Settling in. Fewer surprises this month. Alexa continues to be steady and Compete continues to be erratic, and yet they both have their points. In Alexa, Dominic Deegan rises two spots to rejoin the top 20, while Fanboys Online falls two spots out of it, and I Can Has Cheezburger? nudges past Ctrl+Alt+Del.

As predicted, many of Compete's new additions from last month are back out... though they weren't always replaced by the previous month's mainstays. Out: Filibuster Cartoons, Rob and Elliot, Commissioned Comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. In: 8-Bit Theater, Least I Could Do, Dueling Analogs, Wondermark. Virus Comix and Day by Day slip by more than 20% but remain in the top 20, and Virus is holding on to its recent gains much better than other strips.

Points of agreement. In both lists: xkcd, Cyanide and Happiness, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Penny Arcade, VG Cats, Perry Bible Fellowship, Order of the Stick/Erfworld, Questionable Content, Least I Could Do, Dueling Analogs.

Big winner of the month? For no immediately apparent reason, that would be Cubetoons, with a Compete gain of 2979.0% (much less than Virus Comix' gain from last month) and God Mode, which moved its Alexa ranking from 99134 to 39905 over the course of the month, from 155163 in November. But recent surveys make the month-to-month gains and losses in Compete seem too erratic to be of much use. The Rack has bounced back from its trouble last month, while Elsie Hooper's gain of two months ago is an even more distant memory than it was last month (see below).

Winners of the year: Compete's biggest gainers over the course of the year are Virus Comix/Subnormality (78110.30%) The Fart Party (13317.60%) and Left-Handed Toons (8722.20%).

Biggest losers. Playtime Projects and Misery Loves Sherman are completely off both services' radar and marked for deletion. Miss Dynamite and Please Ask For Assistance dropped out of Alexa, while Compete lost track of Filthy Lies, Elsie Hooper, George, Hero by Night, Poppycock Theater and... Argon Zark, another classic webcomic of old now sinking beneath the waves, last updated over a year ago.

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Candi is a minority protagonist, which is still something of a rarity in the world of comics-- and it comes up in occasional conversation, but it's not really emphasized in story or art. Do you consider that aspect to be part of the basic pitch for the strip, or is it just "a strip about college" or "a strip about an art student?"

It's mostly just a strip about an art student and her roommates. Candi's ethnicity is part of her character, but its not what the story is about. Some of the storylines may touch upon many of the characters racial idenities, but mostly to let the audience know more about them and where they are coming from.

The strip features a couple who seem to be made for each other as each pursues another relationship. Are you just marking time until Candi and Jon get together?

It depends. I go back and forth on the idea of Candi and Jon getting together. They are both very passive people when it comes to relationships, so even if they did get together, the relationship probably wouldn't be perfect at all.

The Wikipedia article indicates that your art "falls into the modern American-Japanese Fusion genre." News to me that someone had found a term for it. You often tweak some of the highfalutin ideas that academics have about art-- what's your read on this?

If that's a new "genre," I guess I'll take it. When it comes to art, people will label it however they see fit, and I think that's fine. If you try to fit yourself into one genre or style, people will find ways to tell you how it doesn't fit at all. Personally, I'm trying to grow away from the manga art style, but its difficult since its how I learned to draw. Old habits are hard to break, and I wish I had studied traditional figure drawing a lot more in the beginning. Everything in hindsight, I suppose.

A few of your characters are pretty negative people, whereas Candi's largely an optimistic type. Are you thrashing out your own competing views in life? If so, how would you describe those views?

Heh, I guess you could say that. Candi is a reflection on who I was in while I was still in art school, so she's still very naive in a lot of ways, but as a result of that she's very very optimistic.

I still try to be a very positive person today, but I'm aware that the world isn't all rainbows and cupcakes. Many of the other characters are just learning basic life lessons themselves. Jessica's philosophy is, for example, "If you don't expect much from people, you can't be disappointed." Is it very positive? Not at all. But she's also learning to loosen up a bit as time goes on.

Keenspot's announced a lot of policy changes recently. How's that been affecting you?

It's been for the better. I have control over all the ad space on the website and keep 100% of the revenue from it. It's a lot more responsibility on the artist's part, but I welcome the change. It just brings me closer to being able to possibly make a living from Candi one day.

What's the road ahead?

The road ahead is a slow, but steady one. I would like to have the comic updating 4 days a week again sometime soon, and possibly print a Candi book this year. Balancing a fulltime job and webcomic is tricky, but I'm gonna try at least. :) ]]>2008-03-16 20:53:46http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=132"I've always felt driven to keep trying new things creatively and experimental web comics just started to feel a little too familiar, y'know? Too safe. I wasn't going to improve as a creator sticking to that ground."
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey

Note: For my thoughts on Goodbrey's early works, see my contribution to The Webcomics Examiner's Aggressive Experiments article (December, 2004).

Best known for his impressive formalist experiments, usually featuring Flash interfaces (eventually culminating in his Tarquin Engine), Goodbrey was one of the early pioneers of the new artistic realms that Web publishing opened to comics creators. In the past three years, however, Goodbrey has produced only one of his "hypercomics," the 24-hour comic Never Shoot the Chronopath, which he published this past December. Most of his efforts these days have gone into more traditional seeming fare: two static humor strips and a longform tale of undead cowboys.

It would be a mistake to think that Goodbrey has given up on pushing himself creatively just because he isn't inventing wild new interfaces, though. "Experimental" is a relative term, and nothing stymies innovation faster than repeating oneself. And even the most traditional methods can help a creator to break new ground if they've never tried those methods before. In fact, the least interesting work that Goodbrey has produced in recent years is the most overtly experimental; "Never Shoot the Chronopath" is an enjoyable little comic, but nothing we haven't seen Goodbrey do before.

On the other hand, Goodbrey's Brain Fist, All Knowledge is Strange, and The Rule of Death all incorporate forms and ideas that are new to Goodbrey's body of work, even if they don't look so different from the kinds of comics most people read every day.

Brain Fist

"The trick with Brain Fist was defining the iPod as a "looking into" device. I think there's potentially a more intimate connection there than with the comics page-- all your attention focused into this single little glowing square."

Goodbrey's first effort at more traditional comics was Brain Fist, which wrapped up last August after nearly a two-year run. A straightforward talking-heads strip, Brain Fist presents a succession of monologues (Goodbrey describes them as "one half of a conversation.") by a rotating cast of characters, including a trigger-happy old cowboy, a devil lady, a foul-mouthed talking cat, and a woman with no eyes. The tone of the strip is generally bleak, exploring the worst impulses of the damaged and the damned, with a frequently philosophical bent. The strips most often feel like simple black comedies, but just as often they venture into petite drama, such as the strip In Tears, in which a young murderess describes an event from her childhood:

"I asked my mother once. Why it always had to end in tears. And I remember she...she just looked at me. So much sadness in her eyes. And then at last, she let out a breath. And answered simply: 'Because otherwise it wouldn't end.'"

The result felt like something of a cross between the self-conscious thought experiments of Dinosaur Comics and the amusing horrors of A Softer World. But like A Softer World, Brain Fist is at its best when Goodbrey leaves out the punch line-- the absurd extremism of the characters creates a wonderful tension between the ridiculous and the genuinely frightening. Relieving that tension with punch lines only reminds us that we are looking at cartoons rather than horribly plausible people.

As static as Brain Fist is, there was still a structural experiment at work. The comic was designed with portable devices-- the iPod specifically-- in mind. Goodbrey saw the potential to tap into that "more intimate connection" by turning a comic into an implied conversation between the reader and the character on the screen. (And given the growing ubiquity of camera phones, it's not far off from the direction on-the-go communication is actually headed.) My own first experience of Brain Fist was its web incarnation, but I downloaded several strips to see how the experience compared.

The first obvious difference is that the panel-to-panel transitions become much more suspenseful, since you can only see one panel at a time. The second strip, titled "Fist," makes particularly good use of this fact-- when you can't see what's coming, the transition from the character's face, to his open hands, to his bloody fists, and back again is very jarring, as it ought to be.

