Webcomics News & Things 8/30-8/31

Congratulations to August J. Pollak, whose Some Guy With A Website is now featured on the Huffington Post. The HufPo is the fifth most popular blog on Earth according to Technorati.

Here's a contest that's actually respectable: "Pitch Your Game" from The Penny Arcade Expo.

More Wikiscanner fun: state governments discover their employees are filing paperwork on 8-Bit Theater.

Censored: This Opus installment. Newspaper editors continue ever vigilant for the next cartoon jihad, sort of the way Homeland Security keeps watching for the next kamikaze hijacker. (Lightning will strike twice ANY DAY NOW!) Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that this is not a portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed or even of a Muslim woman, but a moonbat trying on multiple identities, but whatever.

Comics installments: Uh oh. Okay, I'm just going to give up guessing where Brad Guigar is going with all this. Also from Brad: the best pun I've seen in ages. And I don't need to tell you why I like this one, do I?

My favorite comic of the day: Shaenon Garrity asks, "What if Edward Gorey drew Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles?" Apparently it would be AWESOME.

Miscellaneous: "KNEEL BEFORE BARGAINS..."

Superbad

This was the best-reviewed teen comedy at least since Mean Girls, and I'm in the business of teen comedy so I had to check it out.

When the credits rolled, I turned to Greg and said, "That was the best movie I've ever considered walking out of." Things pick up nicely during the second act and by the end it's firing on all cylinders. But to get there, you gotta sit through a lot of "the outrageous buddy," Seth, being really obnoxious and hyperactive. Greg called him "Cartman in eight years." Some hints of his redeeming virtues, early on, would have made things go down a lot easier.

The best thing I got from it was a reminder that a cliche-sounding premise-- the boys are hoping to score cool points by bringing ID to a party and getting laid, but WILL THEY EVER GET THERE?-- can easily be made fresh, simply by avoiding the plot points everyone's seen before. I hope Gisele and I can do that when it comes time for The Great Karen Showdown of 2008.

"Heroes"

Annotated version starts today. Hey, remember when we all thought Voyager was as bad as the Star Trek franchise could get? J.J. Abrams, OUR FATE IS IN YOUR HANDS.

Penny and Aggie On Tablet

Yeah, you know what? This gets its own post after all, on account of bein' SO PURTY and stroking my sacred ego.

GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY

It's like Jeffrey Rowland is giving a seminar titled "How to Separate T Campbell From His Money." I haven't bought a merchandise shirt in over a year, but you better believe I'm buyin' this one. I was sold before I even knew it was for charity.

Other stuff from all over:

Penny and Aggie on a tablet PC, via Wowio.

I suppose congratulations are in order to Jorge Vega for winning the Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge, even if the headline "millions of votes received" looks pretty shabby if you know that "voters" were encouraged to "vote as many times as they liked." But Vega's Gunplay does have an interesting pitch and early fragments look promising. Some good may yet come of this. But Jorge, prepare to spend the next year being known as THAT GUY.

Stuff Sucks is ending somewhat awkwardly and abruptly as Liz Greenfield struggles with the slower connections in her new digs. I suppose the transition between this strip, where the lead resolves to stop jumping from relationship to relationship, to the most recent two, where he dives right into a new relationship, is appropriate to the character's aimless pattern. I suppose the fate of the record store is kind of funny. But it's a disappointing ending to a young-relationship strip that looked like it could have grown to give Questionable Content tough competition. I hope Greenfield refines her art a bit and comes back with a brand-new winner in a year or two.

The Paranormals webcomic helps kids learn to read.

A couple days ago, I suggested that nobody made that big a deal about webcomics anniversaries anymore. Then somebody made a huge deal about The Joy of Tech's 1000TH STRIP DING DING DING DING! The universe mocks me.

I've been meaning to link to this quote for a while: "Hello registered user! I am the semigod for this artificial pocket universe. Please select an option." The background of that panel is truly inspired.

Strips that are hilarious, but only if you know the series in question: example one, example two.

I thought this Wordpress plugin was pretty funny too.

Wait-- Sproose can't be "user-powered search!" Mahalo is already "human-powered search!" Unless... USERS ARE NOT HUMANS...

New webcomics magazine. Gisele and I have agreed to be interviewed for issue #2, so I'm totally biased, but it's by Michael Rouse-Deane, who's an old hand at this by now.

