Apparently, without realizing it, I may have scooped the world and lucked upon unreleased news concerning a superstar of the newspaper comics page.

If so, I wholeheartedly apologize for this inadvertent act of journalism, and promise not to journalise again in the future. On the other hand, I haven’t been able to confirm the story at all with the syndicate, which would put me back on the more familiar ground of unsubstantiated rumormongering.

But because I feel I owe you people at least one bit of factual reportage today, how about this: Darren J. Gendron mails to say

Dear Pirate has reached Strip No. 50.

Plasticine figures and better advice than Dear Abby’s idiot daughter? What are you waiting for?

Looks like one last two month reprieve for Little Dee‘s syndication hopes, Chris Baldwin reports:

The current situation is (and it is in writing to this effect) that I will continue running Little Dee at comics.com until the last day of July. They have requested this as further “development” time.

So Dee will be back to littledee.net on August 1st unless they make an actual offer of syndication.

I wish this gray area of what’s happening wasn’t continuing, but I am still tempted by the carrot they’re dangling.

Okay, here’s where you can help get something good onto the comics pages. It seems that (although curiously, it has not been widely reported) that Cathy Guisewite is handing off writing and/or art duties to a collaborator. From what I can tell, her strip has always metered high in the dump it category of newspaper comic strip polls.

This affords the perfect opportunity to write a polite letter to your local paper’s features editor, asking them to a) move away from a strip that’s gone zombie (that is, moved away from original creator to substitute hacks, a fate recently shared by B.C.), and suggest one that’s both all-ages friendly and amazingly good. Get writin’.

At the AV Club. Man, I love that photo where they look like Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker.

Advance convention circuit news in the mailbag from Mike Russell today, regarding the 4th Annual Stumptown Comics Fest. Want a table? They’re on discount for another week or so:

The Stumptown Comics Fest is preparing for its 4th-annual celebration of comics and cartooning — to be held Saturday and Sunday, September 29 and 30, at the Exhibit Hall of the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel in Portland.

The exhibitors’ hall is larger than last year — allowing the Comics Fest to offer 8-foot tables to exhibitors rather than the 6-foot tables of previous years.

Tables are available at discounted early-bird rates of $90 for a full table, $50 for a half table, through June 15.

After June 15, tables will be available at $110 for a full table and $70 for a half table.

Stumptown’s always been webcomics-friendly, so go check out everybody that can’t make it out East for MoCCA, and tell Guest of Honor Shaenon Garrity, that I said hi if you see her.

Lately I’ve been thinking about webcomics sites, specifically how they’re being hosted. What’s really caught my eye are the very basic, DIY kinds of hosting. Of these, I’ve of late been transfixed with webcomics that are available through Livejournal (or those to which I’ve been introduced through Livejournal). Many webcomics have RSS feeds, so updates and new comics and such appear more or less automatically. I’m a major fan of this technology, in part because I have a job which requires me to be online a fair amount as it is (which means when I’m home getting online’s less attractive as an option).

And there’s always the question of remembering to click; there’s a small handful of webcomics that I click to on a daily basis, but it’s becoming more and more common for me to just get them through my friends page if they aren’t ones I read regularly (and some of those are ones I read regularly because they pop up over there). In my defense, I’m getting settled at the new place: I can’t find my flash drive and I’m still painting over the paneling. It’s all making me a little crazy–I’m really ready to be done with it all–and has caused me to space out a bit on important things (for starters, I’ll be at MoCCA later this month; stop by the Trees and Hills table…!)

So things like “simple” and “sweet” are even more so given the state of disrepair, boxes, and so forth in my immediate surroundings. Lately I’ve been really into the totally compelling Normal Life by Natasha Allegri. This site was one of those suggested way back in the beginning when I first started posting here, and it was one I’d always meant to name-check. When I first looked at it, I found that her color work was so breathtaking and her linework so crisp that I immediately wanted to try color work to see if I could capture some of that same emotion, the easy, evocative grace of her images. They remind me a little of Hope Larson‘s work and Leela Corman’s as well. It’s amazing stuff, and I feel like I ought to have mentioned it earlier. I’m not sure how much other work she has out there–or if it’s somewhere other than Livejournal–but what I’ve seen basically just makes me want to see more of her work. It’s gorgeous, and sweet, and straightforward in a way that’s, weirdly, exactly what I want to see.

