Advance convention circuit news in the mailbag from Mike Russell today, regarding the 4th Annual Stumptown Comics Fest. Want a table? They’re on discount for another week or so:

The Stumptown Comics Fest is preparing for its 4th-annual celebration of comics and cartooning — to be held Saturday and Sunday, September 29 and 30, at the Exhibit Hall of the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel in Portland.

The exhibitors’ hall is larger than last year — allowing the Comics Fest to offer 8-foot tables to exhibitors rather than the 6-foot tables of previous years.

Tables are available at discounted early-bird rates of $90 for a full table, $50 for a half table, through June 15.

After June 15, tables will be available at $110 for a full table and $70 for a half table.

Stumptown’s always been webcomics-friendly, so go check out everybody that can’t make it out East for MoCCA, and tell Guest of Honor Shaenon Garrity, that I said hi if you see her.

Three fast things:

1. First seen at ¡Journalista!, since seen elsewhere: 10 Wicked Awesome Webcomics, from something resembling a mainstream publisher.
2. The winner of the DGMED shirt contest is John Riggs, who would like all his adoring fans to know that he’ll do his very best to live up to the vestigal virgin-saint standards expected of a pageant winner in the modern age. Oh, also that he wears a size medium.
3. Today marks almost exactly one year since Ryan North dropped some hints to me that he was working on something extremely cool, and at long last we at Fleen have gotten our act together to offer Project Wonderful ads for your purchase — right now they are a freakin’ bargain.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Lore Sjöberg has repurposed his Bad Gods site away from Flash animation and towards whatever medium suits the given project best:

The clever among you will note that this is a very similar approach to the one I took with The Brunching Shuttlecocks. The clever and obsessive among you will note that [Friday, 1 June 2007] is Brunching’s tenth anniversary.

One part of this Brunching Mk. II is a webcomic (which appears to be more character- and plot-oriented than the reflective musings of Lore Brand Comics); ladles and jenglemints, please enjoy the comedic stylings of The Capybara Brothers (which starts here, continues here, and will eventually be directly accessible here).

Today marks five years of goblins, devil bears and saucy lasses having a laugh. Fleen congratulates John Allison.

Our previously-announced t-shirt contest has a winner! We will be notifying the lucky party and bringing you the name shortly; if for any reason the winner cannot successfully discharge the duties of the office, the runner-up will receive the t-shirt for the duration of the reign.

Double dose of Ryan Estrada news:

• Continuing his theme of comicking ’round the world, Estrada is starting a Mexican comics commune (story via Matt Boyd).
• And, following up his earlier reports of Bollywood using webcomics as a source of uncredited material, Estrada informs us of swipes from Yirmumah! and Coffee Achievers.

If Bollywood is going to keep this up, I believe that they must make amends by making Aishwarya Rai available for a lengthy interview here at Fleen. Yes, that does so make up for thefts from creators! Because I said so, that’s why.

So it seems that LOLBOTS may not be consuming 112% of the bandwidth of the internet at the moment; growing outward from originator Rich Stevens, it has now encompassed Jeph Jacques and Ryan North, the Twin Towers of webcomics (and between them the center of all crossovers and cross projects). Analysis continues to pour in from corners far and wide, with comic strip scholar Wendell Wittler kicking things off:

I was about to make a post bemoaning the fact that LOLCATS images are more popular than Webcomics, meaning that all the creative writing and drawing all over the web is being trumped by pictures of cats and captions in bad English, but now a couple of the sharpest writers in Webcomicdom have decided not to fight ‘em, but to join ‘em.

I’m talking about LOLBOTS, the instantaneously popular blog of LOL-pictures featuring robots, assembled by a team that includes one guy who really knows robots, Diesel Sweeties’ R. Stephens and another who knows a few robots, Questionable Content’s J. Jacques (both of whose work I have praised in this very blog) . In two days, they have assembled an impressive assortment of memes and macros starring some of the biggest mechanical stars of science fiction and some real-life robots too.

and LJ opinion-meister istametaketoshi adding:

The biggest problem with LOLcats is the way in which they divorce the phenomenon from the context. A lot of the funniest lolcats are impossible to understand without a fairly solid grounding in forum parlance and etiquette, but the concept itself has taken on a kind of life of its own in the hands of those who just think cats that talk are inherently cute.

Well, geek culture is striking back, RE-appropriating the lolcat phenomenon and returning it to its rightful place–in the hands of those who love cartoons, robots and video games. LOLBOTS is the next big craze–be sure to tell your neighbors about it.

As part of that geek culture, I couldn’t be more proud.

As a side note, work will be taking me to a place with very sparse internet during the day for the next two weeks, so expect updates that are old, pre-written, and/or sporadic. If any of you would care to send me advance notice of your forthcoming controversies, that would be a big help — I have a hole in my schedule for next Thursday, and either a Wikifight or a Logan/Jacques shitstorm should fill it nicely.

1. Genesis.
2. Inevitability.
3. Ubiquity.
4. Requisite feed.

But first, some updates to yesterday’s piece on social bookmarking; if you’ve read the comments, you’ll notice that Dave Kellett has added per-strip bookmarks to Sheldon, which I missed. There’s also a note that Drunk Duck provides similar functionality, and I saw ’em at Bang Barstal this morning, but read over them yesterday when doing research for the article.

This leads me to think that maybe we’ve got two issues at play: first is the coding part (and apparently, Tyler Martin is your go-to guy for such), and the second is a design issue. The tendency at this point seems to be to put the per-strip link buttons

• immediately below the strip
• in subdued colors to not distract from the strip or overall site design

which is probably good logic, but may cause people (and by people, I mean me) to overlook ’em. In a remarkably short while, I imagine this problem will go away as readers just become accustomed to looking for the link buttons.

