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.

It’s that time of year, when those who follow [fill in the blank] produce list of the [best | worst] examples of [fill in the blank] of the year. This year, I’m going to take a slightly different tack; this is not a list of the [integer] Best Webcomics or Top [integer] Webcomics Stories of the year.

Webcomics, like all other forms of artistic endeavour, and a matter of taste. If you like it, it’s good. If you don’t like it, it’s not so good. If you like it enough to spend money on it, it’s really damn good and a creator loves you in proportion to your financial largesse. So we’ll be breaking down what I thought was good enough to spend money on this year, which is representative of nothing more than my personal tastes; map them to yours as you wish. And before somebody points it out, even this is a flawed model, since my purchases tend toward certain items (original art) and away from others(bumper stickers). Finally, we’ll note that these aren’t necessarily books first published in 2008, just ones that I bought in 2008.

Webcomics Books That Gary Liked Enough To Buy In 2008

• The Great Outdoor Fight and The Achewood Cookbook
• Digger volumes 2 and 3
• Do Not Eat
• Dr McNinja: Surgical Strike
• The Fart Party
• FreakAngels
• Girl Genius volume 7
• Girls With Slingshots volumes 1 and 2
• How To Make Webcomics
• Jellaby
• Moresukine
• Octopus Pie: A Brownstone Companion
• Penny Arcade volume 5
• Ahoy Hoy!
• Set It To Awesome
• Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars
• Pugs: Gods Little Weirdos and Nerds On Parade
• Silent Kimbly: Clip Art
• Starslip Crisis volume 2 and Chainsawsuit
• Templar, AZ: The Great Outdoors and The Mob Goes Wild
• Wondermark: Beards of our Forefathers

Books That Gary Would Have Spent Money On In 2008 But The Authors Kindly Gave Him A Free Copy

• The Book of Biff #3
• Zot!: The Complete Black & White Collection

Book That Gary Can’t Count In Either Of The Prior Two Categories Because He Contributed To It

• Unshelved: Frequently Asked Questions

Books That Don’t Tie Directly To Webcomics But Are By Webcomics Creators And Worthy Of Your Consideration

• Chiggers
• Secrets & Lies

Books That Rumor Has It Are Alleged To Be Released Next Week And Thus May Sneak Into Calendar Year 2008

• The Devils Panties volume 2
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation

Book That Gary Wishes Would Get Made Someday Because He Would Totally Buy It

• Name’s Bang

That’s it for now — stay tuned for other year-end content in the coming days.

The kind of cold where you come in, and you can’t talk easily because your cheeks are too stiff to move on your face and your ears ache all the way into your skull? Bleah. Time for a warm corner and a warming drink and warm thoughts.

There are, of course, few places warmer than a working kitchen, and it appears that Liz Cusack Greenfield has found a kitchen to work in. “Less time for comics” is the downside for you and me, but “Don’t have to run an internet store any more” is the upside for Liz. To celebrate, it’s a closing-up-shop sale at the Stuff Sucks Boutique — get your orders in now, because come the first of the year, it’s shuttered for good. She does hold out the possibility of more comics and drawings in the future, so wish really hard on that Christmas star that she continues to share her artwork with us all.

And what’s a warmer thought that a wedding, in any event? Courtesy of Matt Boyd (the writerly half of Three Panel Soul), please enjoy his comments at the wedding of Ian McConville (the arterly half) and Jess Weigand this past weekend:

As a man named Ray Smuckles once said “Just put the symbolic ring on. The real ring went on basically when you met.”

Fleen congratulates the happy couple, and marvels that Boyd managed to work a requested Achewood quote into his speech without referring to the bride as a vittles bitch.

… and I am sunburnt! No, wait, that’s Beatrice from Much Ado. I am sore from shovelling that freezing crap out of my driveway. Also, it’s Friday afternoon and I want to knock off and relax. But at least I don’t have to have my comickin’ impaired by a faceless corporation:

Cartoonist Ed Appleby of Ed’s R Us has been producing full color comics on the web for over nine months now. In an effort to streamline his work and produce sellable originals, he has been drawing strips on 19″x24” bristol board and having them scanned professionally at his local Staples.

This all came to a screeching halt on December 10th. Ed dropped off the originals for the week of Christmas (Dec 22-27), as well as the two Sundays previous (Dec 14 & Dec 21). When the originals were returned, no scans accompanied them. Five attempts at getting the originals re-scanned later, and still no scans. Attempts at getting Staples to send Ed the scans by E-mail, burning them onto a CD or putting them on a jumpdrive have all met with failure. [T]he Hub, where Staples copy center sent the originals five times … are sending scans from previous weeks insisting that they are the correct ones.

Ed has vowed to post the proper strips back in the archive once he gets them, and there will be a strip at Staples expense for every day he is forced to miss because of their mishandling.

Fleen would like to express sympathy towards Appleby, and to offer up a small Christmas present in the form of advice: given that Staples charges you to scan your strips and you’re held hostage by them, maybe it’s time to invest in a scanner of your own. You don’t even have to buy it from Staples. And yeah, none of these will scan 19 x 24, but plenty of webcomickers scan a strip in halves and join ’em up in Photoshop. Take the leap, Ed Appleby! Let Santa drop something under your tree and see how rapidly it pays for itself (don’t forget your travel time to/from Staples, car wear & tear, gas, and the frustration that you’re feeling now).

Okay, weekend. See you on Monday.

Fortunately, I have a ready guide to gifts in hard times courtesy of Chris Onstad. Now that the Great Outdoor Fight book tour is wrapped, hopefully he’ll have time to continue making and writing about sandwiches.

Mailbag Quickies:

• Animated holiday card from The Wannabe Pirates.
• Open auditions for new members through the end of December at webcomics collective SpiderForest
• New chapter and some pages to go with it at Kitty Hawk. ‘Bout eight weeks back I wrote that Kitty Hawk’s several-pages-per-weekly-update model would likely let the story evolve in a FreakAngels-like fashion. Since then, I have decided that:
  1. It’s a bit more … not episodic exactly, but composed largely of brief vignettes
  2. Like FreakAngels, I enjoy reading this one occasionally, with multiple updates giving me plenty of pages to pore over

  Pop over and see how you like it.