Eight years? Yep. Little Gamers isn’t so little anymore.

• Will somebody please give Brian Warmoth, Friend of Webcomics, a break?
  

  CBR News has confirmed that Devil’s Due Publishing, the home of Tim Seeley’s “Hack/Slash” and Milo Ventimiglia’s “Rest,” among other titles, laid off two employees today: editor Cody DeMatteis and Marketing Manager Brian Warmoth.

  Warmoth, you will recall, fled Wizard online (no link because they piss me off) scarce 11 months ago, and like fellow FoW Rick Marshall, has been both searching for and deserving of a permanent, long-term position in comics. If you know of any such, drop us a line and we’ll see that he gets it.

• Is it just me, or is Project Wonderful (even in these dread economic times) expanding its pool of advertisers? From the beginning, the users of PW (both those placing ads and those providing space) have been almost exclusively associated with [web]comics. As a result, there is a certain amount of monetary recycling within our semi-dysfunctional humble li’l community but relatively little cash brought in from “outside”.

  But of late, we seem to have been more broadly discovered by those wishing to vend to the sort that would frequent comicdom — for example, Sore Thumbs presently is seen as a good venue to advertise naughty ladies that want to meet you. Hey, as long as webcomics is getting paid, I have no problem with this.

• Finally: horrotacular photowork from Paul Taylor — a model, a camera, and bingo! His demon characters spring to creepifying life. Yikes.

Kind The First: KC Green has been fired from his webcomic. That’ll teach him engage in vaguely autobiographical journal-style ventures! In the meantime, other creators are now chronicling Green’s life for him.

Kind The Second: The catgirl bloodbath continues at Something*Positive, with desperate survivors crying out for a savior. And lo, into this hour of despair stepped a man burning with the righteous power and fury of a thousand suns to save them in their hour of need. Ladies and gentlemen, TV’s Wil Wheaton continues his unbroken string of [web]comics badassery.

Kind The Third: I’ve mentioned my buddy Brett previously; our obsessive tendencies run in parallel directions, but there are some places where we’re never going to agree. Case in point — molecular gastronomy. He’s in favor of it, I find it offends me on an almost lizard-brain, instinctual basis.

I think it’s partly because the mad scientists that engage in dehydrating, rehydrating, inflating, foaming, and other-ing what used to be be perfectly respectable food remind me of the 1950s-era industrial boffins that gave us the vast pile of excessively-processed “food product” that we’re only now beginning to crawl out from under.

Partly it’s because while I am by no means a chef (or even qualified as a line cook), it remains a fact that had I the time to practice my craft and access to the correct ingredients, a dish of surpassing deliciousness would be within my powers. Indeed, I bake more than 50 iterations of italian flatbreads, french breads, sourdoughs, and other various rustica each year, and I’m as a result slowly getting better; by the time I die, people may say, Sure gonna miss Gary’s bread. I do not require a laboratory and millions of dollars of chemical apparatus to ply that craft.

But mostly, I think it’s because the incredible precision required to topologically alter something like (say) an acorn squash into something like (say) a balloon containing vaporized essence of burdock is to my way of thinking, the antithesis of cooking. Cooking is not precise — every squash is a little different, every day the humidity is a little higer or lower, every burdock root a little more or less burdocky. Even baking — which is much closer to science than cooking — is fundamentally imprecise … exactly what are those little bastard yeasts going to do this time that they didn’t last time?

Only by getting your hands on the ingredients and by use of all your skills and senses can things be made consistent, but MolGas depends on tolerances so tight, in conditions that resemble a Class 1 clean room more than a kitchen, the results might be called identical from day to day. You lose out on the natural variations that are the very hallmark of food, and you do so with tools like constant temperature control equipment (click on the picture for PolyScience). In my world, you don’t prepare food with “constant temperature control equipment” … you start by learning to control fire.

This is the gulf that mere friendship cannot bridge.

