Penny and Aggie Research Reference

Via William G. He IMed me asking if there was anything I wanted him to sketch, and less than an hour later, I had a new character sketch that might get used in an upcoming story for my webcomic, Penny and Aggie. Whee, community!

9/9: Slender Sundays

Pickings are slim today, as they often are on Sundays-- the more time goes by, the more cartoonists seem to follow the cycles of Internet usage rather than newspaper-founded tradition. Which means that a lot of the best material goes up Monday, the busiest Web day of the week, but on Sunday webcomics hit snooze and go back to bed.

Looks like my favorite of the day is this alternate ending to Dr. No.

What really made me laugh today was catching up with the most recent week worth of Luann, particularly this strip. T.J. could actually give lessons to Stan from Penny and Aggie.

Comixpedia.org, the webcomics community's Wikipedia alternative, is under new management. Best of luck to Josh Roberts.

And at CBR, Bill Reed has been celebrating webcomics all week.

Lisa by noa-2003

Lisa as Harley by Gisele

"One In Every Crowd," Said Another Forumgoer

Here's a milestone, I suppose: first reader to request deletion from our forums because Penny and Aggie was "too gay" for him.

"I can accept a lezzy lesbo lesbian once in a while, but I'm not interested in stories about homosexuals."

As "reader resignations" go, I've seen a lot worse. At least this fellow actually left the forums instead of saying he'd leave and then hanging around to protest some more. When Scott McCloud did a lesbian coming-out story back in the Eighties, one of his snail-mail-writing readers did just that.

It's actually almost refreshing to hear from this contingent, as we're in the middle of a coming-out arc that's gotten a lot of positive feedback and shortly after we've learned that our audience is only about 72% straight. It even takes me back to college, when I believed in gay rights but was still kinda "EW" about watching two guys kiss onscreen. Since this fellow's parting words on the forum were "too many perverts for me," I know he's not a younger me, but still. I can be zen about it today.

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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."

Fashion Resource For Penny and Aggie

Back to school fashions!

Psssst! Amyyyyy!

Hey, Amy Mebberson!

There's a couple of posts from Dilbert creator Scott Adams that may be of some interest to you, considering where you want to take Thorn...

20 Merchandise Ideas For Penny and Aggie

Just brainstorming, but let me know if the more... unusual ones strike you as interesting. Or suggest your own!

book collections
digital downloads
wallpapers
patches
buttons
magnets
jigsaws
dolls
signed prints
T-shirts
full shirts
jerseys
sweaters
posters
mousepads
shorts
socks
shoes
fonts
perfumes

Thorn!

My friend and collaborator Amy Mebberson has a new strip you should read.

Productive!

Done today:

Five sets of breakdowns for Penny and Aggie. More coming tomorrow, Gisele!

Outline of Divalicious, last two chapters.

Two solicited proposals for short Tokyopop pieces.

Relatively quick session on "Sketch." Unfortunately my best line of today would give the whole project away.

And fixed the Fans RSS feed (with Zach Lewis' help).

I wish every day left me with this much to brag about.

San Diego Rest Of Weekend

Luggage arrived! And with it, my special folder, full of sample pages. I used it to pitch Penny and Aggie, Burgerzone, The Verge, The Alchemists and Rip and Teri to various publishers Thursday-Friday.

(This blog hasn't shared The Alchemists with you yet. That will change.)

I missed most of my panel wishlist.

Panel highlights: Got to see GoComics lay out a strategy; these guys essentially own American mobile comics right now. Scott McCloud's family, normally a well-oiled machine, gave a thoroughly chaotic travelogue of their yearlong 50-state tour, but we all loved them anyway. Warren Ellis downed four Red Bulls and a small bottle of some alcoholic energy drink called Sparx during his two-hour talk, then lit a cigarette in open defiance of con rules. Best panel I attended: easily Scott Kurtz and Robert Khoo's "Create A Comic And A Marketing Plan" exercise.

Had dinners with Tokyopop, ComicMix, the McClouds and company. Missed: dinner with David Willis and friends, Stu Levy's birthday party.

