whole. You either love the strip and therefore tolerate Gallagher's inconsistency or you loathe the inconsistency and therefore come to loathe the strip as well. This is why I say that Gallagher should simply drop the facade, tell people he's not going to pretend to hold to an artificial MWF schedule anymore, and just produce actual comic books. He'd be free from the crazy deadlines and the hassle of trying to keep his site up and running and up to date with the latest technology, and I think Megatokyo would be greatly improved as a result. Sure, it'd probably be an initial hit in the income at first (I imagine he makes a significant amount off advertising revenue), but he's signed on with no less than freaking DC COMICS, and I'm pretty sure they'll take care of him, especially since Megatokyo is going to be like a springboard for a whole new division of comics for them.

Gallagher himself has said on many occassions that he doesn't feel Megatokyo is a webcomic, but rather a comic that appears on the web. Well I say: put your money where your mouth is. Stop pretending to be a webcomic and start publishing with a normal print comic schedule. You'll stop angering people with your inconsistency and I think the freedom will lead to a Megatokyo which exceeds even what you've accomplished so far. If you still aspire to the "available free on the web" concept, post the pages in batches (ala Inverloch) or just the whole comic book each time a new one is ready to go out.

And that's my two cents. Maybe some other people have other opinions?

Cred

2006-04-02T23:59:00.000-05:00

A picture of my webcomic shelf. Click on the picture to see it in convenient desktop wallpaper size, so you can bask in my reflected glory!

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned on here before that I'm a fan of reading in the bathroom. Also, I love having the opportunity to sit down and read my favorite webcomics without having to suffer through the annoying wait for each individual comic to load.

Reading webcomics online can actually be frustrating sometimes. It sounds weird, since you'd think webcomic=meant to be read online, but it's true. Especially when you're reading a comic with a continuous storyline, the little breaks while you're waiting for the next comic to load, coupled with the hassle of occassionally having to scroll or move your mouse around to find the "Next" button can really make you lose the flow of the story. It also makes it take a lot longer to read.

So if a webcomic I enjoy comes out with a print collection, chances are I'll buy it, and the webcomic shelf stands as a testament to that. In fact, on two occassions I've bought the complete line of books for a webcomic before I even read the comic (Melonpool and PhD), so yeah, I'm a fan. Anyways, let's take a look at the shelf, from left to right:

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Ok, technically not a webcomic, but Scott McCloud's name has become synonymous with webcomics so I figure it counts. And yes, I know it'd be more appropriate if I had Reinventing Comics, but Understanding was the only one the store had, and I just haven't gotten around to ordering the other one yet.
Melonpool volumes 1-5. As mentioned before, I bought these before ever reading Melonpool, partly because they were uber-cheap and partly because I knew I would like Melonpool but wading through the archives online would be tough. These are definitely a good buy, with commentary on all the strips and a ton of extra material. Probably the most extra material of any of the books I own. Plus, did I mention they're cheap?
That really skinny one is the Webcomics Hurricane Relief Telethon collection. While the quality on that one is not the best (probably due to the fact that it's an ammalgamation of strips which were probably sent in a variety of different formats and qualities), it's a piece of webcomics history which will definitely be remembered by future generations.
Next we have the Nodwick Chronicles 1 & 2 in one volume. Now, I might be mistaken here, but it's my understanding that this is material that's not on the web, but actually from comic books. It's actually the one book on the shelf I haven't read yet, so I can't really comment on it.
Following that is the PvP Dork Ages collection, which I've attached PvP issue #0 to (issue #0 was actually a recent PvP comic book which sold for 25 cents and was meant to introduce new readers to the comic. But it was only 25 cents so I figured what the heck and picked it up). I also have the other three volumes of PvP way over on the right side, since the shelf is organized by book size for the most part. The PvP books don't really have any extra material, but the material that's in them is stuff from the comic books, which varies somewhat from what appears on the web. In general it's the same stuff but what's different is actually pretty cool.
Next are two out of the four Dandy and Company books. I had originally planned to get all four, but after seeing the quality of the first two I decided to wait and see if Derrick Fish doesn't try to get them published in a new and better way in the future before buying more. I don't know if the problem stems from upsizing his web-quality strips or if it's just that Cafepress has really crappy print quality, but in any case both those books are jaggy-city.
Now we're up to the infamous Penny Arcade book. And of course, being printed by Dark horse means the quality is good. And there's commentary on all the strips, but I don't really consider that to be extra content since the commentary is basically required as half the strips wouldn't make a lick of sense without it. Also in the back of the book is the infamous "Webcomics Manifesto", which was really nothing groundbreaking at all, just Tycho saying that webcomics ought to be available to read online for free, which to me just seemed like a cheap shot at Scott McCloud and Joey Manley, but whatever.
The Real Life Year One Collection gets a lot of brownie point with me for being by far the longest book on the shelf (except maybe Nodwick, which again I haven't read yet). It's definitely got over 300 strips in it. And Greg Dean comments on all of them, although for the most part the commentary doesn't really add anything, and it's got a lot of typos. Dean seriously needs to get a better editor (hopefully his wife can help him now).
The Ctrl+Alt+Del books began with a somewhat sour taste in my mouth because Tim Buckley uses ZeStuff as his distributor, and ZeStuff is the most ridiculous shipping gouger I've ever seen. If you ever want to buy Ctrl+Alt+Del, VGCats, or 8-bit Theater stuff, wait for a con because otherwise the price will almost be double thanks to the shipping. As for the books themselves, they are very much Ctrl+Alt+Del, with commentary by not only Buckley, but many of the characters themselves. Not much in the way of added material, but nice pretty full colors.
I got the two volumes of PhD at Jorge Cham's university lecture before having read his strip, and they are good. Not a whole lot of extra material, but volume 2 does have about 6 extra strips that never appeared online, and in my opinion they are absolutely crucial to the plotline, so if you're a fan of the strip you've pretty much gotta buy the books. Pretty sneaky, Jorge.
After that comes the first Starslip Crisis collection, which narrowly wins out in the coolest name contest with "A Terrifying Breach of Protocol". A more cleanly presented book, it doesn't contain any commentary but it does have character bios, which is pretty cool.
Volume 1 of RPG World suffers from the same jaggy issues as Dandy and Company, which makes it very tough to read sometimes. Which sucks because RPG World is a really cool strip.
Lastly, we've got the Megatokyo books. The first one has commentary to fill space before the strip went "manga style", and each volume has a special story/short comic at the end. But what really makes these books worth it is that this is really the way Megatokyo was meant to be read. Fred Gallagher groups together all the Shirt Guy Dom strips, Dead Piro Days, filler, and other random junk at the back of the books, which leaves the story to run uninterrupted for the whole book. And it's so much better than reading it online. If Gallagher had the guts, he'd shut down the website entirely and run Megatokyo solely as a print comic, releasing comic books maybe four times a year and collected volumes once a year and not only would that shut up the critics, but I think it would give him the freedom to make Megatokyo even better than it is already.

So that's it for the books I own. I'd like to mention that I also tried to order Girl Genius books and a Mac Hall book, but they appear to be out of print.

Some books that I may need to buy:
-Word on the street is Dinosaur Comics has a super-awesome book on the way.
-Dominic Deegan has a book, but with only a bare 100 strips in it out of his whole archive of over 1000, it hardly seems worth it.
-Dork Tower has a lot of books. Too many for me to buy them all, and also too many for me to decide which ones are worth buying. So I'm caught in suspension.
-Goats has several books, which can be purchased in a handy dandy bundle pack. Come next paycheck, they will be mine. Oh yes, they will be mine.
-HOUSD has a book, but it's even shorter than the Dominic Deegan one. It's on my "include sometime when I'm making a big order" list for awhile.
-Inverloch is getting a book come May. I'm practically foaming at the mouth for that one (the web presentation kills Inverloch, in my opinion).
-Schlock Mercenary is getting a book "soon". Not soon enough, in my opinion.
-Ugly Hill has a book, and I was on the verge of ordering it when I checked out the preview page and saw the the whole thing was in black and white. Not grayscale, mind you. Straight up line-art black and white. And now I'm on the fence. On the one hand I love Ugly Hill and want to support it, but on the other hand the comic just looks lame without the colors, in my opinion. It robs it of all its charm.

So there you have it, a brief summary of books from the webcomics I read. I'm pretty happy with what I've bought, and I only look forward to buying more. Keep 'em coming, boys.

This could be trouble.

2006-04-01T02:32:00.000-06:00

I received a rather interesting email in my Gmail inbox today:

Blogger Support < support-noreply@blogger.com > to me

It has come to our attention that your blog is generating quite a bit of
traffic. First off, congratulations! We are always happy to see our
users achieving success in their pursuits, and we hope you've been satisfied
with the service provided by Blogger.

However, we have encountered a problem with one of your blogs: The
Webcomicker (http://webcomicker.blogspot.com/).
We have a monitoring program which looks for suspicious spikes in bandwidth at
certain blogs, which is usually an indicator of illicit activity. So when
the program informed us of a spike in your bandwidth usage,
we investigated your blog for any evidence that you were engaged
in activities outside our Terms of Service.

We were relieved to discover that you had not, in fact, violated the Terms
of Service, but we are still somewhat concerned by the heavy load your blog
has put on our servers. The amount of bandwidth being used by
your blog is disproportionally large, and in order to commit more of our
resources to the task of ensuring fast load time for your pages, we needed
justification from the content of the blog itself. It is on this matter
that we felt the need to address you in a formal email.

As you are probably aware, Blogger is home to many high-traffic blogs in
addition to the many, many low traffic blogs we support. In all previous
cases, high-traffic blogs have been associated with topics which are widely
accepted as relevant and supplemental to the overarching social discourse.
This includes topics such as politics, mainstream media entertainment, and
homo-erotic firemen. However, in our investigation of your blog, we were
surprised to discover that your express purpose for writing was the generation
and elaboration of literary criticism on webcomics.

To put it simply, we do not view this topic as legitimate enough to justify
our continued support of the massive bandwidth your site requires. It is
widely known that webcomics are nothing more than the amateurish chicken-scratch
of hack artists without enough talent to become properly syndicated. To
make the claim that such boorish creations can even be subjected to proper
literary criticism is utterly preposterous. Therefore, your blog is
clearly not supplementing social discourse in any way, shape, or form, but
simlpy pandering to deluded, geekish fanboys who only see the light of
day if they attend a comic book convention which happens to
be held in a convention center with skylights.

