This page has previously mentioned Ursula Vernon’s Digger, although so far only as an example of art that clearly expresses emotion. This means that this page has neglected to mention any other aspect of Digger, such as the fact that it has an exemplary update record, sharp writing, gorgeous art, and is all-around the best thing on Graphic Smash. Today, it does something more.

Today, Digger gives us the first true webcomics philosopher.

Sure, there are webcomics characters that plumb the really deep depths of thought and the meaning of existence. You got your Utahraptor, your Weedmaster P, Ray Smuckles, fish, and even saucy English lasses, but for a top-notch conceptualization of the nature of Good and Evil, you have to look to a hyena named Ed (click here for today’s strip if you don’t have a subscription). Let’s let Ed muse on the Big E:

Evil is having reason, always, many and many. If hunter beats mate, has reason, always. Mate is lazy, burning food, is stupid, is speaking on and on.

Evil always has some justification; the logic and worth of the argument don’t enter into it, because Evil always sees itself as reasonable. And good?

Is only good not having reason. Little one hugs, no reason. Digger-mousie is giving name to nameless, say “Ed”, no reason. Skin-painter paints skin of child, no reason. Just is.

Good just is. There it is, boiled down to its essence, by a societal outcast guilty of some crime beyond imagining. Get yourself a GS subscription and start reading the other strips of Ed’s worldview (especially the creation myth of the hyena people … it’s brilliant); while you’re at it, notice how well Ed’s speech patterns form an accent that’s not contrived or overblown. Ursula Vernon’s work here is top-notch. You could say that she’s just that good.

Neil Gaiman gave a really nice talk a couple weeks ago at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. He’s funny, he’s engaging, the guy from Wired who moderated was good at his job (and brought free copies of the Snakes On A Plane issue for everybody). Neil spoke about lots of things, but what really stuck in my head was his description of being on the set for Beowulf (starring the motion-captures of Angelina Jolie and Crispin Glover). He spoke of what he hopes the film will look like when everything’s rendered in a year or two. Then he paused, and asked:

“How many of you here saw The Polar Express? Or saw a clip of it? Okay, now put your hands down if the eyes didn’t disturb you.”

Every hand in the room stayed up. He used that as an intro to talk about how for Beowulf, the actors essentially have brainwave-recording skullcaps on, which are measuring the muscle impulses that shift their eyes around, so that things won’t be so disturbing in this movie. I bring all this up because there have been a number of attempts to do webcomics with hyper-realistic 3D character models, and so far it’s all an interesting experiment. Each new iteration makes the character models a bit less stiff and more organic … but the eyes … brrrr.

Ben Adams is the latest to take a whack at 3D webcomics; he’s opted for an autobiographical story called Misfit’s Journey, the first chapter of which was recently released. If you don’t take a light hand to the story, autobiographical comics can quickly become an exercise in navel-gazing, but Adams channels enough Harvey Pekar that the writing isn’t the problem. He’s written comics before and contributed to an anthology by Joe Zabel (who’s been responsible for several 3D comics and has worked on several iterations of American Splendor, so there’s a nice circle closed) and knows how to keep a story moving. It’s a bit early to see how fully it will develop, but he seems like a guy willing to explore his flaws without glossing over them, so at the very least you get an honest look inside his head.

Ben has a few photos of himself on the site, so you can compare his actual self to the rendered version and they’re pretty close. But no matter how engaging the story, no matter how well Ben and Joe and other 3D artists create their models … the eyes. Everybody that does 3D comics should buy a beer for the first person to get the eyes to be not-disturbing.

Somebody needs to do a visual reference to old Looney Tunes sight gags. They need to be named, catalogued, and preserved, if only to make the point I’m about to make easier. Friz Freleng had this one sight gag that I’ve always called Five Doors; it must have been a particular favorite, because he used it at least three times that I can remember, but he first used it in Little Red Riding Rabbit. All togther now: “Hey Grandma, I brought a little bunny rabbit for ya TA HAVE!”

Five Doors consists of Bugs and the Big Bad Wolf (or, in later cartoons, Yosemite Sam, or Tweety and Sylvester’s fingers, “walking” at the end of his arm) chasing each other in and out of five doors, three of which are at the top of a set of stairs, and two below. The music rises and falls as they run up and down the stairs, in and out of the various rooms (and just because Bugs runs into door #2 doesn’t mean he won’t come out of door #5 on a different floor).

What always struck me about Five Doors is how extravagant it was; it’s well known that the Schlesinger/Warners animators had to bring in their cartoons to within eight frames of exactly six minutes. There was no editing, no fat to trim, every single one of 8640 frames had to move the story forward. And Five Doors took upwards of 25 seconds of screen time, at the end of which, the characters were essentially right where they started. So how did Freleng justify it? It was a luxury — sometimes, you just have to put in 25 seconds of well-timed music and animation that doesn’t particularly serve the story. It’s just icing on the funny cake.

Paul Taylor does something similar in today’s Wapsi Square. There’s been literally weeks worth of his dark storyline, with dead gods and the end of the world and portents of danger. He’s been doling out the hints of what’s going on at a furious and satisfying rate. But sometimes, you have to put all that aside for a day, and draw a big ol’ wide panel of hot girls dancing. Five Doors is funny and all, but this just might be better. Plus, in the midst of all the dark exposition: Porky Pig reference!

