I got an email t’other day, one that I can’t say I ever expected to receive. It’s worth quoting in full:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

That from Andrew Rothery, and therein, friends, lies a tale. If you’re new around here, you may not recall the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, a thing so old that its website has long since lapsed and been staked out by domain squatters¹. A thing so old that our first, offhand mention was in 2007, when it was assumed anybody reading this page would just know what we meant. Since that was a long damn time ago, let us recap:

In February of 2005, the denizens of a message board decided to see who could maintain a Mon-Fri daily webcomic schedule longest. There were rules: No posting of sketches, two panels minimum (but you could do a single-panel update every ten strips), your update must go up by midnight PST, and if your hosting went down you had to post somewhere by deadline and let people know where to find it. The contest would start 28 Feb 2005, it cost US$20 to buy in, and the last person standing got the pot, which amounted to US$112 (next to last would get the money raised from site ads, last thought to be about US$135).

There were names that you’d recognize in there: Natasha Allegri, Jennie Breeden, Tom McHenry, Scott Kurtz, John Campbell², Phil McAndrew. People that were prominent webcomickers and then weren’t and then were again: Steve Troop, Greg Dean, DJ Coffman. Ed Brisson, who is writing at half the comic book publishers, was one of the referees. Ali Graham does media marketing now; Dean Trippe teaches kids how to make comics.

By the time this blog started, half the field had been eliminated; heck, even Chris Crosby, who is presently on year twenty one of Superosity, was out by November of 2005. Seven remained at the five year mark; there were only three remaining at the end of 2014 (among them the very sexy Brad Guigar³) and only two on the 10th anniversary (Guigar ran three days worth of single panels close out the old year and ring in the new).

And there they have sat for the past five years: Payne and Rothery, here on the last day of Year Fifteen, ready for the first day of Year Sixteen tomorrow, continuing on out os a sense of pride and sheer cussedness. At this pint, I imagine it’ll be one of the two claiming the big purse and the estate of the other getting the small purse. Or, alternately, they both decide to celebrate having reached the milestone by getting blind drunk tonight, and both accidentally sleep through updating tomorrow, leading to a dual disqualification; after all, you can’t spell irony without Iron.

Spam of the day:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

We aim to please.

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¹ The oldest instance of which was April of last year with an asking price of US$1888. Today’s asking price has gone up to US$94,888 which seems a tad unrealistic.

² That’s a sad story, one of bad choices and brain chemistry gone wrong.

³ At the start of the IMDGC, you’d have been hard pressed to find a stronger advocate of regularity in posting schedule than Guigar. Take a listen to him on ComicLab these days, it’s the furthest thing from a priority for him. Time changes us all.

I swear I came up with that title before I saw that the first panel listed on Saturday is for The Simpsons.

Saturday Programming
Cartoon Network: Steven Universe
10:00am — 11:00am, offsite
Well, sort of offsite; much like the STRIPPED screening at the Marriott, the Steven Universe panel (with series creator Rebecca Sugar and supervising director Ian Jones-Quartey¹ plus the voices of Steven, Steven’s dad, and all three gems) will be outside the convention center, but part of the show and thus require badged access. In this case, the Hilton Bayfront (that’s the one on the opposite side of the convention center from the Marriott, past the meadow where they line up the Hall H crowd for four days), in the Indigo Ballroom.

Writers Unite: Writing and Pitching Comic Stories
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 25ABC
If you can’t make it to the Bayfront Hilton, this session featuring the ubiquitous Jim Zub looks like a good alternative.

Diversity in Genre Lit
10:00am — 11:00am, Room 7AB
Okay, this is getting spooky; the even more ubiquitous (at least at this show) Gene Luen Yang will be on the panel here …

Avatar the Last Airbender: Legend and Legacy
10:30am — 11:30am, Room 24ABC
And, allegedly, here as well. Okay, at least this isn’t two sessions in exactly the same timeslot like yesterday, but given the distance he’d have to cover to get from 7AB to 24ABC, Yang couldn’t spend more than 20 minutes in the first if he wanted to make the start of the second. Does he know that he’s apparently being shuttled from panel room to panel room all weekend long without so much as a bathroom break? And will we see the ever-elusive triple booking to go with two (and counting) doubles? Let’s find out together!