None of which is to say that the comic in Lucy Knisley‘s LJ that Brett pointed me towards, which recounts her visit to Alinea, one of the defining outposts of molecular gastronomy, doesn’t make the meal sound amazingly delicious. The flavor combinations have my imagination singing, and I wish I could sample them myself (even though the meal would be produced by insane cyborgs).

Heck, I’ll even break out my red robot socks for that meal.

Although to be fair, I love Dylan Meconis and Erika Moen more. I mean, they do awesome comics like Family Man, Bite Me, and DAR, while you’re the sort that hangs around reading my stuff which quite frankly brings your taste into question.

Anyways. Dylan and Erika are doing a live broadcast later today, and will be answering questions from readers. I’m on EMT duty tonight and can’t participate, so y’all need to step up and make sure it’s the best livecast ever (what I said about your taste above? That was totally about the guy three IPs down from you).

The fun kicks off at 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8), at The Erika Moen Show (brought to you by Ustream), and will run for an hour or so.

You may have heard about hosting difficulties that beset webcomics and and around Thanksgiving. Meredith Gran found herself cut off at the knees and having to shift sites on pretty much zero notice (not the first time this has happened to her, if memory serves — curse her ever-increasing readership!).

Then the PvP forums (hosted by Kris Straub under the umbrella of the Halfpixel hosting) found themselves on the chopping block for the crime of consuming too many CPU cycles (and secondarily, containing too exemplars of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory), with some discussions migrating to other fora, and others finding their own home.

It’s never pretty when these kinds of crises require a site owner/creator to scramble to find alternate solutions, so Straub has a handy primer on getting ahead of the CPU curve over at Webcomics.com. Go check out his mailsack for all the dirt. Short form — you may not be consuming excess resources now, but you will someday. Best get yourself optimized while you have the time to do so all leisurely-like.

In other news:

• A little late on my part, but the webcomicker cameo meme continued at Weregeek for the strip’s second anniversary.
• Now here’s how you promote a book: Ray Friesen has a mess o’ cartoons up at Don’t Eat Any Bugs. He also has a book, Cupcakes of DOOM! (which, I’m reliably told, features sword fights aplenty, parrots, penguins, sea serpents, a treasure hunt or two, and all sorts of other piratey shenanigans), coming Real Soon Now:
  

  I’m running a special promotion where the first 50 preorders get a free page of original art from the book, suitable for framing or accidentally dropping behind the couch.

  I’m hoping that Friesen isn’t under-valuing his originals, but if you take a look at his work and decide you like it, it’s hard to beat that opportunity right there. I’m wondering how I can convince some of my favorite creators to replicate this tactic. In any event, check out CoD!‘s first chapter and decide if $12.95 + S&H is too much to ask for original art pages (answer: “No.”).

• Reminder: The Guest Strip Project has simultaneously:
  1. Hit 100 strips
  2. Started the December Donationathon — 31 strips in 31 days
  3. Put the Kid’s Book Project on special for only £4, with all money going straight towards the Make-A-Wish Foundation

  As always, the call for guest strips is open, and coordinator Mike Rouse-Deane would be happy to slot you in for one of the remaining days in the year-long project.

So my niece Colleen attends the Savannah College of Art & Design, where she studies art history and is busy with her thesis (I keep telling her she needs to do a thesis in the form of a daguerreotype fumetti, but she keeps going on about not wanting to die from exposure to dangerous chemicals). We got to talking comics during the run-up to Thanksgiving.

I introduced her to the finest in sci-fi art criticism, and she complained that she burned three hours trawling the Starslip Crisis archives before having to leave to enjoy food with the rest of us whiteys. In return, she pointed me to three friends whose work I now share with you:

The portfolio of Jon Chadurjanijhadistan … to be honest I’ve known the guy for four years and I have no idea how to spell his last name. His longest running project is “Robot Dave”. [Editor’s note: Jon Chad has graduated SCAD and now teaches silk screening and bookmaking at the Center for Cartoon Studies, which he describes as a dream job.]