The question of establishing a more intimate connection with the reader is a bit more complicated. I can see the sense of intimacy that Goodbrey suggests, but I can see just as much potential for the opposite. I asked my wife, who was unfamiliar with the strip, to read a few installments on my iPod and describe the experience of reading them that way. Her word: "isolating." Even if you capture the sense of having a conversation with the character, it's impossible to get away from the feeling that they're talking to you through a tiny hole from inside a tiny box. The intimacy that's achieved is an uncomfortable intimacy; the closest approximation I see is how I imagine a conversation in a confessional to feel. But that's okay; the tone of the comic is confessional, and these are disturbed, off-putting characters. Any intimacy with them should be uncomfortable.

Even if you don't have an iPod, Brain Fist is still enjoyable as a webcomic. While the iPod was his inspiration, Goodbrey hoped to create a comic that fit comfortably enough into multiple delivery formats-- iPods, the Web, and print-- that readers would feel they were reading the comic in its native format, no matter which delivery mechanism they were using. It's not actually in print yet, but it certainly does work on the web. Even so, it's worth taking a look at Brain Fist on the iPod; it's a rare sort of comic that actually does maintain a sharper edge in that format.

All Knowledge is Strange

"Trying to work the three-panel strip format twice weekly lets me stretch a bunch of different writing muscles and also gives me a home for the ideas I have that don't fit anywhere else. And I'm drawing things! With my hands! And a Wacom! Not being one of nature's drawers, I'm finding the process to be an amusing diversion."

Goodbrey's follow-up to Brain Fist, All Knowledge is Strange, is a simple humor strip, with a dry, occasionally bleak, sense of humor. Subtitled "A Pictorial Almanac of Necessary Facts," most strips begin with a trivia category, followed by three examples of questionable veracity. For instance, the category of "Problems Guns Can't Solve" accurately includes "Zen Koans," while the more enigmatic category of "Lies the Moon Will Tell You" includes "It's all going to be okay." All Knowledge is Strange has been updating every Tuesday and Thursday since last September.

The most immediately striking thing about AKS is just how un-Goodbrey-like it is. It really is true to the four-panel gag strip format, even if the humor itself is darker than the norm for such strips. There is no structural experiment here beyond Goodbrey just trying his hand at the structure that everybody else is already using. Even Brain Fist, as straightforward as it was, was still playing with form, if not as ostentatiously as Goodbrey's previous work. But All Knowledge is Strange is comics at its simplest. Goodbrey may play a little loose with the traditional rhythm of Set-up, Beat, and Punch-line, but the rhythm is there nonetheless.

It's often easy for creators with an experimental bent to dismiss the four-panel gag strip as played out and uninteresting, but anyone who's actually tried it knows just how challenging it is to come up with consistently funny material that fits into such a constrained format. And setting challenges for oneself is the heart of experimentation. Even if other creators have already mastered those challenges, the only way to truly learn the lessons of the exercise is by undertaking them oneself. It's pleasing to see that Goodbrey has the humility to understand this, however avant-garde his own natural inclinations may be.

Just as pleasing is the fact that Goodbrey's comedic talents have grown since Brain Fist. All Knowledge is Strange may not have the depth or character exploration of Brain Fist, but it's much funnier. Goodbrey is clearly letting loose a little here, setting aside his usual intellectual concerns and having fun. It's not the work that Goodbrey will be remembered for-- humor strips are still not his primary talent-- but as he says himself, it's an "amusing diversion" amidst his headier projects.

The Rule of Death

"What Rule of Death actually is, is the last bastion of me Making It Up As I Go Along... I'm just writing it till it's done. I kinda know where it's going now (sort of. Mostly. Ish), but I only found that out by accident along the way. And I found it out while the audience was watching me find it out, which makes for a different kind of writing experience."

Perhaps the most interesting of Goodbrey's recent projects is his most traditional effort to date. Scripted by Goodbrey and Illustrated by Douglas Noble, The Rule of Death is the story of Pete Colby, a man who died-- then changed his mind and came back. Colby is no flesh-eating zombie, just a quiet man who just wants to get back to living the life he occupied prior to his demise. But he lives in a small town in the Old West, where people tend to notice when the dead decide to walk the Earth, and they're generally not happy about it.

The story is subdued and thoughtful, but with the promise of darker things to come. Colby spends much of the early chapters trying to devise a way of convincing the townspeople that he didn't really die in the first place; failing that, he begins trying to negotiate a peaceable coexistence with them. Meanwhile, Death himself has become aware of Colby's violation of the natural order, and is on his way to pay him a personal visit.

Douglas Noble's artwork on the series is neither pretty nor immediately eye-catching, but his dark rough lines, evocative of woodcuts, do an excellent job of setting both time and mood. Noble's design of Colby in particular looks satisfyingly deathly, without looking typically zombie-ish. And what his drawings lack in refinement, he more than makes up for with an exceptional eye for knowing how to compose a panel with just the right amount of visual information to set tone and build mystery. (According to Goodbrey, Noble often breaks scripted pages into many more comics pages than is Goodbrey's intent . "I get my revenge by writing more scenes featuring the dog, Jasper. He hates the dog and keeps threatening to kill it off in an adlibbed barbed-wire accident. Really it's a very synergistic working relationship we have." – Goodbrey) This is especially important for a story as heavily dialogue driven as this one-- much of the action is just a sequence of philosophical conversations, making it quite a challenge to keep the story visually interesting. But Noble's depictions of the conversations maintains a high level of tension, making clear that these philosophical ponderings aren't mere indulgences; decisions are being made, and those decisions will have real consequences down the line.

Working with a collaborator has clearly given Goodbrey a renewed sense of freedom in his approach to storytelling. Goodbrey's own artwork has a coldness to it, which is well-suited to his experimental structures and self-aware explorations of warped realities, but has a somewhat limited emotional range. (In truth, a lack of confidence in one's illustration prowess is often part of what motivates experimental creators to go in that direction in the first place.) By handing over the artistic duties to Noble, Goodbrey has allowed himself to delve into more emotional subject matter and more complicated character relationships. Not to suggest that The Rule of Death is in any way a melodrama-- the characters themselves are actually very reserved, as one expects from stories set in the mythos of the Old West. But Noble's artwork brings out the emotional subtext of the characters, even when the characters themselves are trying to keep their feelings under wraps. Goodbrey has moved from exploring the nature of narrative to exploring the nature of life itself, exploring themes of identity, morality, and societal acceptance.

Since this is a true narrative, it will be impossible to judge just how successful it is until it's completed, but so far it's enjoyably creepy, with a fun premise, an intriguing cast, and compelling themes. Goodbrey is proving that he is a versatile writer, who can tell a story with or without experimental trappings.

Looking to the Future

The future looks busier than ever for Goodbrey, who has projects in the works for a variety of publishers and media, not to mention the ever-increasing brood of ideas still at the pure concept phase. As with The Rule of Death, many of Goodbrey's upcoming projects are collaborations where he'll be providing scripts, but leaving the art to other hands. Sean Assapardi is illustrating Goodbrey's web-to-print series, Necessary Monsters, which does not yet have a publisher. He's also working on a graphic novel called Improbable Division for AiT (no artist attached yet), and an as yet unannounced six-part project for Marvel.

