Scott McCloud has produced a comic-book introduction to Google’s new open-source browser and you. Apparently some special people in Europe have received these in printed form, but we can make do with the Creative Commonsed online version. Beware: the hosting site seems to be getting hammered pretty hard, leading to somewhat spastic page loading (I still haven’t gotten through all 40-odd pages), and it contains words and phrases like Object Heap, Cryptographic Hash, Class Transitions, and Execution Stack. Civilians, you have been warned.

Anyway, it’s called Google Chrome, the website will apparently be live on Wednesday, and it’s all pretty readable if you’re a nerd. McCloud’s done his usual bang-up job making BIG COMPLICATED IDEAS into small, digestible chunks. In a couple days, I imagine we’ll see if Chrome has built-in webcomics hooks, but the different-processes-for-different-tabs thing sounds promising, as do the Opera Speed Dial-like Tab Page and the completely secretive porn mode (that’s not the official name, but let’s be honest) for when you don’t want anybody to know you were reading Wizard (and one could hardly blame you).

In the meantime, pray that somebody mirrors this thing, because when America gets back to work/school tomorrow, there ain’t gonna be no reading it.

Labor Day is when the presidential campaign traditionally kicks into high gear, and that’s what we find in webcomics today. Check out Shortpacked!, Diesel Sweeties, Sinfest, Overcompensating,
and especially Ugly Hill for a lesson in what American politics is really like. Also possibly Starslip, but who the hell know when it comes to Zillion.

• Speaking of politics (although not webcomics per se), how can I fail to point you towards Matt Boyd‘s interview with James “Rusty Venture” Urbaniek when he (Boyd) teases it with:
  

  This is the first time in the history of the Internet that someone has typed the sentence “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but before I knew it, a pedophile was getting my replacement offspring shot full of holes/I’d chosen a relatively untried governor from Alaska as a running mate.”

• Thirty one days. Thirty one comics. The Guest Strip Project finishes up the August donationaramathon with a beauty from curator extraordinaire Jen Babcock. If there’s ever a commissioner of webcomics that’s got to wrangle all of the creators, I nominate Mike Rouse-Deane.
• And finally, we note with some relief that Gunnerkrigg Court is back up and running. Near as I can tell, getting shut down by your host for using too much bandwidth/CPU/whatever is pretty much a badge of honor. Fleen welcomes Tom Siddell to the premier league.

Back to college season is in full swing in the States, which is when a webcomicker’s thoughts turn to new (and returning readers). Along those lines, a mess of webcomickers appear to be linking the snot out of stuff today — pretty much you can pick a a comic over there to the right, and then follow the trails of recommendations.

Some names keep recurring, like Gastro~Phobia, but I found the most interesting (ie: never would have found them on my own) links over at Indigo Kelleigh’s Ellie Connelly. And the link from Rich Stevens to Kinokofry is the most dangerous — one click and I realized I can’t go there until I have three hours with no other demands on my time. College kids, your homework for this weekend is to grab a link, start exploring, then get good and lost. Allow me to help get you started: One Swoop Fell.

Updated to add: Looks like Gunnerkrigg Court took a few too many high-value links; since the main site is presently down, look to the mirror at Modern Tales for your fix.

• DAMMIT JEPH I TOLD YOU — NO PICTURES.
• PAX kicks off today, and have you seen the pictures of the cake done by Scott Kurtz‘s brother, Brian? What is it with the Dallas/Ft Worth area and insane-talented cakers? I have a colleague who does stuff like this in her spare time and she lives in Dallas. Also, I am very scared to ask this, but I have to: what does Gabe taste like?
• Friend o’ Fleen Rick Marshall has landed at Viacom, where he’ll be an editor for their MTV Splash Page (comics, movies, and that side of the pop culture coin). Okay, cool, he’ll be eating, but there’s better news — he’ll be continuing his series of webcomicker interviews, this time on the pages of his personal blog, so nobody can ever take them away from us again. Everybody feel good for Rick!
• Mr T in the pages of The Beat on waiting for WOWIO to cough up monies owed. For the record, have any WOWIO creators gotten paid for Q2 yet? I ask because we’re 2/3 of the way through Q3 and I haven’t heard of anybody getting paid since Platinum took over the checkbook.

