The webcomics blog about webcomics

Of Moles And Skins

Ah, Moleskine, king of notebooks. You form my convention sketchbook, keep track of my expenses, acted as my diary on that trek through Australia and Japan. You hold up under all circumstances and never crap out, and ink never looks blobby on your pages. I love you as man should not love inanimate objects. And now, you’re the inspiration/namesake for a journal webcomic.

“Moruskine” (since Japanese doesn’t have an “L” sound) is the project of Dirk Schwieger, launched at the beginning of the year. People send him suggestions of things to do in Tokyo, he does them, and then draws a comic about it. And here’s the best part: I will DO it, no questions asked and whether I like it or not.

Schwieger’s art is presented as if photographed from his Moleskine (and if not, it’s a darn good facsimilie thereof); it’s clean, expressive, heavy on the blacks, is insanely detailed at times, and often has a feel like a mutant cross between American Splendor and This American Life.

The only real drawback is that Schwieger publishes in a LiveJournal, which doesn’t offer the tools for a proper webcomic archive. But screw that — this is quality, insightful work about a guy and a very different culture. Plus: okonomiyaki! My favorite! Go read it, then drop Schwieger a line and see what you can get him to do.

Rubbish. LJ does offer the tools. LJ has date and tag-based archiving. The date-based views can be handled as calendars or topics-in-a-given-month. can be made to display one post at a time in the style of traditional webcomics archives. (If you go too far into the archives, LJ will attempt to set you paging through day by day even when there are no posts there, but the month view circumvents this.) Tagging allows for sorting by subject, arc (which Moruskine doesn’t have, but others do), what-have-you.

Tagging, of course, relies on organization at the creator’s end, but this is true of any CMS — and, ultimately, LJ still falls into the CMS rubric.

What doesn’t visibly exist is an S2 style dedicated to what many expect a webcomics site to look like, but that’s not a failure on LJ’s part.

CMS? S2? Sorry, I don’t speak your moon language.

[…] did I not see this until just now? Dirk Schwieger’s brilliant little journal webcomic reprinted in a replica Moleskine (the city notebooks are awesome)? OH CRAP […]

RSS feed for comments on this post.