And he certainly hasn't lost his interest in exploring the possibilities of technology. He plans further exploration of mobile comics, though he has no specific project in mind yet. And he hopes to attempt a "sonic comic" one day, once he's found "the right story or collaborator or sponsor." Oh, and there's one more mysterious technology he's excited about-- but he won't say what it is because he's under NDA. What that might mean is anybody's guess, but with Goodbrey involved, it's bound to open the door to a whole new world of comics-creation possibilities. ]]>2008-03-16 20:31:01http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=131

	Site	Compete.com's "people count" (February)	Month Gain	Year Gain
1.	I Can Has Cheezburger?	454,833	8.30%	6288.10%
2.	xkcd	395,980	12.80%	1532.50%
3.	Cyanide and Happiness	262,590	4.10%	26.30%
4.	Penny Arcade	153,806	-3.10%	100.00%
4a.	Dilbert	144,642	11.50%	88.30%
5.	VG Cats	143,320	45.90%	33.90%
6.	Natalie Dee	136,670	55.80%	195.40%
7.	Toothpaste for Dinner	120,457	19.50%	58.40%
7a.	Garfield	101,433	1.40%	-24.40%
7b.	Peanuts	97,158	5.70%	24.10%
8.	The Perry Bible Fellowship	85,500	30.20%	520.20%
9.	Virus Comix	85,465	19683.60%	N/A
10.	Order of the Stick/Erfworld	84,085	8.50%	40.10%
11.	Questionable Content	82,975	19.40%	227.20%
12.	Day by Day	80,984	20.80%	21.20%
13.	Ctrl+Alt+Del	74,816	-18.70%	100.00%
14.	Married to the Sea	74,597	19.40%	384.90%
15.	Filibuster Cartoons	71,156	196.70%	731.00%
16.	gaping void	65,848	2.80%	63.00%
17.	PostSecret	62,254	27.50%	40.00%
18.	Rob and Elliot	47,109	282.80%	2494.10%
19.	Commissioned Comic	42,058	2054.60%	3373.00%
20.	Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal	39,640	29.00%	868.50%

An odd couple. Patterns are beginning to emerge from the data. Most significantly, Alexa rankings appear slower to change than Compete rankings. Even though the Alexa figures are grabbed from individual days, while Compete covers an entire month, there is much less statistical variation in the Alexa chart. Nineteen of Alexa's top twenty webcomics were also top-twenties last month, with the lone new strip, Dueling Analogs, pulling slightly ahead of Dominic Deegan. The most significant changes on the top 20 are Dilbert, which fell over 800 places, and I Can Has Cheezburger, which is closing in on the top four.

Though there's no change in the rankings for the top four webcomics at Compete, things get interesting after that. In: Virus Comix, Day by Day, Filibuster Cartoons, Rob and Elliot, Commissioned Comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Out: 8-Bit Theater, Least I Could Do, The Book of Biff, Sluggy Freelance, Sinfest. Stay tuned for reversals?

Points of agreement. In both lists: xkcd, Cyanide and Happiness, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible Fellowship, Order of the Stick/Erfworld, Questionable Content, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (replacing Sinfest, 8-Bit Theater and Least I Could Do.)

Big winner of the month? The biggest jumps in Alexa numbers come significantly below the top 20, so give it to Virus Comix, with a Compete gain of 19683.6%. After researching the Digg survey, I don't have to look very far to discover the reason for that. Viral? You better believe it.

Runners-up. In Compete, it's Fart Party with 2118.0%, Commissioned Comic with 2054.6%, and Planet Saturday with an out-of-nowhere gain of 10,489. Fart Party's traffic gain still puts it well below the others, with a "people count" of 6033. Fart Party is a journal comic by Julia Wertz, whose life has recently taken an interesting turn or two. Commissioned Comic is another bigg Digg winner.

Over in Alexa, the most significant ranking gains for the month are for Fart Party again (195736 from 743177) followed by NeverNever, FreakAngels, Skin Horse, and Anders Loves Maria.

The biggest year-to-year gainers in Compete were The Slackerz, still benefiting from its StumbleUpon boost, Basic Instructions, still benefiting from its Scott Adams endorsement, and I Can Has Cheezburger?, still strong but starting to level out its growth curve a little. Of course, all three of these sites have held onto their gains with steady performances.

Biggest losers. Oh, this is a sad day: Electric Sheep has gone offline. Patrick Farley's comics made inventive use of the Internet, but unlike many "experimental" works, they were gripping and moving because of their plots and themes, not just their virtuosity. Farley was an early role model for those of us who wanted to celebrate the Web's possibilities. UPDATE: Tim Tylor notes that Farley had announced a plan to bring his work to electricsheepcomix.com-- two-and-a-half months ago, with no word since.

The second-biggest slider was Planet Zebeth, a sprite comics hub. Based on the blog posts currently on the homepage, its contributors seem to be suffering from distractability and badly soured audience relations. Third-biggest was Home on the Strange, which wrapped its story last year.

Over in Compete, the biggest sliders, in ascending order, were The Rack, Dungeons & Dorks, and... Elsie Hooper, which had been Compete's biggest gainer of the previous month. Hard to explain these dips entirely, especially for The Rack, a strip which would seem to be doing everything right and be frequently linked from its co-creator's popular blog. Yet more evidence that Compete's version of Internet traffic is more fickle than Alexa's, especially in the short term. So what about the long term?

Year-to-year and percentagewise, Compete's biggest losers were Elsie Hooper (yes, again-- making its previous month look like more of a fluke), the long-concluded Pet Professional and Home on the Strange again. The once-mildly-controversial Misty the Mouse and Emerald Winter dropped from Compete scores of 1281 and 1170 to zero: both sites are currently offline, Misty due to server issues and Emerald Winter due to a hacking which deleted the entire site. Both strips' creators have promised to rebuild. Note to creators: make backups early and often!

Compete digs Chicks. Thanks should go to TWG for pointing out that a frequently uncredited mainstay of the independent comics scene, the Jack Chick tracts, have long ago established a Web presence. Unfortunately, Chick.com is a bit too diverse in its offerings to really be a "comics site," but if it were, it would easily place in Compete's top 20, just between Garfield and Peanuts. Now there's a picture. In Alexa, however, it'd place in the 60s.

New additions to the survey, suggested by Wikipedia listings or by users: Camelot Addict, A Doemain of Their Own, Gregnog.com, Purrsia.com, Strawberry Comics (an imprint), Virus Comix, Cectic, Mildly Hot Peppers, Rival Angels, Bobbins, Strange Candy, Purple Pussy, A Town Called Dobson, George, Crowfeathers, Crimson Dark, Please Ask For Assistance, Isotown, Yehuda Moon, Skin Horse, Soxaholix, Lackadaisy, Cavcomics, Hero by Night, Sam and Fuzzy, Jesus and Mo.

Marked for deletion, since they're showing up on neither Alexa nor Compete: BustOut Odds, Fur Will Fly, Incomprehensibility, Kabutroid, Planet Karen, Playtime Projects, The Plutocrat Country Club, Twisted Peel, Cascadia.

Marked for deletion, because though they've gotten some listings, they now seem to be offline or no longer comics sites: Anime Arcadia, The Ultra Geeks, Scribble Kid, Hellbound, This Comic Sucks, Stage Select, Overduemedia.com.

And (sigh) Electric Sheep.

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El: So, tell us a bit about The Phoenix Requiem, what’s the story?

Sarah: It's a fantasy story set in a world similar to a Victorian-era Europe, about the re-appearance of religious and supernatural beings, and the effects they have on the faith and lives of the common people, specifically a small group of friends living in a small northern town.

El: How long will the comic be and how far into it are we at the moment?

Sarah: It will be five volumes in length, each spanning five chapters. At the moment we're a bit over halfway through the first volume. Odd things are beginning to happen to people, but nobody is making any connections or knows why.

El: The Phoenix Requiem. is your second webcomic, following on from the very successful Inverloch - both are fantasy stories and very creative. Where do you get your ideas? What are your influences?

Sarah: Ideas and inspiration come from all over the place. While I try my best not to directly copy off other ideas in books, movies and other comics, they certainly influence my way of thinking. Often the little things, like conversations between two people or a non plot-crucial event, come from my own life experiences and those of my friends. The main story concepts tend to evolve from seeds of ideas, being added to and modified until they become something much larger and more complex.

El: Are there any particular books/movies/other comics you would site as having had a major effect on your own creative efforts?

Sarah: I would have to say no, actually. I don't like to let any one thing become a major influence, because I think I would inevitably be compared to or questioned about that source. In a more general sense though, my comics are movie inspired in that the story follows a cinematic format; they build up slowly, introducing characters in a quiet, non-eventful setting, before throwing them into chaos for an eventual dramatic climactic finale.

El: You’ve expressed some dissatisfaction as to how the finale of Inverloch turned out and have turned that experience to your advantage now you’re penning your new comic. What advice would you give to other writers who are nearing the end of their first project - how do you go about tying up all those loose ends?

Sarah: I think the best thing you can do is not create so many loose ends to begin with! Inverloch became a little more complicated than I had originally anticipated, and I had far too much explaining to do at the closure - but still left a lot of people either confused or dissatisfied. Certainly an advantage to scripting out the entire story first means you can figure out how to tie it all together long before you start drawing it, meaning you can make changes throughout the story if the ending just doesn't work (and you won't have to redraw). Inverloch had a completed script before drawing, but I added to and modified it too much. Stick with your original ideas, and don't over-complicate things.