If my math is correct, today Howard Tayler becomes the fourth (somebody check me on that updated to add: the recently concluded Funny Farm ran for 3594 strips) confirmed webcomicker to hit 3000 strips (although Tatsuya Ishida is closing fast). If I’m still correct, he’s the second (maybe? Anybody know if JD Frazer ever punted a day?) to do it without ever missing an update or running a guest strip, completing 365.24 days a year of pure, continuous cartoonery (sorry, Chris Crosby — that blizzard clearly was out to deny you your place in history). He’s done it with a continuous up-trending in the complexity and audaciousness of his plots (including killing and bringing back a major character without it feeling like a cheat), and his art‘s improved by leaps and bounds.

My estimate is that in those three thousand days, when sick, injured, or playing hooky to play dad, his buffer hasn’t fallen below 19 days. He cannot be killed by conventional means (of this we have empirical proof), and apart from the fact that he won’t let me buy him a beer, I can find no reason why I’m not proud to have him as my evil twin. Well done. Now get back to work on the strip for October 3rd.

• Speaking of round numbers, Lucas Teodoro da Silva’s 8 1/2 by Eleven hitting four years and 700 strips tomorrow.
• Not exactly webcomics, but friend of our medium Josh Fruhlinger (the Comics Curmudgeon) has shown what acting snarky will get you — an opportunity to record a snark-track with MST3K alumni. Nicely done, Josh!
• Everybody been following the comickry that Dark Horse puts up on MySpace every month? September’s installment will feature works by Chris Onstad and Liz Greenfield. Look for them to go live on Wednesday.
• Hey! Toys! One-offs that nobody else will ever own! From what I’ve seen at cons, that’s a major draw for the vinyl toy crowd, and it shouldn’t prove to be any different if the artist works in wood. Get in on the ground floor now.
• Heh. LibrArian swag. Awesome.

Some things you will never get sick of; strand your ass out on a desert island, and they’re what you’ll take with you to keep sane.

For me, the list includes the collected essays of Stephen Jay Gould, Carmina Burana, Perpetuum Mobile, Save It For Later, Watermelon In Easter Hay, In Between Days, Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance, seasons 3 – 5 of The Muppet Show (anybody know where I can find a clip of the “teach yourself to fly” sequence from the Linda Carter episode?), the collected works of Hayao Miyazaki, Brad Bird, and Sir Simon Milligan & Manservant Hecubus, and as of today, The Great Outdoor Fight. Also a boat.

The most obvious challenge in creating this book: the strips collected here ran between 11 January and 30 March, 2006; they ranged from simple two-row strips of genteel conversation to irregular, screen-filling, action-packed behemoths (including Ray ripping a dude’s face off), which seem impossible to fit onto a regular page.

Creator Chris Onstad adapted by working with a page sized to two rows of panels, and chopped the strips into a continuous narrative, resizing where necessary to make it all an orderly grid. An occasional LATER or THE NEXT MORNING caption added allows the narrative to flow in a continuous manner, with almost no hint of the discrete installments that left readers sometimes waiting for three or four days for the next update.

This itself is remarkable, as Onstad has been famously quoted as not planning out his story lines — the characters go where they go, and surprise him as much as the rest of us. But The Great Outdoor Fight functions first and foremost as a complete story, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine that anyone could construct it one day at a time. The only hints that this was the method of creation come from the rising and falling panel counts in the individual online updates, which isn’t perceptible here; a few new, wordless splash pages are all that are necessary to bridge the transistions.

From the seemingly innocuous entrance of Todd (to talk about a genital-themed truck accessory of all things) to the final, somewhat abrupt “FIN”, The Great Outdoor Fight functions as a pure distillation of years of Achewood — the new reader can see the grand themes and histories of the characters coming off the page without a single page of backstory narration. You need not have read since small times to realize that it’s a big deal for Roast Beef to use punctuation. No familiarity with Ray’s scheming ways are required to know that he is not strong, that he is a coward who would desert a dying man. Ramses Luther Smuckles, a mystery to the old Achewood fan and newcomer alike, so perfectly wears his character in a mere ten panels that years later, a single shot of a bumper sticker is all that’s necessary for the reader to know he’s returned.