However, this does not mean we are simply cutting off service to your
blog. Rather, we have a series of restrictions which you must put into
effect immediately. If you comply with the restrictions, we will allow you
to continue posting on The Webcomicker. However, if you violate any of
these conditions, we will be forced to close down your blog and remove it from
our databases.
You must refrain from storing thumbnail images of the comics you are
reviewing on the Blogger servers. Instead, direct-link to the image
on the original webcomic site. While this will cause the bandwidth costs
for each comic you review to skyrocket, we feel this will actually result in an
overall improvement of the internet by driving many of these no-talent
hacks of the internet. In fact, we suggest you direct-link as many comics
as you can.
You must refrain from using more than 500 words in any given post.
Seriously. Who wants to read a 1400+ word post about a subpar comic
changing from one subpar artist to another subpar artist anyways? We've
got a word for that here at Blogger: insipid.
You must talk about subjects other than webcomics and webcomics-related
news. We were pleased to see that in many posts you complain about a lack
of free time in your life, suggesting that you do know something about how to
blog properly, but a vast majority of your posts are simply wasted space, filled
with the "insulating foam" of mental masturbation thinly veiled as legitimate
criticism. You may use any of the following starting lines to begin a more
appropriate blog post: "George Bush is a flaming retard...", "George Bush is
trying to take over the world and hates gays and hates black people and wants us to worship him as a god and he's really the devil...", "X-men3 is gunna
roXorZ...", and "As I felting his pulsating member pressed up against my
loins...".
If you must talk about comics, at least talk about good comics,
like The Family Circus, or Momma.
We thank you for your time and consideration in this matter, and hope to
continue to have a good relationship with you under these new restrictions.
Freak.
-The Blogger Support Team

So I guess we'll be seeing some changes around here starting today. You just can't fight City Hall, you know?

So... uh, George Bush is a retard.

More Than Cute. But still pretty dang cute.

2006-03-31T04:30:00.000-06:00

Shocking conclusion! (or is it?) From Count Your Sheep.

So, I was actually planning to put up a post here about yesterday's Count Your Sheep, but since Adis has already got something up for today, and it's a pretty interesting strip, it would be silly of me to just ignore it.

First of all, let me remind everyone that Count Your Sheep is to me what Narbonic is to Mr. Burns. It's one of my most beloved strips, the strip I tend to champion to my friends as the "you need to read this" strip. That doesn't mean I absolutely love everything Adrian Ramos does (I'm not a drooling fanboy, although I shamelessly act like one at cons sometimes. But that's a horse of a different color, as they say.), but it does mean I love most of it. And it means I watch with quite a bit of anticipation whenever he seems to be changing up the formula, both because I look forward to how it's probably going to improve the strip and I dread how it might screw the whole thing up. I've been watching very carefully since Adis started the "More than Cute" campaign to see exactly where he was planning to go with it. And while we have seen a little change in tone on a few strips, for the most part it's pretty much been cute.

Not that I can really blame Adis. He's got such an incredibly adorable character in Katie that it's really hard to have her do anything without it ending up cute. Take this joke for example. It's a pretty lowbrow joke about snoring, and apparently farting in your sleep as well. But with Katie as the character, it comes off cute! The girl can't not be cute.

But then, about two weeks ago we suddenly had something new. Here was a strip with no Katie at all, and no Laurie either, really. Certainly outside the usual formula. It's just Ship on the phone. And who's he talking to? Laurie's sister (Karla). Interesting. And it appears that Ship and Karla have a history. Apparently she can't actually hear him herself, but she knows he exists, and acknowledges that fact. And that was interesting enough in itself.

Then, we get a couple of strips of Laurie on the phone with her sister. And for basically the first time in the history of Count Your Sheep we see Laurie interacting with someone other than Katie or Ship. And, surprise surprise, it reveals a side of Laurie we've never really seen before.

See, when Laurie is around Katie and Ship, she's pretty much sucked into the "cute zone". She's interacting with characters who are engaged in cute activities, and as a result we only see Laurie as the patient, loving, and struggling single mother who reacts to the cuteness around her. Presumably when she steps out of the house and goes to work or to the store she acts differently, but we never see this. Until now (ok, we saw a little of it in the Beatles storyline. But that was really focused on Laurie's struggles and not her character).

On the phone we see Laurie actually interacting with another adult. And not just any adult, but an adult with whom she shares a very close bond: her sister. And we see a completely different side of her. We see her yakking it up, cracking jokes, and ultimately ending up somewhat jealous of her sister's footloose ways. And it's all pretty funny, but it's not cute.

In and of itself that set of three strips would be eventful in my mind as the first time Adis successfully broke the cute mold. But he wasn't content to let it stand at that. Oh no. All of a sudden we got a week of "Laurie as a kid strips" focusing on her relationship with Ship. And most of us pretty much forgot about the phone conversation of the previous week and thought it was back to business as usual. But we missed the secondary focus of these strips. They weren't just about Laurie and Ship, they were about the nature of Ship's existence. Is he just an imaginary friend that comes alive when there are people to imagine it (ala Hobbes) or is he a real creature who can only be seen by those who believe (ala Skull the Troll)? If we had remembered the dual nature of Karla's relationship with Ship (she knows he really exists but she can't actually interact with him directly), we might have seen yesterday's strip coming.

...Or at least, we would have seen the first half of yesterday's strip coming. We never could have imagined this shocker:

Ship. In love. With Laurie's older sister. Laurie's older sister who is willing to believe whatever it is Laurie believes, even if she can't see it herself. Laurie's older sister who still, in the present, believes what Laurie believes, even though she STILL can't see it.

That just knocked me out of my chair. Now we understand the nature of Ship and Karla's relationship. She can't see him because she doesn't believe in him, but she can accept his existence because she believes in what Laurie believes. And what about Ship? He thinks he's found a love interest. He can't be a love interest for Laurie or Katie because he's their imaginary friend, not their imaginary boyfriend. To attempt any sort of relationship beyond a friendship would be to attempt to change the underlying foundation of his existence in their world, and that simply CANNOT be done. But he's not Karla's imaginary friend. To Karla he could be anything. There's no boundaries, and here's a college-aged girl showing interest by calling him cute (and let's not get into the ramifications of Karla calling him "cute" in a storyline obviously intended to bring the comic to a level "more than cute". The levels of irony in there are way thicker than I'd care to ply). For someone who's been stuck in a role of "friend and only friend" with no real way out of it, simply the sheer enticement of a potential romantic relationship would be more than enough to make more Ship instantly smitten.

And then, in today's comic we see Ship realize that Karla cannot see him, and only believes in him de jure Laurie. And we can only imagine the crushing blow this must have dealt to Ship as we watch him symbolically peel away the hearts from his eyes. Just like the rest of us, Ship wants to at least have the chance at something deeper than just a friendship, and now he realizes that this simply may not be possible. And now when you go back to the first strip, with Ship unable to even communicate a single word to Karla over the phone, it's practically heart-ripping. This is depth to Ship's character that I never even imagined, and it just makes him so much more real, as we learn just how imaginary his life is.

In a word, awesome. In two short weeks we've seen both Laurie and Ship evolve beyond cute to much, much more. Now we've seen glimpses of the people behind the cute and we know so much more about them. I doubt we'll see anything similar happen with Katie. Katie is supposed to be cute. She's not supposed to be anything more than cute. She's supposed to be the very picture of the innocence of youth, and if that ever changes then that means the whole strip is undergoing some SERIOUS changes. But now we have Katie providing the cute and Ship and Laurie not only supplementing the cute, but really for the first time adding charateristics of their own personalities beyond the cute. Once again Adis has me begging for more.

Now go to bed! (I'm saying that to myself, here. It's frickin 4:30 AM. I hope this post makes sense when I read it in the morning)

Quick Note

2006-03-30T11:31:00.000-06:00

I want to talk about Count Your Sheep today. I mean, I really want to talk about Count Your Sheep today. But there's no time. Maybe around midnight tonight I'll have enough free time. Maybe.

Also, after about a month and a half's worth of reading I've finally finished the Goats archive. All I've got to say is... wow. I'm pretty sure that my fragile mind has been rent to shreds now. Goats is one bad mofo of a comic. Don't expect a review, I don't even know if it's possible to review Goats.

Lastly, I took about fifteen minutes of my day and picked up a new strip: Banished. It's done by Ryan Smith of Funny Farm fame, and Jamie Anderson, who I'd never heard of but apparently does a webcomic called The Destructive Tendencies of Us. It's a short archive, and it looks like it's got potential. Review upcoming.

Still on my reading list for the moment: Everything Jake, Pilli Adventure, and Silent Kimbly. I'll get to them as I have time.

That's more like it.

2006-03-29T21:25:00.000-06:00

Random killing. As it should be. From The Pet Professional

So, I've decided that I'm just not going to apologize for not posting in like a week and a half any more. I'm in grad school, I think people understand. Theoretically I'll be able to post more once I get out of this school and on to a normal job. I can only hope.

So let's talk about the Pet Professional. Pet Pro, as we all know, is a strip that started out with a lot of fanfare and certainly didn't disappoint, and then unfortunately had to change artists midway through. And that's always a trying time for any webcomic.

But to make things worse, Pet Pro actually underwent the artist switch in the middle of a storyline, which in my opinion was about the worst thing that could happen for all people involved. For the author it's trying to adapt the story to a new artist who probably has a new vision on the flow of the panels. For the artist it's like trying to jump on a moving bicycle and keep it pedaling forward without any loss of momentum. And for the fans it's this sudden jarring change in the look and feel of the strip while they're trying to keep track of some continuity in the story, which really doesn't hold together well. All in all, to put it kindly would eb to say that it's rough.

And Jason Salsbury tried earnestly to hold it together for awhile, and then realized that this just flat-out wasn't gonna fly, which resulted in this strip. And quite frankly, I would have been a lot happier if that strip had come immediately before the artist switch, as a last hurrah from the old guy, or at least as the first strip from the new guy. Really give a sense of closure to the previous era of strips and say "now we're going to move forward with new stuff." The vain attempt to hold together continuity only made the artist switch that much more jarring, etching into our minds at every step that the strip had changed and openly inviting comparisons between the old artist (who, in most cases is favored simply because we're more familiar with him) and the new artist. And that can only hurt the development of the strip with the new artist.