El: It does sound like quite hard work - so what is it you prefer about epic, story-driven comics as opposed to those which feature many short story arcs or a gag a day?

Sarah: I suppose I like to create things that are much more involving, especially emotionally. I prefer spending time creating and developing characters, and that often doesn't happen so much in gag strips. As far as my own reading preferences go, I also prefer single arc stories rather than ones that just keep going, never seeming to go anywhere or end. I like to know that there *is* a conclusion, a point where the characters overcome whatever problem faces them, and return to normalcy. Also, I am no good at writing consistently funny gag strips. Otherwise, I probably would! :p

El: You mention that a longer story can be more emotive - which do you think plays a greater part in achieving that effect, the characters or the plot?

Sarah: For me, it's definitely the characters. They are what people relate to. Epic plots are one thing, but there's no emotional connection there. Characters we feel for, identify with, and, if written well, come to care about what happens to them.

El: Now, from writing to art - how would you describe your art style and do you offer a tutorial giving insights to your technique when drawing?

Sarah: I would describe it as cell-shading much like stills from a traditional animated movie. Because the story itself follows a more film-like pacing and format, I thought carrying this look throughout the comic would support the impression of it being frames from a movie. I also find that it’s a fast way to work - each full page takes around 6 hours from sketch to completion - and allows me to produce multiple pages per week in a full coloured style. The look itself takes inspiration from both Disney and the more realistic manga art styles. I don't really have any up-to-date tutorials at the moment, although I do show my basic cell-shading steps on the Inverloch site.

El: Which did you get into first, writing or drawing, and when?

Sarah: I've been drawing cartoons and writing short stories from a very young age, although I dropped writing and started attempting to draw seriously in my late secondary school years. I really only started writing again when I created the script for Inverloch; that's also when I started simplified comic art too, as I'd been painting more realistically up until then.

El: What do you think plays the most important part in the success of a webcomic - the art style, quality of writing, regular updates or simple commitment to what you’re doing?

Sarah: I think all the elements play a part. People are often drawn in by good art, but if the story is badly written then many will lose interest. I think story can keep people around longer - even mediocre art won't spoil a riveting, page-turning story. If you have both - a story with great art and an equally expertly-penned story will suffer if the creators can't provide regular, frequent updates. So commitment plays a huge part; completing pages on time, being involved with your readers and forming a dedicated community.

El: How do you account for the success of Inverloch and The Phoenix Requiem? You have a huge fanbase now, but how and when did it start? How quickly did your readership grow? And what do you think was the biggest force bringing in new readers?

Sarah: Success is due a lot to hard work and promotion. If you're only willing to put an hour or two a week into your project, then it would be wrong to have high expectations. Despite my full-time job, an extra 30+ hours per week go into my comic, which means sacrificing other extracurricular activities (and sleep!). Also, if you never tell anybody your comic exists - if you don't advertise, list it, and get it linked - then nobody is going to find it. I've found that toplists bring in a lot of hits, as well as advertisements on other popular comics. The other half of course is producing something that can find an audience, and having that combination of quality artwork, solid writing, likeable characters, and regular updates. You can sweat as hard as you like and spend a fortune on advertising, but if you're not producing something that people enjoy then it's all for naught. The fanbase for Inverloch grew at a slow and steady pace; I don't think there was ever one particular time where I had a huge influx of new people. The numbers of new people visiting every week grew exponentially while it was small, but as the numbers got larger it began to level off. Around 60% of Inverloch's readers stayed on for the beginning of The Phoenix Requiem, and while readership for that remained fairly steady for the first couple of months, it has begun increasing quite rapidly in the past few weeks as the story begins to kick into gear, and I hope it will eventually surpass the readership Inverloch had. I'm far happier with it as a story, and would love for others to also enjoy it. ]]>2008-03-11 23:39:58http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=127Not too far away, as it turns out.

David Hellman

The artist half of the team that produced the now much-missed A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, Hellman hasn't been seen much since his strip's last update in May of 2006. He posted a series of sketches and paintings to his website throughout the following September and the beginning of October, then went offline. He resurfaced briefly to post video of a lecture on his approach to page composition, given in April of 2007 at Johns Hopkins University. And since then, there's been little hint of any new comics forthcoming.

However, he has had a very different sort of project in the works; Hellman's style is easily recognizable in these screen shots for the forthcoming video game, Braid. Hellman has been designing all of the backgrounds and text art for Braid, which is due for release on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade early this year. The game's producers aim to create "Artful, Experimental and Expansive Games," so Hellman's art should be well suited. The game has already received an award for "Innovation in Game Design" from the 2006 Independent Games Festival.

This news may offer little comfort to those desperate for more of Hellman's comics, but as a fan of both Hellman's art and odd little video games, I'll be looking forward to Braid's release.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any information on new projects by Dale Beran, the writer of A Lesson is Learned.

Derek Kirk Kim

One of the early superstars of webcomics, Derek Kirk Kim's first online series, Same Difference, ran online before joining several of his early works in the print collection Same Difference and Other Stories, (Top Shelf, 2004). This work won him an Eisner and a Harvey, as well as an Ignatz for "Best New Talent." It would be almost four years before Kim published another major work.

His next two short stories, "The Ten Commandments of Simon," and "Black Harvest," were announced to be part of a new book entitled Healing Hands. But in 2006, partway through serializing a third section of the project, Kim announced disdain for the material and abandoned the project. Only the two completed stories remain. Soon after canceling Healing Hands, Kim illustrated a short story in 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, which presented a series of origin stories for characters in Bill Willingham's Vertigo series, Fables.

Finally, in August 2007, Kim's second completed book, Good as Lily, was published by DC Comics' Minx imprint. Scripted by Kim and illustrated by Jesse Hamm, Good as Lily tells the story of Grace Kwon, a teenaged girl who is visited by three incarnations of herself at varying points in her own life-- childhood, middle years, and old age-- each of whom is struggling to reconcile with losses from their shared pasts.

Hope Larson

Hope Larson made her first splash in webcomics with her beautiful, but quickly abandoned Girlamatic series, I Was There and Just Returned. She remained away from comics for only a few months, though before returning with her magical tale of burgeoning adulthood, Salamander Dream. But Salamander Dream concluded in 2005, and aside from a few short pieces and illustrations, Larson hasn't published any significant new webcomics.

She has, however, moved on to a promising career in print, where she has been building her body of work and accumulating awards and honors. AdHouse books released the print edition of Salamander Dream in 2005. Only a year later, Oni Press published Larson's second book, Gray Horses, which in some ways picks up where Salamander Dream left off. Where Salamander Dream brought its main character, Hailey just to the edge of adulthood, Gray Horses follows another young woman, Noemie, who has just arrived in Paris, where she will be on her own for the first time.

Larson has yet another new book due out later this year; Chiggers, a story of two nerdy teenaged girls at summer camp, will be published by Simon and Schuster's Ginee Seo Books. She has posted a related short story, Chiggers: Seance, online.

Jason Little

After winning the Xeric Grant for his one-shot, Jack's Luck Runs Out, Little earned an avid following for his "bubblegum noir" thriller, Shutterbug Follies. The story followed Bee, a teenaged photo developer who decides to investigate the source of a series of particularly brutal images dropped off by a Russian photographer. But Shutterbug Follies wrapped up in 2001 (ages ago in Internet time), and a print edition was published by Doubleday Graphic Novels in 2002. After that, Little's website went dormant for almost three years.

In 2005, Little began posting pages of a new Bee story, The Motel Art Improvement Service (portions NSFW). Updates have been sporadic, with occasional hiatuses, making the series difficult to follow regularly. But Little has continued plugging away, recently posting the 47th page of the projected 101-page story. This time out, Bee is on a cross-country bike trip, until an accident leaves her with a wrecked bicycle, stranded part way. She soon takes up with a pill-popping hotel orderly, who makes a habit of surreptitiously "improving" the artwork on hotel walls. If you like it well enough, consider subscribing to Little's mailing list: you can find links to that mailing list and the story at http://www.beecomix.com/.

