More of the stuff that’s dropped since the various holidays wrapped up.

• Interviews! Raina Telgemeier at Newsarama, Chris Onstad (and shortly David Malki !) at The Sound of Young America (listen at your local public radio station this week, or to Onstad online now; Jesse Thorn is seriously the best interviewer alive right now).
• Speaking of Malki !, sad news at Wondermark today — The Onion is dropping the comics page from its print edition, and thus Wondermark will be losing that distribution channel (and I’ll be losing Ziggy en Español). But to make up for it, Wondermark is joining a syndication service for college/independent papers.
• Also heading to a three-days-a-week update schedule, Ugly Hill.
• John Campbell is going insane again: hourly comics!
• Webcomics Weekly returns after six or seven weeks, and apparently they had some fun at my expense.
• Finally, they basically raise money year-round, but I’m going to arbitrarily put a period on this year’s Child’s Play efforts, which to date amount to US$1.17 million. Considering they keep telling us this is one of the crappiest economies in six or seven decades, to have exceeded the goal by nearly a half a million dollars is one of those things that make you feel good inside. We’ll see if we can’t come up with something tomorrow to cure that.

We’ll come back to some of it tomorrow. For now, a portion of what broke over the weekend:

• Matt Boyd of Three Panel Soul did an interview with MC Frontalot, the rapper laureate of webcomics.
• Once upon a time, I asked Jon Rosenberg why, if he was going to do Goats four days a week (instead of the more usual three or five), was it Monday - Thursday? Why not Mon-Tue-Thur-Fri, so that the three-day drought between the last installment of one week and the first of the next was only two days? His answer: I drink on Thursday nights, rendering Friday comics unlikely at best.

  Welp, he’s got a house and a child now, and is prepping up three books for release with a major publishing house, and he’s no longer drinking only on Thursdays. As a result of not wanting to die, he’s been forced to cut back to a three days a week schedule, which is really a bargain when you consider that I originally asked my question (v.s.) in the era of single-row, black and white strips instead of the multi-row, color extravaganzas we get these days.

• Hey, do you like things that are fancy? How about webcomics that have new, more functional site designs, including improved archiving tools and resurrected forums? Then check out the new/improved Theater Hopper, which features all of these (and more!) as of this morning.
• Creator sighting! Danielle Corsetto will be bringing girls and slingshots to the wilds of suburban New Jersey on Saturday, and the arctic hinterlands of Canada but a week later. Seeing as how one of these signings is only about 20 minutes up the road, I’ll be doing my best to drop by.
• Of course, if I miss Danielle on Saturday, it’ll be just about a month before she’s back this way — New York Comic Con (having tried a pleasant Spring weekend and decided it was entirely too pleasant) returns to its February timeslot this year.

  Now, this page has griped in the past about various aspects of how NYCC has been run, but I’ll give them this bit of unqualified praise: last night I got my press credentials for the show with absolutely zero hassle. It was the easiest credentialling I’ve ever been through, driven almost entirely by the question, Have you been here as Press before? with an affirmative answer resulting in Okay, here you go. It took all of two minutes, and every big con needs to adopt this model.

  Keeping with my current very good mood regarding NYCC, I’ll note that webcomics will likely have a pretty significant presence, with the lovely Ms Corsetto, Comics Bakery, various Dumbrellites, at least some Halfpixellians, a Canadian or two, and a couple of obscure guys from Seattle all rumored to be in attendance. The NYCC home page also features an advert from Disney’s children’s book group featuring a purple guy with webcomicky roots.

  Programming for the Con isn’t up yet, but the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference taking place the day before looks promising, with the first session devoted to “Comics on the Web”, which sounds a mite familiar. See you there?

So I’m extremely grateful to Lore Sjöberg, who has decided to make January a month that overflows with comics. Like a cornucopia. Or something:

There’s a little cutback over at Wired way, and for the foreseeable future I’m going to be providing a video every other week instead of every week.

Looking on the somewhat brighter side, this frees up more time to do other things! I was thinking to myself “I wonder if I can update Bad Gods every weekday in January.” Then I realized that’s what George Orwell would have called “loserthink,” if he had written a teen comedy instead of a biting political satire. So instead I’m asking the question “What happens when I update Bad Gods every weekday in January”?

Keep checking Bad Gods, you’ll see new material constantly emerging like pups from an extremely gravid prairie dog.

