Waffle

For well-drawn, well-written escapism, check out Wake. Wake is the story of a human girl marooned on a jungle planet and picked up by a nomadic space community seeking to colonise planets for the many sentient races the Wake consists of. Young Navee is quite happy living the life of a solitary hunter-gatherer in the jungle she grew up in, but the Hottards, a species requiring extremely hot, dry weather, has chosen the planet to settle on. Because the Wake's definition of intelligence includes telepathic ability, Navee is not recognised as a sentient being, and is slated to fry along with the other animals living on the planet. The first album, Fire and Ash, is about Navee's battle to stay alive, ending with her being taken along as a research subject (if you think this is a spoiler, think again. As an origin story, it could only end that way, and in any case, the journey is a lot more important than the destination). The following books document her growing up and becoming integrated in the traveling community, becoming an undercover agent and adventurer. The fourth book, not yet available in English, seems to be the beginning of a new cycle in which Navee begins to uncover corruption within the system she's serving.
Wake has excellent stories and presents a thoroughly developed, original Science Fiction universe with many interesting, believable alien species. I was impressed by the way the ostensible villain of the first story got to put in his defense at the end. What really makes the series special, though, is the art, which is clean, complex, spectacular and gets better with each new book. Page layouts and colors are breath-taking. If you enjoy science fiction comics, you'll want to check out this series.

Book 1: Fire and Ash
Book 2: Private Collection
Book 3: Gearing Up

This is a backdated entry from before this weblog was started. It was originally posted on rocr.net.

Het Dagblad van het Noorden reports that Groningen's Comics Museum will open its doors at the end of April, and not April 8 as originally reported in Zozolala. Wrangling over the rights for the materials used in the museum is said to be one cause of the delay.
The McDonalds franchise sharing the museum's front door will open on April 8 though.

While doing a project for the comics museum in Groningen, I've been somewhat embarrassed by the lack of a website for people involved to link to. Now, at least, there is a web page about the project by Libema, who are sponsoring and developing the venue.

cmkaapjes' recent post about lego reminded me of The Brick Testament, by the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith. It's the Bible in Legos, and it rocks.

Today I've been to the Comics Museum to pick up a computer to set up the digital exhibit on. Work on the Museum is now definitely progressing.

I caught a glimpse of the pillars in which the computers will be mounted! The artwork is looking really good; it should, for the work involved in the production of the files drove me nuts. I've taken some pictures which I'll upload and post as soon as I've located the cable that came with my camera.

One advantage of setting up a webcomics exhibit is that it's a good reason to finally read the archives of famous webcomics that you know you should be reading anyway. One disadvantage is that you get to slog through huge webcomics archives in a short period of time.

This week, I'll be listing some of the comics in the exhibit. I want to start off with two that distinguished themselves by having a "best of" page in which I could easily find their most-loved work:
Boxjam's Doodle and Sluggy Freelance. Both are well-known (or should be) but deserve extra mention anyway for this good practice.

Another comic that follows the "best practice" of having a Best Of archive and therefore deserves an early mention is Hans Bjordahl's pioneering Where the Buffalo Roam. On the internet before there was a web, WTBR doesn't quite have the polish of many modern-day webcomisc and takes little or no advantage of the formal possibilities offered by online publication. It's simply a humorous strip, probably made with newspaper syndication in mind. And Columbus was just a schlub who got lost...

Another one that tried to make my work easier (although I ended up making my own selection from mostly the earlier ones) is Dr. Fun by David Farley. A very early, Far Side-inspired cartoon series that may well have been the first Webcomic, and is still going.

In addition to the ones that I've been posting along with the day's ROCR comics, there are some new sketches for some earlier ROCR installments in the Book of All Things. Some more will appear in the next few days.

Two creators who went above and beyond the call of duty: Maritza Campos of College Roomies from Hell!!!, and Adrian Ramos of Count Your Sheep.
Maritza made available color versions of her comics, which are not currently in her online archive. They may be back there some day, but until then, the museum has a nice rarity on its hard drives.
Adrian went one further and (at my request) had 20 comics translated into Dutch so that Dutch-speaking children could read them. There are very few comics online that are appealing to young readers and Count Your Sheep, while not being strictly a kids' comic, is among the very best of them.