Deciding what was a "non-webcomic" was also a bit challenging. A few high-scoring entries were repurposed print comics or selections from same-- I've removed those, but let two borderline cases into this survey. One, "This Modern World," has gotten its start as a print comic but is reaching more people via Salon and Working for Change. The other is the incredibly popular "Garfield minus Garfield," a Web-based alteration of a print-based comic, which has gotten more diggs than anything else on the list. Setting those two apart, here's what we get:

0a*. Garfield, minus Garfield (6347 diggs, made popular 6 days ago, originated at garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com)

1. Remember Windows ME? Here's the explanation (5042 diggs, 154 days ago, xkcd.com)

2. Exploits of a Mom (xkcd) (4910 diggs, 145 days ago, xkcd.com)

3. LOLzcats go after Scientology, too. (4907 diggs, 38 days ago, icanhascheezburger.com)

4. Man proposes via LoLCat (4687 diggs, 18 days ago, icanhascheezburger.com)

5. THIS. IS. MUSHROOM KINGDOM!! (4675 diggs, 322 days ago, vgcats.com)

6. The Internet Has Always Had Loud Dumb People... (4322 diggs, 202 days ago, xkcd.com)

7. Master Chief Unmasked! (Pic) (4121 diggs, 153 days ago, godmodeonline.com)

8. That's not supposed to happen! (4029 diggs, 64 days ago, explosm.net)

9. The #1 Programmer Excuse for Legitimately Slacking Off (3792 diggs, 201 days ago, xkcd.com)

10. Kansas Classrooms (3645 diggs, 224 days ago, bigfatwhale.com)

11. This. is. PORTAL!! [comic] (3588 diggs, 1 day ago, duelinganalogs.com)

12. The SWEETEST LOLCat - no more fighting (war) (PIC) (3554 diggs, 62 days ago, icanhascheezburger.com)

13. xkcd: Duty Calls (3546 diggs, 12 days ago, xkcd.com)

14. Applying for a Job at IKEA [Comic PIC] (3510 diggs, 281 days ago, unknown)

15. Sometimes It Doesn't Pay to Have Good Eyesight [COMIC] (3468 diggs, 3 days ago, pbfcomics.com)

16. Geek's version of an aquarium (3369 diggs, 96 days ago, xkcd.com)

17. Please Vote Because of the Real Important Stuff [COMIC] (3317 diggs, 26 days ago, nataliedee.com)

18. Explaining the Success of Shitty Bands [COMIC] (3267 diggs, 13 days ago, viruscomix.com)

19. Meditation- The Geeky Way [Pic] (3129 diggs, 102 days ago, geekculture.com)

20. Do You Have Any Idea How Offensive That Is? [COMIC]) (3097 diggs, 19 days ago, filibustercartoons.com)

21. Why Wikipedia is Awesome (3059 diggs, 63 days ago, explosm.net)

21a*. Hello kids, It's me, Mr. 9/11 Man (COMIC) (3049 diggs, 90 days ago, salon.com)

22. Shopped! (2998 diggs, 42 days ago, xkcd.com)

23. Lesbian Cuisine [c&h]/SFW (2991 diggs, 42 days ago, explosm.net)

24. xkcd: Fuck Grapefruit (2955 diggs, 7 days ago, xkcd.com)

25. xkcd: Map of Online Communities (2955 diggs, 7 days ago, xkcd.com)

26. Arguing With a Believer Is Like Playing Chess (COMIC) [Included because of this interesting tidbit: "Reported by Diggers as Possibly Inaccurate"] (2840 diggs, 44 days ago, cectic.com)

Conclusions: xkcd is still Digg's darling. A "long tail" of xkcd items extends well past this top 25, while the two other major contenders, I Can Has Cheezburger? and Cyanide and Happiness, didn't have nearly as many total entries. Still, ICHC?'s entries were "made popular" (hit the homepage) more recently than xkcd's, on the whole. That could be a sign of gathering momentum on Digg...

Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del almost made the top 25, with a 2918-digg entry from thirteen months ago and a 2685-digg entry, respectively. Still, "almost" is pretty disappointing for two of the top webcomics, who have much more history than these more recent upstarts. VG Cats's #5 entry is the oldest on the list, too.

Man, Diggers can't get enough of those Sparta jokes: such jokes occupy positions #5 and #11, and the top Ctrl+Alt+Del strip is another one. #5 is the oldest on the list but #10 is the newest. (VG Cats and Dueling Analogs' entries feature clever crossovers with popular video games, while CAD relies on well-established character traits.)

I try to stay off value judgments in these lists, but... of all the Perry Bible Fellowships Diggers could pick, that doesn't seem like anywhere near Gurewitch's best work. But it was frontpaged around the time that Gurewitch announced his semi-retirement, which may have given it extra momentum.

I'm heartened to see a few webcomics on the list that I hadn't even heard of before (Virus Comics, Filibuster Cartoons, Cectic.) I've added these to my watchlist and will put them in future surveys.

Does inviting readers to digg you on your site itself help your chances, or is that just adding useless clutter to your pages? Well, "Garfield Minus Garfield" and xkcd don't mention Digg anywhere... but ICHC?, Cyanide and Happiness and Dueling Analogs do. So does The Joy of Tech, although its top-25 ranking is actually taken from Flickr. All things considered, adding links to places like Digg and StumbleUpon probably couldn't hurt, if the Digg link can be integrated seamlessly into the larger design of the site. For some sites, though, that's a big if.

100% of the top 25, plus the two also-rans, are one-off gags. God Mode is an ongoing strip, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from its dugg installment. The closest thing to a real series is "Garfield Minus Garfield," which is at least connected by an ongoing theme. But in general, Diggers' short attention spans have no place for the continuity strip.

Only 24% of the top 25 were placed in "Comics and Animation." Only 44% came up in a search for "comics." Even allowing for the ICHC? factor, it's remarkable how few Diggers feel the need to call a comic a comic-- calling it an "Image" seems to suffice. To my mind, this represents a widespread acceptance of the form among Digg users, with the validity of that form taken for granted.

I'm glad to see that. ]]>2008-03-05 21:31:44http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=129 The usual "news cycle" about this topic has gone something like this: Wikipedia deletes an article about a relatively popular comic, webcomics readers and creators respond with a storm of criticism and armchair-quarterbacking (I'm as guilty of this as anybody), the article is restored, general solutions are proposed, but in a few weeks, the only people who remain to deal with the topic are those with a high tolerance for Wikipolitics, who are almost all Wikipedia editors. Everyone else has gone on to do other things. Wait a year or two, repeat.

For some time, I've felt this approach had given us a skewed view of what was actually happening to webcomics on Wikipedia. Enough time has passed since the last dust-up that I can now test this theory.

It's been a year since the interview in which I asked Dragonfiend, a Wikipedia editor particularly known for motions to delete, whether the future held more Wikipedia articles about webcomics, or fewer. She responded by pointing to Wikipedia's exponential growth: "Yes, some articles will be deleted, but many more will be created." Though she didn't actually promise an increase in the number of webcomics articles, she seemed to expect it. Since the interview was published, Wikipedia's overall growth has shifted from exponential to linear, but remained robust.

Well over a year ago, I did a quick Google search of wikipedia.org pages for "comic strip," "comic book," and "webcomics." Results in November 2006: 7370, 18500, 2530. Results in March 2008: 8390, 19400, 3020. Tha-a-a-at does look like growth, though considerably more modest growth than the 57% or so Wikipedia itself has experienced. ("Webcomics" references seem to be up about 19%.) Then again, such a search covers many pages on Wikipedia that aren't articles, such as deletion discussions, requests, editorial comments, and others. It might be more meaningful to take a look at Wikipedia's own "list of notable webcomics."

"Notability" standards have gotten tougher in the last three years: articles require citations more often and the citations are expected to come from more trustworthy sources. Under these circumstances, I'd expect Wikipedia to shed a number of webcomics entries that were entered in more permissive times. But those standards were firmly in place by the time of the interview, and I'd certainly like to believe that the section is seeing growth. Certainly I'm seeing more webcomics that I consider "notable" (using Webster's definition and not Wikipedia's) all the time, and the mainstream media, the biggest source of "reliable citations," is paying more and more attention.

Here's a comparison between that page as it was about a year ago, shortly after the Dragonfiend interview, and as it is at this writing. (In both versions, Dragonfiend had final edit, so the effect of editors' differing standards is likely to be minimized.) Here are the names of the webcomics that list has gained and lost.

