MoCCA final notes and photos to come in a separate post, so let’s get back to the wider world of webcomics. Lotta stuff going on, kids.

In the Back From Hiatus Department, please enjoy both Help Desk and the song stylings of Eric Snark.

Little Dee has begun reruns to acclimate the comics.com readers with its general awesomeness. I must confess, I have a touch of trepidation about a) the now-to-be-locked archives; and b) the two-week delay in strips showing up at Chris Baldwin’s site. Yes, I could just view them at comics.com, but that site is a) slow as shit; b) allergic to my browser; and c) full of pop-ups when accessed with IE, which I hate using. But it’s still Little Dee, so I’ll be there every day because I’m that adorable girl’s bitch.

The WCCA nominations are out, and there are some tough categories this year. Achewood vs. Scary Go Round vs. Perry Bible Fellowship? Copper vs. A Lesson Is Learned vs. Applegeeks? We talked about their process earlier in the year, but a question has occurred to me just now as I’m typing this. I want to know — even more than the size of the electorate on these things, about which I’m curious — “Outstanding Comedic Comic”? Isn’t that a tad redundant? Mark Mekkes, if you’re reading this, fill us on on the decision to use that wording.

Speaking of Scary Go Round, the SGR Idol results continue to stream in; I’ve particularly enjoyed runners-up #1 (it takes some serious art chops to have as wide a range as Tyler Martin has) and #4, which features a totally awesome badger omnibus, and nicely captures the speech patterns of Tackleford’s goblins.

And in one of those occurrences that may be most accurately described as ‘explosive’, Narbonic is abandoning the subscription model, and its full archives are opening up. Given that we’re talking about what’s likely the most successful sbuscription-locked strip on Modern Tales (and possibly the most successful subscription-locked strip, period), does this mean that that particular business model is officially dead? Comments from Colonel Joey here, and your thoughts welcome.

Finally, in response to reader requests, we’re in the process of tagging articles (there are a lot of them) with searchable labels, and will be making those visible in (hopefully) the near future.

David Hellman has never been bought a burger by this page. This oversight will have to be corrected in the future.

John Allison is awash with successes — he sold out of his books and paintings, and wound up selling ideas (What if there were ferret record producers? What if the mighty American bald eagle was just a working Joe with a briefcase?) at the bargain price of $2.00 each. With little stock (and no voice) left after Day 1, he posted a sign apologizing for his lack of witty repartee, which somebody promptly bought. New full-color sketches drawn on the spot were snapped up continuously on Day 2. Even his ScaryGoRound Idol contest was a massive success, resulting in 92 entries of such high quality that instead of showing five days worth, he had to expand to seven (so be sure to check out the entries from Saturday and Sunday).

You get the feeling that Jeph Jacques kind of just wanted to draw comics, and never imagined he’d end up running a small business/ cottage industry. Like many creators, Jacques reports the business end of things (order fulfillment, looking for publishers, figuring out where PayPal dropped orders) to be significantly less fun than drawin’, so if you’re a college student that feels like making well over minimum wage, and you aren’t going to flake out on showing up for work today just because you’ve got a hangover, the man’s got t-shirts that need shipping. Also, he said some significantly nice things about this page and our new writers, and really felt bad about your dropped order, Sommer.

Kean Soo is counting days — days until Flight 3 comes out (look for it at San Diego), days until he delivers pages to his publisher. Hyperion will be publishing two Jellaby books, with the pages that have appeared online so far forming the initial chapters of the ongoing story. Noting that Hyperion is a Disney company, there is also the possibility of Jellaby stories appearing in Disney Adventures, which has previously run such creator-owned works as Jeff Smith’s Bone.

And, for those of you wanting to know what the absolute must-see part of the show was, no less an authority than The Toronto Man-Mountain declared it to be these guys. Now you know.

Finally, if you ever wondered what to buy r stevens for his birthday, the answer is: noodles and ice. Trust me on this one.

If it seems a bit quiet in the world of webcomics today, it’s because all the creators are sleeping off their time at MoCCA ’06, and we at Fleen were there to report on all the happenings.

Ryan North is poised to take over the world. The man has ideas, ideas which are crafty, and which make webcomics cooler. The new idea — which will have an impact on the ability of creators to control parts of webcomics-as-business (shhhh, it’s a secret so far) — is one of those things that have the potential to redo all the rules of webcomics. He is also very tall, and was a gentleman towards my wife.