I wonder how many cartoonists might benefit from this quick how-to about image optimization for search engines?

Odds'n'Ends

All right, I gotta get this day started, so let's blitz through the rest of this:

Wowio: Just to be extra clear, since it seems some missed this: "information shared in aggregate only" means that no information specific to individuals, like e-mail addresses or such, is ever shared with anyone. Wowio asks for demographic information like age and income level as part of the signup process.

Worth listening to, MARVEL AND DC: Christopher Bird outlines a sensible proposal for using webcomics' well-established and addictive episodic format to save, or at least help, the traditional comic-book industry. This conversation is an endless one and I can't get sucked in today, but Bird is one of the few big thinkers who's still in the direct market up to his eyeballs, so he's worth reading if you are too.

Not sure why this blog is linking to a five-year-old comics-PHP-making program. I'm kind of interested in the program's stated ability to build PHP pages without a database, which would certainly make setup easier. But I'm wondering if you pay a price on the back end. I've contacted the people known to have used it and I'll let you know if I learn anything.

Jesus, every time I think Goblins can't possibly get any more violent (not really safe for ANYWHERE)...

Search Engine Inanities 8/28

Webcomics? You want the next post.

If this video series isn't Robert Scoble's Waterloo, it's certainly an error that will cost him dearly.

"Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years."

You can stare at that sentence as long as you want, and I promise it won't make any more sense than it does now. Techmeme is a tech blog, an underdog competitor to Gizmodo and Engadget, all of which serve a niche audience. Facebook, as a social network, is kicking the Google-owned Orkut's ass everywhere except Brazil, but Google's got a much bigger ass than Orkut, baby. Only Mahalo even pretends to be competing with Google, and its "human-powered search" has so many flaws I don't even know where to begin--

Oh, that's a lie: let's begin with "webcomics." No results at all except, um, Google's. Now let's move on to "comics." First search turns up no page for comics, but pages for Dark Horse, DC, Marvel and, rounding out the four... Sin City. Second search, conducted ten minutes later, turned up no results at all. If this is what's going to replace Google, I weep for our future. (And please don't tell me it's just a beta. If you call yourself a search engine and cannot deliver on "comics," it's time to give up and go home.)

For more informed Scoble refutations, I leave you in the hands of Danny Sullivan and Valleywag.

Unintentionally Hilarious Headlines

"A flood of emotions in a Katrina comics serial" - I dunno, I think it may still be too soon for the puns.

"Comic creators spin pennies into gold" - Tycho and Gabe do micropayments???

"Penny Arcade Site Debuts" - Well, it's about time.

Plus, intentionally hilarious dialogue: "You're having sex with it, aren't you?"

The Howio of Wowio: Our Profit, Your Privacy

I've been getting some questions about Wowio. How does it work? Is readers' privacy secure? How is it that readers pay nothing but Gisele and I make money?

Wowio exists because advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach customers. The ads are embedded in the e-books Wowio sells-- downloadable PDFs, generally designed for the screen. Wowio's clients include companies like Verizon and Electronic Arts.

Wowio compensates creators 50 cents per unique download. If you download our first e-book over and over and over again... stop doing that, because Gisele and I won't make any more than fifty cents. But if you download all 14 Penny and Aggie e-books (nine available at this writing, the rest coming soon), Gisele and I make $7. And if two people do that, we make $14. As it is, Gisele and I have made over $1,000 with Wowio in less than a week, most of it with just four books.

And now for the big question: how does Wowio tell that you're unique? For the answer, I phoned the company president and CTO, William Lidwell:

"If there was a magical, universally-agreed-upon standard for determining that, we'd be all over it. In fact, that might be my next project, given the challenges we've had with this one."

At present, Wowio asks for one of three different kinds of information: a "non-anonymous" e-mail address (my Gmail account is no good, because I could have fifty of those), a scan of some ID like a driver's license, library card or passport (interesting but a lot of work for a signup) or a credit card number (what I ended up using).

It's this feature that has triggered some small controversy. Webcomics blogger extraordinaire Gary Tyrrell admits, "There's no way in hell that I'd ever transmit either [CC numbers or IDs] to somebody offering me something for free. Why yes, I am a cynical sumbitch, thank you."