Saw: too many good people to list here, and I will only forget someone and feel horrible. I have a lot of post-con catching up to do.

Probably should have stopped by the Dumbrella table or panel. I've had a difficult time with one of the Dumbrellans lately, but Comic-Con is an occasion to forget, or at least smooth over, such differences. As it was, I felt awkward and unsure of my welcome there. No offense intended, fellas.

Weirdest thing that happened all weekend: I ran into Frederik Hautain (my superior at Broken Frontier) by happenstance... twice. Neither of us had seen a picture of the other, and the first time we shared an elevator, neither knowing who the other was.

That's my con experience. Gary Tyrrell outdid himself with Comic-Con coverage this year, so if you want more info, you know where to go.

Not For The Squeamish or Tasteful

Randy's latest horrifying guest strip.

He showed this to me and added, "May the God you pray to protect you if you ever let me do a Penny and Aggie strip with no script provided."

Attention E-Mail-Less Donors! (Penny and Aggie)

Eric S. Goldberg, Alison Buck and Erin Lindsey: please send me your correct e-mail addresses so that I may send you your just rewards.

"Bedside Manners"

Begins today.

Man, look at Gis go.

Received Via Snail Mail

Dear G & T:

I seem to have stumbled into something of an unexpected government windfall... on MY birthday, no less. The coincidence is too blatant to ignore. (Fate Boot-To-The-Head!)

So if I ride... EVERYBODY rides.

Good luck, Gisele. You totally deserve to get your creativity and talent running under your own steam. Really really.

Penny's strength and Aggie's heart!

Enclosed: a check for $650. Our largest single donation to date. I'm not going to name this donor here because I don't want complete strangers to hit this guy up for a loan, but you have our everlasting gratitude, JGT.

P.S.: If it's not TOO much trouble, my sister's birthday is July 28... >wink wink<

We're all over it, man! Birthday cards for all donors as soon as we can churn 'em out!

P&A Sprites!

Created by Amber, who's also given the world a P&A fanlisting. Whee!

Aggie
Brandi
Cyndi
Duane
Jack
Karen
Katy-Ann
Lisa
Marshall
Meg
Michelle
Penny
Rich
Samantha
Sara
Stan

Aggie and Stan are my favorites.

Farewell to Favorite Advertisers!

Penny and Aggie, Cool Cat Studio and Fans are trading out all but a few of our Project Wonderful ads-- the really small ones-- for ads from other advertising networks. More money for us in the long run, which is good!

But I can't help but be a bit sad that those sites will no longer be so involved with such a webcomics-friendly service. There were a couple of comics sites I was especially happy to receive bids from recently, and since I can no longer display them on those sites, I figured I'd just show them here. Lunchbox Funnies is a nice kid's-comic collective, and Dresden Codak is one of my ten favorite comics right now. So click those ads!

RSS Follies

I'm currently in the midst of trying to create a more streamlined RSS for the comics and an RSS-to-HTML solution that'll help broadcast these posts through the network. Many thanks to Zachary Lewis and the FeedForAll folks for their help so far.

Fanart 7/7

Lisa by Olivera T.

P&A Fanart: Karen

From Olivera T.

Penny and Aggie Alignments

Courtesy Aris Katsaris. Great stuff. Captures Sara's current non-sexual dilemmas in a nutshell. (Naturally, characters sometimes move out of their "chosen alignment" as they grow...)

Penny and Aggie

We had a continuity error scare last night, and I would show you the problem, but Gisele has already erased it from existence. (Can you tell which of the characters in this one used to be someone else? No fair if you've already peeked at the forums.)



Gis has also reformatted all the older strips. Look how much detail we can show you now!



Yay.

In Progress...

New homepage for PNA being created as we speak. It'll be a template for annotated Fans, too.

Also Done Yesterday...

