Okay, everybody who’s not read Jim Zubkavich’s Makeshift Miracle, stop right damn now and go start from the beginning. Now do yourself a favor and pick up the print version, because it reads even better in book form. Now ask yourself, Why is Gary pushing a two-three year old book that prints pages that ran on the web like seven-eight years ago, cool as it may be?

The answer, Bunky, is because of what Zubkavich has been up to since then. Bit of design work, some artwork for a mildly obscure RPG there, and oh yeah — artwork for a new browser game … a little thing called ZORK.

Holy.

Crap.

Zubkavich is the lead designer, contributing all the characters and monsters, and was aided by a terrific logo design from the able hands of fellow webcomicker Indigo Kelleigh. Honestly, the only thing that could make this cooler is if the soundtrack busts some phat rhymes.

Not quite getting the idea of “easy”, or just in a cranky mood? Chris Yates eschews RSS feeds for The Update-O-Tron. If anybody manages to navigate it all the way to the end successfully, let me know. Also, I think that by the time you finally do navigate it to the end, it’s statistically likely that the strip will have updated.

• I don’t have the energy for this — would somebody please explain to Zuda that their understanding of women vis-a-vis webcomics (as both audience and creators) might possibly be a bit skewed? ‘Cause this shit ain’t making me think that the people in charge of Zuda (or, to be fair, this particular marketing push) have ever met actual live girls. (link via ¡Journalista!)
• C’mon people, we could have done better than this — Mike Rouse-Deane rends his garments:
  

  After 9 months, 134 different artists contributed to 134 different strips each one adding their own take on a group of police officers and their lives. The goal was to make it an entire year, from April 1st to April 1st and finish it. Each strip was on time, each strip was regular as clockwork until today.

  As of Tuesday 13th January 2009 the Guest Strip Project failed in its mission. It wanted to carry on a regular strip through different artists and raise as much money to the Make-A-Wish International Foundation as possible. This has always been its goal and unfortunately we have failed.

  Via email, Rouse-Deane informs us that GSP raised $84 (sadly, I don’t think that’s a typo) for the Make-A-Wish International Foundation through ad revenue and book sales, and that the direct link to the Make-A-Wish Foundation on the site was visited 106 times. Still, every little bit helps. It was a hell of a thing for Rouse-Deane to try, and it’s too bad that the full year didn’t get filled. Go give the archive a read, and if you like even the occasional strip here and there, toss a couple of bob to MAWIF.

• Finally, The Flowfield Unity takes a shot at rhyming slang. Very clever stuff, and I’ll tell you this much — I’m going to use the word berk much more than I have in the past, now that I know its origin.

Major redesign today at what is now merely “Starslip” without the “Crisis” — complete with new, sleeker character designs (they already appear to be more facially expressive), which only makes sense since they’re in a completely different universe and all. Now we just have to wonder what the big, three-glowy-bits thing at the bottom of Friday’s strip was. It kind of looks like a cross between a Starslip arch, the 2001 space fetus, and one of the Bone cousins.

So despite the fact that I told you all to go to Danielle Corsetto’s New Jersey signing this past Saturday, I’d completely spaced on it myself because I’m an idiot. Until, that is, lazing around my home on Saturday early afternoon, reading Jennie Breeden‘s The Devil’s Panties volume 2 and hitting page 183 where Jennie recounts meeting Danielle at a convention and getting her picture taken with the giant McPedro.

Crap! I exclaimed, and quickly finished a number of household chores I’d been putting off. Then I raced up to Kenilworth, and had a grand time with Danielle until the snow forced the signing to conclude early; if you tried to come by after about 4:30, Danielle feels really bad about it.

Because I forgot my camera (cf: idiot, above), I didn’t get any pictures with Ms Corsetto, and because I already had her two books signed & sketched, nothing new there either. But because Ms Breeden fortuitously left room at the bottom of page 183, Ms Corsetto was kind enough to do a sketch in that space. You’ll have to pick up a copy of DPvol2 to figure out why cartoon Danielle is shocked at her own previous behavior.

Confidential to RS3 in MA: Happy Birthday, and also apparently to PM in Sweden. In fact, Happy Birthday to each and every webcomicker — much like race horses are all assumed to have a birthday of 1 January, I’m declaring 12 January the Official Birthday of webcomickers who are not Jon Rosenberg. Hooray!

Okay, that’s really beyond clever, given the past little bit in Starslip Crisis has led us to confront the possibility of a ‘slip going bad. Anybody besides me worried by the broken navigation button that’s visible about halfway down on the right edge? Oh, and while this piece of beauty is presently at the main Starslip page, by next week it may be visible here instead. Now go look at it some more.

• After a seemingly interminable delay, both Gunnerkrigg Court and The Devil’s Panties have their new books in comics shops (and my house). The quality of Tom Siddell’s work in Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation is especially apparent, and it caused a vetern comic-shop clerk to go “Oooh, what’s this?” and “I have to buy this now” while I was being rung up.

  Here’s hoping that both books are a big damn success for Siddell and Jennie Breeden, as I don’t want to wait forever for the inevitable next volumes (not wanting to be at the mercy of a publisher Breeden is already taking orders for a self-published Book 3, which should see release in about a month).