Berkeley Breathed: The Last Comic-Con Panel!
12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room 9
Whoa. Breathed is almost as reclusive as Watterson. All these influencers on Generation Webcomics are coming out of their cloistered retirements.

Spotlight on Bryan Lee O’Malley
12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room 28DE
Everybody knows that Seconds is out this week, right?

We Are BOOM!
12:30pm — 1:30pm, Room 24ABC
The description starts with a blurb about a deal with 20th Century Fox, and a movie staring Denzel and Marky Mark, but I know I’m not the only one that thinks all of BOOM!s interesting stuff is coming on the all-ages end of things. To that end, I’ll note that Noelle Stevenson of Lumberjanes and the Frank half of Becky and Frank (of numerous Adventure Time backup stories and The Amazing World of Gumball) are the participants what caught my eye.

CBLDF: Banned Comics!
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 30CDE
Featuring Gene Luen Yang. I should get a running count of how many panels he’s on. I’m starting to think my kidding about him being held prisoner by the showrunners is more true than I meant it to be.

Spotlight on Lucy Knisley
2:00pm — 3:00pm, Room 28DE
Lucy Knisley is one of the very best creators we have, and the only one that makes me physically hungry reading her work.

30 Years of Usagi Yojimbo!
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 28DE
I am sometimes puzzled that you don’t see more written about Usagi Yojimbo until I realize that after three or four months you run out of ways to say Yep, Sakai put together another master class in comics storytelling, art, layout, and pacing. Uhhh-gain. He’s had a hell of a rough year, and I think everybody showing up to give the guy a little love would be an excellent thing.

Comics Journalism: The Hulk Takes a Butt Selfie and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next
6:00pm — 7:00pm, Room 23ABC
My nominee for best panel title of the show.

TeeFury-Practicing Nichecraft: Marketing & Brand Development for Independent Artists
6:30pm — 7:30pm, find it yourself
Seriously? They gave a self-promotion panel to frickin’ TeeFury? It is the end times.

Best and Worst Manga of 2014
7:00pm — 8:00pm, Room 23ABC
Props to my buddies Brigid Alverson, Christopher Butcher, and David Brothers (and also Deb Aoki, who I don’t know personally but whose writing I find smart and insightful) for sharing their wisdom so late in the day when by rights they should be at a bar enjoying a well-earned drink or eight.

Sunday Programming
Panels & Pictures
12:00pm — 1:00pm, Room 32AB
There’s some counter-intuitive staffing on this panel devoted to graphic novels for kids. Kazu Kibuishi, Raina Telgemeier, Mike Maihack, Sonny Liew (artist of The Shadow Hero, written by Gene Luen Yang, who will apparently be in a coma at this point since he’s not on the panel) all make sense … the curveball comes from the inclusion of Emily Carroll, whose work I absolutely adore, but never thought as for kids. Then again, kids love to have the bejabbers scared out of ’em, so I can see them eating her stuff up. Well done, panel organizers!

All-Ages Comics Have Arrived
1:00pm — 2:00pm, Room 24ABC
Gene Luen Yang will be dragged from the medically-induced coma that he’s been in for the past twelve hours long enough to talk with the likes of Dave Roman, Ian McGinty, Dave Petersen, and moderator Shannon Watters.

Fund My Comic
2:00pm — 3:00pm, Room 29A
Everything I said about the Kickstarter panel on Thursday would also apply here, except they included Kel McDonald on this one. Still offering that dollar to successful crowdfunders to attend.

Keenspot 2014: Giant-Size Panel of Pure Weirdness
3:00pm — 4:00pm, Room 4
The blurb says this is the 14th year for the Keenspot panel and that sounds about right. What caught my attention was the inclusion of DJ Coffman, who we haven’t seen in the webcomics scene for some time. Interesting times we live in.