Becky Driestadt. Everything she does is beautiful, and usually involves forest critters. [Editor’s note: there’s hints of Owly in Driestadt’s work, and I like it!]

Ned Hugar, my roommate and best friend. He’s an acquired taste, but I love him. To be honest I don’t quite get Cats Jetson, but his Urban Buzz project is really cool. [Editor’s note: I’m picking up … not sure I’d use the word ‘influences’, but echoes of Kurtz, Krahulik, and Gran in the art and animation design, and definitely influences of John K because the guy is inescapable.]

Enjoy, and see you all in December.

If I don’t miss my count, this makes a total of two Team Force Alpha strips in two years. Ironically, this is not the worst update schedule in webcomics.

• News from across the Atlantic: pre-orders soon on the new Planet Karen book. Karen Ellis has put herself out there in her autobio journal, and the strip is one of the really good new voices of the past year or so. You’re not working tomorrow, so take a trawl through the archives; if you like what you see, watch this space for news of the orders opening.
• Speaking of books and preorders, Danielle Corsetto‘s Girls With Slingshots vol 2 is now available. Buy with vol 1 and get a discount! Hey, Danielle, next time you’re in New Jersey, I got an awesome bar to share with you — they make drinks interesting and strong.
• Trust Jennie Breeden to quote Georgia state jurisprudence on a … pressing topic. This made me giggle out loud.
• Finally, nothing to do with webcomics, but this is too funny not to share with you. Happy (non-Canadian) Thanksgiving, everybody.

Confidential to Noz-Eezin’ in the Hudson Valley: I’m six years older, how do you think I feel? Happy Birthday.

I’ve mentioned previously how Freakangels, by Internet Jesus (with illustrator Paul Duffield), reads better by running several weekly installments (each six pages long) together. Know how it reads even better? As a book. Picked up the trade paperback recently, and damn, but Warren Ellis can write. He’s a master of the show-don’t-tell skillset, giving us bits and pieces of a ruined world without every coming straight out and giving us the whole exposition (not that he doesn’t know how to do exposition up a treat).

And in print, some pages work better than on the screen; check out this four page sequence from the story; in the book, the first two images face each other, as does the second pair. Now consider a few additional facts:

• Freakangels follows a near-total four-panel layout; sometimes it’s splash pages, sometimes it’s one above and two below (or vice versa), but it’s nearly always four panels on the page
• That almost completely blank page has a four-panel grid on the other side of the sheet of paper
• The paper is slightly thin

As a result, there’s a subtle ghosting of panel borders and word balloons that show up translucent behind that big block of white. It turns an image of being lost in the totality of the universe into something more haunting — panels and balloons mean the passage of time and conversation in comics, and they’re going on somewhere just past where (or when) you can grab onto them. It may be an accidental artifact of printing on too-thin paper stock, but damn it looks pretty.

So there you are. We’re nearly the same age, Warren Ellis and me, speak the same language, and have had many of the same historical touchstones in our lives, and yet he turned out to be the kind of person that could think up and spin stories that I absolutely adore and I did not. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all those voices rattling around in his head waiting to get out and for his compulsion to spit them out to where I can read them. Now, who wants pie?

Now this is how I know the economy isn’t really imploding: independent webcomic creator Meredith Gran’s business is too successful to handle herself:

It’s difficult for me to delegate tasks to others, but I believe the time has come to find an intern.

I am looking for someone who is hard-working, reliable, knowledgeable with computers, and is near/can travel to Easthampton, Massachusetts.

My ideal intern would be either an art student or a budding artist, who’d like a hands-on look at the business of webcomics and self-publishing.

This is not a paid internship, as much as I’d like to be able to afford that right now. I’m happy to do the necessary paperwork to give you college credit, and I will gladly buy my interns lunch and take them out for drinks once in a while. But if you need a salary to live, I’d like to be quite clear that I am not your gal.