So I was pretty happy when Salsbury decided to just kill the story before it got too bad and go back to the random killings. We need to see random killings from the new artist. We need proof that Matt Kaufenberg can do the random killings before he and Salsbury get into longer storylines. So I was happy to see today's strip, and the random killings in it. It's actually the first strip I've seen with the new artist that really makes me say "looks like Pet Pro is going to be allright."

So, there's another piece of advice to keep in mind, folks. If you need to switch artists, try your hardest to do it at a natural breakpoint in the story, and if that's just not possible, invent a breakpoint. No matter how contrived it may be, it'll just work better that way.

Hahaha!

2006-03-18T12:01:00.000-06:00

Classic. Just classic. From PvP

Ok, I know Scott Kurtz isn't a big fan of when people over-analyze his stuff, so I'm going to try not to delve to deeply into this particular strip aside from the fact that it was absolutely hilarious. When I read this strip, I'm pretty sure I laughed harder than I've laughed at PvP, like, ever.

The thing that makes it so great is that it works on so many levels. First off you have the concept of Brent and Skull body-swapped, which is a goldmine of humor right there, and since the audience knows this they're coming in primed for some funny jokes.

Then there's the idea that when Brent tells Skull to act like him the only thing he can think to do is make lewd references about sexual escapades with Jade. Since Skull's pretty much panicking at this point, that means he's just saying the first thing that comes to mind (as Skull is wont to do when he panics), and that means the first thing he thinks of when thinking of Brent is that Brent is some kind of sex-crazed maniac who likes to talk about his adventures. And that's pretty funny.

Then there's the fact that Cole actually falls for it, which implies that at least to a certain degree Skull's knee jerk impersonation was at least reasonably close to how Brent really acts.

Then there's the final cherry-on-top punchline: "Boobs. It's what's for dinner."

The pacing in this comic is great, ramping up the humor to a new level in each panel until on the last panel you're just falling out of your chair. Well done, Kurtz. Well done indeed.

I owe you a beer.

It's kinda like Toasty Oats: Review of Press Start to Play

2006-03-17T12:04:00.000-06:00

A classic send-up of those tedious tasks in video games we all hate, from Press Start to Play.

Remember when you were a kid, and every grocery store had it's own generic knockoff brand for practically every food product in the store? And sometimes your parents would decide to buy the knockoff brand, and it just didn't quite taste the same?

I remember when I was a little kid our grocery store had a Cheerios knockoff called "Toasty Oats", and while it certainly wasn't the goodness of Cheerios, it did have a certain charm to it. I remember it was a little more tangy than Cheerios, as if the generic-cereal-making people had left the dough out in the sun and it had sourdoughized a bit. It was really a unique experience.

Of course, then Apple Cinnamon Cheerios came out and all bets were off. But I digress.

Press Start to Play is a Penny Arcade clone. It's two guys, hanging around, making riffs about video games. No storyline, no continuity, a real sense that in any strip, anything could happen. It has the same sort of pacing in the jokes as Penny Arcade. It's pretty clear that Press Start to Play is not trying to be a knock off of Ctrl+Alt+Del or VGCats, because those strips both have a pretty clearly defined sense of style and pacing which differs greatly from Penny Arcade. Heck, the guys even list Penny Arcade as their main influence. From the FAQs: Penny Arcade are the father of webcomics, and we'll always try to listen to the advice they give, and try and hit in on whatever they're using to be so damn funny. I'd like to think our humor isn't too far off that of Penny Arcade.

But you know what? I don't care. Press Start to Play is the Toasty Oats to Penny Arcade's Cheerios. It's basically trying to copy off the success of another product, but at the same time it's got its own unique flavor. Maybe not quite as good, but certainly not bad. Here's the important thing to understand: Press Start to Play is not stealing Penny Arcade's jokes. They're copying their style. This is an important distinction to make. The jokes in Press Start to Play are fresh, they're unique, they cover a different range of video games than Penny Arcade covers. Sure, they look and sound a lot like Penny Arcade comics, but they're not.

So if you like Penny Arcade, be sure to check out Press Start to Play. You may find that if you add it to your list it'll be like having a double-shot of Penny Arcade every week. And that ain't bad.

Well, I suppose something written by a guy named "Fire" should move pretty quickly...

2006-03-15T23:28:00.000-06:00

Bipartisan romance! From Winger.

So I'm sitting here waiting for my part-of-speech tagger to finish marking up some text for my research (intriguing, eh?) and I find that I've got some free time as a result. So what to do?

Get some serious writing off my chest!

It kills me that I've been neglecting The Webcomicker. You guys probably don't realize how frustrating it has been for me to go through my daily reading and keep seeing things I want to talk about, but just plain not having enough time to put them into cohesive words. Ugh.

So anyways. Winger. Winger is a comic I absolutely fell in love with when it first began, probably mostly because I'm a conservative and the vast majority of webcomic creators seem to be fairly liberal. Now, this is not to say I'm some kind of ultra-conservative "Bush is God" type, but I just tend to fall on the conservative side of most issues. But this isn't about me. I think Winger was a legitimately good and funny strip outside of being a political strip that tends to cater toward conservatives. I thought Dab being forced to flame internet trolls was pretty funny, and this strip made me laugh for a good long time.

But then, almost out of the blue, things started getting weird. First there was Dab claiming to be a demon. But I let that slide as just an odd tangent. But then there was the (in my opinion) unnecessary transfer of some old Elf Life characters, And a weird talking cat... But I figured "ok, Carson Fire wants to take things in a little more surrealistic direction, that's cool. It's hard to do straight political humor every day and not come off as just a pundit."

And then came the latest storyline. And Fire's changing things up. Now Minion's gone off to be an Assistant Marketing Director, breaking the wonderful dynamic that we had of Minion and Dab manning the bookstore floor. Which made me sad. I thought that dynamic provided some of the greatest material for the strip. And now Minion and Dab are going out on a date, and as evidenced by the strip I've thumbnailed above, it looks like they're up for some first-basing.

And it all seems kind of sudden to me. I mean, Winger is still a freshman strip. In my opinion, the characters hadn't fully settled into their roles yet, and Fire's already changing those roles. I wanted to see more of Minion and Dab as political enemies slowly becoming friends in spite of their differences of opinion. I wanted the political differences to be a huge stumbling block, as they usually are in relationships. Instead, we see Minion coming over to Dab's side really quickly. Heck, she's even agreed to freaking go to church! It's just unnatural. People don't change that fast. I mean, assuming the Winger strip is following a roughly real-time pacing (and it seems to be), Dab and Minion have only known each other for about three and a half months. And Minion's already gone from book-burning liberal to more of a centrist. We've lost most of the main conflict in the strip, and as we all know, conflict is the essence of humor. So we're losing the biggest goldmine of humor as well. And it makes me sad.

I'm hoping Carson Fire will prove me wrong. I'm hoping this is just a false start and this date between Minion and Dab ends with a huge fight, setting them at odds with each other, politically at least. I'm hoping Minion truly does use her marketing position to advance her liberal agenda, and Dab fights back with conservative means. I hope the push and pull of their relationship continues, with them craving the constant back and forth, as they did in this strip.

Don't let me down, Fire. Don't let me down.

Updates!

2006-03-13T19:37:00.000-06:00

Ok, first off you guys should all know I've got a new article up at Comixpedia for my "Through the Looking Back Glass" series. Props to Xerxes for editing my stuff until it actually sounds more like a legitimate article than an extended blog post.

Secondly, in case you hadn't already noticed, the "Monthly review of what's going on in every webcomic I read" has pretty much gone away (so much for that resolution), because it took me like days to write the dang thing. I'm just going to focus on normal commentary for now.

Thirdly, you'll notice the sidebar has changed once again. First, I changed the description of me to be less self-deprecating. Eric Burns posted some thoughts on running a critical blog, and I thought I pretty much held to all the guidelines he mentioned except I do tend to have sort of the "just a guy with a blog" mentality, so I'm going to start taking things a bit more seriously around here. I really want The Webcomicker to be a place of commentary for people who like webcomics and also useful information for aspiring webcomickers like myself (hence the articles about stuff like web design. I'm still planning a series on Content Management Systems at some point). So anyways, I changed my little "Who am I? Why are you reading me?" tagline to something a bit more informative and confident. Also, In my continuing efforts to group my links in a more meaningful way, I've once again shuffled the links around. Hopefully you can find everything.

Ok, so let's talk about what I've been reading. Obviously, Piled Higher and Deeper has been added to my list of stuff I read. I also added Checkerboard Nightmare, because I just realized that for some reason it never got on the list. Weird. Maybe because I thought it ended (which it did... kinda...). Apparently I forgot to add On the Rocks as well, it's there now. Same with Schlock Mercenary.

I also added My Life in Records, which you will here more about as time goes on. I've read it since it started a few months back, but was hesitant to add it because I didn't know if it would last. Since it looks like it's at least going to be around for awhile, I feel safe in adding it to the list now.

As for stuff I'm reading, I've been slowly working my way through Goats (at slower than snail's pace right now), and my reading list has got a couple of other strips in the backlog that I haven't taken more than a passing glance at (Everything Jake comes to mind). I've just been too bogged down with work to do much reading (keep repeating to myself, "the thesis will be done in August, the thesis will be done in August...").

That being said, I'm looking to add some more manga-style strips to the stuff I read. I'm a huge fan of anime and manga, but I don't read much online because (let's face it) most of the manga stuff online is either crappy or way too inaccessible to the non-hardcore fan. So if anyone knows anything good, let me know!

I'm still annoyed that I haven't written anything commentary-wise in awhile, and there's really stuff I want to talk about (Winger in particular), but things aren't looking promising for this week.

There are things which need a-writin'

2006-03-10T18:52:00.000-06:00

...But the writin's not being done. I've reached the point in grad school where your life is consumed by trying to get your thesis done and finding a job for when you're done. So things may be a little sparse here for a little while.

I'm thinking of maybe adding another writer on to The Webcomicker to keep up the critical discourse up while I'm on the DL, but haven't quite decided if that's what I want to do yet or not.

Hopefully I'll get some stuff squared away over Spring Break (one week from now) and have some more free time for writing. Hopefully.