First Second in Conversation
3:30pm — 4:30pm, Room 26AB
Readers of this page know I stand second to no man in my admiration of :01 Books, and they’ve got four of their very best in conversation: Paul Pope, Faith Erin Hicks, Lucy Knisley, and the restless ghost of Gene Luen Yang. This is my fourth must-attend of the weekend, and if I’ve got my math right, Yang’s eighth panel of the show. If you see him on the floor, maybe pass him some snacks?

Spam of the day:

In just the woman previous ones coming via our lawmakers yet optional places of work, Gurus if i could truthfully come with the actual most jane’s seminars elizabeth LBJ program relating to arrest important affairs collage tx of, Precisely your sweetheart learned.

You know how artificial language-construction systems are getting to the point where they can persuasively simulate like a 13 year old Ukrainian kid? Yeah, this was apparently written by a system that simulates a drunken libertarian brand marketer.

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¹ I’ll give you a dollar if you ask him when RPG World is coming back.

Man, I love it when creators send me the logical next part of the story. Makes my life easier. One may recall (if one wishes) my discussion of Michael Jonathan, his minicomic Quail: The Song of the Blackbird EP, and the plan to get music produced to accompany said minicomic. Did I say plan? I meant totally completed project, as the music to accompany Quail is now complete and available to all and sundry. Jonathan has this to say about the tunes:

The album that syncs with this comic (and my new Quail comic “Rope”) released today! You can listen to the entire album for free at the bandcamp site and download track 2 “Breath of Searing Gecko” for free as well.

The bandcamp site is http://gambelcovey.bandcamp.com/ — Gambel Covey is my band that worked on this, made up of actor/comedian Chris Yule and illustrator/girlfriend Nan Lawson.

I worked super hard on it and I’m EXTREMELY proud of how it turned out.

And well Jonathan might be; he provided a download of the full song package to me and I’ve given the tunes a good listen, which range from pretty damn credible bluegrass (Song of Blackbird) to almost Pomplamooseian, verging-on-preciouscore folk (the aforementioned Breath of Searing Gecko). Can I also say that it’s awesome that when you download your songs and/or comic and/or prints, the button on the screen says Gimme? Like the music, it’s just so unapologetic in its enthusiasm. GREAT FUN WOULD LISTEN AGAIN.

• Also on the followup front, DJ Coffman weighed in on the Drunk Duck situation via Fleen’s patented ActionCOMMENTS™ ‘tother day, and in case you didn’t see it, it was pretty useful stuff:
  

  I got a lot of emails last week about this, primarily because I encouraged a lot of creators starting out to use DrunkDuck back when I was cheerleader. For the people having problems I rewrote my “How To Host Your Own Webcomic” article and posted it here.

  Although every situation is unique and you can’t just follow a checklist and expect it to work in all circumstances, Coffman’s put together a pretty damn comprehensive guide that will get you about 97% of the way to hosting comics on your own, from buying your domain to changing DNS to setting up WordPress and plugins. In contravention of Tyrrell’s First Law of the Internet, the comments at Coffman’s guide are useful and informative, so give ’em a read.

• Not followup, but as long as we’re talking infrastructure, let me mention Karmacritic. It’s a new tool for creators to get feedback on their work, but much like some commenting systems (especially those derived from the Slashdot model), it implements a karma mechanism to try to weed out the unthinking and promote the helpful. From creator Marco Leon:
  

  I created a site where creators can submit their work and get feedback. That’s been done before, oh, only a hundred times? But the twist here it this: this community doesn’t vote on the submissions themselves; instead we vote on the feedback given to those submissions. If you give useful feedback, you get karma points. And submissions are sorted in the front page by karma points. You see? In other words: any creator who invests some time helping other creators with useful comments or advice, will get rewarded with more prominence for his own work.