Gosh, with a mental image like that, how can you say no? It’s Monster Manual Comix for the meantime, but I have hopes of more Lore Brand Comics (which, curiously enough, don’t seem to show up at Lore Brand Comics). Regardless, be sure to click on the “Notes” link below each ‘toon; it’ll bring you up the equivalent of a very short director’s commentary.

I would call this the laziest strip ever, but for the fact that David Morgan-Mar set the wheels in motion a year ago, has been laying foundation since early summer (or winter, since Morgan-Mar is a Sydneysider), has been building up to it for months, has been tying directly to it for pretty much all of December.

Not to mention that in Tuesday’s strip, he either had to have taken both those pictures of himself a year ago (planning!) or make sure that he had the same haircut and basic physical appearance a year after launching the plot (continuity!). In any event, tying together fourteen different themes (which, for all intents and purposes are fourteen different webcomics). The only thing he might have tied in but didn’t wasn’t really a strip at all. Well done, Dr Morgan-Mar. Well done.

Ricknonroll, courtesy of xkcd. Thanks for a wacky year, webcomics!

For those of you who missed part one, what follows is a list of what webcomickry I personally found interesting enough to lay down American cash money. Last time it was books, this time it’s other merch, and once again ’tis items I paid for in 2008 regardless of actual release date.

Original Strips That Gary Liked Enough To Buy In 2008

• Little Dee, 24 & 28 March, 20 October
• Octopus Pie, #176, #195
• Planet Karen, 31 January
• Sheldon: 16 January, 27 March

Other Visual Arts That Gary Liked Enough To Buy In 2008

• Vera Brosgol, Braid Hair and Tandem Bike (prints)
• Carly Monardo, Walking the Ostrich (print)
• Octopus Pie, Ugly Winter Hats — Grey X-Mas (painting)
• Ursula Vernon, The Taxman (print)
• Wondermark, #191, #219, #245, #394 (prints)

Items That Gary Commissioned

• Berg’s Craftsmanship In Wood, a freakin’ coffee table to store all this stuff in
• Rene Engström, sketch drive drawing
• Carly Monardo, print of my dog
• Chris Yates, two custom Baffler!s

Miscellaneous Stuffs That Don’t Fit Into Another Category, But Gary Liked Them Anyway

• Achewood, greeting cards for dudes, t-shirt
• Wondermark, 2009 calendar (similar to the 2008 version)

Original Strip That Was Bought For Gary As A Birthday Present Because He Has The Best Wife In The World

• Sheldon, 3 May 2007

Barring any last-minute purchases, that should take care of 2008. My resolution for 2009: Stop trying to support this nascent artistic movement single handed, but first let me see if any of those laser robots are still available.

Edit to add: Dammit, I knew I’d forget something. I just realized that I wrote out this post while drinking from my Pub Stub pint glasses, which were obtained in 2008. Come to think of it, I probably forgot to include them because I was drinking from them.

It started in the first half hour of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, when host Liane Hansen spoke with technology commentator David Kushner about Penny Arcade. It’s not a very detailed piece, running a little less than three minutes, and somehow Kushner managed to completely avoid mentioning the Fruit Fucker (despite talking about On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness), and nobody from PA was included, but still. This is probably the first mention of webcomics that many of NPR’s audience will have heard, and the outraged letters that they’ll write because of offended sensibilities will be amusing.

The day continued with a piece in the New York Times that’s really about how the challenges currently facing newspapers are confronting comic strips as well. This piece was notable in my mind for two quotes, which I will reproduce for you here. Quote the first:

Cartoonists are not waiting for the syndicates to develop new business models. They are posting to free sites like Comic Genesis and Webcomics Nation. Some Web comics, like “The Argyle Sweater” by Scott Hilburn, have been picked up for syndication, but that is unusual. Even more rarely, a Web comic might attract a large following at a stand-alone site; such is the case with “Penny Arcade,” a video gaming strip.

I’m not sure that the second statement is factually true. I think that there have been more Web comics [sic] that have made it big on their own than have been picked up for syndication. The problem here likely lies in the idea of what constitutes a reader. “Generic Newspaper Comic Strip” may appear in 1000 newspapers with a combined circulation of tens of millions, but how many of those papers are actually read, how many copies get shared between people, how many readers actually read “GNCS”, and how many do so casually rather than actively?

