We previously mentioned Malfunction Junction when talking about an odd occurance of Trent Reznor.

Today’s comic brings up the ongoing American flag-waving impetus to “Support Our Troops!”. And it puts it in a pretty good perspective, too. Nobody knows what it really means to support our troops, and nobody really wants to write their Congressman to raise taxes to pay for more body armor either.

Malfunction Junction suffers from the same things that other journal webcomics suffer from – the comic is only as interesting as the (usually exaggerated) life of the person doing the comic. It’s a mixed bag with Matt Milby – sometimes this is interesting and sometimes not, but usually he manages to find something funny in everything (even if a bit juvenile).

In general, Malfunction Junction is a good read with decent art, and deserves some of your time.

Also, Matt Milby has a Sheriff Pony wallet.

Neil Gaiman gave a really nice talk a couple weeks ago at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. He’s funny, he’s engaging, the guy from Wired who moderated was good at his job (and brought free copies of the Snakes On A Plane issue for everybody). Neil spoke about lots of things, but what really stuck in my head was his description of being on the set for Beowulf (starring the motion-captures of Angelina Jolie and Crispin Glover). He spoke of what he hopes the film will look like when everything’s rendered in a year or two. Then he paused, and asked:

“How many of you here saw The Polar Express? Or saw a clip of it? Okay, now put your hands down if the eyes didn’t disturb you.”

Every hand in the room stayed up. He used that as an intro to talk about how for Beowulf, the actors essentially have brainwave-recording skullcaps on, which are measuring the muscle impulses that shift their eyes around, so that things won’t be so disturbing in this movie. I bring all this up because there have been a number of attempts to do webcomics with hyper-realistic 3D character models, and so far it’s all an interesting experiment. Each new iteration makes the character models a bit less stiff and more organic … but the eyes … brrrr.

Ben Adams is the latest to take a whack at 3D webcomics; he’s opted for an autobiographical story called Misfit’s Journey, the first chapter of which was recently released. If you don’t take a light hand to the story, autobiographical comics can quickly become an exercise in navel-gazing, but Adams channels enough Harvey Pekar that the writing isn’t the problem. He’s written comics before and contributed to an anthology by Joe Zabel (who’s been responsible for several 3D comics and has worked on several iterations of American Splendor, so there’s a nice circle closed) and knows how to keep a story moving. It’s a bit early to see how fully it will develop, but he seems like a guy willing to explore his flaws without glossing over them, so at the very least you get an honest look inside his head.

Ben has a few photos of himself on the site, so you can compare his actual self to the rendered version and they’re pretty close. But no matter how engaging the story, no matter how well Ben and Joe and other 3D artists create their models … the eyes. Everybody that does 3D comics should buy a beer for the first person to get the eyes to be not-disturbing.

Molly McCausland’s Tea For Three hasn’t quite hit it’s running legs yet. She’s not kept a strict update schedule, she hasn’t established a clear artistic style or voice, and her characters are a bit stereotypical. Yes, one of them has a French accent. It’s a little more plausible here, since the strip is set in England and the character is an international spy (which is a cheap writer’s trick in it’s own right, but…)

But as far as relatively new comics go, this is better than a lot of them. From the writing side of things, she is really trying to establish a coherent story, and trying to show different facets of her characters in the right situations for those facets to come out. She’s trying to tell her story, rather than someone else’s.

Her artwork is improving, and you can see the raw edges of her artistic voice coming out from the background as she gets more strips done. Just the amount of improvement already shows that there’s a good amount of talent underneath.

So spend an hour or two reading the archives – you might have trouble with the next & previous buttons, so use the archive view – and check back in with Tea For Three in a month or two to see where things are.

Belphegor

Somebody needs to do a visual reference to old Looney Tunes sight gags. They need to be named, catalogued, and preserved, if only to make the point I’m about to make easier. Friz Freleng had this one sight gag that I’ve always called Five Doors; it must have been a particular favorite, because he used it at least three times that I can remember, but he first used it in Little Red Riding Rabbit. All togther now: “Hey Grandma, I brought a little bunny rabbit for ya TA HAVE!”

Five Doors consists of Bugs and the Big Bad Wolf (or, in later cartoons, Yosemite Sam, or Tweety and Sylvester’s fingers, “walking” at the end of his arm) chasing each other in and out of five doors, three of which are at the top of a set of stairs, and two below. The music rises and falls as they run up and down the stairs, in and out of the various rooms (and just because Bugs runs into door #2 doesn’t mean he won’t come out of door #5 on a different floor).