Onstad rounds out the book with a series of extras that provide the perfect context for this story. From the start of the Fight in 1923 at Ken Crandall’s farm to a selected set of champion biographies (including the cautionary tale of Ty Jessup, enticed into changing his name as a gimmick by an internet startup), to the significance of a black wristband, Onstad gives his creation a weight that’s astonishing.

It’s worth noting that these additions are original, and not taken from the fan Wiki that sprang up in the wake of this strip. Entertaining as that massive (and quickly-created) enterprise is, it’s an ahistorical artifact with only slight relation to Onstad’s world. In a few millenia when they make a weekly brainbox series about The Great Outdoor Fight, the wiki will be the writer’s bible; unfortunately, it will resemble what really happened on the Acres in the same way that Xena: Warrior Princess resembles Thucydides. Appropriately enough, Onstad references this phenomenon in history of the early Fight:

Some had Crandall shooting the victor dead and burning down the barn with all the bodies in it before killing himself; some merely substituted flank steak for the turkey. Penny paperbacks, utter pulp fan-fiction accounts of the event, were widely circulated. There was an illustrated Great Outdoor Fight training manual for children, a weekly radio program recapping the latest rumors, and even a book of Great Outdoor Fight recipes targeted at women.

Some of those recipes are reproduced in the book, by the way; I will be trying the Great Outdoor Delight and the “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds at the first opportunity¹.

Read The Great Outdoor Fight, perhaps most urgently if you are not a fan of Achewood. The characteristics of the strip that keep new readers from casually getting in on the game (and this is a weakness of Achewood — it took me four or five attempts before I really got it) are entirely absent here. The characters, the unique voicings, the utter batshit insanity that’s fully and completely committed to in service of the story are all here. And when you’re done reading it, you will find it is not sass in the main. This is a thing. This is completely a thing and Onstad’s every move is the new tradition

_______________
¹ Although I fear that after the Chuds, I will be forced to quote Roast Beef and for the same reason ask you to excuse a man.

So there really is a post today; look for Great Outdoor Fight rhapsodizing tomorrow. Also, WordPress updates have left us without images at the top of new posts (and may I say, the alt-text for those graphics has been disappearing at random for the last few versions? Yes, I think I may) — working on it, etc. Real shame, actually, I had a good one lined up.

• Hey, anybody listened to the latest Webcomics Weekly? Postal services vendor Endicia is sponsoring the podcast (it looks like for four weeks), and they’re offering up a special deal for webcomickers. Head over to www.endicia.com/webcomics for a deal on postage services & supplies that’s better than (near as I can tell) any current Endicia user got when first signing up. It almost makes me want to run out and get a bunch of stuff that needs mailing.

  On a more serious note, this is an interesting instance of targeted sponsorship, and I’m not sure we’ve quite seen its like previously. Anybody got any examples of similar partnerships between webcomics undertakings and the vendors that want to sell to them?

• First eyes, then color, now names? Approaching 500 strips, A Girl And Her Fed [Named Pat] continues to evolve. Oh god, please don’t let the threats go from eyes to … I dunno, all-beef patties.
• Kiltmania is set to erupt at Dragon*Con this weekend, courtesy of menace to all that is holy Jennie Breeden. Be-kilted guys, be sure to sign her release if you want to end up immortalized like the 54 gentlemen in the new kilts & leaf blower playing card deck. Now I know it’s short notice, and will require the coordination of at least two webcomickers, a t-shirt printer, and an express delivery service, but please, please, please have at least one of those kilt guys be wearing this t-shirt.
• Funny. For now.

Great Outdoor Fight! In my hands! AAAAAHHHHHH!

That is all.

It appears that my concerns have been addressed satisfactorily, which sets a slightly dangerous precedent (I must resolve to use my powers only for good, and never for awesome). Confused? Check out the official portrait: Carly’s gonna punch you in the face with her happiness! Everybody feel good for Chris and Carly!

• In fact, it was only the news this morning of Chris & Carly’s engagement that displaced that which — on any other day — would be the most exciting webcomics news of the day. Two words for you, Sparky:

  Wonderella.

  Book.

  Pre-order by the first of September for bonus savings, and to get it signed by creator Justin Pierce!