  If that sounds complex, the whole thing is explained with pics over here. Karmacritic is not for profit; I’m paying for the bandwidth out of my own pocket, and I just hope it helps people. Sometimes all we need is a few words, and we go from there for miles.

  I’ll confess that I didn’t get Leon’s explanation at first, but the pictures cleared up my misconceptions in short order. If you’re just starting out and haven’t developed a network of trusted peers to give you feedback, Karmacritic can quite possibly give you that first set of critiques that kicks you in the direction of developing your skills. Maybe? It’s a mechanism to receive feedback, but all critiques ultimately are useful or not depending on what the receiver is willing to hear and act on.

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What? No footnotes? I must be slipping.

Already really late, so let’s hop straight to the Lightning Round!

• TopatoCo have already filled one of their positions (announced last Thursday/Friday depending on where in the world you are), but you can still be their intern, especially if you are:
  

  [R]esponsible, reliable, generally self-reliant, and able to take direction even if you know deep down that what you are doing is wrong.

• The greatest thing ever painted by Jeff Zugale (as of today; tomorrow, the sumbitch will probably blow the doors off this magnificence before lunch) has progressed to the published fanfic stage (not sure where that falls on the hierarchy) for the beneift of Lupus research. Yay!
• Meme in the making? The System impressario Rosscott launched the hashtag on Twitter, and now “Future World Problems” has escalated to illustrated form.
• Definitely meme — draw yourself (or favorite creator) as a three-stage Pok&eacut;mon progression: The Portrait-Dex.
• From the Department of Redundancy Department: I’ve been following DJ Coffman’s e-book off an on for the past three weeks or so since it launched. Still haven’t read it (I’m not a cartoonist trying to make ca$h), and have been curious to see which cartoonists were using it. There’s testimonials and blurbs provided on Coffman’s site, and I’ve followed links to get familiar with some strips that I previously didn’t know. In that list: one “Mark D Ashworth”, who waxed rhapsodic about the benefits Coffman provided to his own efforts, and signed with his (Ashworth’s) site, www.memesink.com.

  Which consists solely of a redirect back to Coffman’s site.

  I like to give everybody the benefit of the doubt — and this could be just a busted link — but given the fairly rapturous praise given to Coffman’s book immediately on launch by people who didn’t seem to actually create comics, gotta say that Ashworth isn’t helping DJ dispel whatever perception existed that the testimonials were empty.

Got a link in the mail to the preview of an e-book by DJ Coffman. This isn’t a review, since I a) don’t have the entire book in front of me; b) wouldn’t have had to time read it properly since it launched yesterday, and c) it’s not even remotely aimed at me. Ca$h for Cartoonists is bright, colorful, has a busy, eye-grabbing (almost advertising-like … and if there’s one thing ad guys knows, it’s how to hold eyeballs) design, and (as befits an e-book) up-to-the-second. For instance, you can get a discount on website hosting with a code provided in the introductory section, something that would be all but impossible with a traditional ink-and-paper presentation.

The chapters are pretty specific (“Spot Illustration”, “Digital Caricatures”, and “ACEO (Art Cards)” are the first three), and are presented in a detailed, relentlessly upbeat tone. There’s not enough in the preview to see if any of the full book ramps back a bit from the enthusiasm (Here’s how you can do this!) to something perhaps a bit more realistic (Here’s how I did this, you should be able to make it work similarly, but keep in mind that it’s a different economic climate and your mileages of persistence, luck, and talent will vary.), which I hope does happen.

All those copies of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (or more recently, all the How to Draw Manga books) led to an awful lot of starry-eyed kids who were certain that success was imminent; some lost interest or found other dreams, some wound up bitter, and they didn’t have an easily identifiable and accessible author to blame their lack of success on. Here’s the risky bit for Coffman:

A VERY SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time when you buy the full edition of my ebook, I’m going to make myself available to you for the ?rst 30 days as a Personal Cartooning Career Coach… or Comic Coach… or, well I really don’t have a fancy title for this service, but if you draw comics or cartoons and want to personally pick my brain, or if you’re feeling stuck and need inspired… this is the deal for you!

