The webcomics blog about webcomics

Wednesday Morning Roundup

MoCCA final notes and photos to come in a separate post, so let’s get back to the wider world of webcomics. Lotta stuff going on, kids.

In the Back From Hiatus Department, please enjoy both Help Desk and the song stylings of Eric Snark.

Little Dee has begun reruns to acclimate the comics.com readers with its general awesomeness. I must confess, I have a touch of trepidation about a) the now-to-be-locked archives; and b) the two-week delay in strips showing up at Chris Baldwin’s site. Yes, I could just view them at comics.com, but that site is a) slow as shit; b) allergic to my browser; and c) full of pop-ups when accessed with IE, which I hate using. But it’s still Little Dee, so I’ll be there every day because I’m that adorable girl’s bitch.

The WCCA nominations are out, and there are some tough categories this year. Achewood vs. Scary Go Round vs. Perry Bible Fellowship? Copper vs. A Lesson Is Learned vs. Applegeeks? We talked about their process earlier in the year, but a question has occurred to me just now as I’m typing this. I want to know — even more than the size of the electorate on these things, about which I’m curious — “Outstanding Comedic Comic”? Isn’t that a tad redundant? Mark Mekkes, if you’re reading this, fill us on on the decision to use that wording.

Speaking of Scary Go Round, the SGR Idol results continue to stream in; I’ve particularly enjoyed runners-up #1 (it takes some serious art chops to have as wide a range as Tyler Martin has) and #4, which features a totally awesome badger omnibus, and nicely captures the speech patterns of Tackleford’s goblins.

And in one of those occurrences that may be most accurately described as ‘explosive’, Narbonic is abandoning the subscription model, and its full archives are opening up. Given that we’re talking about what’s likely the most successful sbuscription-locked strip on Modern Tales (and possibly the most successful subscription-locked strip, period), does this mean that that particular business model is officially dead? Comments from Colonel Joey here, and your thoughts welcome.

Finally, in response to reader requests, we’re in the process of tagging articles (there are a lot of them) with searchable labels, and will be making those visible in (hopefully) the near future.

My impression has been that the most financially successful subscription-locked comic is James Kochalka’s American Elf. According to Kochalka, he makes considerably more money off of his web subscriptions than he does from the print versions of the same work, and he seems quite happy with the model.

Yeah. How about “Outstanding Humorous Comic?” It scans better, anyway.

I almost want to curse Narbonic for having free archives and making me want to read them all despite not having the time to do so.

But I’ve been enjoying them to much to resort to petty curses.

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