Bruno is one of those comics that you know you should read, but whose archives are a bit intimidating. I've finally done it, and feel humbled. Christopher Baldwin does realism extremely well, to the point where I start to wonder what I'm doing writing a fantasy comic. Then in the ghost story and the dream sequence he also proves that he can do fantasy better than almost anyone.
There is no other comic remotely like Bruno, to the best of my knowledge. A shoo-in for the exhibit.

Studio-mate Jeroen was impressed by the art when he saw me rooting through the Vast and Intimidating Archive and later asked me for the URL.

Almost immediately after finishing Pin Drop, I started work on a second volume of wordless comics. I drew several stories but because I started on a very busy job that year, the project fell by the wayside. Later, there was the launch of rocr.net in 2000 and all the other, newer comics work I was doing.

I wrote and drew this story, Desperately Seeking in 1998 but never published or indeed finished the last panel until now.

(Or: Comics for the exhibit, part the sixth)

Yet another comic with intimidatingly large archives, Narbonic. I still haven't finished reading but recommend the Smart Gerbils storyline as a good (i.e. side-splittingly funny) starting point. This is what I've chosen for the exhibit.

You need a Modern Tales subscription to read this great story. I order you to want one!

Nifty idea: a database in which you can look up crossovers between webcomics. May be helpful for following the big mess that the FRAMED!!! Great Escape has become...

More artists who went above and beyond the call of duty for the Comics Museum's digital exhibit:

Jesse Hamm of Happygoth
Charley Parker ofArgon Zark
Donna Barr of Stinz
Cayetano Garza, Jr. of Whimville
T. Campbell and the Waltrip brothers of Fans and Rip & Teri
Jeroen Jager of Capn
Scott McCloud

All these artists (and Adrian Ramos who I have mentioned several times before) have contributed hi-res art for the display columns
at very short notice, with little information from me about what was needed (because I was still figuring it out).

Dagblad van het Noorden has an interview with Joost Pollman, curator of the Comics Museum.

Quick summary by yours truly:

• No precise date has been picked for the opening, but it will be in April
• Joost is kept awake at night by all the stuff that still needs to be done (I know how that feels)
• Attractions will include a "Moving Theatre" introducing comics to the masses, a "studio" demonstrating the modus operandi of several famous cartoonists, a coloring room where (presumably young) visitors can try their hands at working on a comic, and the webcomics room.
• Joost is not a great comics lover, but an experienced exhibit organiser. Even his brother Peter Pontiac was hardly represented in his book collection.
• Joost also discusses some of the constraints in which he has to work. The museum has no collection of its own and will not be able to do research. Also, a lot of work on the museum's charter content was already done, and the museum's focus was pre-destined to be on popular works from the Netherlands: Franka, Jan, Jans en de Kinderen and Heer Bommel among others.
• Despite these constraints, Joost has a wish list of comics he wishes to exhibit. The range is pretty wide: he is working on an exhibit on Archie, Man of Steel but also supports the inclusion of young Dutch artists.
• He says the museum will be aimed at a wider audience, not just hardcore fans.

Webcomic Skirting Danger has moved from Graphic Smash to Keenspot. The new website has a nice design, and I just love the way Meredith Gran courts Keenspot's key demographic in its very first episode as a Keenspot comic. Betcha she won't deliver any of what she promises on Wednesday!

Yay! I'm happy to announce that my pet project with Adam Cuerden is going to be featured on GraphicSmash! Dangerous and Fluffy: the Sheep of Doom. Quite astonishing if you consider the fact that we only got together march 1st. Since then plans for a joint venture rapidly evolved and due to fortunate timing, we're turning pro. Pretty weird considering my webcomics Cap'n and Belle never got that much attention.
Happy Camper :)

Oh! Thank you Reinder, for introducing us :)

This comic was made for the Bries Anthology Wind, published in 1999. I think it was later re-published online in the now defunct Webzine Cartoozine, in color, but I can't find the files.

Via Carson Fire:

Keenspot has announced its revenues for 2003. Money quotes (quite literally):

"Our 2003 gross of $188,475 is an 81.2% jump over 2002's $103,976 in revenues," said Chris Crosby, Keenspot Co-CEO "These numbers certainly aren't spectacular in comparison to major traditional print publishers, but they show that webcomics are a thriving, growing industry that could be a major force in the future of entertainment."