But I'm not sure why Gary thinks a company that asks for a credit card number, or alternatives, and no money is less trustworthy than a company that asks for a credit card number and money. When my identity was stolen, it was due to a transaction made in an Orlando restaurant. There is always risk in exchanging information, online or off-- and many companies don't have founders saying things like this:

"We don't store identifying information, and there is no way for anyone at this company to break individual information out of aggregate. Some people have even sent us driver's licenses with certain information blocked out-- we accept those."

How, then, does Wowio continue to verify that the same individuals aren't signing up multiple times? Lidwell's answer was partly confidential, but the gist is that they use well-worn techniques from other online vendors who do ask for money, and err on the side of user security.

Ultimately, it's your call whether you believe Lidwell's words. My own beliefs are that a writer of books on management and design doesn't put his reputation on the line lightly, and that Verizon and Electronic Arts are not in the habit of tying their brands to scandals-in-the-making. When I signed up for Wowio to download the Sore Thumbs collections, I typed in my credit card info without a second thought.

"Awakening"

"Awakening" has begun. Presumably one or more of the Penny and Aggie characters is going to become more awake in a literal or a metaphorical sense.

Wowio

I forgot to mention this last week, but Penny and Aggie e-books are now available on Wowio. Every person who downloads these for free makes money for us, so download away! Four up now, five more on the way and five more soon to follow those.

Our debut rocketed us to the top of the comics "bestseller list:"



I won't pretend that wasn't a little thrill.

And People Thought Fans' Ending Had A Wild Resolution To Its Love Triangle.

My favorite comic of last week goes out to crossword lovers everywhere.

Noteworthy: Inverloch has concluded recently at 764 pages (excepting some "where are they now" bits that Sarah Ellerton has promised-- but all is resolved). Curious new readers, start here.

Informative: Slashdot has a lengthy writeup of the Penny Arcade Expo, Day 1.

Fun: Found this webcomics-themed puzzle from an abandoned blog. How many can you guess?

WOO

Demeter and Tiede projects done. More stuff to announce tomorrow.

Status Update

Dialogue for the Demeter and Tiede projects is done. Filling in scene descriptions now.

To Tim Demeter and Dirk Tiede:

TODAY IS THE RECKONING.

I will be writing your long, long-promised stuff TODAY.

TODAY.

OR DIE TRYING.

Thank you for your patience.

Star Trek FanTubes

Kirk/Spock slash is so last century. Thanks to J.G. for the first of these. Greg, this is for you.


Time Warp


Monty Python -- Camelot


I'm Too Sexy

Yesterday's Blogvictims Defend Themselves

D.J. Coffman responds to my earlier question by giving an IP address of his own, different from the one cited. I'm sure one of his fans can verify that sooner or later? He also speculates the edits were the work of his one-time collaborator Bob McDeavitt.

Needless to say, not knowing who vandalized the Graphic Smash entry doesn't make me any happier. But it was a couple years ago; I'll let it go. In a day or two.

---

Matthew Toner of Zeros 2 Heroes did his best to address my earlier impressions. I hesitate to inflict my speaking voice on all of you any more, but I thought you might be interested in our exact conversation (mp3).

My takeaways? I was interested in the opportunity "Comic Creation Nation" might represent for beginning writers. Z2H will use its federal funds to commission artists for some user-selected pitches. ...Yes, they retain trademark. ...No, they are not paying writers at present. But when I was just getting started, I would have worked under those terms to get something professional drawn from one of my full-length scripts, some centerpiece for a portfolio I could take to paying clients. (I didn't ask if Comic Creation Nation would give the writers any say in choosing the artists who worked with them, though, which could be an important qualifier. I mean, Rob Liefeld is technically a "professional...")

So I think that is a modest value-add for beginners. A freelancing opportunity for artists, too, although Toner's admission that different nationalities get paid different rates may come back to haunt him.

Beyond that, Z2H seems scattered. As Toner explains it, the central idea is helping people start from the bottom and fly into the sky: "zeroes to heroes," get it? But Z2H is also doing that ReBoot thing where users vote on five professional pitches, and offering some hands-off hosting packages, which Toner says are for more seasoned webcomickers. He also says "We may have a few false starts," which says to me, "We're not committed to any one project so much as to the general idea of helping out creators... somehow."

I've been guilty of similarly cloudy thinking, so I feel a stab of sympathy. I never assumed Toner was rubbing his hands together in fiendish glee at the prospect of bilking cartoonists. I don't think there are too many Helena Dionysuses in the comics field. But if a company has only a vague sense of its goals, it often finds itself on the path of least resistance, a path paved with good intentions. I hope Z2H can blaze a better trail.