Why be coached by me? I’ve done just about everything you can do in the cartooning business, from newspaper syndication to full blown super hero comics with a big hollywood producer. Not only have I had a ton of success with my skills, but I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way which I learned from and can pass a lot of knowledge on to you.

ONE MORE THING… You’ll have a chance to get on the AWESOME LIST. What is it? A special email newsletter for buyers of the full edition only, which basically assures this book will never end! I’ll send you updated ways to earn more money with your cartoons and illustrations as they become available. [emphasis original]

I hope that those starry-eyed kids don’t take Coffman’s enthusiasm for a promise, and really hope they don’t read over the most important part of that quote:

I’ve also failed many times and made mistakes along the way

Let’s cut that down one more time for those in the back:

I’ve also failed many times

No book will keep you from having your own failures, starry-eyed kids! Keep that very important bit of perspective in mind while you peruse the lessons! $47 to download, going up to $97 after September 30.

• Speaking of $47, if you had that much to spend but don’t want Coffman’s book, you could get the 2-day VIP package for NEWW 2 and have $2 left over to buy a refreshing beverage. Plain ol’ non-VIP passes are $10, and one-day passes $6, for those that can live without the special-edition NEWW2 Sharpie (not sure I can).
• Speaking of books, Chris Eliopolous pulled a fast one on me with this morning’s tweet:
  

  The book. http://www.miserylovessherman.com/2010/08/26/the-book/

  I can’t be the only one that got his hopes up that this would be another Misery Loves Sherman collection, can I?

It’s kinda quiet today; webcomics are normally full of dudes and ladies with opinions and words and everything, and today — quiet. In the wilds of Colorado, Boxhead breaks out the semaphore flags. In a San Francisco toy store, a pantomime takes place, exeunt lovers. In Anytown USA (although one that tends not to get snow — draw your own conclusions), taxes provoke silent desperation and release for one family, while workplace frustrations drive a man to the only place he can have peace and quiet (although it’s been pretty quiet for him all week).

Ninjas always strike silently (whether in the Great White North, or plummeting over Western Maryland), so I’m not sure that counts, but the noisiest two dudes geeking out over a unicorn in silence? That’s definitely weird (although they appear to have made up for it some 65,000,000 years in the past). A bit more recently (at least in geological terms), a man quietly plumbs the depths of filthy desires, and Jeph Jacques provides an unusually quiet episode of Magical Love Gentlemen — usually, it’s pretty shouty until all de plookin’ ‘n thrashin’ be done wif.

On the far end of the spectrum, Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV has gotten loud, gender-swapped, and marginally less SFW than it normally is, but hey — eight page update. Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz has found that existentialist films can be made more quickly than the insanely detailed comics he normally does. Meanwhile, messers McGuire, Green, and Lesnick have joined forces to create comics that can never be read on an iPad even as xkcd goes old-school … hint: “xyzzy” does nothing.

April Foolery has a long history in webomics, but even today there’s some legit stuff happening:

• DJ Coffman returns to daily stripping
• Steve Troop maintains a perfect once/year update schedule at Zero Worship
• K-9 Lives has a new short up at Vimeo
• The Ego And The Squid just hit update #1003 (more significant than 1000, because squid)

Sometimes you find yourself pondering the big imponderables. For instance:

• Is It Funny Today? launched on Monday courtesy of a couple a college guys. Webcomic gets registered, people vote on the latest installment being funny or not … I dunno, just doesn’t seem that compelling to me. I don’t need to know if one of my webcomics is found worthy of laugh-chuckles by 47% of site users for me to enjoy it. At some level, it reminds me of some game show or reality show or something, where the reward isn’t for actually knowing something, but for guessing how many other people think the same way.

  That’s besides the fact that not every webcomic is meant to be funny, or to be funny in every episode. The developers appear to be giving this some thought as well with a new “story comic” feature. We’ll see if IIFT? turns into a thing, or is just the proverbial flash in the pan.