An evening with Jorge Cham

2006-03-01T22:49:00.000-06:00

An image promoting the lecture series by Jorge Cham, creator of Piled Higher and Deeper.

So, I had the opportunity earlier this evening to attend a lecture by Jorge Cham (now you can go check out his website and match the date of this post to find out what school I go to!). This was the sort of thing that I wasn't going to pass up on, since I'm kind of out in the middle of nowhere here and I don't really get the opportunity to go to many conventions. So if a webcomicker is coming to my town, I'm not going to miss out no matter who it is.

So let me preface this post by saying that prior to the talk I'd never really read PhD. I'd heard of it before, and when I saw the flyers going up around campus I checked it out briefly to see what it was about, but I didn't really even give it enough of a perusal to, say, learn who the main characters were. So I went in cold for the most part.

And I've got to say, I was pretty impressed. The first thing that struck me was that the lecture hall was PACKED. The official capacity for the room is listed online at 263, but there were so many people standing on the fringes and sitting in the aisles that I'd wager we had closer to 300 people in the room. The second thing that struck me was that when he asked how many of the people in the room were grad students, 99% of the people in the room raised their hands. There were like 4 undergrads and 3 "miscellaneous", with everyone else in the room being grad students. PhD, of course, is a comic about grad students, so apparently Jorge has his target audience nailed. So this gave me a good impression right off the bat.

As for the lecture itself, it was brilliant. He had the audience cracking up the entire time, and really demonstrated that he has a deep understanding of the trials and rigors of being a grad student. He has felt our pain, and he wants to help. That's why his talk is called "The Power of Procrastination". Underneath all the humor and satire, Jorge really communicated that it's important for us all to get away from our work, to step back and really enjoy life as opposed to constantly being under the gun. I think a lot of people could benefit from taking his words to heart (Not me personally, of course. I already know the fine art of procrastination. It's one of the few things that keeps this blog running.).

After the talk I stuck around and bought both of his books, then stood in line for him to sign them. He stayed and signed books for a good hour after his talk was over, and even though I was like the second to last guy in line he still took the time to talk to me and try to get to know me a little. I had him sign my books to Gilead Pellaeon, but he didn't recognize the name, so apparently I'm not that cool yet, but that's ok. Now I intend to devour the books in the next few days and then catch up in the online archive and add it to the reading list.

You really should go check out the speaking tour page at PhD, and if Jorge Cham is going to be anywhere near you I highly recommend you go check it out. It will be time well spent.

Yet more congratulations

2006-03-01T01:51:00.000-06:00

A celebration image from the Daily Grind Message Board.

Well, The Daily Grind turned a year old today (or yesterday, depending on how you count your time). In that time we've seen it get huge amounts of recognition (including a link from no less than Slashdot, which is really saying something.), and really spark a lot of community, commentary, and general interest in the webcomic community. If not for the Hurricane Relief Telethon, I'd say it was the biggest event in webcomics all year.

Over the course of one year's time we've seen just a shade over half the contestants drop from the contest, leaving 27 cartoonists still in the running. There's been drama, there's been arguments over the rules and who should be out, there's been excitement as some of the early favorites have dropped and some of the dark horses have managed The Grind with ease.

But most importantly, what we've seen is a lot of cartoonists develop their craft. They've gone from sketchy, half-finished characters to full color works. We've seen a huge improvement in the actual quality of the story or the humor in practically every comic in The Grind. We've seen a lot of contestants gain a bunch of readers and really become much more successful with their comics. We've gained around 20 new cartoonists who know how to get a comic up every day, rain or shine, no matter what the circumstances, and that's the kind of dedication it takes to really drive the webcomic community to more noteriety and monetary success.

I wholeheartedly believe that The Daily Grind is going to have lasting, lingering effects that will ripple through the webcomic community for years to come, and we'll be better for it. So congratulations, webcomickers, not only for making it this far but also for making the world of webcomics a better place in general.

I tip my hat to you.

This is news?

2006-02-27T15:02:00.000-06:00

Preview of Volume 4 cover, from Megatokyo.

So, today at Megatokyo Fred announced to the web (having previously announced at the New York Comicon this weekend) that Megatokyo was being picked up by DC Comics.

This immediately prompted from me a "Wow... a webcomic is being printed by DC Comics. That's pretty awesome." But after about a minute of thinking about it, I realized, "wait, this is Megatokyo we're talking about... what's the big deal?"

I mean, this is hardly a huge step up for Megatokyo. The first three volumes were all published by no less than Dark Horse, and while they're certainly not DC or Marvel they are the third largest comic book publisher in the U.S. (guess who's ahead of them). Megatokyo already appears in basically every bookstore around the country and has even been used on those fricking "READ" posters. DC is not really opening up a whole new world of opportunity for Megatokyo here. Now, if DC were to pick up something like Dominic Deegan or Inverloch, then we'd have something to talk about. But Megatokyo? For Megatokyo this is just like a baseball player getting traded to a new team. It's the equivalent of a mid-tier webcomic switching collectives. It's really not huge news.

But, I suppose congratulations are in order anyway, as the first webcomic to break into DC. So, congrats, Fred. *shrug*

A tribute.

2006-02-21T20:25:00.000-06:00

Celebration of a milestone from HOUSD.

So, HOUSD reached it's 1000th strip yesterday. Bravo. Bravo to Ali Graham for producing 1000 quality strips, and doing them on a 7 day a week basis. I don't know how he keeps it up.

But that's not what this post is about.

See, in reading the 1000th strip of HOUSD (go ahead, read it. Click on the picture to see the whole strip. I'll wait.), for some reason it just reminded me so much of Scott McCloud's infamous "story that could take any number of panels to tell," The Carl Comics. It was a theme he did quite a bit of experimentation with, so I think most people are familiar with it. If not, just follow the link and check out that crazy Carl.

So I got to thinking, "Hey, someone should do a Carl version of the HOUSD 1000th strip." Then I got to thinking, "Hey, why don't I do it?" So I did.

I present you with: CARLSD.

A tribute to Ali Graham for making it to 1000 strips, and a tribute to Scott McCloud for... um... being Scott McCloud, I guess.

Enjoy. Oh, and please don't sue me for stealing your art, Graham. I'm just trying to give you a tribute.

A preliminary lexicon (because not everybody needs to rip off Eric Burns)

2006-02-21T01:01:00.000-06:00

Ok, I've finally managed to get myself to the point where I enjoy webcomic criticism. People have interesting things to say, they highlight portions of a strip which I personally would never have noticed, they show me the good points in strips which I generally consider to be universally bad. Reading criticism gives me a better understanding of the medium as a whole and enables me to make more informed decisions when choosing what to read (although ultimately in the end it comes down to: Do I enjoy reading it?), and can really create some great discussion when people build on each other's posts.

That being said, if I see one more webcomic critic use the word "snark" on his site, I'm gonna puke. I'm literally going to disembibe stomach acid on my keyboard. The same goes for "Cerebus Syndrome" and "First and Ten". I'm ok with it when Burns uses them, because they're his terms. But seriously? Show a little creativity. I know most of us were inspired by Burns. Heck even I openly admit that the sole reason I started The Webcomicker was because he demonstrated to me that the concept of webcomic criticism was cool. But I've never once stolen any of his terms. Outside of this post, I've used the word "snark" once, and that was when I was specifically referencing Burns in my very first post. And I've never used "First and Ten" or "Cerebus Syndrome".

That being said, it is useful to have some shorthand terms for referring to common events or circumstances in your field of criticism. Where would art criticism be if they had to explain the concept of "avante garde" every time they wanted to reference it? And as I've made posts on this blog, I've come up with some useful lexical terms that would be helpful to make known to the readers, so I don't have to explain them again in the future.

So this is the kind of post that will probably get a permanent link (although perhaps a version of it without all the ranting at the beginning, to save face), and get periodically updated as I think of spiffy new terms. Feel free to use these terms if you like (I think they're pretty good), but keep in mind that overuse of the terms will make them cliched, much like Burn's stuff has become.

(Note: as of this writing only one of the terms defined here has actually been used in a post: sidequesting. The other ones are terms I've had kicking around in my head and look forward to using sometime in the future.)

Sidequesting: In the world of RPGs, a sidequest is an adventure that is completely tangential to the main storyline, and is typically used as an element to length the playtime as a game. Sidequests are usually performed to make one's characters stronger or purely for the enjoyment value. In webcomics, sidequesting refers to the situation when a webcomic that is primarily storyline driven has the characters engage in some kind of side adventure or mini-storyline which is tangential to the plot as a whole. This occurs to some degree in almost every storyline driven webcomic, and sidequests vary wildly in frequency, length, and quality.

Techno-Bill: Techno-Bill is a minor character from the Dilbert comic. He only appeared in two strips, but was hugely popular with the Dilbert fanbase, and his moniker is still widely used on the internet today. So the lexical term refers to exactly what Techno-Bill is: a hugely popular bit player in a webcomic. Techno-Bills are pretty rare in webcomics because when readers latch on to a character, they tend to bug the creators to reuse them so much that the creators cave and make the character more regular (because fanservice is much more necessary in webcomics than other mediums). Some examples of characters which began their careers as Techno-Bills but ultimately joined the rotation are Chef Brian from Ctrl+Alt+Del, and the infamous Homsar. A good example of a real Techno-Bill is Pizza Girl from Questionable Content, who to date has appeared in two strips.

Respawning: Ok, this one's got a history to it. Obviously the term respawning originally came from the world of first person shooter games, where after you die your character magically comes back to life back at your base (or some other location). Beyond that I have nothing concrete to say about the etymology of the word. In the world of webcomics, respawning refers to when a strip fundamentally changes its premise. Note that this is not the same thing as retconning. In a retcon much of the history of a strip may change, but the premise is typically the same. The need for this term arose from a recent post of mine where I wanted to describe how the premise of Ctrl+Alt+Del had changed. I used the term "jump the shark", but later was made to understand that jumping the shark contains the implicit implication that things have turned for the worse. And while jumping the shark typically includes a shift in the premise, this shift does not necessarily indicate a downturn in the strip. Note also the difference between respawning and the ever popular "Cerebus Syndrome". Cerebus Syndrome specifically entails that a gag-a-day strip has become more serious, has taken on some dramatic elements or at least a running storyline with consequences. None of this is required for a respawn, just a change in the premise. Examples of strips that have respawned are Ctrl+Alt+Del (as mentioned in the post linked above) and Real Life.