Chris is right about it not being spectacular in comparison to major traditional print publishers. Indeed it's worrying that after 4 years, the company still isn't making a living for absolutely anyone involved. Nevertheless, with 4 years of learning everything the hard way under their belts, the Keen people now have something to build upon. The latest batch of promotions is proof of that. Skirting Danger which I blogged about earlier, got 17,000 visitors and 208,000 pageviews on its first day at Keenspot. Sore Thumbs also posted very high visitor numbers on its premiere day. (Their Extreme Tracker says 21,534.) Those are numbers that I'm sure many a Modern Tales cartoonist would murder for.

Keenspot knows its target audience, raises the quality bar for new comics a little bit with every new wave of acquisitions, and uses the popularity of the comics already present to drive the marketing machinery for new comics. Unless the web advertising market tanks again (always a real possibility) they could well double their takings again. And that means even more cartoonists get a Four! Figure! Check! every quarter.

One of the great things about doing this exhibit is that I get to rediscover and re-appraise.

While looking for Holeboy a pioneering webcomic that other webcomics histories have so far neglected to mention, I was delighted to find that not only was it still online, but that the artist's other, regular strip, CultuRe Trap had returned in a new format. CultuRe Trap was what made me discover Christian Cosas's work in the early 1990s, that strange time when people complained about a webcomics glut because there were dozens of them to choose from. I even interviewed him for a magazine I was editing at the time.
True to form, Christian has only produced a few new comics, but it's still fun to see how the characters and style have evolved. And it's interesting for me to see how he's done his entire site in Moveable Type.
Christian should probably have been mentioned among those who went "above and beyond" in my earlier museum-related blog entries, because I asked him to submit material from Holeboy for the columns, but forgot to tell him two weeks later that I'd got enough material from other contributors. At the time, he was still looking for his original files from way back when. So to compensate for this unintentional snub, go and take a look at Holeboy, one of the first webcomics to explore the possibilities of the screen.

When someone suggested I include Ozy and Millie as part of the "Kids" section of the exhibit, my initial reaction was "nah". I'd read it a bit before, and didn't think it was all that hot, and something in one of artist D.C. Simpson's opinion pieces just rubbed me up the wrong way. I don't remember what it was he said, or even on which subject, but I did remember thinking he was a bit of a closed-minded stick-in-the-mud for saying it. I try to avoid people like that. So imagine my surprise when I went to give it another look, to find that not only was it a lot, really a lot, better than I remembered (I must have had a bad day when I read it the first time), but also that in his newer opinion pieces he showed a much greater maturity of opinion than I remembered from back then. I am now reading those pieces in reverse-chronological order, so I'll eventually rediscover that old article. I'll probably find that I was a bit of a closed-minded stick-in-the-mud for reacting like that in the first place.

Cory Doctorow shares his thoughts on E-books in a long, rambling text that deserves to be read in its entirety.

In Chasing the Sunset, Feiht has now returned from her little escapade into the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan universe. See if you regular ROCR readers can tell anything different about her...

Andrew Rilstone's ongoing coverage of his love/hate relationship with Cerebus has got very little attention from the comics blogosphere, possibly because he is not part of that blogosphere. Too bad for them, because he is easily the most accomplished critic of Dave Sim's seminal work. The lengthy and detailed commentary on the last issue is just fascinating, to the point where it makes me regret not having snapped up the final issue. (Is that available for download somewhere? I promise to buy it if I see it...)

In his preamble to the critique of issue 300, he also asks this question:

Question: Moore has not been vilified for Promethea to anything like the extent that Sim has been vilified for 'Chasing YHWH'. Is there a prejudice which says that Tarot cards and worshipping snakes is 'New Age' and therefore good; but studying the Torah and fasting is 'religious' and therefore bad? Both (in the forms that they take for Sim and Moore) seem pretty barking to be.

This is worth an answer. For a long time I for one have been willing to let Alan Moore off the hook, arguing that his barking mad beardie-weirdie-ness is merely a postmodern retreat into subjective reality. Nowadays, I would leave out the "merely", note that subjective reality isn't reality at all (and that such a retreat is more damaging than it seems), and observe that there is probably a direct line between Moore's theology in "Dialogue: From Hell" and Sim's later loonie-tunes theologising about a divinity that is neither Light nor Void but instead - whatever it is that Sim thinks is the nature of God. In that light, Sim's preface to the reprint of "Dialogue: From Hell" in Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman can be seen as a sort of theological father-killing.