Now, onto the main item for the day: Xaviar (rhymes with Caviar, but dealing with him does not require trafficking in endangered species in violation of the CITES protocols, and I have no idea where I was going with this) Xerexes wants to ask of you a favor:

We’re coming up on the two year anniversary of starting the wiki-based webcomic encyclopedia (hosted at comixpedia dot org).

What it needs now, however, is enthusiastic and committed leadership dedicated to maintaining this project and helping to develop a more active community around it. After thinking about it a lot this year I know I’m not the person to do that. Realistically, I don’t have the time for it (I struggle to carve out just the time spent here at comixpedia.com).

So I’m in need of a plan for the future of the webcomic wiki. A future without my direct involvement. What I’m potentially offering to a person or an entity is my assistance in transferring the backend of the current site to a new host, the URL comixpedia.org and/or the name Comixpedia.

It needs to be a plan that I think has a reasonable chance of success in terms of people, organization and resources. I don’t know what that plan is right now, but I hope to blast this post far and wide enough online to get some interest going in coming up with a workable plan.

Double-X solicited some opinions from some of the finest minds in webcomicdom (and by the finest minds in webcomicdom, I mean the finest minds in webcomicdom, plus me) on what to do with the Comixpedia wiki project a couple of weeks ago; part of what came from our discussions is that the project needs technical support & resources, but it also needs a sort of philosophical guidance — in short, it needs its own Jimbo Wales, only without all the baggage that goes along with being Jimbo Wales.

So if you’ve got ideas on what the webcomics wiki could be and you’re willing to help shepherd it in that direction, there’s a comment thread a-waitin’ for you. And on the off chance you don’t have the time to be part of the running-it end of things, there’s about a zillion webcomics articles that need writing or updating.

One thing about webcomics that I really love? Innovation. You’ve got a couple zillion really creative people grinding away out there, and when one of them stumbles on a clever idea, it spreads slowly at first, then quickly becomes just a standard part of a well-designed site. Case in point: social bookmarking.

Sites like Beaver and Steve and Little Gamers have had links to add particular strips to sites like del.icio.us and digg for a while now; Diesel Sweeties has feeds via RSS and a host of alternate readers/syndication sites for the main page (but not, as far as I can tell, for individual strips).

To that list add Sheldon, which this week added a tactical nuke-out of feed readers (15 by my count) to the front page (like DS, Sheldon appears to take the inform me when there’s a front page update approach, rather than the hey check out today’s installment approach favored by B&S and LG). My guess is that in two months, we’re going to see those little buttons on most of the high-traffic sites. For reference, the various links and readers are:

• Beaver and Steve: StumbleUpon, digg, del.icio.us, reddit
• Little Gamers: RSS, LiveJournal syndication, del.icio.us, digg
• Diesel Sweeties: StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Bloglines, LiveJournal syndication, My Yahoo, Google, RSS
• Do me, Sheldon: RSS, My Yahoo, My msn, Windows Live, Google, My AOL, Bloglines, netvibes, newsgator, Pageflakes, Rojo, Newsburst, feedlounge, LiveJournal syndication, StumbleUpon

Oh, and if we email and ask him politely, do you think Andy Bell will grace us with some pictures of Darth Creature?

Seriously, why are people even showing up at my job today? You should have taken vacation this week, people! At least webcomics offer a respite:

• Via ¡Journalista!: A Photoshop spot-fill how-to with your host, Hope Larson. I don’t even know most of what she’s talking about, and I can feel myself getting more skillful.
• Webcomics-by-mail? Benson is a collaboration between Tristan Baumber (found here) and Peter Durston (found here). They swap off frames in turn, until there’s enough for a strip (a technique with some literary precedent); the process is described here.

  Most interesting: in a time of global electronic communications, Benson is sent by postal services, as much as six times, before being inked and scanned. Apart from the sheer insanity of the technique, I was struck most by how consistent the art is from panel to panel, and how far in advance Durston & Baumber must have to work to update on a daily basis. Insane, I tells you!

• We’ve written of Ninja Bunny on this page previously, and having reached 200 strips yesterday, creator Phillip Spence celebrates this week with guest strips starting today (courtesy of Furry Black Devil); look for contributions from Head Injury Theater and Grumps later this week. Grumps, we should note, today has a strip from Paul Southworth, who himself is almost running self-made guest strips this week at Ugly Hill (showing his original concept for the strip, circa 2002). If this keeps up, every single webcomic in existence could be part of a grand guest strip circle at the same time.
• And finally, I confess: I LOLed (or here, if the subscription kicks in).

Ah, Memorial Day. Almost nothing goin’ on today. Thoughts of some note:

• Karen Ellis’s Planet Karen was recommended to me a while back as potentially the breakout webcomic of 2007 (much as xkcd was in 2006). In four panels yesterday, Ellis shows why — it’s an effective, economical musing on the creative process.
• Want to get out the word on webcomics? Do what Matt Newton did: write your own.
• It’s official: puppets have become a webcomics thing.
• Josh Fruhlinger, aka the Comics Curmudgeon, offers up some webcomics-related goodness from his day job, in the form of an interview with Ryan North on the topic of Project Wonderful, available in transcript or audio form.
• And finally, today’s obligatory pus-related humor, via a Brad Guigar guest strip. That’s Eisner-quality funny, folks!