Very, very productive Penny and Aggie and "Sketch" story meeting with Greg Eatroff, which grew out of an early viewing of Ratatouille. Film analysts are watching Pixar for signs of a stumble, citing internal politics at Disney, the gut reaction to the topic of rats in the food industry (which affects licensing) and the fact that it's the most unspellable major movie title of the year.

I'm hoping that good reviews and Pixar's brand overcome these factors, because Ratatouille is a treat.



After it was over, Greg and I realized the film hits its protagonists with seven different challenges in its third act, yet never feels rushed or jumbled.

"Seven," I said to Greg. There was a pause.

"Would it be possible to do eight...?"

And we were off.

Approved New Design For PnA Site (Coming Soon)

Rejected Design for PnA Site:

iPhone-Phriendly PnAs

Noted for Reference

Nine ways to draw black women's hair. Considering how often Gisele experiments, we might be consulting this sooner than I expect.

Artistic Critiques

Via Fleen: Josh Lesnick offers some artistic critiques of popular webcomics.

Would I like this piece as much if: 1) Josh didn't use "What We Don't Know" correctly as a jumping-off point and 2) Josh was less kind to Gisele?

Maybe not quite as much, but I'd still be glad he did it. It's the kind of criticism that I'm trying to encourage. The essay probably won't make his life any easier, but I'm glad he wrote it.

Here it is.

Commission Sketch by Gisele (colored by Olivera T.)

Um... wow.

Click the image to learn more about it.

This might be a good time to note that the Free Gisele Fund has a long way to go, but it is making slow, steady progress...

Hope Y'All Had A Happy Father's Day...

Daddy and I had ours a week early. Didn't plan it that way-- I just forgot which week Father's Day was supposed to be, and Daddy'd been vacationing out of the country so he was a little off his calendar too. We went to see Ocean's Thirteen, a thoroughly faithful sequel that gave us the dependable guy's good time we were looking for.

And I got to give him a card that Gisele and I made together.

It was a good day.

I Knew French Classes Would Come In Handy Someday

According to Gisèle, Steven Withrow and John Barber's Webcomics, to which I contributed four pages on webcomics' development, has been published in French under the title BD En Ligne. (Poor Gis... she speaks fluent French and I got published in the language first!)



I'm pretty hopeless in conversational French, but I remember enough to know that BD is short for the French phrase for comics, bande dessinée, literally "drawn strip," and ligne means line, so... there we go, "on-line comics," or "online drawn strips." Wonder if the strips in there that aren't "drawn" so much as vectored or 3-D modeled give the French any problems? They tend to be linguistic purists.

I'm tempted to order this thing just to see if I can tell how well they managed the translation, but right now it's priced at 27.55 euros, or just under $37, plus shipping. So not now. But it's kinda weird, thinking that other people are speaking for you and you don't know the exact wording of what they're saying. Course, I guess Gisèle and I should be used to that by now.

P&A Fanart

Whee!

"Vertigo"

Starts today with a guest appearance from Liz and Tony of Cool Cat Studio, one of my favorite songs ever (and one that'll have a long shelf life at dance parties, I think), the return of Rich and, incidentally, our 500th strip. All I'll say about this story is that it features one very expected plot point and one very unexpected one.

Looking To Be A Good Week.

The DDOS is well behind us now, and I'm getting ready to roll out some new projects this week! Kicking things off, I've finally gotten rid of that ugly pile of white on black that I've been calling a homepage. Clearly the new design needs a few things added to it-- I gotta get links to the guest storylines back in there, for one thing-- but I like the new minimalist look. It's kinda "oldschool Google."

And speaking of guest storylines, anyone who enjoys the things Gisele and I do together should head on over to Sluggy Freelance, starting midnight tonight. I've put a lot of my own heart into "Heart of Hearts," and worked closely with Pete Abrams to make sure it stays true to his characters. I hope the results are something you can enjoy whether you know Sluggy or not.

So Today I'm Having Trouble With The Teenbit Newsbox...

And I ask my ol' buddy Dave Belmore for some help.

Chat transcript follows.

6:21 PM davebelmore: What I've got running locally here is a small image.