Now, for those of you curious types, here's how I ultimately chose the term respawning. I was looking for a good term after the aforementioned Ctrl+Alt+Del post, and lacking inspiration, I tried to think of strips that had undergone similar changes and hoped I could find some good term from their discussion of it. So I went searching. And what I ultimately found was this strip at Megatokyo. If you scroll down the page a bit, you'll see that this was when Fred Gallagher (Piro) first announced that Rodney Caston (Largo) had left the project. This signalled a fundamental shift in the premise of the strip, from random adventures with zombies and robots to more serious relationship drama. And what was the title of the strip when this announcement was made? "Respawning tactics." I knew I had my term the moment I read it.

Some thoughts on changing artists

2006-02-19T05:50:00.000-06:00

A look at some art change over at The Pet Professional.

Here's a topic I've been wanting to discuss at length for awhile now: webcomics changing their artists mid-run. The idea of a comic strip changing it's artist has been kind of a hot topic lately, with the whole announcement about Unfit wanting a new artist and the fact that the fans got to be part of the decision-making process (that and the fact that Scott Adams was captaining the effort, and he is nie unto a god in the world of comics these days).

Really, Unfit only got this much attention because of the rather curious way in which it went about looking for a new artist, with an open call and publicly viewable tryouts. The idea of comic strips (and comics in general, for that matter) changing artists is by no means something new. All the old-guard comic strips have done it. Blondie, Hi and Lois, Hagar the Horrible. Superhero comic books do it on a near-constant basis, and in some regard it is the lifeblood of the industry. What makes Unfit any different?

Well, one significant difference is that Unfit was actually looking to change its artistic style. Not a bad idea, really, considering Unfit is about the ugliest mofo on the comics page right now, but this is a relative oddity. Most of the time when an old comic starts being captained by a new artist, the goal is to make the new artwork as close as humanly possible to what was already being done so as not to alienate the fanbase. Even in superhero comics where this restriction is loosened somewhat, generally the artist tries to keep to the original design of the characters fairly closely on the whole, with most variations being on the "cosmetic" side of things. Unfit underwent a complete and total overhaul, and will in no way resemble the strip it used to be. And it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Which brings us to the discussion of webcomics changing artists. And it's important from the outset to understand some fundamental differences between when webcomics change artists and when more traditional comics change artists. First of all, when a webcomic changes artists, it is universally as a result of a writer/artist pair splitting up, with the writer wishing to continue the project and the artist wishing to move on to something else. It's interesting to note that if this split happens the reverse way (writer leaving artist), in almost all cases the artist will simply pick up the writing duties and continue on solo. But when the artist leaves, it is almost never the case that the writer will begin drawing the project. This is a rather interesting distinction between writers and artists, that artists seem to be able to pick up writing skills as they go along, while most writers fail to pick up any artistic skills. My guess is that this is because the process of developing the art for a story teaches someone a lot about storytelling, while describing the desired art to accompany a story teaches someone practically nothing about drawing.

But the point is that when an artist leaves the writer holding the ball, in almost all cases the writer can't run with it by himself. He needs a new artist to help him out. So he'll put out an open call for anyone looking for a project, advertise it around a bit, and try to find someone new who's willing to take on the "art monkey" duties. We've seen this happen in a few webcomics recently, notably Pet Professional (which I demonstrated above) and Gossamer Commons. And because of the limited pool of artists available willing to devote hours of their time for little or no compensation, and the fact that any artist willing to do that is typically looking to develop their own style as opposed to strictly copying someone else's, the comic ends up looking different. Not necessarily fundamentally different (you can still tell the Pet Professional is the Pet Professional between the two panels above), but different enough that the structure of the comic has changed on a somewhat fundamental level.

And, based on what I've seen, when a webcomic changes artists, it is generally detrimental to the health of that webcomic.

Now, I'm not quite sure why this is. I mean, even when a webcomic doesn't change artists its art typically changes quite a bit over time (see: Goats, Penny Arcade, and Questionable Content, to name a few), and people seem to be more than willing to stick with it. When a writer changes there may be some rocky times, but some strips have proven more than able to come out on top. So why is it that when an artist changes, a webcomic just can't seem to recover? My guess is that the fans develop more of an emotional attachment with the artist, because no matter who's in the background pulling the strings, it's ultimately the artist's work that we see on the page every day. The artist's contribution is staring us right in the face, while the writer's contribution hangs nebulously in the background.

Another problem could be with the different visions of the project. Typically when a writer and an artist pair up, they bring a single, unified vision to their project. The writing and the art fit together perfectly because the writer and the artist specifically joined up together for that reason. When a new artist is added to the mix, he brings his own vision to the project, and there is frequently a clash between his vision and the old artist's vision, and therefore a clash between him and the writer, who shared the vision of the old artist. And reworking those visions into something cohesive and unified is an extremely difficult process, which can ultimately end up severely blunting both the artist and the writer's desires and result in a much more mediocre end product. I speak this from bitter experience, as this sort of conflict is what ultimately deep-sixed my first webcomic project, Gideon D. Ragon, Private Eye, when I was forced to seek a new artist after my original one ran out of free time. The new artist I found just didn't have the same vision for the project that me and my old partner had, and in our attempts to compromise with each other into something workable we ultimately killed the project.

Now, this is not to say we couldn't have a strip get a new artist and see it flourish. Heck, I think both Gossamer Commons and Pet Professional have a shot (although, in both cases I preferred the old artist. But is that just because I had an attachment to them?). I'm just saying it's really hard. Say Gabe decided to suddenly leave Penny Arcade. Would Tycho be able to find a new artist? Heck yeah. Would the strip still be good? I think Tycho is a smart enough guy that yes is a safe answer to that question. Would it be as popular? At first, definitely not. We've come to love Gabe's take on the characters over the years, and any new artist, unless he was able to exactly reproduce Gabe's work, would be seen as worse than Gabe, no matter how talented he was. It would be worse because it would be different, and what we want is more of the same. But ultimately, I think the quality would speak for itself and Penny Arcade would be able to reestablish itself on the top of the pile. I think success stories can happen.

So if you find yourself in the situation with your webcomic that you have to change artists, think about the ramifications. It might be better for you to find a new artist and start a new project with him, rather than trying to keep a burgeoning property alive. You might even want to start a new project with yourself as the artist and develop your own artistic skills so you don't ever find yourself in this situation again. This is not to say that you should give up on your original vision, you might get lucky and find another artist who shares it with you. But you'll have to realize that you'll be starting from the bottom again, and it's going to be another long climb up to where you were when your other artist left. So think about what you'd rather do.

For those of you desperate to do some reading

2006-02-18T15:16:00.000-06:00

Ok, since it's come to my attention that there are a lot of good webcomics criticism sites I don't read, and there are people out there who want to read AS MUCH criticism as they can, I added some links to my "Webcomic Related Stuff" section. Here's some reviewers I found by the exhaustive search process of "checking out the websites of everyone who commented in my last post":

I can't promise I'll keep up with all these reviewers (in fact, I probably can promise that I won't), but I'll try to read them from time to time to be sure I'm giving you guys a well-informed perspective here.

And, as always, I'm going to try to post here more often. I've got stuff to say, I'm just short on the time to say it in.

Ctrl+Alt+Del jumps the shark!

2006-02-18T01:28:00.000-06:00

Ding-dong the bells are going to ring! From Ctrl+Alt+Del

Ok, I waited awhile, but now I'm going to say something, because apparently no one else in the world of webcomic criticism (by which I mean Websnark, Phil Kahn, Fleen, Comics Rock and Comixpedia, the only criticism sites I read) cares about what goes on in the Ctrl+Alt+Del strip itself, and only sees fit to mention when Tim Buckley does something controversial.

Anyhoo, this week saw something HUGE happen in Ctrl+Alt+Del. Something monumental. Something shark-jump worthy.

Ethan and Lilah got engaged.

Now keep in mind the definition of the term "jump the shark". To jump the shark means to fundamentally change the premise of your strip (it applies to other media as well, but we're talking webcomics here). Jumping the shark isn't the characters embarking on some crazy new adventure. It isn't even the addition of deletion of a major character. This can often accompany a shark jump, but by no means signals one. For example, Questionable Content recently introduced a new character in the form of the OCD girl upstairs, but it has by no means changed the premise of the strip.

No, jumping the shark implies a much more fundamental change, a change in the very premise of the strip. And for Ctrl+Alt+Del, that premise has been Ethan and Lucas, living together and driving each other crazy. Even recently when Tim Buckley played out the huge storyline of the apartment burning down, when didn't see the premise change. We just saw the setting change.

But now... things are different. If Ethan and Lilah get married (and presumably they are. Them breaking up would be a bit too much drama for Ctrl+Alt+Del, methinks), the relationship dynamics are going to change. Ethan's going to have new concerns and responsibilities as a married man. Being Ethan, he'll probably ignore the majority of them, but still. The relationship between a man and a woman changes when they get married. And your relationships with your friends change as well. The whole gang is probably still going to live in the same house, but it'll be different when one of the sets of people is married.

I think it's cool that Tim Buckley is willing to let his characters evolve like this. I get bored of webcomics that have their couples dating forever and the relationship never advancing *ahem*PvP*ahem*. If you're going to do a comic with a story, let the story advance, don't just pretend that it's advancing while desperately keeping your premise the same. Let things evolve and change.

Now, as I say this, I hope that Tim Buckley actually does let his characters evolve and change naturally, and the comic doesn't just become "Hey everything's exactly the same except Ethan and Lilah happen to be married now". I want to see marriage change them, like it changes real people. Heck, at some point I'd love to see what Ethan would be like as a father (and let me tell you, it'd be comedic GOLD).

So, let it flow, Buckley. Let it flow.

Review: On the Rocks

2006-02-15T01:53:00.000-06:00

Just one of the many misadventures from On the Rocks.