Bile Pt. 5: And Now We Know

Todd W. Allen points out that we do definitely know that DC is holding the trademarks, in part of a lengthy piece that covers Zuda, Drunk Duck, and scrappy independents like Jennie Breeden (another businesscartoonist Gisele and I look to for inspiration).

Bile Pt. 4: More Wikisins of the Past

Once more, with feeling:

Is this D.J. Coffman's Wikipedia edit history? The address is located in Connellsvile, Pennsylvania, where D.J. resided as a child. Said author claimed Yirmumah was one of the most popular strips on the Internet and edited Graphic Smash's entry to read "Completely Graphically Smashingly Comics online!"

I am displeased.

(Update: D.J. answers, "No." More in the comments.)

Bile Pt. 3: A Grain of Salt

Dirk Deppey links me today, for which I'm always grateful, but adds "I was unable to find anything that specifically claimed ownership over the copyrights or trademarks of user-submitted content. A grain of salt may be required."

Note that I never said "Zeros 2 Heroes claims your trademark and/or copyright." What I said was "The idea here seems to be to trap creators yadda yadda." I based this on the press release, which talked a lot of Web 2.0-speak about leveraging intellectual properties and social networking and built-in fan bases and on and on, and mentioned absolutely no benefit to creators for signing up besides those possible development deals. (Another version of the news item makes it clear that creators won't be paid immediately, and says "they will partner with Z2H on any development deals." To me that implies that they won't have any choice about that. But it doesn't outright state it. Keenspot had a plan like that and never sewed up media rights, but that led to other problems. More info forthcoming, I'm sure.)

Here's the thing, though, Dirk: people shouldn't have to be doing investigative journalism and legwork to determine whether a new publisher requires our firstborn child as a down payment. If you'd like to attract quality creators to submit to you instead of going it alone, then you need to offer a good deal and shout that deal from the rooftops. Otherwise creators have every right to assume the worst.

(Dirk also links to this quasi-online comic, commissioned by DC, then rejected, then leaked into a small U.K. print run and the Internet, where it won an Eisner award, forcing DC to publish it after all. That is even funnier than the comic itself.)

Bile Pt. 2: This Might Be A Cheap Shot

This should be the last time I pick on Tim Buckley for a little while.

I read Ctrl+Alt+Del. Sometimes I smile at it, like during this awkward moment.

But I don't really understand why Ethan, the main character, still has a fiancee. Or a best friend. Or a job. Or a life outside a mental institution.

Take the latest sequence, where he keeps a scorpion against his fiancee Lilah's wishes, it gets free and it puts his best friend Lucas' girlfriend in the hospital. Admittedly, Lilah does withhold sex thanks to this, which seems to be her usual response. But that seems like a very mild reaction to putting the lives of everyone in the house in danger... for at least the second time. And this is pretty typical. Ethan does some utterly outrageous thing that would drive most people to homicide, and whatever comeuppance he receives is out of all proportion to the offense.

For a while it seemed like he was in danger of growing up, but we're well past that phase now.

These days, Ethan reminds me of "Big Head" from the original Mask comic-book miniseries (and not the sanitized Jim Carrey movie). That character's model was Warner Brothers cartoons, while Ethan's is Tycho and Gabe, but in both cases they're icons of over-the-top cartoon violence dropped into a real world where people can actually die. Their antics are therefore humorous, but also kind of horrifying (Panel 6).

Getting The Bile Out Of My System 8/24

I have a lot of negative things to say today. Let's start with "mild embarrassment" and work our way up. Part 1 of some.

Mild embarrassment: Brad, you know you're my bud, and I hope this doesn't sting too badly...

Last week, I said Brad Guigar had his best week to date. Part of my judgment was based on where his plot was going and part was based on where I thought it was going to go. I was wrong.

I thought we were in for an extended sequence where Captain Hero, disillusioned not only with the Legion of Justice but with the superhero establishment, committed fully to the Dark Hood identity, shifting from his earlier role of doing good by managing "evil" to trying to do good by actually performing "evil."

Well... no. This week, Hero handed Evil, Inc. over to its original owner, saving himself a lot of headaches and us a lot of interesting conflicts.

So the previous week becomes... still entertaining, but something less than Brad's best, or the best comic of the week. Brad's still given himself some good story options as Evil Inc. goes from a struggling institution to a small remnant angling for a comeback. But in a lot of ways, we're back to the status quo, and Hero leaves just as he was getting more interesting.