(Sorry, guys, but this article took way too long to do, so I'm too pooped to add in links for each entry. Go to Wikipedia and search the names of the strips in question if you are curious.)

Added:

1. Freefall
2. Bobbins
3. Zortic
4. Okashina Okashi - Strange Candy
5. Purple Pussy
6. Zap!
7. Camelot Addict
8. Town Called Dobson
9. George
10. The Dreamland Chronicles
11. Minus
12. Planet Karen
13. What the Duck
14. Lackadaisy
15. Quirksmith
16. Hero by Night
17. Three Panel Soul
18. Last Blood
19. Octopus Pie
20. The Night Owls
21. Air Force Blues
22. Bob The Angry Flower (as a "newspaper comic with a large online audience")
23. Dilbert (ditto)

Deleted:

1. Road Waffles
2. Gaming Guardians
3. Striptease
4. Deep Fried
5. Wish3
6. Cuentos De La Frontera
7. Professor Hobo
8. Miss Dynamite
9. Pupkin
10. Natalie Dee
11. The Starship Destiny
12. Instant Classic
13. Filthy Lies
14. Skirting Danger
15. Yirmumah
16. Felicity Flint, Agent From H.A.R.M.
17. Fighting Words
18. Everybody Loves Eric Raymond
19. Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth
20. Pandect
21. Pure Pwnage
22. Dungeons and Denizens
23. Goblins
24. Scribs
25. Alecto: Songbook
26. Innocent
27. Atland
28. Talismen
29. Theater Hopper (yet, unlike all the other deletions, it retains its own Wikipedia page)

So all told, that's 23 additions to 29 deletions (28 if you don't count Theater Hopper.)

But not so fast!

While thinking of webcomics that might qualify as "notable" (a bit of a toss-up, because different editors interpret "notability" in different ways) I discovered a number of extant webcomics articles that had never been entered on the list. If we added these to the main list, it would put us back over the top (though that would still hardly qualify as "robust growth"):

Strips Notable Enough To Have Pages Of Their Own, So Why Not Entries On The List of Webcomics?:

1. Theater Hopper
2. Married to the Sea
3. FreakAngels
4. Dresden Codak
5. High Moon
6. Return to Sender
7. Sequential Art
8. A Doemain of Our Own
9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid (note: there may be others, these were just a few that jumped out at me)

It's difficult to suggest webcomics for nomination, because the differences in opinion about "notability" mean that almost any nomination would be discussed.

But of the listings we've lost, I'd most question the deletion of Natalie Dee, which is still placing in one top 10 in the Unreliable Survey. Moderate Alexa rankings shouldn't be the determining factor in a listing, but a top-10 Alexa ranking might be another story. Natalie Dee, the cartoonist, is the only female cartoonist to place anywhere on either list, and her Married to the Sea does have its own Wikipedia entry. When you consider that it's done with husband Drew of Toothpaste for Dinner, which is also listed, this situation begins to look a bit chauvinistic.

Rounding things out, here are a few strips that have gotten attention on these pages and elsewhere in the last year, which might be worth an article of their own. As a cartoonist with three wikilistings (two of which are out of date), I'm in no position to get into Wiki-editing myself, and if you're thinking about entering this thankless field, I'd pray God have mercy upon your soul. But if you really are determined to help webcomics here, these suggestions may be the place to start:

Strips That Might Qualify As "Notable:"

1. Natalie Dee (see above)
2. HijiNKS ENSUE (need I remind you how celebrated this strip is by top blogs? Wikipedia has a bias toward print sources, but if any blogs are respected enough to be the exceptions, then BoingBoing and Gizmodo are.)
3. Basic Instructions (the endorsement by Scott Adams is the comic's biggest claim to notability, making it a nearly unique example of a webcartoonist mentored by a well-known newspaper cartoonist.)
4. Sugarshock (written by the notable Joss Whedon, published by the notable Dark Horse Comics to spearhead their MySpace initiative. Like Zuda, it's a milestone in webcomics' development.)
5. Bayou (we've already got the first Zuda contest winner, High Moon, and one of the instant winners, The Night Owls, so why not the first instant winner?)

Even if I didn't want to give the total number of webcomics articles a bit of a boost, I still wouldn't want to suggest webcomics-related articles for deletion. I'm not remotely temperamentally suited to that task. But as it happens, there's no shortage of activist editors who have demonstrated a willingness to take it up.

Conclusions: Whether webcomics' representation on Wikipedia has grown or shrunk is maddeningly inconclusive from the data given-- some of the unlisted entries are new (Dresden Codak) and some are not (A Doemain of Our Own), but there's no way to track how many unlisted webcomics entries existed last year and how many of those have since been deleted. The Google searches mildly suggest growth, the "list of webcomics" page mildly suggests shrinkage. One thing is certain, though: the number's not growing in proportion to the growth of Wikipedia in general. Whether those growth rates should sync up with one another is a debate outside the scope of this study.

Food for thought, eh? Pop by the forums and discuss.]]>2008-03-04 15:01:14http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=126substance. Substance takes time. I'm just one guy, and I don't even think my strengths lie in this kind of work. There's only so much I can do.

With that in mind, I thought I'd post a list of articles that I would love to see but don't personally have time to do. If you've been asking me how you can help with the site, or how you can use publicize your own efforts, then volunteering to write one of these for me is probably your best shot. Hit the "contact" button above if you're interested and we'll take it from there.

Which Awards Are Winners? A roundup of awards that webcomics can win and have won, from the webcomics-focused like the WCCAs and the Clickies to more generalized, but more prestigious, comics awards like the Harvey, Ignatz and Eisner. What are the problems and strengths of each? (I'd love to do this, but given my history with the WCCAs, I think I'm too close to it.)

Worldwide Webcomics. I know way, way too little about the pursuit of webcomics in cultures where English isn't the dominant language. I haven't learned much since I did this piece last year.A general survey would be ideal, but a specific report on a particular nationality (or language) would also be acceptable.

"Read 'em While They Sleep." Like "Worldwide Webcomics," this was an idea I pursued last year. It's pretty straightforward: find some worthwhile webcomics that have stopped updating in 2007, and point them out to the rest of us so that we can see them before they vanish into the ether. (Of course, some of the strips covered in the last installment did revive... and at least one of them has stayed revived. But we can't be sure that'll happen.)

The State of Mobile Comics. I've kept up with this so little since leaving Clickwheel, it's not even funny. What companies are trying to advance this form of mobile entertainment, how much progress have they made since last year, and how are the iPhone and related products changing the game? UPDATE: Someone's volunteered to take this on.

The State of Printed Webcomics. Looking at sales charts, is there a particular kind of comic (besides "a popular one") that does well in the Amazon market, the bookstore market? (I would love to be able to study the direct-through-Paypal market too, but I expect too many big sellers would be a bit tight-lipped about specific business information. Feel free to prove me wrong!) UPDATE: Someone's volunteered to take this on.

The State of The T-Shirt Market. I think the only way to do this one is as a general report on T-shirt sales in 2008. How is the market changing? What works, what doesn't? Are the Shmorky/Todd Goldman and Jess Fink/Hot Topic stories starting to have an impact on how major sellers do business?

Webcomics and the RSS Feed. More and more comics have 'em these days, but people are using them in different ways. Who's using what method? Which are the most popular feeds according to Google Reader, and what do they seem to have in common? (I'm happy to share my own list of 300+ feeds to get you started.)

The State of Comics Filesharing. Someone has to say it: Z-Cult FM's shift to non-DC, non-Marvel and non-SLG material hasn't really changed anything, unless you believe Z-Cult was the only file-sharing hub on the Web. What percentage of comics are being file-shared now? How many people are downloading them? And can we present any proof that this sharing is ultimately helping, or hurting, publishers' bottom lines?

That'll do for a start, I think. Tune in later this week for new pieces by both Alexander Danner and me about some "Where are they now" webcomics stories and a long view of the webcomics-Wikipedia intersect. 'Til then!]]>2008-03-02 23:25:31http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=124 3. The Crosbys Take Keenspot. Chris Crosby has always been Keenspot's public face, but the company has always been run by a group of four. Teri Crosby, Chris's mother, is staying on, but Darren "Gav" Bleuel and Nate Stone, who constructed the company's technological base, are training their replacements and moving on. The press release about the matter has little to say about Keenspot's future plans, which is a little eyebrow-raising, since the company has rarely been reticent about those.