Sometimes all you need for a good comic is simplicity. Over the years, the medium of webcomics has evolved over the years into sort of a haven for those artists who want to balance gag-a-day humor with long-form storytelling. This combination is a feat that has really only been reproduced outside of the web with one other comic strip: For Better or For Worse. It's really neat to watch how different webcomics perform the balancing act. Each strip needs to execute by itself: setup, delivery, punchline, possible counter-punchline. It needs to be funny in its own accord. But then you also need to weave the strip into the overarching continuity, and whatever individual storyline may be going on. So you've got to introduce daily humor without losing the overall flow of the storyline, and that's a very difficult thing to do. Seeing people do it successfully is one of the joys of webcomics.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Some webcomickers have thrown out the notion of needing each piece to stand alone. Inverloch does this, as does Dominic Deegan, on occasion. And, of course, many comics go the other way and take the more traditional approach of simply having no continuity and just doing daily gags. There are a myriad of these that I could list. On the Rocks is one of them.

On the Rocks is almost archetypal in its formula: You have two friends, a polar bear named Wally and a penguin named Osbourne. They live in Antarctica. They have humorous adventures. There's no large continuity, any storylines that do pop up tend to be variations on a theme and not longer than a week (with one distinct exception I can think of), and in general it reads like most newspaper comics: "Let's crack open the website and see what ole Wally and Osbourne are up to today."

Now remember, it does not take originality of concept for a webcomic to be good. Having a very original concept can help distinguish a certain comic from the pack initially (take, for example, The Pet Professional), but ultimately it's quality and it's resulting popularity and success will rest in it's execution. Execution beats concept every time, and it becomes even more important when using a tried-and-true concept if you want to distinguish yourself from the pack. So the question is, does On the Rocks execute well?

And the answer is: "Sure, I guess." Here's the things that struck me about On the Rocks, as I was reading it: It has good, clean artwork that perfectly suits the tone of the strip both in linework and in colors. It has pretty decent jokes, on the whole. A few of them made me laugh out loud (I particularily liked the one I linked above). The website design is great, with easy navigation and a color scheme which perfectly suits the comic.

But the strip does suffer from some deficiencies, the most crippling of which is the relative dullness of the characters. Wally is "the dumb guy" and Osbourne is "the normal guy". They're really not developed beyond that. Now, don't get me wrong. Flat characters are fine by me. In fact, one-dimensional characters are usually some of the absolute funniest and can carry a comic (for example, Sam in Freefall). But there's a difference between flat and dull. If you have essentially one-dimensional characters but you don't fully develop that one-dimension, then your characters become boring very quickly, and without interesting characters you can't have interesting interplay, and you very quickly expend your supply of quippy jokes and run out of steam. I see On the Rocks being in danger of that.

But for the moment, it's a pretty good read. No real commitment level to speak of, and a high degree of "chuckle-factor" make it a strip to keep on your radar, at least. I'm going to keep reading it and hope that Wally and Osbourne start to come into their own and really begin generating their own comedy, as opposed to right now when it seems as if their following scripts.

Ok, I admit it. I'm intrigued.

2006-02-08T20:15:00.000-06:00

Intrigue! From Starslip Crisis.

So, I just realized I never did my monthly roundup for January, something I'll have to remedy in short order. But not right now. Right now I want to talk about Starslip Crisis.

The latest plotline in Starslip has been rather interesting for several reasons. First, it began very abruptly with two men speaking in archaic modern English in what can only be assumed to be a roughly medieval setting. No explanation of what was going on. No helpful "meanwhile, back in 1505" text box, no setup by our plucky gang of museum caretakers in 3441. In fact, the previous strip was just a one-shot gag by Cutter about eyepatches. Kris Straub just threw something completely random at us.

And that's interesting because that's not the sort of thing that Starslip Crisis does. In its roughly one year run, Starslip hasn't been known for wild plot twists and random turns. While some of the plotlines have been somewhat silly, none of them have been complete deviations from the normal plot. The closest we've seen is with the Hardware Pirates storyline, but even that started out with a known character in Vore.

So we've been ripped violently from our usual Starslip Crisis universe to something completely different, with no explanation of where or when we have gone. We can only assume that this storyline is going to intersect with the usual Starslip Crisis universe somehow, but that leaves us with the question: How? My first conjecture was that this was just some kind of strange planet that chose to have all the trappings of ye olde England, and they were going to end up in need of some obscure piece of ancient Earth artwork, then enter the usual cast. But then we got to today's strip, and now I'm not so sure...

It's obvious that the character introduced in the third panel of today's strip doesn't fit in this world. It's also fairly obvious that he belongs in the normal Starslip Crisis world. He talks in "normal" English, he uses the usual Starslip Crisis voice font as opposed to the serif font which is being used by the archaic characters. He's dressed in a futuristic fashion. He's a member of the normal Starslip Crisis universe.

But how does he fit in? Who is he? What's his relationship with the Fuseli crew? And where the heck are we right now? These are the questions that are keeping me on the edge of my seat. My current guess now is that he's a time traveller, and we actually are in medieval England (and I have my reasoning behind this guess. I can't give away all my secrets), but that still doesn't explain what he's doing there (he claims that he's not "doing" the queen, if you catch my drift, but what IS he doing?), and how he's going to be hooked into Starslip Crisis as a whole.

Any thoughts?

Weird stuff going on

2006-02-07T21:40:00.000-06:00

Ok, so my new posts seem to keep disappearing. I wrote a couple of fairly lengthy posts over the weekend, one about podcasts and one about Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animation, and both of them have inexplicably gone away. I'm not sure right now if this is just a glitch in Blogger or if someone malicious has compromised my account (I'm inclined to think the former, since I haven't seen any defacing at all, just a few posts disappearing into the ether). In any case, I don't want to write anything major until the issue gets cleared up, so things might be quiet here for a few more days. I've been in contact with the Blogger help staff, and hopefully they'll be able to clear this whole thing up.

Just so you know

2006-02-07T11:08:00.000-06:00

I've become something of an "on again, off again" writer for Comixpedia. Hopefully I'll become more on than off as time goes on. Anyways, I wrote a little piece for their February issue, a retrospective on what happened in webcomics during January. Not the most exciting thing I've ever written, but I think it sums things up pretty nicely. Give it a look.

By the way, Comixpedia issues are now featuring Checkerboard Nightmare comics, which brings me much joy. Last month's was pure hilarity, and this month's is pretty good, too. So be sure to visit Comixpedia at least to check those out.

Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animation

2006-02-04T08:36:00.000-06:00

A "still" from Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animation (Hooray for the Print Screen button!)

Ok, so let me start this post with a little bit of the so-called "snarkiness". First of all, I'm amazed at the amount of people who have said "Eh, I'm not a huge Ctrl+Alt+Del fan, so I'm not going to watch this new animation thing he's got going on." Seriously. Get over your little "Ctrl+Alt+Del is just a ripoff of Penny Arcade and PvP, leeching off their success" high horses, people. No matter what your personal opinion of Ctrl+Alt+Del happens to be, this is an auspicious occassion for webcomics on the whole. Here we have Tim Buckley, who has gone through all the trouble of hiring a professional animation studio, gotten professional voice-talent, and really assembled an entire team of people to make a professional quality animation. This ain't no homebrew Blamimation (not to say that I don't like the Blamimations I've seen. They are actually quite funny. But there is definitely a huge difference in terms of overall quality).

This is the first time something like this has ever happened in the world of webcomics. We actually have someone crossing over into professionally made animations. And it's a major step. So it's at least worth checking into, your personal opinions aside. And it's only gonna cost you two bucks. Are you seriously trying to tell me you don't have two bucks to spare? Come on...

Well, I've got two bucks to spare, so I signed up for a month of Ctrl+Alt+Del premium just so I could watch the show. Now, mind you, if you're actually (god forbid) a fan of Ctrl+Alt+Del, then there's literally no reason on Earth why you shouldn't sign up for this. In addition to the animations you get a lot of other cool Ctrl+Alt+Del related stuff like exclusive comics, wallpapers, a special forum, and other behind the scenes stuff. Definitely a good amount of fan service. If you're not a fan that stuff's not so interesting, but still: two bucks.

Now some snarkiness aimed at the Ctrl+Alt+Del folk. I absolutely could not get the video to play in Internet Explorer. Once I switched over to Firefox I had no problems, but quite frankly it annoys me that so many people are coming out with "Firefox only" content these days. Internet Explorer is just as good as Firefox in every way except it's somewhat less secure (but that's really more of a Windows thing than an Internet Explorer thing), and it's better than Firefox in many other ways. Sure, it's not 100% "standards compliant", but that's only because the W3C people make up these so-called "standards" pretty much out of thin air and then demand that everyone else follow them, and quite frankly it makes me sick.

But I digress. In any case, if you want to watch the Ctrl+Alt+Del animations, you're going to need Firefox. Now, let's talk about the actual show itself. First off: The animation actually is very good. The characters' movements look natural, the lip-syncing is pretty good, and there's some very good camera work with pans, zooms, and spins (or whatever the technical term for moving the camera around a character is). Whatever Tim Buckley paid for the animation, he got his money's worth. There are times when it looks kind of blurry, but I'm not sure if that's an animation problem or a result of the compression for the web. In any case, well done.

Now, as for the voice acting, it was kind of a mixed bag for me. Obviously the voice actors were well-trained, and the dialogue seemed natural and not too over-acted or forced. Most of the episode revolved around Ethan and Lucas, so they're the only characters I can really say anything concrete about right now, and in a nutshell I liked Lucas but I wasn't a big fan of Ethan. Something about Ethan's voice just seemed off to me. I don't know if the pitch was off from what I expected, or if it was the kind of energy which was put in the voice or what, but it just didn't strike a chord. It's like when they made the Dilbert animated series and there was just something inherently wrong about Dogbert's voice. You could never quite put your finger on it, but you just knew that wasn't really what Dogbert would sound like. Lucas, on the other hand, I think they hit perfectly. And even if Ethan's voice was off a bit in my head, it wasn't unbearable.

As for the content of the show, this episode was basically about Ethan and Lucas fighting for control of the TV. It began with a pre-credits sequence introducing Ethan's character by having him make fun of someone who doesn't know anything about video games, which fits his character pretty well, and the rest of the episode was him and Lucas pulling stunts on each other to try to get the TV. It's a pretty cliched storyline, especially in the world of cartoons: two characters both want some particular object, so they battle for it in escalation-style warfare. But just because it's cliched doesn't mean it's bad. There have been entire SERIES built around this premise, so what's important is the execution. And the execution was pretty good. It seemed rushed at times, and definitely could have been expanded into a longer cartoon, but those things that were done played pretty well.