The Toronto contingent, upon driving across the George Washington Bridge, was confronted with the sight of a naked man masturbating in front of a homeless guy. It is possible that this was part of a financial transaction, and that one or the other was paying to watch/be watched. Welcome to New York, Canadians!

(speaking of New York, ask John Allison to do his Mayor Bloomberg impersonation sometime)

Big News! Ian Jones-Quartey dropped by with DVD copies of his thesis film, Unfair, which has been accepted into several festivals, including Animation Block Party and the Super Shorts Festival. Additionally, he informs us that his days as an intern at Noodle Soup (working on season 2 of The Venture Brothers) has come to an end … because he’s now working for them as a director. We’re talking 26 episodes of half-hour animated goodness, folks! Everybody congratulate Ian!

Jeff Rowland does not want dressing on his sandwich. Any kind of meat, cheese, or vegetable is fine, though.

Jon Rosenberg was seen selling stickers bearing the URL www.teamforcealpha.com on them, stickers that featured a skull with an eyepatch. With his studio nest partly empty (so to speak) now that megaGAMERZ has left us, could this augur a new project? Only time will tell!

Be sure to come back tomorrow for more on MoCCA ’06! There may even be pictures!

I GUESS THE ANSWER TO THE ETERNAL QUESTION IS, “YES. YES, YOU CAN SPEAK EVEN WHEN YOUR HEAD HAS BEEN RIPPED FROM YOUR BODY BY YOUR BOON COMPANION SLASH GREATEST NEMESIS AND IS SLOWLY SINKING INTO A MIRE OF BLOOD THAT IS THE REMAINDER OF THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF YOUR SMALL, SELF-CENTERED UNIVERSE.” JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING.

GOODBYE, GAMER1 AND GAMER2, FOUL-MOUTHED, SEMISENSICAL AVATARS OF THE DIGITAL AGE, POST-MODERN SUCCESSORS TO AKBAR AND JEFF. GOODBYE, SCOTT. YOU WERE ALWAYS A GOOD ELEPHANT. GOODBYE, MARTY. YOU WERE ALWAYS A GOOD MIDGET CLONE. GOODBYE, SPHERE OF SMARTNESS, GLAIVE OF KRULL, SQUIRRELS, CHRISTMAS ELVES, DEMON FERRETS, BONO, JERRY FALWELL, AND YOUR MOM. GOODBYE TO BENTAR THE MAGNIFICENT, AND MONKEY DIDDLERS, THE MOST AWESOME GAME EVER, BANE OF REPETITIVENESS VULTURES EVERYWHERE.

WE AT FLEEN EAGERLY AWAIT WHATEVER PROJECT DIABLO THE CHICKEN ENGAGES IN NEXT.

Consider:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monestary in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Also:

Every man believes that, given the right provocations, his innate skills will emerge and he will be capable of tremendous feats.

The directive of the Badass Games is to place you in the very situations which test those abilities.

— unknown, presumably Ray and/or Roast Beef, Achewood

Assuming Ray and Beef are behind this, my money’s on Pat — he’s got that primal rage simmering just below the surface. Ordinarily I’d give it to Lyle, but he’s pretty unconscious right now and has been throwing up spaghetti pretty hard of late. Of course, we know not who else has been invited to participate in THE BADASS GAMES, so it could go to anybody; note (as Stephenson did in The Cryptonomicon) that stupendous badassery is the natural inheritance of every living thing (even Philippe and Mr Bear), on the grounds that every day is trying to kill you and everything that isn’t a stupendous badass is dead.

And I’ll further put money on the notion that by this time tomorrow, THE BADASS GAMES will have a well-populated wiki devoted to it. In the meantime, prepare for Chris Onstad to kick your ass … with awesome.

This page wrote about what might (or might not) be the ultimate triumph of no-hassle micropayments; we promised at that time to keep an eye on the service, and so we’re briefly revisiting IndieKarma today.

When last we left the intrepid entrepenuers of e-commerce, there were a total of 227 sites and 540 users signed up over the course of about a week (and the number was changing rapidly due to the press they received). As of this writing, the numbers stand at 335 sites and 818 users. In the interests of testing, I took out an account and got my free dollar; presently, my balance sits at a dollar still, as I haven’t come across any sites that use IndieKarma yet. One of the things that company principal Brad Patterson was looking at for IKv2.0 was a listing of member sites, but it’s not there yet. Also not yet implemented is the ability to configure contribution amount/interval on a per-site basis; in fact, the only things that appear to be configurable at this moment are password and balances (see who got your pennies, or add more via PayPal).