• David Malki !‘s interview is now up at The Sound Of Young America (and will likely be part of this week’s radio broadcast), and it’s good listenin’. And for those of you able to lay your hands on the print edition of The Onion, there’s an extra-special Wondermark bonus in this week’s issue (if you’re gonna get cut with the rest of the comcis page, why not run a coupon for 10% everything in the Wondermark Goodsery?
• So David Morgan-Mar has been doing some pretty simple strips for more than a week now, but has obviously been using the time to work on today’s annotation (make sure you have the annotations turned on, and cookies enabled). It’s an essay and an exercise in something like natural philosophy (which is what they used to call science) starting on the topic of “black” and ending up with how we know all about the stars around us. Between this and the latest podcast of Radiolab, I am feeling pretty damn edjumacated right about now.

  I suspect it may also have some bearing on the color shift we’ve seen since New Year’s Eve — things are getting cooler in the 14 themes, possibly down to about, oh, 2.725K or so. You know, the sort of thing that might happen when, say, a new universal reality is sudden assembled. And since that little thought brings us suspiciously back to what’s happening at Starslip, I’ll wrap it up here. Have a great weekend.

• First up, those of you in and around Miami without plans on the evening of 23 January, Dave Kellett is having a signing at Books & Books in Miami Beach. Tell Dave that Fleen sent you.
• Secondly, for those of you in and around the dark recesses of the mind, Eric “Monster” Millikin doesn’t talk to people much with words, not when his visuals can give you the jibblies for days. But he’s talking with the X-man himself over at ComixTalk — about undead perversions, Monkey Day, and making political statements via art. Good bedtime reading.
• Thirdly, for those of you in and around Los Angeles (I’m doing these in order of progressively scarier places), Brad Guigar has a favor to ask of you — he knows an experienced receptionist/admin/assistant that needs a job. She needs a job because she took a buyout that resulted in the Bradster keeping his job, so if you could help him out on this one, you’d be doing him a solid.
• Finally, for those of you in and around the internet, there are apparently even more awards than there used to be. Some of them are for blogs, where thanks to a rare bout of good sense, Fleen is not up for anything. But there are several categories where you can support webcomickers and friends of webcomics — in the Best Humor Blog category, one may find a nomination for Josh Fruhlinger, aka The Comics Curmudgeon; trust me, he’s one of us.

  In the Best Comic Strip category there are a carryover from the print world, but also some actual we-really-want-to-be-on-the-web style webcomics — The Book of Biff, Calamities of Nature, Medium-Large (the gleefuly web-attitude comics of the guy who writes Sally Forth, of all things), Garfield Minus Garfield (possibly co-opted by Jim Davis, but still webbish), What The Duck (more bloggy than some of the others), Jesus and Mo, a pair of duelling editorial strips (Day by Day and Town Called Dobson), and some obscure thing called xkcd. Vote early, and until next Tuesday, you can vote every 24 hours.

Whew — caught up on the backlog, or nearly so. Let’s get contemporary with our news items.

• Calamities of Nature had a contest to run guest strips, producing three winners which ran recently. Congrats to winners Dawn Griffin, Carl Ackerson (by way of R Stevens) and Stephanie O’Donnell. If you like what they did with Tony Piro’s strip, check out their own creations.
• Glad to see that Howard Tayler‘s Open Source Conference video on making money in webcomics is making the rounds.
• New semi-single panel strip from a pair of webcomics vets: Darren Gendron is the creator behind Dear Pirate and the writer of The Expert’s Guide on How to Kill Things That Go Bump in the Night, and is the word-monkey here. Bryan Prindiville is the creator of Broken Muzzle, Frances and Friends, and the newspaper strip about a basset hound that didn’t suck (naturally, you can guess which one is still syndicated).

  Anywho, Gendron and Prindiville have, Volton-like, joined forces to become something greater than either of them would be separately, with the result being Hello With Cheese. Early indications show a comic with an art style situated midway between Bob The Angry Flower, early ALILBTDII, with a Herriman-like color palette. Promisingly, the writing appears to concentrate on fart jokes.

• New to me: Daisy Owl, which reads like a cross between Achewood, Cat and Girl, and Nedroid; big thanks to alert reader Susan Cole for pointing me at this one. There’s about six months worth of strips in the archive, which I was compelled to read straight through. No creator’s name that I could find on the site, which makes me sad — this is damn good work, and deserving of a a little bow-taking if only for cracking the code of science (namely, get a Watson).

  Edit to add: Thanks to the commenters who had more luck than I did discovering the name of the creator of Daisy Owl; Ben Driscoll, put your name on the front page and take a little credit!

  So for everybody that’s not quite back into the rhythms of work, spend the rest of today goofing off with Daisy Owl. I think you’ll be glad you did.

More of the stuff that’s dropped since the various holidays wrapped up.