Honestly, this is a situation that I’m surprised I don’t see more often in webcomics. Sure, there was The Great Halfpixel Intern Fight of Aught-Eight, but where are the others? Just about every webcomics creator lives within spitting distance of a college … just about every college has some kind of internship program … there’s all kinds of departments that might apply to webcomics interning (art, business, publishing, and creative writing come immediately to mind). Just as long as the intern isn’t going crazy with the Uline catalog, abusing the Endicia account, or calling their boyfriend/girlfriend halfway ’round the world for eight hours at a stretch, there’s not much downside.

Contact info for Ms Gran may be found at the link. If you’re not in the western Massachusetts area, consider that you’ve probably got a webcomicker near by who may be looking for the sort of go-getter that approaches with a stack of college credit paperwork in hand and says, I’m reliable and trustworthy. Sign here, and I can work for you in exchange for coffee and bathroom privileges starting next week. And if you put in the request to the MBA program, I know that there’s still 14 students looking for case studies that will do an analysis of your business needs and opportunities for free.”

Gonna be a sparse week — looks like I’m not the only one with frantic stuff to do this week (what with the impending ‘Merican holiday and all), so let me just point out the Holy Bat-Buckle on Metal Steve, and we can all prepare for the feast (side note: Randy Milholland referenced the Questions of Bartholomew in the run-up to the catgirl holocaust, but I’m digging this Orpheus-like conclusion alongside the apocryphal gospels … for my money, S*P has more depths to it than your average Classics scholar).

• Today marks 3002 updates at Sinfest, and while the actual day of the big round number was pretty nondescript (with nary an acknowledgement of the achievement on the site), the day after featured one of Tatsuya Ishida’s gorgeous Sunday blowouts, so that’s all right.
• I’ve mentioned Moose Mountain once or twice since it launched, but I must confess that the current storyline — about a teenage squirrel that goes on hunger strike until she can move back to New Jersey, complete with her teeth growing out of control — is my favorite so far. Not just for the wacky hijinks, but for the simple fact that New Jersey is a place that many of us choose to dwell despite the opinions of out-of-staters.
• Too slow on the draw, dammit. Meredith Gran’s putting original paintings up for sale at Octopus Pie every weekday between now and Christmas, so I have 22 more chances to snag one of these beauties.

The various half-baked personages behind mezzacotta (including, one should note, Dr David Morgan-Mar, PhD, LEGO^TM) appear to have set themselves a new goal: launch as many new webcomics in as short a period of time as is physically possible. Thus, two new contributions to the genre this week: Square Root of Minus Garfield and Lightning Made of Owls.

SROMG is seeking to use a different mechanism for messing with Garfield strips in each offering. Thus, strip #1 offers Garfield in haiku form and #2 gives us a multiplicity (two, actually) of Garfields. There is no strip #3 yet, but my guess is that the mezzacottans can keep this up for quite a while before they get bored and/or run out of Garfield permutations.

LMOO is a user-driven project. Given the characters supplied (which may be redrawn as desired, so long as certain key identifiers are kept), do yourself up a single-panel strip on anything and submit it. Into the queue it goes, and hey presto! You’re on the internets. Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

Speaking of Australia (which we were, considering the mezzacotta conspiracy are from Oz), there’s a webcomic I’ve been following for a little while now that has built up enough content that I can share it with you. Home Time Bell is about six kids walking home from school one summer day in Australia.

I particularly like the stylistic conceit that creator Campbell Whyte sometimes employs where he shifts perspective out-of-plane on the 2D world of the comic, giving us a new POV on the world.

On the other hand, Home Time Bell lacks a decent navigation system, so if you’re going to read it, let me save you some time and point you to the first strip. Otherwise, your only alternative is to start from the home page and hit “previous” until you get to the beginning, then work your way forward again.