Hey webcomics please stop doing so much stuff all at once. Seriously, I have whole days when I have to scrape the bottom of the news barrel, and all of this (plus Disney/Marvel) comes about at once? Sheesh.

• If you haven’t seen it yet, Ada Price of Publishers Weekly did a pretty good piece on webcomickers getting to print, speaking with the likes of Jerry Holkins, Meredith Gran, and Jon Rosenberg (all of whom have deals with varying incarnations of Random House). It’s much better researched and thought-out than most articles one has seen in the wider world about our little art form, and well worth your time (full disclosure: Ms Price interviewed me for background information).
• Almost missed it: new comics from William George, known once (and perhaps still) as The William G. Yes You Can! only has five updates so far, providing not a lot to go on, so I’m probably way off when I say it reminds me a bit of Erfworld with a bit of Girl Genius, and a soupçon of Dragon Ball sprinkled on top. Given how much Bang Barstal rocked, I’m more than willing to follow along and see how right or wrong I might be. Jump in now before all the cool kids do.
• Last week, I spoke about the text-heavy background material that’s running at Erfworld; the usefulness of that technique popped back into my head on Saturday as I read the third installment of Dave Kellett‘s Saturday-only (officially nameless) sci-fi second comic strip (please also enjoy installments 1 and 2). Do me a favor — read the strips, but only the strips, skip the blogposts.

  Nice, huh? What started out unconnected (and almost suicidally depressing) became linked up and much more light-hearted with that long, wordless whistle in the last panel. But now for the fun part — go back to installments 2 and 3, and read the blogposts that accompany them — the xenobiological information on the “Continuum of Makers” and the letter from Conrado to his grandson; none of that information is necessary to hook me on the story (heck, that one panel of alien critter steering the spaceship with gripping feet got me good), but man does it add color or what?

  Just from this extraneous material, I can see a mess of potential story hooks:

  1. Somebody outside the ruling family is figuring out how the pinch drive works
  2. Somebody outside the ruling family is figuring out that the ruling family doesn’t know how the pinch drive works
  3. The Makers show up, wanting the technology back
  4. The Makers show up, wanting “The Spirit” back
  5. Whoever stole “The Spirit” from the Makers shows up, wanting it and/or the drive, and/or whatever, back (or maybe for the first time)
  6. Conrado’s descendants prove not to be as capable as he (after all, in 58 years he took a broken piece of alien technology and reverse-engineered it, presumably turning it into first a commercial, then a governmental empire, uniting a starving and fractured humanity) and the Empire starts to feel the strain, with our without any/all of the above …
  7. … and wacky hijinks ensue. C’mon, this is Kellett — it’s gonna be funny.

  The other thing I really like about Nameless is that Kellett’s posited a future empire of humanity that’s Spanish-language dominant. Whether that’s because the imperial family is Spanish, or whether “mighty Indústriaglobo” was already the source of power elites doesn’t matter — it’s something I haven’t seen since H Beam Piper wrote about a future where the superpowers blew each other up, leaving the southern hemisphere less damaged and Spanish language/culture as the de facto primary. Piper also assumed a lot of cross-cultural integration, to the point there’s a guy on a hell-planet hunting oceanic monsters named Mohandas Ghandi Feinberg — and he’s a big, ruddy-faced, red-bearded guy.

  To conclude: read this story. It’s good. Also, go hunt down some Piper if you haven’t read his stuff before.

• On any other day, this would probably be the most prominent webcomics news around: David Morgan-Mar and friends have cooked up the equivalent of TiVo for webcomics with too-damn-many strips in the archive: Archive Binge lets you choose a strip, and a number of installments from the archive to be sent to your RSS reader each day until you’re caught up.

  If you skip ahead on your reading, you can tell AB and it’ll pick up delivery from the first unread strip. And best of all, they asked the creators if it was okay! No scraping of content here — if you’d like your comic included, I’m guessing that the email address at the bottom of the page, for a chap named dmm, who may be found at a domain called dangermouse, which is a dot–net, would be a good place to start. Just remember that The Comic Irregulars are doing this as a service (they’ve declared Archive Binge to be non-profit and that they will not accept paid advertising, which means they’re even footing the server costs), so be polite and patient if they take a little while to get back to you.