• What the hell is up with ADSDAQ? A bunch of webcomics creators use it as a key component of their advertising model, and a bunch of them them are telling me that ADSDAQ has dropped them as clients. Reasons have ranged from “Improper Content” to “Too Many Graphics” (um, they do know what webcomics are, right?) to “Site Under Construction or Broken”.

  I can’t tell if this is a general retrenchment in internet advertising, or if it’s a deliberate attempt to pull back from webcomics accounts — in which case, what’s wrong with saying Sorry, our models say that your site doesn’t produce enough benefit for our advertisers, nothing personal? If you’ve been using ADSDAQ and have been dropped, add a comment with the reason you were given. If there’s logic here, then by Darwin we’ll find it!

• What’s the best webcomics story of the year? This isn’t my year-end roundup — that’ll be in a few weeks, and in a somewhat unusual form. No, I think the most significant thing that’s happened in webcomics this year is an outburst of collegiality and common good that’s been building. There’s a lot of webcomickers that have gone out of their way to talk about their peers and promote their work, to provide a general “Rah, go Team Webcomics!” feel at conventions, and today, there’s an outbreak of everybody and their dog pointing to webcomics merch made by other creators. Seriously, look at the front page of the people who make their living at this, and chances are pretty good they’re linking to what could be considered competitors for your entertainment dollar (start here if you like).

  If not for the fact that DJ and Scott still bring it, I might think I’d fallen into the last reel of It’s A Wonderful Life. And Scott & DJ? Seriously guys — I love your work and like both of you personally, but if either of you didn’t exist the other would have to invent him. Let this be the Christmas that your hearts grow three sizes and you find the strength of ten webcomickers (plus two). Do it for the children.

Couple things going on in the world of webcomics. For starters, the Applegeeks crew are due in next month’s Dark Horse Presents on MySpace. The topic of Dark Horse in general came up at lunch with Rick Marshall yesterday, and we’re astonished by the string o’ webcomics talent that they’ve been trafficking in.

But the big story is undoutedbly the news from CBR that Platinum have entered into a deal to produce a Hero By Night TV show. You remember Hero By Night? Created by a guy named DJ Coffman who, as of this writing, hasn’t actually been contacted by Platinum regarding said deal? Since the partner mentioned by Platinum in their press release, IM Global, appears to have a track record in distribution and has a number of projects in the pipeline, this may be more than just a PR announcement where the project at issue never comes to fruition.

That leaves the obvious question, What about DJ? The contracts offered by Platinum for the 2006 Comic Book Challenge aren’t public (momentary pause here to offer some kudos to Zuda for their disclosure of the contracts; I don’t like a lot of the terms they contain, but at least they’re where we can all see them), so I asked DJ for some broad outlines about the agreement he has with Platinum. I didn’t ask for the particulars of rates or dollar figures, but did get some interesting details:

Judging from that clip, not too much to ask at all.

Finally, following up on Tuesday’s story about Help Desk’s financial woes, creator Christopher Wright is reporting that his readers have dug down into their pockets, and that the site will remain up for at least another month. Obviously, it’s not a long-term solution, but it’s at least a short-term happy ending.

Oh, yeah — I update the blog every weekday. Right.

• Missed it, but Dirk Deppey caught it: DJ Coffman‘s got the latest on Platinum/WOWIO non-payments. Key bit that jumped out at me:
  

  [Platinum head] Scott Rosenberg use to say to me a lot “Perception is reality.” He showed a lot of passion for promoting Drunk Duck and letting the creators do their own thing there and not interfere with the site. But now the PERCEPTION is that he did, or somebody there did, see this place as a mine for young creators. Many roped into contracts with that mobile side, not paid … lied to, as the above email suggests. The truth though is that Platinum Studios is poorly, poorly managed. And right now, there’s just no money to be had. They’re holding on for that big deal to come through, and it just might. And that’s ALL they care about. But at what cost?