But those are just off the cuff remarks. To consider Andy's question, and that of the balance between an artist's crackpot ideas and the genius of that artist's work in any more thorough way, I'd have to catch up with Cerebus and read Alan Moore's work and pronouncements more extensively. This will take time, but I think I will do it anyway.

[Update: I have now started reading Latter Days. It's much better than I'd expected - even the bad, nonsensical bits are still pretty readable.... right up to the point where the little grey bastard starts commenting on the Torah. I will probably have to revise some of what I've written above in the light of what is said in that section, and the notes in the back of the book, because it's turning out a bit different from what I'd inferred from the commentary on Sim's ideas on the Internet.]

[Update no.2: Despite using the Freud-derived term "father-killing" above as a convenient shorthand for "distancing yourself from those who have influenced you in order to better ignore this influence", which is how I've always seen it used in situations where the influenced dissed the influencer, I don't have a very high opinion of Freud. Not that mentioning this would stop Sim from lumping me in with the Feminist-Marxist-Atheist-Psychologist-Hypochondriac Axis of Not-Sim...]

When I started this blog 4 weeks ago, I made a point of not wanting to bang on about the sort of things that I usually bang on about. That's why there's only one post about Jethro Tull so far, and none about Deep Purple . It's also why you haven's seen me telling you to drop by at Elf Life and go through the archives until now. But there's gotta be a first time, and it's now.

Y'see, the artist, Carson Fire, has finally started a set sale of his original art, which I've been telling him to do for some time. "Good for him," I hear you say, and "Rah!" and "Arr!" because a lot of my friends have been saying "Arr!" in my presence lately. But the way he's going about this, and the reason he's going about it this way, both make me uncomfortable.

... is that I get this itch to play Dave Sim and work on non-standard layouts! Here's the art for Friday's ROCR episode:

I have not drawn in the backgrounds, because while drawing it, it struck me that someone else might want to play Gerhard and draw the backgrounds in. And you can! If you are interested, fetch the high-res scan, and go nuts!

I'll probably do my own version unless someone sends a version back to me really quickly, but it would be interesting to see how different people approach the background. The only thing you need to know is that it's set inside the Gnomian Parliament, and that Maghreid and Feiht are at a table in the background of panel 1.
In the future, I might want to work with a background artist to ease my workload, but for now, this is just for the challenge and the fun of it, OK?

Well, it's 6 more hours before my first webcomic goes live, and I suppose I ought to take this chance to describe how it all came together.

The seeds for D.A. - No, mustn't use the acronym - Dangerous and Fluffy: The Sheep of Doom were sown many years ago - I can remember toying with the idea of a farmer superhero when I was nobbut eighteen or so, but it wasn't until about two years ago that I actually commited pen to paper, with a short dialogue between young Gregory Senthwaite and his parents, which is roughly equivelent to this coming update and the first page of the next update (it ends just before the "Clawed Death From Above" sequence on page 4), though various scribbled down notes set out the plot until just before the appearance of Bledlow (the cheerful, nautical-looking individual you may have seen in our promotional art). Everything after that point, with the exception of a single page that will come right at the end of Chapter 1, several months in the future, is new material.

For those of you who are interested in such things, the original title was Superfarmer, changed to the rather more interesting sounding Gregory Senthwaite and the Sheep of Doom before I closed my notes on it two years ago, and changed to the current title just before we started drawing.

About a year ago, I remember showing these little story notes to a friend, who asked me if it was going to become a comic. And I replied that there was no way it would become a comic, it was doomed to remain a story. I may have privately thought it would be nice to have it as a comic, but saw no real chance of it becoming one, and was resigned to having it as an amusing tale.

Fate has made me eat my words. It's crafty like that.

Late last year, I thought it might be fun to do a guest comic for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I didn't have much talent, but thought if I carefully wrote the script, I could get away with only drawing people from the front. That... was hopeless. I ended up with a fun script that I was completely incapable of drawing. But Reinder came to the rescue and introduced me to Jeroen Jager. It was a fun project for both of us, and gret fun, but afterwards, we lost touch again.