• Interviews! Raina Telgemeier at Newsarama, Chris Onstad (and shortly David Malki !) at The Sound of Young America (listen at your local public radio station this week, or to Onstad online now; Jesse Thorn is seriously the best interviewer alive right now).
• Speaking of Malki !, sad news at Wondermark today — The Onion is dropping the comics page from its print edition, and thus Wondermark will be losing that distribution channel (and I’ll be losing Ziggy en Español). But to make up for it, Wondermark is joining a syndication service for college/independent papers.
• Also heading to a three-days-a-week update schedule, Ugly Hill.
• John Campbell is going insane again: hourly comics!
• Webcomics Weekly returns after six or seven weeks, and apparently they had some fun at my expense.
• Finally, they basically raise money year-round, but I’m going to arbitrarily put a period on this year’s Child’s Play efforts, which to date amount to US$1.17 million. Considering they keep telling us this is one of the crappiest economies in six or seven decades, to have exceeded the goal by nearly a half a million dollars is one of those things that make you feel good inside. We’ll see if we can’t come up with something tomorrow to cure that.

We’ll come back to some of it tomorrow. For now, a portion of what broke over the weekend:

• Matt Boyd of Three Panel Soul did an interview with MC Frontalot, the rapper laureate of webcomics.
• Once upon a time, I asked Jon Rosenberg why, if he was going to do Goats four days a week (instead of the more usual three or five), was it Monday – Thursday? Why not Mon-Tue-Thur-Fri, so that the three-day drought between the last installment of one week and the first of the next was only two days? His answer: I drink on Thursday nights, rendering Friday comics unlikely at best.

  Welp, he’s got a house and a child now, and is prepping up three books for release with a major publishing house, and he’s no longer drinking only on Thursdays. As a result of not wanting to die, he’s been forced to cut back to a three days a week schedule, which is really a bargain when you consider that I originally asked my question (v.s.) in the era of single-row, black and white strips instead of the multi-row, color extravaganzas we get these days.

• Hey, do you like things that are fancy? How about webcomics that have new, more functional site designs, including improved archiving tools and resurrected forums? Then check out the new/improved Theater Hopper, which features all of these (and more!) as of this morning.
• Creator sighting! Danielle Corsetto will be bringing girls and slingshots to the wilds of suburban New Jersey on Saturday, and the arctic hinterlands of Canada but a week later. Seeing as how one of these signings is only about 20 minutes up the road, I’ll be doing my best to drop by.
• Of course, if I miss Danielle on Saturday, it’ll be just about a month before she’s back this way — New York Comic Con (having tried a pleasant Spring weekend and decided it was entirely too pleasant) returns to its February timeslot this year.

  Now, this page has griped in the past about various aspects of how NYCC has been run, but I’ll give them this bit of unqualified praise: last night I got my press credentials for the show with absolutely zero hassle. It was the easiest credentialling I’ve ever been through, driven almost entirely by the question, Have you been here as Press before? with an affirmative answer resulting in Okay, here you go. It took all of two minutes, and every big con needs to adopt this model.

  Keeping with my current very good mood regarding NYCC, I’ll note that webcomics will likely have a pretty significant presence, with the lovely Ms Corsetto, Comics Bakery, various Dumbrellites, at least some Halfpixellians, a Canadian or two, and a couple of obscure guys from Seattle all rumored to be in attendance. The NYCC home page also features an advert from Disney’s children’s book group featuring a purple guy with webcomicky roots.

  Programming for the Con isn’t up yet, but the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference taking place the day before looks promising, with the first session devoted to “Comics on the Web”, which sounds a mite familiar. See you there?

So I’m extremely grateful to Lore Sjöberg, who has decided to make January a month that overflows with comics. Like a cornucopia. Or something:

There’s a little cutback over at Wired way, and for the foreseeable future I’m going to be providing a video every other week instead of every week.

Looking on the somewhat brighter side, this frees up more time to do other things! I was thinking to myself “I wonder if I can update Bad Gods every weekday in January.” Then I realized that’s what George Orwell would have called “loserthink,” if he had written a teen comedy instead of a biting political satire. So instead I’m asking the question “What happens when I update Bad Gods every weekday in January”?

Keep checking Bad Gods, you’ll see new material constantly emerging like pups from an extremely gravid prairie dog.

Gosh, with a mental image like that, how can you say no? It’s Monster Manual Comix for the meantime, but I have hopes of more Lore Brand Comics (which, curiously enough, don’t seem to show up at Lore Brand Comics). Regardless, be sure to click on the “Notes” link below each ‘toon; it’ll bring you up the equivalent of a very short director’s commentary.

I would call this the laziest strip ever, but for the fact that David Morgan-Mar set the wheels in motion a year ago, has been laying foundation since early summer (or winter, since Morgan-Mar is a Sydneysider), has been building up to it for months, has been tying directly to it for pretty much all of December.

Not to mention that in Tuesday’s strip, he either had to have taken both those pictures of himself a year ago (planning!) or make sure that he had the same haircut and basic physical appearance a year after launching the plot (continuity!). In any event, tying together fourteen different themes (which, for all intents and purposes are fourteen different webcomics). The only thing he might have tied in but didn’t wasn’t really a strip at all. Well done, Dr Morgan-Mar. Well done.