Happy Holiday To My Federal Employee Readers
Also, Wonderella. The rest of us have to work today. Yay?
- Looks like ten years of near-daily updates has provided a chance to start afresh over at Sinfest. Slick is slicker, the Devil is more devilish, and I hope that tomorrow things will be back to normal, because if this is a reboot and I have to wait nine years to see more progress on the Fuschia/Criminy romance (which started just over a year ago), I’ma get pissed.
- [Editor’s note: this item edited to correct dates; thanks to Jeff Carter for correcting us!]
Comics start and comics finish — Boxcar Astronaut will hit 150 weekly installments and the end of its storyline
yesterdayon Sunday. Backyard adventures only last as long as the summer, and next spring the games will be different. Very Calvin & Hobbes feeling to the wrap-up, and at 150 strips, it’s the perfect size for an archive trawl over pizza tonight.
Newish strips that I’ve been looking over, and perhaps you should too:
- The Optimist, which has a pretty strong sense of design and virtually zero archives at the moment. However, creator Tom Pappalardo has about two decades of cartoonin’ in him, so it’s not your usual two-update-nonwonder; Pappalardo also worked on Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! for a couple years. Big possible downside right now — no sequential archive; you can look up strips by tag, but not browse by date. Weirdly enough, this is a design decision on the part of the creator:
Many (but not all) of the WTF strips can be viewed on this site in a deliberately hard-to-navigate manner, so as to encourage you to purchase the book collection instead. Ha! Suck it!
So … yeah. We’ll let you know how that last part works out.
- If it went on hiatus and got retooled, it’s new, right? Scooter and Ferret by Georgia Ball launched in 2004, ran until 2008, when it was retooled for a chance at newspaper syndication, and now is back:
[F]ollowing the antics of a bad-tempered Ferret, his dim-witted buddy Scooter and his superficial best friend Maridee. Scooter and Ferret is available 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Which sounds okay enough, but what interests me is what an established strip, after a year off and retooling, would look like. A lot of self-editing can take place in a hiatus, and a much stronger strip could emerge. Unfortuantely, the website is having technical difficulties at the moment, so as soon as it’s back we’ll look at it a bit more closely. But seriously — taking time off and coming back? Intriguing.
Looks like Scooter and Ferret are up and running again.
By Dan on 01.18.10 4:14 pm
Okay, okay… truth be told, I didn’t have a sequential archive on The Optimist site because I accidentally messed up that bit of code once and never got around to fixing it. Ho-ho. (I just manually added in links to provide monthly archives. So *there*.) Thanks for the mention, FLEEN.
By Tom Pappalardo on 01.18.10 6:36 pm
Just our luck our hosting service would be out to lunch on the day you mention us… I swear its the first time!
By Georgia Ball on 01.18.10 6:54 pm
Thanks for even more new comics to check out – despite the vast quantities I’m already following, I’m always delighted to hear about more good stuff.
A recent encounter of mine that you might check out – Archipelagocomic.com. Apparently posted five books worth of material in August ’08, and has been updating about two pages a week since then. Like many others, the art is quite rough in the early pages, and watching it steadily improve is one of the joys of comics. But it’s the story that kept me compulsively hitting next, next, next,…
By Alice Bentley on 01.19.10 2:56 am
Thanks for the mention of Boxcar Astronaut Gary, but actually our 150th and final strip will run this coming Sunday, the 23rd. Yesterday’s strip was only the penultimate chapter.
By Jeff Carter on 01.19.10 10:20 am
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