It's probably only my Gilbert and Sullivan obsession that leads me to compare this to Gilbert and Sullivan meeting to do an odd little play called Thespis, which went largely unnoticed, then several years later being thrown together again to do Trial by Jury and begining the famous Gilbert and Sullivan Operas, so well loved even now... but I fear my internal scholar is showing. As you may have guessed, another event - me learning about the start of Cap'n, being greatly amused and quite shocked that he was mining the vein of subtle, bizarre, and perhaps just a teensy bit perverted humour that I often use, perhaps a bit more sparingly than in the first three comics of the Cap'n restart, but, well, those aliens that Thomas talks about in our first update and who have slept in my files for these many years are in that same style of humour through embarrassing revelations as Jeroen was using. I had to spread the word about this comic, and doing so caught Jeroen's attention, and lead to us agreeing to collaborate.

His character designs could have been drawn directly from my imagination. I was shocked - and delighted. We soon got the first two pages of our comic together, whilst wondering what to do with it noticed that Graphic Smash was about to finish up a comics selection period, sent the comics to T on the off chance....

And here we are!

-Adam Cuerden

Dangerous and Fluffy: The Sheep of Doom!

Viz comics has put out a manga-ized version of Spirited Away consisting simply of stills from the animated cartoon movie edited into a comic with word balloons. I've been meaning to buy the DVD but as a reader rather than a viewer, and as a cartoonist who likes to explore still pictures for stealing inspiration, I may enjoy these more in the long run. Or would I? It is co-opted art, and rather steeply priced... are these books worth having?

Joey Manley thinks the difficulty of making money in webcomics is, on the whole, good for webcartoonists.

Money quote:
If making money from web content were easy, if it were simply a matter of applying one perfect strategy to the problem, you and I wouldn't stand a chance. Disney, AOL/TimeWarner, Rupert Murdoch, whoever -- you know, the suits -- would have slapped down their x's and their o's in every corner of the board, and won the game, years ago. That's exactly what they were trying to do during the dotcom bubble, doncha know: establish utter domination, as quickly as possible, and as coldly. That's what they do. This does not mean, by the way, that they are evil. It just means that they are large corporations.

But back to the point: if this game were easy, you and I wouldn't even be allowed to play.

A day or so ago I finally bought a subscription to Girlamatic completing my set of Modern Tales anthology site subscriptions. I'm now digging through the archives.

First impressions:
1. A lot of comics have archives consisting of multiple pages, each of which offers only a second or so's worth of reading. This is annoying and destroys the pacing of these comics. Long, scrolling archive pages, please!
2. Favorite comics so far: Sparkneedle and the ultra-cute Jeepers but both of these were my faves before I subscribed.
3. Currently reading: Lucas and Odessa by the same artist as Sparkneedle and Arcana Jayne - Hair of the Dog by Lisa Jonte and MP Mann. So far, Lucas and Odessa hasn't impressed me as much as Sparkneedle, which is a staggeringly original creation with an even more staggering consistency of style. Arcana Jayne - HOTD starts out very well, but runs into difficulty sustaining the energy of the beginning. The chopped, paginated display doesn't help. I'll probably finish reading it though.

For the first time in many years, possibly ever, I've drawn an original page that is a nice-looking work of art in its own right. So I'm flogging it! The comic that the artwork is the original for will run on Monday, April 12, which is when the artwork will go on sale in the Modern Tales Swapmeet. So watch that space!

I've blogged here about the financial difficulties webcartoonists can land into. Some two years ago, a webcomics reader known as TGIF was one of a small group of people who had been trying to help a webcartoonist get his hands on much-needed equipment, and he had also been discussing the creation of a fund that would give out loans to cartoonists to cover financial emergencies. A way to keep them working without having them be dependent on the unpredictable charity of individuals. Ironically, around that time, TGIF began to suffer from a rare mitochondrial illness. This has rendered him unable to work and has devastated his family' s finances.

A man who went much further than he had to to help cartoonists as a group now needs help himself. Today, in lieu of a page rate for Yonaka who drew the background for today's ROCR episode, I've made a donation to him, and just this once I'd like to ask you to consider doing the same. Using the button below will send directly to TGIF under his real name.