So we’re pretty much where we were a month ago — without the new features, uptake is going to be slow. On the other hand, it is still just beta (whatever that means), and there are several hundred sites out there that are willing to take a flyer on the concept … it’s just a matter of finding them. On the other-other hand, the IndieKarma crew have a large incentive to get those features and site lists to us, since they’ll make money only if they facilitate transfer of funds (and nothing on the first dollar of the first 5000 users). All of which brings us back to the chicken-and-egg situation that is the chief barrier to the service.

Given the potential that IndieKarma has, we’ll keep coming back to see how it progresses, but for now we’ve got to give the service an incomplete. And as we all recall from school, you gotta get that incomplete finished up by the next semester, or it does bad things to your average.

This page has written before on the topic of luxury in storytelling, about how you just have to slow down the plot to put something neat in. There’s a long tradition of splash panels on Sundays (during the last half of Calvin and Hobbes, the Sunday panels were practically all splash, and Will Eisner‘s The Spirit did full-page splashes so beautiful, they’ll make you cry) and at the start of comic book issues.

In webcomics, with no issues, and no restrictive panels (no, we aren’t going into the ‘infinite canvas’ arguments today), chapter breaks provide the same opportunity. All of this is just by way of drawing (ha, ha!) your attention to Ursula Vernon’s latest splash page for Digger. Her daily work is so gorgeously heavy-black that it’s easy to forget that she’s got some serious color chops, too. And besides, what better subjects for a splash page than a troll and a vampire squash? Okay, maybe the rat with wings, that was cool.

And, since we’re on the subject, Digger’s voluminous archives are temporarily free (since Vernon is up for an Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition), so this is an excellent time to pick up the tale of the intrepid wombat. Now, how’s about print volume 2?

The image you see above is from yesterday’s Heart of the City newspaper strip by Mark Tatulli; full-size image here. Ignore the larger gag, it’s not why we’re here today. Let’s zoom in on the 2nd guy from the left here. And a lil’ reminder of one of Colonel Kurtz‘s pieces of merch here.

Coincidence? Or has the influence of webcomics finally made it into that safest of all possible places, the Sunday funnies? This could be even scarier than network TV or VH1 infiltration. Dare we hope that the webcomics revolution is nigh?

So the proverbial “we at Fleen” has truly become a “we”, as this little expression of irresponsible opinion has grown to include more writers. You, our audience, have been very welcoming of the newbies, and I trust that you will continue to let them know when they do well, and when they could use a bit of slapping — they won’t break, but try not to bruise them too much.

Given that it’s now a multi-person show ’round here, there are some changes that you will notice:

1. The blogroll over to the right has been redone: new writers, new favorites, new strips have come to our attention, and some that have ceased updating regularly (or at all). Bit of pruning to try to make it more easily navigable … the goal was to have about 30 items, but we’re presently in the mid-50s.
2. Fleen writers will be making a concerted effort to find new (or at least under-publicized) webcomics. Everybody around here is committed to finding at least one a month, which means we can set up a weekly rotation of undiscovered comics. Creators, let us know that you’re out there.
3. We’re thinking about a new masthead. What do you think of the stereotypical webcomics creator up there?
4. Watch this space for reports from the fields of MoCCA and SPX, and daily updates from the Nerd Prom. Hopefully, we’ll have some coverage of other webcomic-heavy shows as well.

Naturally, we are open to suggestions. What sort of things should we be covering more? What do you have very little interest in? What will make Fleen not just a site you visit during the week, but a vital part of your existence? Let us know, then tell everybody you know to read us — this world ain’t gonna conquer itself, so we all have to pitch in together.

All fans of webcomickry in the general New York area are invited to come check out the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art’s annual arts fest at the Puck Building in Manhattan next Saturday. For a measly eight bucks (ten for both days!) you get access to a lot of neat people.

Webcomic creator types expected in attendance (from the MoCCA Exhibitor List) include Sam Brown, Steven Cloud, John Allison, R Stevens, Jeff Rowland, Andy Bell, Hope Larson, Kean Soo, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Ryan North, Rob Coughler & Ramon Perez, Jeph Jacques, David Hellman, Kent Earle, Ryan Sias, Raina Telgemeier and Jennie Breeden. Chris Hastings will be reportedly walking the floor, and I’ll be doing the CBLDF thing.

Plus, if current trends continue, you can ask Jon Rosenberg if anybody survives Deathrumble 6000. So bring a sketchbook, some cash for cool swag, and small bottle of booze (the traditional thank you gift for a webcomics creator), and enjoy.