IMPORTANT?: Never underestimate the unpredictability of Chris Crosby. Keenspot isn't what it used to be, but it still runs the immensely popular webcomics community Comic Genesis, hosts a handful of formidable talents and is one of the few webcomics brands taken seriously in the mainstream media. And hey, You Damn Kid was still in development, last anybody checked...

OR NOT?: It has been some time since Keenspot has made any real waves in the webcomics world. The Crosbys have seemed to be more focused on the scriptwriting and Wowio sales for their own creations than their company's fortunes. And while you can count on the Crosbys for quirkiness, their practicality has been only a sometime thing (anybody remember the Keenspot bricks-and-mortar retail outlet?). If the company fails to change, or changes to fail, its impact on the webcomics scene is likely to be confined to nostalgic veterans like me, who remember when we could call it "the Universal Press Syndicate of webcomics." And really mean it.

2. Jess Fink v. Hot Topic. Two months ago, I described Todd Goldman's art plagiarism as a "non-story," in part because it didn't seem to have any lasting effects beyond itself, in part because eight months after the incident, no one seemed to be reporting any other cases of art plagiarism. Looks like I might have to revise that assessment. Cartoonist Jess Fink is pursuing what seems like a legitimate plagiarism charge-- no doubt emboldened by the resolution of the Goldman case. Once again, Gary Tyrrell is on the story.

IMPORTANT?: Fink shows no signs of going away quietly, having recently found legal counsel. Hot Topic is a much bigger target than even the millionaire Goldman. Online anti-plagiarism activism really depends on cases like these to focus attention on its cause.

OR NOT?: I'm not sure whether more attention should be paid to Hot Topic, the big retailer with the deep pockets, or "Newbreed girl," the design company that actually produced the shirt. The former is certainly more lucrative to sue or pressure successfully, but the latter is much more likely to fold.

If the case gets wrapped up in legal proceedings that outlast the average Internet activist's attention span, the narrative may change to "big guy screws the little guy, and whaddayagonnado?" Which wouldn't exactly be a new story in the world of cartooning. So, all in all, I think the importance is going to depend on the follow-through.

1. Nicolas Gurewitch Semi-Retires At 25. At the peak of his popularity, the Perry Bible Fellowship cartoonist announced that he would no longer produce comics weekly. Other projects beckon!

It would be a slippery-slope argument to say that this probably means he'll soon stop altogether. But enough other cartoonists have followed that basic pattern that that is the way I'm betting.

IMPORTANT?: The best argument for this story's importance is the example it sets for other cartoonists. Many model themselves after Charles Schulz or Will Eisner, aspiring to fifty-year careers that end in death. It's interesting that the mortality-obsessed Gurewitch has chosen another path, and he's successful enough, critically and commercially, that a small band of talents may follow his lead in the years to come.

This story struck me as jaw-dropping when it first came out, and the analysis from Journalista, Fleen, Comixtalk and The Comics Reporter was largely confined to "isn't it great that this guy gets to do what he wants to do?" Gurewitch's book was an Amazon best-seller, he consistently places in both top 20s in the Unreliable Surveys, he's got a number of syndicate outlets and he's taken a clutch of awards. Why walk away from all that?

OR NOT?: Probably for the same reason that Gary Larson, Bill Watterson and (for a while) Berkeley Breathed did-- to head off burnout. One's interests shift as one gets older, and if your strip is bound together by a certain sensibility more than a set of characters or a setting or a theme, the strip gets harder to maintain as your sensibility changes. No matter how much effort you put into it, at some point you've said what you want to say, and the exercise begins to feel repetitive.

Let's be honest: Gurewitch's Web output hasn't been anywhere near weekly in a long time. So this announcement just makes official what Web readers can see with their own eyes.

And there's a big difference between Gurewitch's exodus and Larson, Watterson and Breathed's-- when those cartoonists went, no one else stepped in to fill the void. Gurewitch's own particular brand of brutal whimsy will be missed, but the field has no shortage of interesting voices. Let someone else take their place in the sun now, as fresh as PBF was when it started. As Gurewitch was fond of reminding us, today's innocent ball of childlike wonder is tomorrow's moldering corpse.]]>2008-02-29 06:37:04http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=115Happily, B. Shur has stepped up to continue that work, and is busy taking comics in fascinating new directions.

His lively imagination and impassioned drive toward increasingly ambitious structural experiments have made for consistently surprising and inventive comics. His surreal meditation on depression, "Cave Monster," was vivid and alienating, incorporating highly detailed digital art, with a surprising organic richness. His follow-up, "I Am a Rocket Builder," was especially ambitious, telling not just one, but four different stories, each set in a different location, but with a shared roster of characters influencing each of the plots. And if that's not complex enough, one of the four stories experimented with different forms of reader interaction in each update. At the click of a mouse, strange creatures appeared in from a witch's pocket, birds transformed into monsters, and carnivorous fish devoured each other. And it all told an enjoyable story in the process.

This same drive toward newer, bigger, more sophisticated (both technically and aesthetically) comics also leads him to be fickle about his own work. He usually loses interest in his own projects before his readers do, and has shown few qualms about shutting down a project that no longer excites him. "I Am a Rocket Builder" ended rather abruptly, while "Cave Monster" didn't end at all. (By Shur's account, the latter ceased to function because Shur himself was feeling far removed from the depression that had inspired the project in the first place. Good for him, bad for an intriguing piece of art.) Shur is up-front about this-- his own site description acknowledges the contents as "a series of half-completed projects, aborted ideas, and interactive doodles." And he doesn't seem particularly concerned about that.

The latest of these interactive doodles was a parody site using a replica of the Craigslist website, with small cartoons and doodles linked from the various Craigslist categories. After Shur's hiatus following the dissolution of his linked stories project, the parody site was enjoyably cute and funny. But it was a far cry from the boundary-pushing projects Shur's readers have come to expect. It now seems, though, that this was really just a placeholder, while he built the interface for his latest project, "Coming Home," which just launched in January.

There's only two pages of actual comic so far, but already it was worth the wait.

"Coming Home" looks to be Shur's most ambitious project yet. The interface alone-- an interactive replica of a Mac OS desktop-- is stunning. Functioning drop-down menus allow you to change the comic's desktop background or read notes from the author. (The menu titled "Monsters" contains no content yet, but hints at intriguing possibilities.) Desktop icons can be dragged about and double-clicked to open the "files." Multiple files can be kept open at once, allowing for interaction and cross referencing between seemingly unrelated pages of content. This isn't an interface designed for the reading of a linear story (though Shur promises that there is one). It's an interface designed for exploring a world. It demands to be played with and poked at in the hopes of finding yet more surprises even after you've looked through all the files and menus several times over. As Shur begins to add additional content, it can only become even more engrossing.

This type of experiment does run the risk of being pure gimmick. Interactive comics always stand a real chance of descending into cheesy "Choose Your Own Adventure" pastiches, and a desktop-like interface could certainly have pushed the work even further in that direction. But that doesn't seem like a danger yet. The interface feels true to the comic, and true to the aesthetic Shur is working towards. Just because an author chooses to give the reader freedoms doesn't mean he has to give up all control of the work.

There's plenty more to see here than just the interface. The artwork is as strange and beautiful as any of Shur's past offerings. Set in an abandoned clock factory in a run-down part of the city, backgrounds alternate between rich browns and golds and cold greys. The characters appear as silhouettes, save for a bit of color on each person's shirt and flecks of white in their faces.

We know little about the cast yet, but the first page of the comic links to brief bios of each of the five principals: Me (a former child genius with no actual talent), The Other Me (it's always handy to have a backup), Dumpster Phil (little is known, but much is rumored), Margot (she once cooked a piece of broccoli by playing a guitar at it), and Bones (a cat with an eye patch who was previously seen in both "I Am a Rocket Builder" and "Cave Monster." He died in the latter when he was devoured by some sort of rodents.).