By contrast, the active nature of having to go get (or at least, subscribe to an RSS feed to) the latest Penny Arcade (or PvP, or xkcd, LICD, QC, C&H, or any of the other high-draw webcomics) means that you have a dedicated reader. I would submit there is a greater potential to make a living with a few tens of thousands of dedicated readers, versus a million people that glance over “Cathy” only because it’s in front of them, requires no effort to do so, and is an ingrained habit of decades.

The more interesting quote was the second one:

But Brian Walker … warns that too much exposure “can take away from the strip itself.” If a comic’s characters are everywhere, he asks, why bother reading the newspaper strip?

And Mr. Walker, who is also a comics historian, believes that comics are best appreciated on paper. He likens reading a comic on a screen to watching a movie on an iPod: the general idea comes through, but some of the essential artistry is lost.

For reference, Walker is part of the creative team of two strips, and one may reasonably assume that some of the essential artistry he’s concerned about is from those two strips. Those two strips are “Beetle Bailey”, and “Hi & Lois”.

I can’t even bring myself to make a snarky comment about the words “essential artistry” being used in reference to those two strips, because even the best strips on the modern comics page are squashed into such a small space as to force the art to be reduced to a minimum of line, design, and dialogue. It’s not the screen that damages artistry (as proved by eye-poppingly gorgeous strips found here, here, here, here, or any other example you care to think of) … it’s the act of printing in newspapers itself.

Heck, take the shrinking space issue away, and you still have inherent limitations of the technology of fast-turnaround printing with ink on newsprint. Cheap paper plus rush jobs do not allow for great art. For a good discussion of the issues surrounding quality art on the comics page, I recommend Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss; the guy may be really wacky, but his scholarship of the great draughtsmen of the comics page — Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and others — is second to none. Read up on how badly the artistic efforts of strips produced without space limits were butchered to get them to reproduce on newsprint, then consider how those limitations don’t apply to screens.

Especially long-memoried webcomics readers may recall a situation way the heck back in the early parts of the century when Penny Arcade and some other sites got into a situation with a company called eFront. Long story short, eFront was an ad network that wound up not paying a bunch of people, and potentially having legal claim on many of their affiliates (to the extent that perhaps they could have fired Gabe & Tycho and taken over the PA name). Whole thing blew up in their faces, and some leaked ICQ logs made their principal officer (one Sam Jain) and another affiliate webmaster named Tim Eckles look pretty bad. Ah, schadenfreude.

So why drag up old news?

Because this morning I happened to notice this story at British tech newsleter The Register, and it mentioned a name that stirred old memories. It seems that since getting out of the not paying webcomics business, Sam Jain has been in the fake spyware warning pop-ups that try to scam you into purchasing bogus malware protection business. Notorious scamware titles such as WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner and ErrorSafe are among those flogged by Mr Jain’s current venture. At present, he is being assessed $8000/day in a contempt citation for, among other things, not showing up to court to answer charges.

Unfortunately, the most persistant scam artists and unscrupulous business types tend to disappear and reappear at intervals — often revisiting a previous venture after it’s thought that everybody affected last time around has forgotten names and lessons learned. So let this serve as a reminder to all in webcomics (and everybody in any kind of venture, really) — while past actions are no predicter of future performance, Sam Jain has a history of bad behavior in our community, and should be looked upon with a weather eye should he resurface.

Since yesterday we at Fleen shared the best of the season’s tendencies, today we take the opposite tack. From Kate Beaton, a less supersitious Scrooge confronts his demons, with predictable results.

And from Down Under, David Morgan-Mar offers Christmas end times, one angry Santa, and a thorough loathing of what is surely a common present under many trees, Monopoly.

Flurry of baking going on at the homestead: cheesecakes a’ chilling, bread sponges a’ aging, and there are rumors of cookies. Allow me to share the good will (etc) of the season with you, as I have lately received two cartoon cards of the electronic variety that I trust you will find as charming as I did.

First up, received from Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, the latest in Roman’s holiday cards series. From there, you may enjoy previous entries, including Dave and Pikachu discovering the true meaning of Kwanzaa.

Secondly, a card that I was supremely happy to receive — you may recall how pleased I was to discover a strip called Rooby Moon last year. Then the RSS notifications tapered off, and it it seemed no more. But Rooby creator Chris MacNeil sent along holiday greetings and it appears that my forgetting of the strip was premature after all. Safe journeys all, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.