So we’ve been getting a fair number of newsbox mentions, blog links, trackbacks, pingbacks, humpbacks, whatever, since Fleen started up.

Today, Fleen makes it into an actual strip.

Creators take note: we may be geeks with fragile egos, but name-checking us in your strip and giving us originals will not impair our journalistic integrity even a little bit. For us, providing the matches for fights and flamewars is reward enough.

You might have seen it at Comixpedia, or at their home page — the Webcartoonist’s Choice Awards have announced their timeline for the year. What struck me about the announcement is the scheduling: nominations open on 15 May, with the awards themselves dropping on 17 July. The logical question here is, “Why are awards for achievement in 2005 happening closer to 2007?” For answers, let’s hear from WCCA Chairman Mark (Zortic) Mekkes:

There are a couple of reasons that it’s set when it is. For one thing, it’s a quieter time of year for everyone. People have more time to look at nominees than they do immediately following the holidays (like now). The other main reason is to coincide with ComicCon. By announcing the results just before ComicCon, it gives people something to discuss, brag about or debate in San Diego.

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There are neat things for you to see and maybe to buy!

John A. has released the cover to The Retribution Index, the forthcoming Scary Go Round book #4. Since it has been scientifically proved that SGR equals wonderfulness, you should start counting the seconds until the release of this book. Count, damn you!

Penny Arcade’s forthcoming collectible card game has what looks like finished box art over at the PA newsbox (scroll down to the fourth item). Congrats also to Hawk from Applegeeks; I met him by random chance at SPX ’05, and we talked a bit about the coloring job he did for Gabe’s card art. Looks like a damn fine job, too.

With a post-mortem celebrity resembling that of a mutant Princess Diana, the Cyclops Kitty makes an appearance in today’s Questionable Content. Now normally, an in-strip t-shirt design has the potential to become a money-spinner for Jeph Jacques, but he notes:

To answer everyone’s questions, yes that is a little tribute to Cy the Cyclops Kitty on Raven’s shirt. To answer a lot of people’s second questions, no I will not be putting that design on t-shirts to sell. The notion of profiting off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten is, to put it mildly, distasteful.

Naturally, not everybody shares his sense of restraint, so if you were planning on trying to profit off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten, get in line. Seriously, this one just feels forced. The only thing that strikes me as less necessary would be if one of those 1000 or so Batgirls was also a cyclops kitty. Please don’t take that as a suggestion.

So Howard Tayler, mad scientist behind Schlock Mercenary, has opened a new website devoted to an ostensibly-fake foodstuff a foodstuff that one might think existed only in a fictional universe, but which has made its way into our own reality, draped in gooey perfection.

Recipes, discussion of various cheeses, and a tribute to cast-iron that would make Alton Brown moist are to be found here.

This could be the start of a trend. Already, Greg Dean, Tayler’s Blank Label-mate, has shifted his life (and update schedule) to attend culinary school. Could there be more webcomickers making the leap to food-themed endeavors? Because that could be awesome. Or sad. Guess it depends on what’s cooking.

From R Stevens, regarding the sudden unavailability of the delightful iheartpixels:

OK, so I made a goof! I used a third party to register my domain and do my hosting for i heart pixels. It was a momentary lapse of do-it-yerselferness. SUDDENLY, THE DOMAIN DOES NOT RESOLVE after 2 really good days of traffic. And guess what? I can’t point it where I want. Lovely. So, I solved this the way I solve most of my problems – atomic warfare. Please change whatever bookmarks/links/boners you may have to iheartpixels.org

You heard the man. Point yer boners here.

The newest webcomics meme has hit over at LiveJournal.

People are drawing Batgirl! Webcomics types like Meredith Gran (Mer gets top billing because she designed our kickass masthead — thanks, Mer!), Ian Jones-Quartey, Brian Lee O’Malley, Abby L., R Stevens, Vera Brosgol, Ryan Estrada, Ryan North, Lem, Kean Soo, and Kristopher Straub have taken a whack at drawing the commissioner’s daughter. Also Andy Runton. Okay, Andy works in the print comics world, but Owly is too cute for words, and you should go buy all of his books.

And that’s just the people whose names caught my eye when scrolling down the list — as of this writing, there are nearly 500 entries. The whole thing apparently got kicked off with a link to some old character proposals by Andi Watson (buy all his books, too). Favorite so far: Jeff Rowland, reminding us that even superheroes need some “alone time”.

One of the things that you get used to real quick when you read webcomics is merch. This is a pretty natural thing, given that the people producing that webcomic you love so much ain’t paying hosting bills for the sheer fun of it. If there’s not a tip cup, there’s stuffs for sale, even for the semi-hobbyists.

But fundamentally, those stuffs fall into the categories of:
1. Shirts and shirtlike garments
2. Books
3. Art

That’s about it. Oh, sure, if you’re willing to associate with Cafe Press, you can get your character on a frisbee or whatever, but why so few options?
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