• Uh-oh! Wacky hijinks brewing at Waspsi Square. This is pretty much how every bedroom farce ever kicks into high gear, with the running, and the doors slamming, and the hitting, and the funny for the audience as people struggle to explain themselves. But in a bedroom farce, there aren’t usually super-powered entities doing the running, slamming, and hitting. This could be either very funny or very, very tragic.
• Anarchist librarian wear coming soon. Get one for the book-slinger in your life.
• Interview with Danielle Corsetto, including a rundown on the GWS drinks contest. I’ve only met Ms Corsetto when she was sober (at least, I think she was), so it’s hard to imagine how much goofier and funnier she could be when “in her cups”, as the cool kids say. Since it’s hard to imagine, I’m publicly calling for video proof. Somebody go get on that.

Why does it seem that every other webcomic I visit today has a big, flashing ad for The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency on Oxygen? To quote Winter McCloud, I think they’re confused about their demographic. This is so odd, I’ve made a concerted effort to determine what the most bizarre pairing of TJDMA and webcomic-running-the-ad might be. Current leader: User Friendly. Seriously.

• Speaking of demographics, count me a member of the Relieved to see that Karen Ellis is apparently alive and well cohort. My obsessive re-clicking on Planet Karen every other hour appears to have finally paid off. Fleen welcomes Ellis back to the waking world, and hopes that her nap hasn’t led to any nasty cramping in her drawing hand.
• Want to work on a project of lasting importance and be a part of something bigger than yourself? Handy with Photoshop and want something really cool to put on your resume? Dying to see pages of Kazu Kibuishi‘s next Amulet volume before anybody else? Kibuishi’s looking for some assistance with production work:
  

  So, as I wind down on the drawing side of production and begin ramping up for the painting stage, I will need some volunteers! Anybody interested in giving me a hand with the flatting (and perhaps painting) of the pages? This year, I decided to find assistants online, to see what the internets will yield. My lead assistant, Alan Beadle, will still be joining me on this journey, as will Amy, Shadi, and Tim, but we’ll definitely need some more brave souls to join the party. If you are interested, please send me an email at kazu [you know how email addresses work] boltcity.com and some examples of your work. From what people who worked on the first book told me, they seemed to have a lot of fun and found it to be a rewarding experience.

  If I knew Photoshop, I’d so be there. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Apparently, purveyors of drive-by malware (served up to a porn-lovin’ public) are into webcomics.

At least, it’s the case that one such set of lowlifes is piggy-backing on Paul Southworth‘s strip-within-a-strip, SasqWatch 2813: A Trunk Deadfall Adventure. See, if you punch the phrase “trunk deadfall” into Google thusly, you find said lowlifes sitting at position #3 for matches on that somewhat statistically unlikely phrase. Actually, if you up the search to “a trunk deadfall adventure”, the #1 match pops up warnings in Opera pertaining to the infectious waste spewing from that dark corner of the internet, so for God’s sake don’t click it.

Now since Southworth is trying to do something family-friendly (and may want to do more with Trunk in the future), I say it’s time to take direct action here. While Google’s algorithms remain a closely guarded secret, it’s generally known that links are key. So if you’ve been enjoying A Trunk Deadfall Adventure, and you have a website, you can help. Some links to the start of the SasqWatch 2813 storyline under those names ought to push the creepy porn malware guys into the hinterlands of Google matches. Do it for the children.

• In non-cryptid-porn matters, Ursula Vernon‘s got an art reception tomorrow at the Jordan Hall Arts Center in Cary, NC. Come by from 6 to 8pm local time, as I’m told there will be cheese. Yum.
• SPX! Who’s going this year? Third year in the new venue, and while it’s a bit away from the downtown eating-and-drinking scene, the hotel and meeting space are much better than they were.
• Dammit, pre-orders are supposed to be helpful: reports are now out indicating that The Great Outdoor Fight is showing up in some comic shops on the east coast already, and Amazon’s telling me now I won’t get it until next week? Okay, it was apparently moved up from September release but still — the wait is killing me. Even Onstad’s ongoing sandwich duel in the pages of The New Yorker (well, the web pages, at least) is barely enough to placate me. Six more days, six more days, six more days….