All IMHO, of course. I'm more of a story guy than a gag-strip guy, and I enjoy changes in the status quo more than readers who are trained to see them as temporary. I'm sure Brad's gotten some readers who say to him, "This Captain Hero as CEO storyline NEVER ENDS! Who do you think you are, CHRIS CLAREMONT?" That balancing act never gets easier.

How Zuda Fits Into The "Loser-Generated Comics" Movement

Zuda's a slightly different beast from the Comic Book Challenge and (apparently) Zeros 2 Heroes, much like a porpoise is not quite a dolphin. On the one hand, its note that "creators will retain copyright" sounds good, but... oh, take it away, Christopher Butcher:

[Zudacomics.com] also says that the work will be published "...under fairly conventional publishing agreements..." which is what you really need to pay attention to.

First and foremost, DC Comics may be benevolent enough to grant you the copyright to your own work, but they haven't said anything about the Trademark (basically, the title of the work). Trademark is interesting, it's why the KRAZY KAT collections that Fantagraphics are doing are called Krazy & Ignatz and why the GASOLINE ALLEY collections that D+Q are doing are called Walt & Skeezix. The copyright on those early works may have fallen into the public domain, but the titles (marks) used in business (trade) haven't, and are still owned by the syndicates. So does Zuda own the trademark to your series, or do you?

Secondly, "fairly conventional publishing agreements" [are] what keeps WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA in print at DC Comics against their creator's wishes. You can own the copyright to the work, as Alan Moore and his collaborators do, but those "...fairly conventional publishing agreements..." could say pretty-much anything. Moore's says that the publishing rights for WATCHMEN only revert to him once the book is out of print for a set period of time. That book will never be out of print...

On the other hand, I have reason to believe Zuda will be paying a work-for-hire rate that I consider acceptable before they secure any rights. If that's true, then Zuda and I can do business together-- I don't feel the need to own everything I've ever done. (If I did, I never would have sold Marvel an Avengers story.) But I don't know the exact terms for sure. (We're ready to see those contracts any time you're ready to put 'em on the website, fellas.)

Webcomics In The News 8/23: Loser-Generated Content, Eh?

Zeros 2 Heroes in the news again, eh? I bet you never even thought about what the largest Canadian webcomics "publisher" was before now, eh? Web 2.0: continuing to set records no one cares about. Eh?

"Comic Creation Nation." I've heard a name very like that before... can't put my finger on it...

I've come to realize that one of the great things about the modern comics scene is that nobody cares whether you're from Canada, or the U.S.A., or the Netherlands, so long as you speak the same language and understand the general needs of your audience. A lot of people don't even know that Gisele Lagace and Ryan North are Canadians, and that's fine, because their work's appeal translates well to American audiences. Sure, there are some cultural differences, but it's not like Canada has flying cars or anything. Is there really a need for a Canadian-only webcomics channel?

Ah, but if it weren't Canadian-only, it wouldn't qualify for the Canada New Media Fund. A nation spending money to raise its own cultural capital is a good thing. I just wish I were confident that the Fund's money would filter down to the creators.

Like most other online "talent farms" (Zuda is a kinda-sorta exception... I think), the idea here seems to be to trap creators with the promise of multimedia development deals, the implied promise of financial compensation, and some squirrelly language about who actually holds the rights, so that the company can claim it's the holder of "thousands of intellectual properties" to herd-mentality investors who are looking to be part of "the next Marvel, Web 2.0." (These investors either don't realize the long-term incompatibility between intellectual property ownership and the Web 2.0 spirit of sharing, or they hope to sell the idea to others who won't.)

It's offensive and upsetting to me to see this snake oil peddled in place of the real value-adds of webcomics collectives past. Keenspot got overambitious in the long run, but it offered free hosting, social networking, cross-promotion and advertising dollars, back when those things were hard to come by. Modern Tales debuted as a new way for cartoonists to make money. OhNoRobot was and is a means to make your comic more findable. Webcomics Nation debuted as an advanced tool suite. Clickwheel represented a hub for comics formatted for a new medium. All of these projects offered these things without laying any automatic title to the rights of its creators. I know, because I was a creator using all five of those.

Zeros 2 Heroes offers...

The chance to help out Zeros 2 Heroes, and a chance to feel more Canadian, I guess.