It was always says teenbit featured comic

everytime I hit refreash the image chancges

6:22 PM beween any on of 6 images

6:23 PM me: Should be 8 images, but that's probably not important. And when you mouse over it, it gives you the same link for the "Teenbit Featured Comic" part as the rest of it?

6:24 PM

davebelmore: yes

and if I click it takes me to it's web page

6:25 PM me: That's the way Version 1 should work, yeah.

The thing here is, I could get the rotators to randomized linked images, but I wanted them to randomize a linked imageMAP.

And that would be Version 2.

davebelmore: it does randomize the images

6:28 PM me: But not the imagemap. Gives me a whole lotta nothin' every time I try, and I'm stumped as to why.

6:29 PM davebelmore: okay I just emailed you my changes that work for me.

6:30 PM Aside from getting a yellow bar pop up at the top of the page.... that I have to say "allow"

it works just fine.

I think....

6:33 PM me: (test) (test) (test) (test)

6:34 PM OMG

WOW

...HOW

davebelmore: LOL I just did what you told me to do.

I removed the line breaks.

where you told me to do it

6:35 PM me: ...There were line breaks on both the Javascript rotators and I only removed them for one.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

davebelmore: LOL

me: And yet, YAY.

davebelmore: you told me to remove both

so I did :-D

me: Apparently I'm a better administrator than coder.

davebelmore: ROFL

Teenbit Launches Today.

Today sees the quiet launch of Teenbit, a collective with a simple theme, simple goals, and simple pleasures. I'm spearheading this one, so you know it's got to be at least modestly interesting, right?

Free Gisele!

There's a whole lot to get caught up on with this blog. Let's start with the most important item: I have a problem.

My problem is that my good friend and collaborator Gisèle Lagacé needs your help.

Read more.

"Burgerzone"

It begins. Only five pages to show you now, but... I think they may interest you.

Penny and Aggie: After-"Dinner" Party

Whew.

Almost six months ago, I wrote:

"Dinner for Six" is, I think, the funniest Penny and Aggie story to date. One dinner. Six people. Three romances. A few misunderstandings. COMPLICATIONS. Permanent changes. Sixty-plus strips. Begins today!

I went into the story knowing almost exactly what I wanted. I had quite a list.

I was trying to re-invigorate the series as a funny comic after the thoughtful "Behind Closed Doors" and "Pod People," the funny but brief "Tees and Cues" and the utterly depressing "Undertow."

I wanted a story that featured both Penny and Aggie front and center with a little more focus on Aggie, another course correction from the stories that had come before.

I wanted a bedroom farce without bedrooms. (Admittedly, the world seems to be Charisma's bedroom.)

I wanted to play with reader sympathies, making villains out of the series' "heroes" and heroes out of its "villains" and then maybe switching again.

I wanted this screwball comedy to set Penny, Aggie, Karen and Marshall all on courses of change for future storylines.

I wanted to tell the story of Charisma right, because I knew that after this one I wouldn't get much of a chance, and because the path she takes clearly outlines some of the choices teenage girls face as they approach womanhood.

And I wanted to conclude Nick's arc, and show that his attempt to recapture his younger days with Charisma, while an exciting interlude, was ultimately doomed.

I know the story was a bit long for some in parts, but the length was necessary to get all that stuff done. Without the complications piling onto complications, Aggie and Charisma never would have gotten frustrated enough to burst out with their moments of truth, moments which have now changed their lives for better and for worse, thrown Nick and Karen into choices of their own, and finally allowed readers to see Marshall the way I've seen him from day one. As for Penny's puzzling reaction to the situation, we'll be unpacking that in upcoming stories, too. And we had to distract you all from the giant loose end left on Penny's cell phone...



It's been a long road, but I got everything I wanted. Today's a happy day.

Poor Randy.

"I hated the storylines you wrote for 'Penny and Aggie,' but when I heard you didn't write them I realized they were actually really good."

I've been there, man.

CAPTCHA This!

Got a forum? Worried about spam attacks? Read on-- this may help...