Announcement: If I'm at all fit to do it, I intend to take part in 24-hour Comics Day. I will start work at midnight, California time (because Scott McCloud who first thought of 24-hour comics lives in California, see) and finish 24 hours later (duh). I'll work at either my own studio or one of the Stripmuseum's public studios (if the museum receives and approves this idea in time - they're all in ultra-crunch mode so they might not be open to it) ; in the former case, I'll webcam it, and in the latter case the museum's visitors will be able to gawp at me.

I intend to go in almost completely blank. No sketches, no developed ideas, and come out with a finished comic.

... because the people involved didn't get my mails, got them but didn't answer them, got them and answered them but I didn't get their replies, got them and answered them and I got their replies but lost them...

The Spiders by Patrick Farley;
Player Versus Player by Scott Kurtz.

I still want both, and have in fact prepared archives for both, in case they email me back to confirm (if they email me back to say no, I'll just delete the archives). You probably know PVP, but if you don't, go check it out. Patrick Farley's The Spiders is a favorite among the arty, innovative webcomics crowd, and rightly so. It also has a great story.

(Forgot to post this one before leaving. Sorry)

This comic from 1991 has been in my Gallery for some time, but as I'm no longer updating that (something in the server setting has changed so I can't post anything), I might as well repost it for new readers to boggle at!

As Adam Cuerden said back when I posted it: "Heh heh heh! Delightfully mad! =)"

I promise, I'm not going to make this the place where I talk about how bad we poor widdle cartoonists have it, but two more of my favorite people in comics have got serious problems to deal with.

Scritch cartoonist Lucas Phelps has been jailed on a manslaughter charge (not for manslaughter as Comixpedia's header on the case says). The contents of the article at Comixpedia are copied straight from Graphic Smash's press release:

[The charge] is the result of an auto accident that took place almost two years ago, well before he began Skritch.

He'll be missed, and his return will be welcomed.

I agree, and although I don't know the particulars, I hope he gets cleared of all
charges. The two-year delay seems dodgy to me in any case.

[Update: T Campbell reports that Lucas pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 3 1/2 years. T also writes:

I have to come to terms with my own hypocrisy, here. If I had known the victim and not Lucas, I would probably hate Lucas for this. How many others have I condemned in my thoughts as totally evil based upon a single moment of astonishingly poor judgment?

Don't misunderstand me: manslaughter is a grievous wrong. And I accept that he deserves punishment. But I insist he also deserves the chance to continue his art. He plans to: as I write this, his wife is working to get him art supplies. As I said in the original announcement about this, "he will be missed, and his return will be welcomed."

And with that, too, I'm in complete agreement.
]

Carol Lay has found out that the tall, handsome and funny charmer she married a few years ago has racked up $24,000 in secret credit card bills, and stolen and lied about money. To get him out of his life, she needs to buy him off, so she's selling a lot of her originals cheap. read all about it at the Comics Journal Message Board.

This picture was on the front page of the Dagblad van het Noorden on Thursday. I couldn't find it on their website, so thanks to my parents for scanning it in!
The picture shows two girls looking at a wall of old Stripschrift covers inside the Stripmuseum Groningen on the day of the opening. As it happened, I'd spoken to the girl in the back in the museum's Teaching Room the same day. She is a former student of mine (and yes, I do get a kick out of saying that line); Barbara and I taught her and 14 others for a week as a special project on comics for first-year art college students. I'm terrible at remembering the names of people I teach, but we did recognise each other, and she told me that she had submitted the comic that she made for the project to the museum's talent competition, and had come out as one of the runners-up! A page from it was displayed on the wall in the Teaching Room. Is that cool or what?

In a few years' time, the 9-to-11-year-olds I've been giving introductory cartooning workshops to these past few weeks will be winning cartooning contests (not to mention Stripschapsprijzen, Reubens and Eisners) left and right. I'm sure of it. It will be world domination by proxy!

Just a week after The Wisdom of Moo, Adrian Ramos' newest comic, debuted on Girlamatic, news comes in that he has "enthusiastically accepted" an invitation for his "older" comic Count Your Sheep to join Keenspot.

This again proves the predictive value of the short links list on the ROCR front page, although predicting success for CYS is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I don't have anything to link to for the announcement but that interminable Keenspace forum thread, but it's from Chris Crosby so it's as official as it gets.