Three fast things:

1. First seen at ¡Journalista!, since seen elsewhere: 10 Wicked Awesome Webcomics, from something resembling a mainstream publisher.
2. The winner of the DGMED shirt contest is John Riggs, who would like all his adoring fans to know that he’ll do his very best to live up to the vestigal virgin-saint standards expected of a pageant winner in the modern age. Oh, also that he wears a size medium.
3. Today marks almost exactly one year since Ryan North dropped some hints to me that he was working on something extremely cool, and at long last we at Fleen have gotten our act together to offer Project Wonderful ads for your purchase — right now they are a freakin’ bargain.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Lore Sjöberg has repurposed his Bad Gods site away from Flash animation and towards whatever medium suits the given project best:

The clever among you will note that this is a very similar approach to the one I took with The Brunching Shuttlecocks. The clever and obsessive among you will note that [Friday, 1 June 2007] is Brunching’s tenth anniversary.

One part of this Brunching Mk. II is a webcomic (which appears to be more character- and plot-oriented than the reflective musings of Lore Brand Comics); ladles and jenglemints, please enjoy the comedic stylings of The Capybara Brothers (which starts here, continues here, and will eventually be directly accessible here).

Today marks five years of goblins, devil bears and saucy lasses having a laugh. Fleen congratulates John Allison.

Our previously-announced t-shirt contest has a winner! We will be notifying the lucky party and bringing you the name shortly; if for any reason the winner cannot successfully discharge the duties of the office, the runner-up will receive the t-shirt for the duration of the reign.

Double dose of Ryan Estrada news:

• Continuing his theme of comicking ’round the world, Estrada is starting a Mexican comics commune (story via Matt Boyd).
• And, following up his earlier reports of Bollywood using webcomics as a source of uncredited material, Estrada informs us of swipes from Yirmumah! and Coffee Achievers.

If Bollywood is going to keep this up, I believe that they must make amends by making Aishwarya Rai available for a lengthy interview here at Fleen. Yes, that does so make up for thefts from creators! Because I said so, that’s why.

So it seems that LOLBOTS may not be consuming 112% of the bandwidth of the internet at the moment; growing outward from originator Rich Stevens, it has now encompassed Jeph Jacques and Ryan North, the Twin Towers of webcomics (and between them the center of all crossovers and cross projects). Analysis continues to pour in from corners far and wide, with comic strip scholar Wendell Wittler kicking things off:

I was about to make a post bemoaning the fact that LOLCATS images are more popular than Webcomics, meaning that all the creative writing and drawing all over the web is being trumped by pictures of cats and captions in bad English, but now a couple of the sharpest writers in Webcomicdom have decided not to fight ‘em, but to join ‘em.

I’m talking about LOLBOTS, the instantaneously popular blog of LOL-pictures featuring robots, assembled by a team that includes one guy who really knows robots, Diesel Sweeties’ R. Stephens and another who knows a few robots, Questionable Content’s J. Jacques (both of whose work I have praised in this very blog) . In two days, they have assembled an impressive assortment of memes and macros starring some of the biggest mechanical stars of science fiction and some real-life robots too.

and LJ opinion-meister istametaketoshi adding:

The biggest problem with LOLcats is the way in which they divorce the phenomenon from the context. A lot of the funniest lolcats are impossible to understand without a fairly solid grounding in forum parlance and etiquette, but the concept itself has taken on a kind of life of its own in the hands of those who just think cats that talk are inherently cute.

Well, geek culture is striking back, RE-appropriating the lolcat phenomenon and returning it to its rightful place–in the hands of those who love cartoons, robots and video games. LOLBOTS is the next big craze–be sure to tell your neighbors about it.

As part of that geek culture, I couldn’t be more proud.

As a side note, work will be taking me to a place with very sparse internet during the day for the next two weeks, so expect updates that are old, pre-written, and/or sporadic. If any of you would care to send me advance notice of your forthcoming controversies, that would be a big help — I have a hole in my schedule for next Thursday, and either a Wikifight or a Logan/Jacques shitstorm should fill it nicely.