And that's all there is so far: an interface, a hint of the setting, and a roster of characters. And yet that's enough to promise that an intriguing and thoroughly enjoyable project is forthcoming. Given Shur's history, "Coming Home" may yet frustrate readers who expect neat storytelling and definitive conclusions. But even if this is all there is, if Shur abandons it tomorrow, without ever getting past page one, it's already an odd and delightful experiment that hints at a range of ways to make webcomics that has yet to be fully explored.

And that's what really matters here, because in Shur's world, building a rocket isn't about going to the moon. It's all about how incredible it is just to build the rocket.

"You Can't Has That!" The inclusion of I Can Has Cheezburger? and PostSecret on this list may confuse or even infuriate some readers, but I've already presented my argument for their inclusion here, and I think we'd be unwise to ignore the influence of these "community-built" experiments in visual-verbal sequences, especially since they serve as a source of new ideas. Certainly nothing else in webcomics has an apparent year-to-year growth curve like ICHC?: it's climbed from the 60,000s in Alexa to its current 2085 ranking, while Compete puts its year-to-year growth at 38,108.4%.

Top Three Shakeup.: The addition of I Can Has Cheezburger? knocks xkcd out of the top spot on Compete, but Cyanide and Happiness surges ahead of it on Alexa. Penny Arcade comes in fourth and third. This doesn't bode well for my prediction that Cyanide and Happiness would decline out of the top three, but we still got a long year ahead.

Points of Agreement. In both lists: I Can Has Cheezburger?, xkcd, Penny Arcade, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Cyanide and Happiness, VG Cats, Questionable Content, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Order of the Stick/Erfworld, Sinfest, 8-Bit Theater and Least I Could Do.

Spikes. According to Compete, the biggest month-to-month spike in traffic comes from Elsie Hooper, a cult black-and-white horror comic coming back from a period of inactivity, with a 1575.20% traffic gain. Another big gainer was Joe Infurnari's The Process (1251.6%), which has gotten a lot of buzz all over via Juxtapoz Magazine, Newsarama, and especially Webcomicgeek, which called Infurnari "The Artist of the Year." Alexa hasn't noticed these two yet, but it does confirm Compete's third-biggest spike, 849.9% for The Slackerz, whose recent strips, ironically, feature its characters fretting about their traffic figures and Internet politics. UPDATE: Scott Smith of Slackerz kindly wrote in to correct my earlier impression. He reports "an unexplained mass of referrals from StumbleUpon regarding a couple of my past strips, like this one, a comic about CSI that was published a year ago." Reddit also referred to the strip soon after, but StumbleUpon referrals made up the lion's share of the traffic boost, a boost which continues at this writing-- although now with Smith's active encouragement.

Alexa, then and now. Pulling Alexa's three-month percentages for this survey turned out to be more challenging than I could manage, so instead, I've compared the scores to the data from the November survey, subtracting the new Alexa rankings from the old ones and dividing the results by the new ones. Of course, this system exempts any site that was not surveyed last time, so I Can Has Cheezburger? doesn't qualify. That makes the biggest gainer over the last four months Freak Angels, Warren Ellis' hotly anticipated new project, going from 2391673 to 257553 as it developed an online community and neared its launch date today. The biggest losers are No 4th Wall to Break, the completed In Wily's Defense and the years-since-an-update Stupid Children, all of which dropped off Alexa's radar altogether.

Zero to 60. Hijinks Ensue gets the highest Compete ranking of any strip that wasn't around last year. I've documented one incident that may have promoted its growth here.

Dead stop. Of the strips that went to a zero score in Compete this time from non-zero scores last time, the biggest decline came from Digital Purgatory, but it wasn't that notable a fall-- the "people score" was only 455 before. Site seems to be between updates and a planned redesign.

Year-to-year growth. Nothing matches I Can Has Cheezburger?, but Compete also reports strong gains for Left-Handed Toons, Lucid TV, Hyper Death Babies, The Slackerz, Simulated Comic Product, Captain Excelsior, Tiny Ghosts and Dresden Codak. (Gains for Unshelved are illusory, as it switched URLs last year from overduemedia.com to unshelved.com. Alexa's different system assigns the same rank to both URLs.)

Steady as a rock. Features whose Alexa ranking has changed less than 1% since November '07: Achewood, Unshelved, Transe-Generation, Striptease, as well as Comic Genesis. Strips whose Compete ranking changed less than 1% between December and January:Melonpool, Girly, Pure Pwnage, I Drew This.

Sinking fast. Compete's biggest year-to-year losers, excepting URLs that have been replaced or have lost interest in comics altogether, are Carpe Diem, Silent Devil Productions and Where The Buffalo Roam. Carpe Diem's loss probably reflects series creator Graveyard Greg's long periods of inactivity, but his recent return may pull it out of this slump. Silent Devil generated some attention last year by getting into webcomics and cutting a deal with the popular The Devil's Panties, but its new print projects haven't generated a lot of heat, and projects like The Devil's Panties and Super Frat have largely independent brands. Where The Buffalo Roam's decline is a bit depressing… it was the first true webcomic… but creator Hans Bjordahl hasn't been keeping up with his new Bug Bash lately, and general interest in "artifact comics" may be on the decline.

Over to you: For a full gathering of this month's data, click here. And to discuss this survey and make suggestions for the March edition, go here. ]]>2008-02-14 12:08:53http://www.webcomics.com/full_blog_story.php?id=113Still, after reviewing five different comics readers, all of which attempt to address this issue to one extent or another, none entirely satisfactorily, I can't help thinking that the final answer to this issue won't be new software, but rather new hardware.

The first time I saw a commercial for the iPhone, the feature that caught my attention more than any other wasn't the touch screen, or the convergence of technologies, or the convenience of real portable Internet access. It was the fact that when you turn the device upright, the screen automatically reorients itself, switching smoothly between wide-screen and tall-screen layouts. It's probably not a vital feature to a handheld internet telephone, but if my desktop monitor could do that, then print-formatted comics could look just as good on screen as any web-native strip. You could even utilize the beautiful high-res full screens seen in CBZ files or DC's Zuda, and really make the most of both the page and your screen.

If comic readers were the only people who'd use such technology, then it wouldn't likely exist. But it seems there is already a demand for such a device from other customers, such as gamers, designers, and even avid users of PDF documents. As a result, rotating monitors, though not yet common, are available. For example, Asus makes a 19" LCD flat screen with 90 degree rotation. Meanwhile, the company Portrait Displays is producing a software package called Pivot that handles the screen reorientation. Such monitors may still be a little pricey for most folks-- at $349 (on Amazon), the Asus model I mentioned above is the least expensive I've seen. Of course, if you really want the tech now, without dropping the cash, there are plenty of DIY tutorials out there.

So far as I can find, none of the currently available rotating monitors automatically reorient the way the iPhone does, but I have no doubt that the technology will come to our desktops soon enough. And after that, maybe Marvel will feel free to go a little simpler when they design the amazing new reader application for their next online comics initiative.

ComicMix

To say that ComicMix's reader prioritizes reader concerns isn't to say they leave publisher concerns out entirely. ComicMix still includes branding. But the branding never overshadows the usability of the software or the readability of the comics, as it often does any time a publisher becomes overly concerned with creating a unique reading experience. (Marvel has been particularly susceptible to this pitfall.)

ComicMix's reader is a simple affair-- nothing revolutionary, nothing pointlessly flashy either. Pages appear as JPG files in the main window), with a toolbar at the top of the screen for navigating them. There's no DRM here-- you can treat these pages like any other JPG file, including saving or copying the images. The usual options are present: single page view, double page, or thumbnails. The best reading is to be had by zooming in on a single page, but since the pages are print-formatted, this means seeing only half a page at a time. Unfortunately, there is no way to toggle between zoom levels without losing your place on the page.

Navigation is similarly simple. Like Marvel and DC, ComicMix has left out the click-to-advance navigation, but they've done the next best thing-- one-button scrolling/page turns with the space bar. There are a handful of other keyboard commands available, but with the occasional exception of the zoom controls, you don't really need any of it. Everything essential is achieved with a tap of the space bar. Simple, quick, and easy to find on your keyboard.

All told, using this reader doesn't feel that much different from reading image files on a standard HTML page, with the addition of zooming controls. That's a good thing. New readers to ComicMix's site won't have to waste any time learning odd controls or hunting for hidden settings. They can just get straight to reading comics.

The short version:

The Good