Company president Matthew Toner: "We're calling on all Canadian novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, journalists-- pretty much anyone who can set down a laptop and write-- to submit their storylines for development. We want to change the way genre entertainment is created and consumed. The strategy is simple and effective: combine user-generated content with social media enhancements to produce market-ready properties that have a built-in following of hardcore fans."

How nice for them. How... investory. SUBMIT!

I resist the term "loser-generated content" because I know there are lots of cartoonists out there, especially beginners, who do good work but who haven't thought through the business side of cartooning, and I don't want to call these guys losers. Because they don't lose at everything. But if they make a bad deal, they're gonna lose at that.

UPDATE: Company president Matthew Toner has asked for a chance to clarify his press release; we'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon/evening. I admit the possibility that Z2H has a value-add it has not shared with the press. I'll share whatever I learn.

---

Also, Robert Khoo on the Penny Arcade Expo: "[It] has grown into something much more than the comic itself. Some people don't even know about Gabe and Tycho."

(Cue weeping and gnashing of teeth as purists cry out, "IT USED TO BE ABOUT THE COMICS, MAN!")

Some Things That Made Me Laugh

"NO FLASHBACKING!"

"That sounded like a great adventure! I can't believe I missed it!"

Forgot to feature this earlier: Joss Whedon does webcomics, all other webcomics scriptwriters now obsolete. (Except Warren Ellis.)

Give the gift of metafiction.

Finally, this continues Edge the Devilhunter's sweetest and best sequence to date.

Webcomics In The News 8/22

Actual quotes from Platinum Studios' 2007 Comic Book Challenge: "Vote often for your favorite comic!... [after voting] Thanks for voting! Vote as much as you like."

I'm not sure the Challenge and I share the same concept of "voting."

Interview with Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots, who is one of Gisele's and my role models right now. She reveals how she's spent her time before and after the donation drive. Graphic novel, she says...?

Interview with Josh Neufeld of A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge.

And what the Hell, almost all the usual channels have linked to it or displayed it: David Malki! is better than Comic-Con, featuring the musical stylings of Kristofer Straub and many, many cartoonist guests.

Divalicious: "Pop Star"

"Hello, Screen Actor's Guild? I need a new best friend! I'm offering six figures!"

Gisele, Amy and I are airing the first three Divalicious stories ever published on our site. First up is the Rising Stars of Manga piece that got Amy and me started-- it was even wilder than what the series turned into. Click here to begin!

Status Update

"Cadence" is done, despite a six-hour power outage yesterday.

Working now on some Penny and Aggie stuff that I hope to be able to announce here by tomorrow.

Status Report

Fully dialogued all of the Cool Cat Studio finale, which finally has a real title: "The Best-Laid Plans." Working this morning on Divalicious 2.8, "Cadence."

Webcomics Scuttlebutt 8/19

Is this Tim Buckley's Wikipedia edit history? If not, then someone is sure doing a good impression of Buckley's low tolerance for bad press. (The only thing that makes me hesitate is that we only have the sender's word that this IP address matches Buckley's e-mail. It seems unlikely that anyone else would edit this obsessively, but with all the CAD fans out there, it's possible.) Update: an anonymous reader notes that the IP address is from New Haven, Connecticut, Buckley's hometown. Hat tips: Randy Milholland, Scott Kurtz.

The Penny Arcade Expo itself will be a game, because Robert Khoo is the smartest businessman in webcomics.

Hmmm. Joe England updated less than six hours after I asked him to. For my next trick, I command Karl Rove to resign! What, already? What are the limits of this power?? I command Robert Khoo to begin rewriting my Wikipedia entry in a way that makes me GADZILLIONS!

Best Webcomic Of The Week?

As far as I'm concerned, this one goes to Brad Guigar, who had maybe his best week to date.

Guigar's gentle, humorous take on super-heroes actually underscores their moral ambiguities better than the angst-heavy, oh-so-serious approach that's become the industry standard. The Legion of Justice, a superhero group, has bought out Evil Inc., a supervillain company, and appointed their own Captain Hero as CEO. Hero moonlights as supervillain Dark Hood to meet the demands of his dual roles. Mr. Invincible, leader of the Legion of Justice, demands profits while squandering his own resources on trophy girlfriends, but still believes himself Hero's moral superior.