  So we at Fleen are forced to ask again: have any creators been paid by WOWIO for Q2 yet? Answers on a postcard.

• Okay, whose heart skipped a beat at the sight of photo-rendered “Dark” Esther De Groot? Look for Esther & Sarah’s ‘zine to be all fumetti-stylin’ SGR for the rest of the week.
• A philosophical musing now, prompted by an email from a reader who identifies himself only as “Andrew”, regarding a videogame that I had not heard of (I have no game appliance in my home, and confess my interest in the medium is mostly sparked by new Civ iterations):
  

  I know this is old news, but I’ve barely seen any notice in webcomicsland — Penny Arcade plugged Braid, but no one’s pointed out that the art bears the unmistakable stamp of David Hellman from A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible.

  Unmistakeable stamp indeed, Andrew — the screens I’ve now gone and looked up for Braid are a welcome breath of ALILBTDII-style goodness from Hellman.

  The question occurs to me, can videogames of an episodic nature (like On The Rain-Slick etc., or BONE) be considered a branching or outgrowth or form of webcomickry? Considering that a webcomicish (and yet … more) enterprise like SBEmail is also almost a game-lite (what with all the hidden things to find), we’ve got a really blurry line.

  Looking back to last year’s Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, the backlash against Steve Purcell was, as far as I can see, motivated more by the extraordinarily sporadic and slight updates, and not by the fact it was essentially an on-rails version of the Sam & Max game. We’ve already established a consensus that webcomics and indy (print) comics have largely merged into one entity — how much broader can the category become? Your thoughts, please.

That’s how the kids talk today, right? All “cool” and “hep”? Anyway, I noticed that several webcomickers have been taking swipes at the current financial crises here in ‘Merica. For those of you in the rest of the world, short version: we’ll be bartering cigarettes by this time next year. In the meantime, please enjoy the comedy musings of Matt Boyd & Ian McConville, Sylvan Migdal, and Tatsuya Ishida, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

• New webcomic discovery: Tim Smith, one of the creators of Head In The Clouds, invited me to take a gander at this newish (two months or so) offering. It’s a two-character play, a new microscene staged in each strip, and within those inherent limitations it’s doing pretty well. There’s something about this that makes me think of haiku — very brief, very minimalist in art and dialogue, very clean and expressive. Good start so far, and I’ll be interested to see if the creative spark can be maintained inside the self-imposed structure without it going stale.
• Tommie Kelly has invited me a few times to take a gander at Road Crew, which just hit 100 updates and the end of a storyline, so this is a decent time to mention it. A little expository at the beginning, but it looks like that was just Kelly setting the basis, since there’s been a better story flow since then. At the risk of being slightly cutesy, it’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to F Chords’ Hamlet. Don’t get too excited about the Shakespeare references (after all, being called “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies” sounds grandiose at first, too) — I just mean to say that Road Crew is what happens just off-panel in a story about musicians. Point it out to the roadie in your life.
• Interview with Chris and Kyle Bolton over at The Pulse. I haven’t read SMASH before, but I think I’m going to have to check it out.
• One thing I really enjoyed doing last year (and sadly, don’t have the time to do this year) was be a judge for Webcomic Idol. This year’s judging panel has just been, um, empaneled, with DJ Coffman and Xaviar Xerexes returning, to be joined by newcomers Brad Guigar and indycomics superstar Jim Mahfood (I loved the stuff he did in Oni Double Feature).

  It’s just about a week or so until the call for entries, so put your applications together, and figure out how you’re going to interact with the judging panel. Best guess — DJ will channel his inner Simon, Xaviar will be Randy, and the other two will have to reveal themselves in terms of their judging styles¹.

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¹Brad’s widely known as the nicest guy in webcomics on the planet, so we’ll have to see if he can bring actual critical feedback to these kids with a Cintiq and a dream of making it big. I’ve never known him to look for anything other than the best in people, so one is forced to assume that he’s totally Paula, only less batshit insane. We hope.