Because Penny and Aggie has a discussion forum about teenagers, albeit fictional teenagers, we found especially vile spam on our PHPBB pages almost every day. It got so bad that I was considering restricting access to current members and people who e-mailed me personally. And that's no way to grow a community. So what could we do?

The default security on discussion forums is a "captcha." The most popular kind of captcha is shown at right. As you can imagine, the string of characters is computer-generated. But PHPBB is free software. Anyone has access to its program. Anyone can take it apart and see how it works. "Anyone" includes everyone who programs spambots for fun and profit. And no "randomizing" software is truly random-- take two copies and run them under the same conditions and they'll always come up with the same results.

Ah, but spambots can't anticipate human behavior! What if you modified the captcha so that forum owners could personalize the test, and create a version that applies only to one forum, ruining the "economy of scale" that makes forum spam profitable?

Torstein Hønsi asked this "what if," then made it happen. Thanks to him, Gisele and I can sleep soundly at night, knowing we will not have to delete "OMG RAPE STORIES" first thing in the morning.

I hereby declare this National Torstein Hønsi Day.

Google Checkout, No More

BEFORE

AFTER

AFTER "AFTER"

We've checked out Google Checkout, and now it's time to check out.

It seemed like a good enough idea. Because GooCheckout is trying to beat Paypal, it's letting people use it without finance charges through 2007. So we could spend the year trying it out and come out with an extra 2-4% of our donations, which were at about $50 a week in December. By the end of the year, that adds up to about $50-$100, just for switching a little code around.

However-- stop me if this sounds familiar-- we underestimated users' reluctance to sign up with a new payment system. There were reasons to think Checkout would be better for us than Bitpass, reasons like the venerable Google brand and the wider range of payments.

This is not irrefutable evidence that Google Checkout is completely useless to everyone. Although I can't confirm this, I suspect that our audience has access to fewer credit cards per capita than the audiences of other webcomics, making a switch between payment systems more daunting. Other websites with extremely loyal donor bases might want to try putting Paypal and Checkout links side-by-side and see what results they get. Try a tagline like "Use Paypal OR... make sure EVEN MORE of your money reaches us!"

Bottom line, though: we went from getting about 97% of $50 to 100% of $0. Do the math.

Penny and Aggie: Celebrity Poker Showdown

I mentioned this indirectly before, but Penny and Aggie: Celebrity Poker Showdown is available for order now. I have my advance copy and it looks fabulous at full size, especially the back cover.

Pick it up and give it a read!

Penny and Aggie Nominated For A WCCA

The Web Cartoonists' Choice Award nominees started going up last Monday, with a misspelled logo (seen here) and asterisked code in place of an ad banner (geez, guys, are you trying not to be taken seriously?). One of the nominees for "Outstanding Romantic Comic" was Penny and Aggie.

I want this award. I admit that freely. Do Gisele and I deserve one?

I never really thought of Penny and Aggie as a "romantic comic," exactly-- it covers all the emotions of adolescence, not just the romantic ones. But you can make a case that it is, and the category is as close to what P&A is as any of the categories in the WCCA.

Last year, I was a member of the WCCA committee, and we discussed, sometimes energetically, what did and didn't qualify as a romantic comic. All agreed that except in extraordinary cases, the WCCAs should reflect the will of the voters. This year, there are no extraordinary cases of which I'm aware, and so the decision is up to all webcartoonists. So, webcartoonists, please consider Penny and Aggie, as well as all of the other nominees for Best Romantic Comic. And vote responsibly.

UPDATE: To register, follow the instructions at this link.

Penny and Aggie: Academic Troubles

Here's the highlight of my day:

Some folks on the forum noticed that Nick, Aggie's father, was listed on the cast page as teaching at Aggie's school. Oops! This was a detail Gisele and I thought of when we created the series, but we changed it as we began actually putting stories together. Somehow we forgot to edit this. No harm, no foul: I changed the cast page and figured that was the end of it.

Except we have two printed books which both feature the error.

Noooooooo...

