Fleen had a recent opportunity to speak with Dale Beran, the writer for A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, over beer and burgers.

We have edited out all of the extended and well-informed commentary from Dale about the quality and meaty essentiality of his burger and what the juice felt like as it washed across his tongue and slid down his throat, and what remains is a conversational interview about his comic and his process. We hope we’ve maintained the character of his conversation, but are saddened that we can’t convey the timbre of his deep manly voice.
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Aaron William‘s Full Frontal Nerdity is a weekly comic strip about three four role-playing gamers.

If, somehow, you’re geeky enough to be reading a daily (or mostly daily) blog about webcomics, but have never actually played any role-playing games, then Full Frontal Nerdity will give you the complete experience, from the friendships with your fellow gamers to the cameraderie you develop, and the pleasures of sharing food to the thrill of the games themselves.

If you have role-played before, then this may remind you of the good times

It’s a faithful rendition of a tedious experience.

We previously mentioned Malfunction Junction when talking about an odd occurance of Trent Reznor.

Today’s comic brings up the ongoing American flag-waving impetus to “Support Our Troops!”. And it puts it in a pretty good perspective, too. Nobody knows what it really means to support our troops, and nobody really wants to write their Congressman to raise taxes to pay for more body armor either.

Malfunction Junction suffers from the same things that other journal webcomics suffer from – the comic is only as interesting as the (usually exaggerated) life of the person doing the comic. It’s a mixed bag with Matt Milby – sometimes this is interesting and sometimes not, but usually he manages to find something funny in everything (even if a bit juvenile).

In general, Malfunction Junction is a good read with decent art, and deserves some of your time.

Also, Matt Milby has a Sheriff Pony wallet.

Molly McCausland’s Tea For Three hasn’t quite hit it’s running legs yet. She’s not kept a strict update schedule, she hasn’t established a clear artistic style or voice, and her characters are a bit stereotypical. Yes, one of them has a French accent. It’s a little more plausible here, since the strip is set in England and the character is an international spy (which is a cheap writer’s trick in it’s own right, but…)

But as far as relatively new comics go, this is better than a lot of them. From the writing side of things, she is really trying to establish a coherent story, and trying to show different facets of her characters in the right situations for those facets to come out. She’s trying to tell her story, rather than someone else’s.

Her artwork is improving, and you can see the raw edges of her artistic voice coming out from the background as she gets more strips done. Just the amount of improvement already shows that there’s a good amount of talent underneath.

So spend an hour or two reading the archives – you might have trouble with the next & previous buttons, so use the archive view – and check back in with Tea For Three in a month or two to see where things are.

Belphegor

I first met the great Diablo at Dor-Con 17. I didn’t get to spend much time with him there, but he was gracious enough to autograph my Chia Pet.

I’m very excited, therefore, to present the following interview with Diablo about his magnum opus, megaGAMERZ 3133T.

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Comic conventions are always a good thing. They’re a great opportunity to meet and greet other artists, smell the fans, and get really really drunk (while still being able to deduct it as a business expense!).

In particular, conventions can go a long way towards helping a nascent collection of rabble gel into a full blown community – and the UK Web And Mini Comix Thing has been trying to help that process along for the last three years. Fleen has only ever heard good things from those who attended – that it’s a positive experience and a good thing in general for the UK indie comics scene.

But the thing about conventions that most people don’t know is… they can be an excruciating ordeal to actually run. They say you don’t have to be crazy to run a convention, but they also say it sure helps.

We received the following response from “Thing”, when we asked for a press release about the upcoming UK Web And Mini Comix Thing 2006. This is presented almost completely unedited (we corrected or at least Americanized spellings, and added links and removed some leading and trailing text that was not directly related – but otherwise this is verbatim what we received).
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The Bears vs. the Packers. The Redskins vs. the Cowboys. The Army vs. the Navy. Labourdonnais vs. McDonnell. Fischer vs. Spasspky. Laver vs. Rosewall. Borg vs. Connors. USA vs Russia at the 1980 Olympics.

Sam vs. Jeph.

Sam Logan and Jeph Jacques have been going at it, pen to pen, tete e tete, nose to grindstone in one of the dirtiest and longest running webcomics rivalries ever. It started out innocently enough as a marketing device, but now… puppies are getting kicked.

It seems unusal that two creators who write such similar comics would be out for blood. Particularly when Jeph is such a whiny emo shoegazer. (Sam Logan, that amazon-wish-list-hacking, baby painting, easter egg stealing fiend, made me say that.)

I had a recent opportunity to try and reconcile these two and attempted to convince them to settle their differences like the gentlemen that I know they are.
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We have previously reported on the failure of Vault Distribution and the impact it had on the creators that were involved. At that time, we also pointed out that there now an open niche in the market and creators who were looking for someone to help sell their stuff. (As a side note, if you’re one of the small distributors out there, and are looking for some exposure – please use our contact form to tell us your story.)

Yesterday, we received the following press release, sent out by Neil G.
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While this is very old news, I recently had a conversation with D.J. Coffman about the demise of PVComics.

PVComics went offline sometime early last year – D.J. said that it had been gone for over a year now but it had actually been floundering for a bit before that.

The bare facts of the matter are that Logan DeAngelis got too busy with ComixPress to continue to manage and direct PVComics. And the domain and intellectual property still reside soundly in Logan’s hands… so nobody else can really pick it up and carry on.

PVComics started out trying to provide a creator centric subscription model, acting more as a service collective than as a publishing house. When it became clear that almost nobody was making any money off of the subscription business, PVComics switched to other business models, and ended up basically a pure service collective.

And then D.J. had this great idea… why shouldn’t someone start a print-on-demand service specializing in webcomics that was just as creator focused as PVComics was…? And so he mentioned it to Logan and…

All of the big plans and high hopes of PVComics members quietly went by the wayside.

D.J. says that the break up was amicable, and that he was happy to get the dishes and that rug that really pulled the front room together, and that he’s glad that all the PVComics alums are still friends.

Of course if any of you out there have a different side of this story, and would like to tell it – we all know that the webcomics industry doesn’t have nearly enough drama on a regular basis, so do your part to keep us all entertained by sending me some email or writing some comments or use the contact form.