If you're reading your webcomics early in the morning, you'll find that many keenspace-hosted comics aren't responding, and according to The Belfry's Keenspace Tracker, the server itself is not responding. Of course, this had to happen on Online Comics Day. If Murphy's Law applied as effectively in the physical world as on Keenspace's servers, The Netherlands and Mexico would both be invaded by evil foreign powers today.

Still, it's early. I'm sure the brilliant Kisai is e'en now pounding away at the servers trying to figure out what has gone wrong, and fix it. And by the time American readers fall out of their beds, things will be hunky dory again. Have faith, little server!

[Update: Keenspace came back some time in the afternoon (CET), with the comics updated, and all is well again.]

Speaking of Murphy...

One of the great things about the Web is that you can use it to correct print reports that haven't made it to the reader's snail mailboxes yet. The Comics Journal writes:

Contrary to reports you may have read online and one which you may be about to read in issue #259 of The Comics Journal when it ships next week, retired Prince Valiant cartoonist John Cullen Murphy is not dead. Not even slightly. Based on erroneous reports, the News Briefs section of Newswatch in issue #259 includes a notice that an obituary for Murphy is slated to appear in issue #260. That is unlikely to happen since the cartoonist is not in fact dead. The Journal sincerely regrets the error, for which the stupid, stupid, stupid news editor, Michael Dean, is entirely responsible. A correction will appear in issue #260.

The Cartoonist's Choice Awards are on again, for the fourth time. The first two years I was quite enthusiastic about taking part, using my website to suggest possible nominees as well as asking my own readers to nominate Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Last year and this year, though, I don't think I can be arsed, frankly.
Why is this? I don't really know. It's just a feeling I have, but thinking about it:
It may have something to do with the way it creates bad blood in the "Webcomics Community" (as if there is such a thing) each year. There's always a lot of criticism and when I take part I always end up weighing in. Bleah.
Also, there isn't much in it for my own comics. I got a few nominations in the past, but right now, ROCR isn't a fresh comic -- it has become part of the landscape. And nobody nominates the landscape. If it was going to generate a big buzz it would have done so in 2001/2.
Other, newer cartoonists may still want to take part though.

Get Your War On rocks the hizbah.

Finally, a webcomic that isn't too small to read comfortably. Problem is, it doesn't fit on my 1280 x 1024 pixel screen!

I think this is where webcomics need to go before we even begin to tackle the question of whether horizontal or vertical formats are more comfortable for online reading in earnest. Really. As long as the choice is between making a comic the pixel-size equivalent of a postage stamp (or in more recent years, two postage stamps either stacked on top of one another or put side by side), the question of whether the stamp is horizontal or vertical should be the least of the webcartoonist's concerns. But I think it may be a little to early to start putting them online at 1225 x 2008 pixels like sizes like this episode of Seven Plains . The comic looks promising, by the way.

[Update: the episode I linked to is the only oversized one in the series so far. The others are on the high end of webcomics sizes but should fit most monitors]

Gillesdegeus.tk is a fansite for the Dutch comic Gilles de Geus. Gilles is a humorous historical comic that makes recent Asterix books look like the pale imitations of a once-great comic that they are. Set during the 80 Years' War, it's funny, well-drawn, tightly-written and impeccably researched.It deserves huge success outside the Netherlands as well as inside. However, only one volume has been translated into English so far (as Bryant the Brigand). So even if this unofficial website isn't the best-designed site in the world, it provides a valuable public service by showing the rest of the world a glimpse of what they've been missing these past 20-odd years.

The site also has a page showcasing other comics from the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, but as a result of the URL redirection used, I can't link to that one directly.

Salon (day-pass, or, better yet, subscription required) has a combined write-up of Cerebus and Bone, two long-running comics which both ended this year. It's not very in-depth but for those of you who have sort of heard of these series and wonder what the fuss was about, it's a good summary.

"Bone" and "Cerebus" share superficial similarities. They're both drawn in black-and-white and self-published by their creators. In both, quirky, anthropomorphic beings shed light on mankind's foibles and virtues. Both books extend their lives outside the comic shops through hefty, trade-paperback reprint volumes available at bookstore super chains. The 16th and last "Cerebus" collection, "The Last Day," chronicles the aardvark's final hours and publishes this month, while Smith will sandwich all 1,300 pages of "Bone" between two covers in a volume due to publish in July.