What always struck me about Five Doors is how extravagant it was; it’s well known that the Schlesinger/Warners animators had to bring in their cartoons to within eight frames of exactly six minutes. There was no editing, no fat to trim, every single one of 8640 frames had to move the story forward. And Five Doors took upwards of 25 seconds of screen time, at the end of which, the characters were essentially right where they started. So how did Freleng justify it? It was a luxury — sometimes, you just have to put in 25 seconds of well-timed music and animation that doesn’t particularly serve the story. It’s just icing on the funny cake.

Paul Taylor does something similar in today’s Wapsi Square. There’s been literally weeks worth of his dark storyline, with dead gods and the end of the world and portents of danger. He’s been doling out the hints of what’s going on at a furious and satisfying rate. But sometimes, you have to put all that aside for a day, and draw a big ol’ wide panel of hot girls dancing. Five Doors is funny and all, but this just might be better. Plus, in the midst of all the dark exposition: Porky Pig reference!

So we’ve been getting a fair number of newsbox mentions, blog links, trackbacks, pingbacks, humpbacks, whatever, since Fleen started up.

Today, Fleen makes it into an actual strip.

Creators take note: we may be geeks with fragile egos, but name-checking us in your strip and giving us originals will not impair our journalistic integrity even a little bit. For us, providing the matches for fights and flamewars is reward enough.

I first met the great Diablo at Dor-Con 17. I didn’t get to spend much time with him there, but he was gracious enough to autograph my Chia Pet.

I’m very excited, therefore, to present the following interview with Diablo about his magnum opus, megaGAMERZ 3133T.

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You might have seen it at Comixpedia, or at their home page — the Webcartoonist’s Choice Awards have announced their timeline for the year. What struck me about the announcement is the scheduling: nominations open on 15 May, with the awards themselves dropping on 17 July. The logical question here is, “Why are awards for achievement in 2005 happening closer to 2007?” For answers, let’s hear from WCCA Chairman Mark (Zortic) Mekkes:

There are a couple of reasons that it’s set when it is. For one thing, it’s a quieter time of year for everyone. People have more time to look at nominees than they do immediately following the holidays (like now). The other main reason is to coincide with ComicCon. By announcing the results just before ComicCon, it gives people something to discuss, brag about or debate in San Diego.

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Comic conventions are always a good thing. They’re a great opportunity to meet and greet other artists, smell the fans, and get really really drunk (while still being able to deduct it as a business expense!).

In particular, conventions can go a long way towards helping a nascent collection of rabble gel into a full blown community – and the UK Web And Mini Comix Thing has been trying to help that process along for the last three years. Fleen has only ever heard good things from those who attended – that it’s a positive experience and a good thing in general for the UK indie comics scene.

But the thing about conventions that most people don’t know is… they can be an excruciating ordeal to actually run. They say you don’t have to be crazy to run a convention, but they also say it sure helps.

We received the following response from “Thing”, when we asked for a press release about the upcoming UK Web And Mini Comix Thing 2006. This is presented almost completely unedited (we corrected or at least Americanized spellings, and added links and removed some leading and trailing text that was not directly related – but otherwise this is verbatim what we received).
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There are neat things for you to see and maybe to buy!

John A. has released the cover to The Retribution Index, the forthcoming Scary Go Round book #4. Since it has been scientifically proved that SGR equals wonderfulness, you should start counting the seconds until the release of this book. Count, damn you!

Penny Arcade’s forthcoming collectible card game has what looks like finished box art over at the PA newsbox (scroll down to the fourth item). Congrats also to Hawk from Applegeeks; I met him by random chance at SPX ’05, and we talked a bit about the coloring job he did for Gabe’s card art. Looks like a damn fine job, too.

With a post-mortem celebrity resembling that of a mutant Princess Diana, the Cyclops Kitty makes an appearance in today’s Questionable Content. Now normally, an in-strip t-shirt design has the potential to become a money-spinner for Jeph Jacques, but he notes:

To answer everyone’s questions, yes that is a little tribute to Cy the Cyclops Kitty on Raven’s shirt. To answer a lot of people’s second questions, no I will not be putting that design on t-shirts to sell. The notion of profiting off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten is, to put it mildly, distasteful.

Naturally, not everybody shares his sense of restraint, so if you were planning on trying to profit off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten, get in line. Seriously, this one just feels forced. The only thing that strikes me as less necessary would be if one of those 1000 or so Batgirls was also a cyclops kitty. Please don’t take that as a suggestion.