So, overall, in terms of the world of cartoons, Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animation is not terribly ground-breaking at episode one. Decent animation, decent voice acting, decent execution. Kind of short, not a terribly interesting plot, and not too much information to make us remember and love the characters just from the animation so far. If you were to take this to Adult Swim and pitch it, they'd probably tell you "it's got potential, keep working on it." But from the point of view of webcomics, this is absolutely ground-breaking. The whole project just reeks of "professional", which is the sort of image that webcomics do not give you very often. It's a huge step forward, and I'm highly anticipating what the other big names in webcomics are going to do to try to keep pace. It's going to be an exciting year.

Various Random Things

2006-02-04T06:55:00.000-06:00

Ok, I keep writing this post and Blogger keeps deleting it. It's getting quite annoying.

A couple of things:
-Further apologies for lack of consistent posting. I am busy and lazy at the same time.
-Two new comics added to my reading list: Schlock Mercenary and On the Rocks. If you like sci-fi you'll like Schlock Mercenary. Full review of On the Rocks coming forthwith.
-I got mentioned on the latest Blank Label Comics podcast. I'm a big fan of those podcasts.
-I listened to the first Keenspot Podcast (Keencast) and wasn't terribly impressed. It lacked the energy and humor of the Blank Label Comics podcasts. I did like the news section at the end, but if the news section is the best part, your podcast is in trouble.
-Why is it that all the webcomics podcasts have an eighties-sounding theme song at the beginning? I'm referring here to the BLC podcast, Keencast, and (at least the most recent) Digital Strips. Let's see some originality here, people!

Update on Biggest Webcomic Loser

2006-01-26T23:30:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'm officially in the contest now. You can see me over at the participants page. So if anyone wants to pick me as their pony and put up a pledge, I'd only consider that added motivation. Remember, you only pay proportionally to what I lose! (I get the feeling a lot of people that actually know me will go and put up big pledges now, figuring it'll be a sure bet I'll actually end up owing them money at the end.)

I'll try to keep you guys posted on my progress in a fairly consistent manner, perhaps in my monthly roundups. My weight loss method of choice is gonna be Weight Watchers (gimmicky, I know, but I've heard it works), and they require you to weigh in every week, so I'll be able to give a pretty accurate picture of how I'm doing.

And yes, because I am a participant that means from time to time you will get to see my crappy artwork. I'll do my best to make it funny, though.

It's like the Hurricane Relief Telethon every day of the year! squeal

2006-01-26T18:32:00.000-06:00

from the Biggest Webcomic Loser.

I don't think anyone's picked up this story yet, so hopefully when I see it going up on a lot of websites in the next few days I can attribute it to people reading my blog and get a slight ego boost. Then again, someone I probably don't read has probably already mentioned it, and I'm just another voice in the crowd. (Edit: Yep, Comixpedia beat me to it. They're on the proverbial ball, over there)

No matter. The news must be heralded from every hilltop anyways. Because this is pretty dang cool.

I think most people know by now that the life of a webcomic artist is a sedentary one, at best. Not only are you doing a great deal of drawing, which by nature requires you to sit down at a desk for long periods of time, but you're also doing all your work on the computer, which means even more sitting down while you format everything to be displayed on the web, and being a part of the community means more sitting down in front of the computer and watching a screen.

So, in a nutshell, being a webcomicker does not encourage a great deal of activity. And, because it's much easier to eat some chips or a candy bar while you are drawing or mouse-jockeying than to have a salad in front of you (which requires a plate, a fork, probably some napkins...), there is not a whole lot of encouragement to eat healthier foods (and let's not even talk about the food choices when you go to cons).

So, all told, the webcomicking community is a veritable breeding ground for overweight people. I myself tip the scales at 325 on a good day, so I'm an active member of the obese club.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Honestly, I've seen the statistics, and I know it's just plain not healthy to be so overweight. Your risk for heart attack and diabetes shoot through the roof. I've been blessed with good genes, so my blood pressure and blood sugar levels are actually at very good levels, but my obesity has already claimed my gall bladder, and that was a very painful time in my life, let me tell you.

But it doesn't have to be that way. And that's the rallying cry that began Biggest Webcomic Loser. Philippe Gaboury came up with the idea, knowing that he personally had a fair chunk of change to unload and noticing that a lot of other creators suffered from similar problems, he figured, "Why not get the webcomic community together and support each other on this?" Just like when the webcomic community came together for the Hurricane Relief Telethon, only on a somewhat smaller and significantly longer scale.

And so he set it up. And now it's become something awesome. Not only is it webcomickers getting together and supporting each other in their goals of losing weight, but they're collecting pledges, and all the money goes to charity (UNICEF, to be exact). So the more weight that gets lost, the more money UNICEF gets. And, to top it all off, there's going to be daily comics by participants chronicling their losses and giving encouragement and laughs. Like I said, just like the Hurricane relief telethon, but for a longer time.

In a word: awesome.

I missed out on participating in the Hurricane Relief Telethon because I couldn't get my act together. Well, I'm not missing out on this one. I'm joining up today, to lose weight, get healthy, and help my fellow webcomickers achieve the same goals.

I don't care if I'm the biggest loser. In a competition like this, everyone wins. (Yeah, I know, it's a corny line. But it's true!)

A chance for the fans.

2006-01-23T22:17:00.000-06:00

Page one of [Insert Title Here], by the good guys at Panda Xpress.

So, Panda Express turned one year old a few days ago, to which I say: "Congratulations! I thoroughly enjoyed the first year of PX and I'm looking forward to many happy returns!" Panda Xpress really is a great comic, with some of the best use of color (outside of their Pepto Bismol site design, of course) that I've ever seen.

So how did they celebrate? With a self-gratifying pat on the back and a big "hurray for us!"? No, instead they celebrated with something that's purely for the fans: a webcomic written by the fans.

That's right, the Panda Xpress guys are embarking on a new webcomic project that will be written entirely by fan submissions. They've got the guidelines posted up over here, and anyone who wants is free to submit their idea for the next page. If the PX guys decide they like it, they'll lay it out, draw it up, and post it on the web for all to see.

I personally think this is an awesome way not only to give a little present to the fans, but also to develop a more hardcore fanbase and maybe draw in some new readers as well. There's just no feeling quite like seeing your idea get turned into a well drawn strip, especially if you're no artist yourself (like me).

So why not give it a shot? They've got one page up so far and they've selected a page 2, so watch the site, and as soon as page 2 gets posted, dive right in with page 3!

I know I will. I've already got some ideas in mind.

Proof that it is possible for me to do a short review

2006-01-22T22:37:00.000-06:00

Just one of many amusing moments from Inside the Box.

When Paul Southworth of Ugly Hill linked to Fleen, he mentioned it as a site you could visit to read about webcomics without having to wade through a 17 page essay. Now, I know he was probably referring to Websnark when he said that, as Eric Burns is famous for writing ridiculously long essays. However, I have been known to drone on in my posts as well, so for all of you out there who prefer conciseness, here's a very concise review for you, of Inside the Box.

Inside the Box is the continuation of The Far Side. If Gary Larson were to suddenly decide to keep doing The Far Side as a webcomic, it would be Inside the Box. It's got scientists, monsters acting like normal people, animals doing human-like things, the generic kid, and, of course, cows.

If you liked The Far Side, you're going to love Inside the Box. If you didn't care for The Far Side, you're not going to like Inside the Box. That's all there is to it.

Done and done.

Some thoughts on Popcorn Picnic

2006-01-22T04:45:00.000-06:00

One of many amusing observations about movies from Popcorn Picnic.

All right, I promised this post days ago and never delivered. I've been hedonizing far too much for my own good the past few days and it's going to come back to haunt me down the road, methinks. In any case, here's some thoughts on Popcorn Picnic, by Chris Shadoain.

This isn't a full-blown review, because... well, Popcorn Picnic isn't really a full-blown webcomic at the moment. It's only got about twenty strips in the archive so far, and is only updating once a week. So we don't know much about the direction it's headed yet.

What we do know, however, is that it is a webcomic which consists primarily of two guys making snarky comments about movies. There's no continuity, just a new riff every week. Sound familiar? It should. It's the exact same formula Penny Arcade has used to build its empire in video games.

Other similarities to Penny Arcade? Popcorn Picnic is willing to occassionally disregard it's main characters in favor of an out-and-out parody of a movie instead, should the situation warrant it (ala Penny Arcade's many video game parodies), and it's allready established in multiple strips a washed up drunk character in E.T. (ala Div, who we don't see nearly as frequently as we ought to around Penny Arcade these days). So let's take a look at some key factors to Penny Arcade's success and compare them to Popcorn Picnic.

First of all, Penny Arcade is legitimately good. It's funny, it has ever-improving artwork, and it's pretty much spot-on most of the time in the way it points out the foibles of video games. Now let's look at Popcorn Picnic. It's also funny (the one I linked at the top of this article is one of my personal favorites), Its artwork has improved from the first test strip (and will presumably continue to do so as time goes on. Remember, only twenty strips in), and it's pretty much spot-on most of the time in the way it points out the foibles of movies.

Second, and probably more importantly: Penny Arcade appeals to a larger market than just webcomic fans. It appeals to all people who play video games (and some people who don't. Myself included in the latter group), which is a market that has exploded in the past five or six years. Millions and millions of people play video games, and most major releases these days come with multi-million dollar development money behind them. But still, the video game industry pales in comparison with the movie industry. Billions and billions of dollars go into movies every year, and more than likely there are billions of people worldwide that watch movies every year. You can't ask for a better demographic than "everyone who goes to the movies."

And this brings us to Joey Manley. For, you see, I discovered Popcorn Picnic when I heard Manley reference it in a recent Blank Label Comics Podcast (yes, I am addicted to the Blank Label Comics Podcast now. Curse that catchy theme music!). the hosts asked Manley what he thought a secret to webcomics success was, and he said one of the most important things at this point was to have a comic which appealed to a demographic outside the realm of "people who like webcomics". The number of people in the "webcomic fans" demographic is simply too small to support more than a few creators. If you look at the webcomickers who have been able to make a living off their creation, you'll see that in almost every case they've garnered support from a major group outside of webcomic fans. Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del = video gamers, PvP = video gamers at first, and then generic comics fans, Questionable Content = indie rock fans/angsty teens (sometimes I think these demographics are one and the same), User Friendly = Slashdot types, Schlock Mercenary = sci-fi fans, etc. Each one of these comics has been able to find a larger pool to tap into and absorb new readers from.