But beneath the surface, "Bone" and "Cerebus" prove to be so different, they're almost like photographic negatives of each other. "Bone" celebrates optimism and narrative simplicity, while "Cerebus" embraces cynicism and experimentation worthy of a mad scientist. Sim and Smith started as comrades in arms, yet their relationship soured into one of the industry's strangest feuds. "Bone" and "Cerebus" mark opposite ends of the comic-book spectrum in tone and complexity. Their heroes aren't technically human, but you can place virtually all modern graphic novels somewhere between them.

There's more. Read it. Don't fear the Day Pass.

I got the Scare-O-Deleria book in the mail from Scary Go Round the other day. It's nothing that's gonna change the world, but it's a fun, lightweight little story in black and white featuring John Allison's trademark humour and the wonderful scrawl of his hand-drawn art, which is very different from his computer art, but at least as nice to look at. I'd subscribe to this if it was a series, and so should you!

Which reminds me... I have nothing new to report on the series of minis that I proposed on the Reinder Dijkhuis forum back in February. I suppose I still want to do this, but I'm just so pessimistic about having enough of a reader base to make them a success even by the very modest standards of minicomicking. Even the Eye of The Underworld mini-comic only got a handful of buyers! Perhaps I should have pushed it more, but unless that is pretty much guaranteed to make sales jump up by several orders of magnitude, it's discouragingly un-lucrative. A guy like John Allison with many thousands of readers who are known to enjoy buying his products, on the other hand, can use minis to keep people interested, even if they're not directly profitable.

Gosh, my reviews of other people's comics all end up being about me, don't they? John's one of my favorite webcartoonists. I wish he'd stuck around on Modern Tales, but if he had, he probably wouldn't have graced us with so much stuff in hardcopy (his T-shirts are also something to behold, and wear).

(via The comics Journal forums, where the poster's choice of a subject line completely mischaracterises the content of the article)

Long article about the state of newspaper strips, the pernicious influence of the cowardice of newpaper editors, and how webcomics may come to realise Bill Watterson's artistic vision.

Zombie Shelley is back!

Via Comixpedia:

The Wickline Color Blindness Filter allows you to test how your web page or image looks to a color blind person. Useful, but also entertaining, as these sample ROCR pages will show:
(large images below the fold)

(Hat tip to Drooling Fan Girl)
Jennifer Diane Reitz writes:

And that is when it hit me. The teflon nibs were exactly -EXACTLY- the diameter of a single strand of Barilla brand Italian spaghetti. And, this gave me a wild idea.

I ran downstairs to the kitchen and took a strand of spaghetti, and returned to my room. I broke off a length slightly longer than the overly short teflon nibs, and inserted into my old, broken pen. And you know what? THE PEN WORKS NOW!

Seriously. Oh, it cannot do any fine linework, it can only do the thick, standard lines devoid of pressure sensitivity that I have been used to for the past several months...but it works otherwise. Perfectly, for basic, normal functions, such as standard line work, coloring, and erasing. Grunt work.

Which is why, now, I have two pens in service.

One is my brand new pen, which can still do pressure sensitive work. It has not lost that apparently fragile capacity yet. And I intend that it keep that capacity for a long time to come.

My plan is to use the new pen only for times when I want to do special, calligraphic, beautiful lines...for alien text, or fine eye details, or for graphic flourishes. But for the grunt work, I will continue to use my old pen, now made functional only because of a length of Barilla spaghetti inserted into the shaft, a dried pasta nib.

I did today's page entirely with that spaghetti nib. I painted digitally with real spaghetti.

Wapsi Square will start updating 5 times a week starting on Monday.

Cool. It would allow for storylines to become more developed and still resolve faster. Wapsi is one of my favorite webcomics of the moment. It has engaging characters and good line art. It's more story- than gag-driven so it can use the extra updates.

I wonder if it's Keenspot's increased payouts that make this possible? The time required to draw Wapsi has to come from somewhere...

Tamlin cameo in today's Dangerous and Fluffy, on Graphic Smash. Go there now, before it disappears behind the subscription wall (Or subscribe and get access to the archives, and those of Fans, Digger, Flick and a wide range of other action-oriented comics.)

A while ago, I promised to write