So, yeah, Gisele and I've been putting corrected editions together. Which requires Gisele uploading about a gig of files and possibly crashing her computer a time or two.

Because we care about our readers THAT MUCH, is why.

Penny and Aggie Cast Page

Revised for the first time since 2005. Special thanks to Gisele and Olivera T. for their special effort on frikkin' THIRTY CHARACTER CLOSE-UPS.

Bits and Pieces

Couldn't get this out of my head today: a preview for Narbonic, the motion picture, set completely to Oingo Boingo's "Weird Science." (Lyrics -- Video) Lots of shots of Helen Narbon's handiwork, and the main characters in various mad-sciencey adventures. Very jumpcutty, very fast. Ends with Helen's maniacal laughter, then living letters assembling themselves into the word "Narbon." The last "n" gives birth to an "i" and a "c," which grow to full size, and the dot over the "I" begins to glow pink, then explodes into a shower of hearts.

Biggest accomplishment today: beefed up the P&A forums. I restored the "view newest post" feature and enabled IP blocking. Just in time, too, because we're currently under a serious spampost attack. I've blocked four IPs already and it may get worse before it gets better.

Gisele and I have been looking into a variety of auto-update programs; I've been testing some. Your suggestions are always appreciated.

The new Penny and Aggie book has hit the proofing stage.

Beyond that, today was pretty much just odds and ends and dull financial stuff. Still not getting done: any serious scripting for Divalicious 2. Let's see how tomorrow goes.

Busy and Boring.

Some stuff I can't talk about yet on the journalistic front, reviewing the Penny and Aggie TPB, and preparing for my Intro to Business class. Yeah, not much I can show the Internet today, except have you seen the new Penny and Aggie site design? It's verrrry bluuuue.

We've got a few more changes to make before it's all done, though. I think our Google Ads may be on the way out-- unless YOU can figure out what any of this has to do with teenage comedy:



Quick! Are you a comics fan AND a restaurant franchise manager who makes life-altering business decisions based on your reading preferences? Then for God's sake, SECURE YOUR MARKET TERRITORY TODAY!

Call For Help With Autokeen Lite

Psssst!

If anybody has recent experience with, or a working copy of, Autokeen Lite as available here, please get in touch with me. I'm tryin' to set it up for Penny & Aggie and it's drivin' me crazy.

(I'm aware there are lots of other auto-update tools for comics, but Gisele and I want something that'll change our existing URLs as little as possible, at least for now.)

Now You See It, Now You Don't...

Penny and Aggie is changing hosts, and there is something different about our main page right now. I wonder if you can guess what it is? (Update: new version of the homepage frozen here, in case we figure out Autokeen sooner than I think we will.)

"Time Friends" by Kris and ME!

Kristofer Straub's Time Friends has become an intriguing experiment in user-generated comics. Here are my entries in this new genre!

"Dinner For Six"

"Dinner for Six" is, I think, the funniest Penny and Aggie story to date. One dinner. Six people. Three romances. A few misunderstandings. COMPLICATIONS. Permanent changes. Sixty-plus strips. Begins today!

Penny and Aggie 12/20/06

When Shaenon Garrity introduced an adorable teenage character near the very end of her Narbonic's astonishing run, Penny and Aggie's course was clear. Cameo attack! Plus: DeCarlo's Betty, a Beatle and amorous 3D Venn diagrams!



And while we're praising Shaenon, her recent essay "Why I Hate Anthony" does what I've often merely attempted: it takes an utterly geeky obsession and makes it clear to everyone why said obsession is grounded in a worthy feeling, and why the norms should listen to the geeks on this.

Shaenon is a treasure. I hope the new outlets she finds in 2007 take a form that the rest of us can see.

Penny & Aggie Christmas Card

(Well, there's no strip update right here, but I think you get the point...)

Not Really That Important...

Penny and Aggie will be leaving Keenspot January 1 or thenabouts. Gisele and I remain friendly with the staff but feel we need to take more direct responsibility for its fortunes.

Boy. Remember a couple years ago, when this kind of thing was a big deal?