So what about Popcorn Picnic? In the podcast Joey Manley cited Popcorn Picnic as being a prime candidate for success ala Penny Arcade because it could appeal to such a potentially broad fan base, i.e. people who like movies. And it's certainly got some of the pieces in place. Good humor, good art, low commitment level and easy new reader entry (you don't have to read the whole archive to enjoy "today's strip"). I like how you can click to see a list of movies in theaters and there will be links to strips he has done about them, and I like how the rest of his archive is listed alphabetically by movie under the heading "On Video and DVD". I think that's a great way to connect with his audience, who's used to seeing stuff in that sort of format. In fact, I personally would include the "Still in Theaters" links on every comic page so that someone who happens on the site can look and say "oh, he's got something about King Kong too", and that can help hook them into the site further and hopefully become a committed reader.

It might be interesting for Shadoian to try putting up his own commentary on movies and movie related items, just like Tycho over at Penny Arcade does for every strip, but then again Tycho is a completely unique creature and perhaps trying to recreate that same sort of feeling that Tycho is able to evoke with his own brand of high-brow colloquial speak would just seem lame in comparison. So whether or not having accompanying commentary to the comics would help increase the popularity of the site or not, I can't say.

In terms of exposure, how can Popcorn Picnic connect with its potential audience? I doubt Shadoian has the money to advertise on such sites as IMDB, RottenTomatoes, or Hollywood.com, and neither are those sites in the habit of linking to sites outside their own little close-knit network. And does the average movie watcher stray from these giants to read the reviews of bloggers and other such amateurs? Not bloody likely. So we've got a potentially huge audience, but an almost equally huge obstacle of trying to find some way to connect with that audience and help them to find your comic.

And, quite frankly, I don't know how Shadoian could do it. Anybody out there got any ideas?

More Updates

2006-01-19T21:57:00.000-06:00

Ah, the joy which is the beginning of the semester. Lot's of free time for reading webcomics. As such, three more to add to my reading list:

Candi
Girl Genius
Inside the Box

Candi got reviewed by William G, but I think he deleted all his stuff, so I'll give it a review as well. Suffice to say, it's kinda like a high-energy Questionable Content with more sexual escapades.

Girl Genius, I think most people know, is a comic which was originally in print and then switched to the web as the primary means of distribution, with at least moderate success (by which I mean, they still do it that way). Right now they are reprinting their old volumes in a MWF schedule as Girl Genius 101 and also putting up new ones on a MWF schedule as Girl Genius Advanced. Because of my intense distaste for reading things out of order I'm just following the 101 storyline right now, but I anticipate at some point I'll get tired of waiting and buy the collected volumes so I can get into the Advanced Class and get caught up to the cutting edge.

As for Inside the Box, it is The Far Side. It's not "inspired by" The Far Side, it's not an homage to The Far Side, it's not even a ripoff of The Far Side. It is The Far Side. It's like Gary Larson got tired of all the publicity and pretended to end his comic, then started anonymously doing it online instead. If you liked The Far Side, you will like Inside the Box.

This is kind of a copout post, and I feel sorry for the lack of meaty commentary lately, so I promise later tonight I'll get a post up about Popcorn Picnic and Joey Manley's Tips to Success! So stay tuned.

Yet more proof that if you don't read Count Your Sheep, you're dumb.

2006-01-17T20:40:00.000-06:00

The evidence of mastering the craft, from Count Your Sheep.

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of critical commentary lately, what is good critical commentary, and is good critical commentary the only thing worth reading or are other opinions and ramblings worth reading as long as they're interesting. A lot of my thought has been sparked by the launch of Fleen and all the various debate which has ensued. I've been following Fleen because I like the concept, but so far they have yet to say anything I find particularily insightful, so I wonder if I should keep reading it just because of the potential of what it could be. At the moment it seems to be nothing more than another webcomics news aggregate. Yay...

But in any case, all my musing on critical commentary and whatnot has brought me to the point where I think it's important that everyone knows my own personal biases and aspirations, so they can view my writing through the properly focused glasses. Not to say my criticism is undermined by my opinions and goals (far from it, I feel my writing is driven by these, and most criticism is, and that's part of what makes it interesting).

So let's talk about me for a moment. I am, in fact, an aspiring webcomicker. I already have one monumental failure under my belt, my current comic is something of a learning experience, and I've got a new project in the works which will hopefully hit the 'net sometime in the next month or so. Now, I'm not looking to make a living off webcomics (I'm an engineer by trade, which is a far more lucrative market), but I'd be lying if I didn't say one of my dreams is to someday be wandering around a con and have someone say to me: "Hey, you're that Gilead Pellaeon guy! I love your work!" My main reason for having this blog is not to promote my comics (the main reason is that I enjoy writing and this provides a good outlet), but I'm not against using the blog from time to time for shameless self-promotion. I also am highly committed to trying to expand the world of webcomics, so that will frequently color my writing as well.

And, like any other person in the world, I play favorites. I have certain webcomics that I just gosh-darn like better than others. Maybe that makes me an imperfect critic. Maybe it makes me biased. Maybe it makes my other opinions invalid, because I can't take a completely objective standpoint. I honestly don't care. If I want to play favorites, it's my prerogative. Heck, even Mr. Webcomic Critic himself, Eric Burns, has made it pretty obvious that he plays favorites, and his favorite webcomic is Narbonic. The best I can do is to be up front about it as much as possible so I don't get accused of having some sort of "hidden agenda".

Now, that being said, let's get into the meat of this post, which is about Count Your Sheep. Everything I've said so far in this post was just a prelude to this statement: Count Your Sheep is my #1 most favorite webcomic. It's creative, it's well-written, it's consistently funny, and the artwork is becoming increasingly more awesome. I think Adrian Ramos is an inspiration to us all in how far he's come from the beginning of the strip, with the rough, two dimensional artwork and very simplistic dialogue. I love it.

And today's strip just struck me as exceptional. I mean, Adis uses the windows on the bus as panel dividers! That's amazingly clever. Is the strip one panel, or is it three? The disjoint is really quite artistic and results in a great effect. Adis has been doing a lot of "multiple panels in one scene" effects lately (including like practically every strip this month), but this one is the first one which really had a clear sense of both a continuous scene AND divided time frames (panels), and it just floored me.

The funny thing is, on top of it all, the joke wasn't really that great. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't one of the more funny offerings, even in the past month. I remember in reading the Calvin and Hobbes tenth anniversary book Bill Watterson made the comment that great art can make up for a lame joke and vice versa, and this strip was definitely one of those cases in which the art saved the day.

Adis, I owe you a beer. Or some sort of juiced fruit beverage.

It's amazing what you can accomplish with a three-day weekend: Updates

2006-01-16T03:59:00.000-06:00

Ok, so I'm finally back in front of my usual computer with a fair amount of free time on a weekend. So what do I do? I read comic archives (I also watched some old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, because that's something you've just gotta do from time to time, you know?).

I knocked out three comic archives so far, and with Martin Luther King Jr. Day ahead of me I'll probably knock out at least one more tomorrow. So here's the new ones added to my reading list so far:
Dominic Deegan, Oracle for Hire
Monkey Law
Popcorn Picnic

As always I'll try to give you guys full reviews at some point, but for now suffice to say that Dominic Deegan rocked my socks off when it wasn't being preachy (I mean, come on, a series about safe sex in a medieval fantasy webcomic?? What the heck?), Monkey Law proved to be a clever and funny webcomic in spite of the fact that I didn't agree with the majority of the political views and stereotypes, and Popcorn Picnic has a Penny-Arcade-esque amount of potential to it. In fact, it could become even bigger than Penny Arcade, given time.

At some point I'll expand all those blurbs into reviews for you guys. Until then, just know that all three comics are on my reading list now.

I also updated my links to webcomics related stuff to be somewhat more relevant (What with Honest Webcomic Reviews disappearing and whatnot). I added Comixpedia and Fleen. I will comment on Fleen here at some point, but I want more time to evaluate it first. It is still in it's fledgling stage right now, and a lot of people have been jumping to conclusions about it. I do not jump to conclusions, and I also hesitate to jump on bandwagons as much as possible. As it stands, Fleen is a site with a lot of good webcomic related content, so it's going in the links.

It's baaaaaaack...

2006-01-12T14:40:00.000-06:00

An announcement of upcoming events from Poppycock Circus

You know, of all the webcomics I read that have announced they were over, or gone on hiatus, or mysteriously disappeared, the one that I thought was least likely to reappear was Poppycock Circus.

Apparently, I was wrong. It's back, and in the form of Poppycock theater. I don't know what it's going to be about, I don't know how it's going to be done, but I know the cast of Poppycock circus is going to be back on a weekly basis, starting January 18th.

And that makes me a happy man.

A brief apology and teaser for things to come!

2006-01-11T00:58:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the relative lack of posts lately. I've been meaning to post more (especially with Websnark on break) but a combination of factors have kept me away. I've been working from my parent's computer while I'm vacationing at their house, and I just don't feel comfortable working on a computer that's not my own, you know? Does anyone else ever feel that way? Also I've been cooking some new projects for my ever expanding portfolio, so those screaming kettles have resulted in me putting the Webcomicker blog onto the back burner and turning the heat down to "simmer".

Anyways, one neat thing I've got going that's fast approaching the boiling point is a little experiment with content management for webcomics which will hopefully coincide with a new webcomic experiment of my own that I'm planning to launch. It will hopefully be a learning experience for everyone as I demonstrate a few of the webcomic content management systems available and what can be done with them, and at the same time experiment with a writing form which is completely new for me. I expect fun times.

For those of you that want a preview, the two main webcomic content management systems I'm going to be showing off are CUSP and Chalupa, so you can check them out if your curious to get a sneak peek. If anyone knows of any other content management systems designed specifically for webcomics (not just like some work-around with Moveable Type), please let me know.

What's my ultimate goal in this? To help webcomics artists be able to create the most functional, best looking, most all-around professional websites with a minimum of effort on their part. You shouldn't have to be an HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP guru to have a well functioning, nice-looking site. You should have an option which lets you do it simply. And so my quest begins.