Guigar followed last week's explosion with a meaty confrontation between Hero and Invincible. With two final words, Captain Hero commits to a startling change in his life, a change Guigar has been quietly setting up all year.

I'll take Guigar's brand of existential superhero over Civil War or Countdown any day.

Also: DAMMIT JOE ENGLAND UPDATE MORE OFTEN PLZ KTHXBYE

More Demo Info

Penny and Aggie's readership (as best we know):

40-60 male-female.

72% straight, 3% gay, 17% bi, 6% not sure.

42% like G-rated material, 44% NC-17 rated, 53% PG-rated, 75% R-rated, 79% PG-13-rated (Penny and Aggie has described itself as "PG-13").

Personal yearly income for 62% of respondents is below $20K. Household yearly income is more evenly distributed, with the largest segment (19%) between $20-40K and the next largest (16%) above $80K. This is probably partly because our audience is young: 30% teenagers and 50% twentysomethings, with the mean age 24, the median 22, and the mode 21.

Noted.

Some Penny and Aggie Merchandise Ideas From Our Poll

The Penny and Aggie poll continues, but participation is slowing down. Looks like we got a response from 11% of our total audience, which will help us a lot, going forward.

Looks like the most popular listed merchandise items were:

1. Books (by a wide margin)
2. T-shirts
3. Buttons
4. Posters
5. Signed prints

Only about 4% of respondents liked the jigsaw idea. Shame. I liked it...

We got the following suggestions from more than one source:

1. dolls/action figures/figurines
2. coffee mugs
3. candy
4. bumper stickers
5. CD collections
6. bags, messenger bags, tote bags
7. bookmarks
8. calendars
9. mousepads
10. DVDs (animated series)
11. games, video games
12. plushies
13. hats
14. hoodies
15. jewelry
16. keychains
17. original art
18. miscellaneous clothing
19. postcards
20. porn (This will not happen)
21. stickers
22. sweatshirts
23. underwear
24. "How to draw" books

My favorite request? "A robotic shark with spider legs that spits snake venom from its eyes."

"Sketch" Day...

Workin' away.

Rare Sighting

Amit Chafee (right) took this picture with me (left) at Comic-Con.

Clearing Out The Bookmarks

The Kelletts and Kris Straub enjoy themselves on the old Price Is Right set.

Achewood speaks for me re: Comic Sans (language a bit NSFW).

I don't hate all user-influenced content: I thought this site, which invites the public to serve as models for comics characters, was a pretty cool idea. We might try something like that in Penny and Aggie.

Fun exercises in alliteration.

Editorial cartoonists contemplate the void.

Jesus Christ, gamer comics can be insufferably smug about a two-sided debate.

See previous item: This is probably the smuggest thing I've seen all year.

Study of Digg.

Spurge on Anthony-Liz anti-shippers.

How can we preserve digital art?

Search Engine Inanities 8/13

It tempts me. It haunts me. Every time I say to myself, "no, I'm definitely done with the search engine comic idea," more stuff like this shows up.

1. Thanks to Nicolas Juzda for pointing me to a better source on the black homepage vs. white homepage energy-efficiency debate. Apparently, the relative power consumption of a black Google homepage vs. a white one varies from monitor to monitor. But in all cases we're talking a difference of one-tenth of a watt, and I think that gain might be offset by the problems of making our most popular search engine virtually illegible.

2. Search engines have been rated on privacy. Ask.com got the highest marks. This was due largely to interview answers about its "AskEraser" feature, which doesn't actually exist yet. Hey, I'm "planning a launch" of a program that'll destroy the nation's social security database! Can I get a privacy award, News.com? Pretty please?

What makes this especially galling is that Ask has been waging a propaganda campaign against Google because oooooo Google collects informaaaaation about youuuuuuu! Now the once-revered CNET is drinking the Ask Kool-Aid. Ask, of course, loses nothing by not gathering user data, because almost nobody uses Ask. It doesn't really think it'll overtake Google or Yahoo, it just intends to carve out a minor market niche for itself by exploiting our paranoia.

3. Of course, it'd be a lot easier to trust Ask if its ads weren't designed by pod people. Via Search Engine Land:

TRUST THE ALGORITHM

We Knew This Headline Would Show Up Somewhere, Because People From The 1960s Were Still Alive

So let's get it out of our systems already:

HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN
BATMAN
BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTEN
USER-GENERATED
HOLY BAT
HOLY USER
USER BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN


And now we can move on.