The following item is hot off the presses and posted entirely without comment.

Scott Kurtz wrote:
PvPonline.com, in association with Nightlight Press is pleased to start off 2006 with a bang.

Since the strip started in 1998, PvP readers have been clamoring to see their favorite characters BROUGHT TO LIFE on their computer screens. Well, thanks to some ingenious technology, that possibility is a reality TODAY!

To bring PvP ALIVE! to life, I consulted with world renowned “Fantastician”, Kristofer Straub about finding an affordable and efficient way to bring PvP ALIVE! on a regular basis. Kristopher has recently been tinkering with a new media called BLAMIMATION that he’s been looking to try out on a new project.

And so, PvP and Nightlight press is proud to present the first of many episodes of our brand new feature: PvP ALIVE!

Well. Okay.

One comment.

Scott may have had too much eggnog this season.

Everyone else is talking about this (or should be).

So we will too.

Nothing Eric says can be trusted anymore.

Ha! Just Kidding!

Seriously, though. Jon is paying me to say this. So don’t take my word for it.

Think for yourself about what this means. And then consider that this is pretty much exactly where Eric has wanted to be, and probably a good part of his motivation for doing WebSnark in the first place. He’s admitted all along that he wants to make money off of webcomics – and that he tried to do it the “normal” way and failed. So then he started “snarking”.

And now he’s getting paid for it.

So am I.

In beer.

When I get the very rare opportunity to get to New York to collect.

Jon Rosenberg made me say this.

But, still. Think for yourself.

Why is this a good thing for webcomics journalism?

Eric Conveys An Emotion is not exactly a webcomic. It is not in any way sequential – it never tells a story. It’s not drawn and scripted and then inked and scanned. It’s not carefully constructed inside a three-d gaming experience, it’s not dilligently researched and photographed before having carefully posed models inserted. It’s not painstakingly drawn one overly large pixel at a time. It’s not a series of quick jokes overlaid on a constant art background, it’s not an ongoing neo-philosophical beat-poetry dialogue between two distinct personality types…

In fact, pretty much, it’s just a series of gag shots of some Asian guy making faces at the camera. But they are very funny gag shots, and he’s a funny looking Asian guy.

A case could be made, though, that Eric Conveys An Emotion is a photographic comic, in the style of Exploding Dog. If Eric weren’t too busy at his job to update regularly, this post would probably be making that case.

Instead, let’s take it for granted that he is not making a webcomic with Eric Conveys an Emotion. So why am I discussing it?

His other project, Eric Conveys an Emotion: Adventure Edition is a photographic webcomic. And he just updated!

Apparently, Ken Krekeler read a lot of webcomics that sucked. So he decided to make one too.

My Nemesis seems to be a pastiche of a lot of other things, without a well developed plotline or believable characters. It starts out being a story about a guy writing a webcomic. It then fairly quickly skips around to different parts of the world and then turns into a comic about a guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend.

The over-the-top attitude and characterization of Kal is obviously intended to be humorous, but it ends up being dull and trite. Having been dumped, the overly angsty Kal then sets off on a journey to find himself.

Pretty much all the jokes fall flat. The artwork is competent, although fairly uninspired – like the rest of the comic.

Ken seems to have talent. But he doesn’t seem to be using it. So, Ken Krekeler, I hope you fucking get shot and die.

Machinima is the growing art of using video games to build films. One of the classic examples is Red Vs. Blue, a twisted series of short clips built using Halo. But machinima is a term exclusively for animations/films (“machine” “cinema”, see?).

We seem to need a new word for comics like Concerned: The half-life and death of Gordon Frohman. It’s not a sprite comic, and it’s not a collage comic. It’s definitely not a pixel comic, and it’s not really a gamer comic either.

Concerned is built entirely (except for lettering) inside Half-Life 2, and takes a very Rosencrantz & Guildenstern approach to the story and script of that game – at least as far as I can tell. I haven’t played anything in the Half-Life oeuvre.

Concerned follows the misadventures of the extremely stupid Gordon Frohman as he wanders about trying to secure a future as a member of the Combine. As a comic, Concerned suffers a bit from trying too hard to follow the plot of the game – there are some mildly disconcerting story jumps. But then again, this is also part of the humor of the comic – Christopher C. Livingston is making fun of Half-Life and other games.

All in all, Concerned is a good, snarky read. And the notes at the bottom of most strips are informative and humorous as well.

But we need a name for this type of strip. Has someone come up with one, and I’m just ignorant? Any suggestions?

Edit – I hate to nip this rolicsome debate in the bud, but Chris Livingston has told me I’m ignorant (in the nicest possible way), the proper term for his type of comic is Gamics.

Edit 2: Gamics may be a trademark of Gamics.com. So we do still need another word.

It seems that a fairly vast webcomics empire has gone kablooie. (Is that how you spell kablooie?)

This is basically old news, at this point – it’s not clear how long they’ve been down. If you have a favorite comic there, you already know this, and you already know where it’s gone. But if there’s something you only check in with once a week or a month, they’ve got a migration list of where strips have gone.

They also appear to be looking for volunteers for an open source replacement for their systems. There are probably still creators out there who are despairing for a new home for their comic.

If you’ve got resources to give, or time to spare, I’m sure they’d appreciate it. If nothing else, a quick visit to see some of the migrated sites would probably be a nice little Christmas boost in readership for the artists.

This was going to be a fairly long post about a departed comic that had been an excellent read.

But it looks like it’s been updating again, at least for a month or so.

Ashfield Online was an early comic that can be seen as a prototype for what we are now calling static comics. Professor Ashfield almost never moves, and the humor is always funny and extremely quirky as well. Among other things, the first and the one-thousandth episodes form a closed loop in time. Not many other comics can achieve that.

All in all, it’s a jolly and surreal read, and it’s good to see some new episodes.

It’s not clear if Aric will be updating this more. If he doesn’t, I think it’s a candidate for Alexander Danner’s relatively new Full Story, a site he is putting together to collect comics that have completed their run. It may not be ideal, as it’s not “a complete beginning, middle, and endÂ? reading experience”, but it does have that whole “closed loop in time” thing going for it.

It also has atomic fireballs!

There are basically two things I find I don’t like about comics printed on paper. And both of them have “being printed” as the big cause.

The first is just ink. The facts are that ink on paper is a complicated problem (much much more complicated than it seems at first glance), and ink in general is produced through propriatary black arts by massive secret consortiums of chemical companies. This means that when you go to draw a comic that you want to print on paper, you have to spend some time thinking about what it’s going to look like after it’s printed. And so you think twice about that shade of orange, and you reconsider whether you’ve made those lines too thin, and you need to broaden them a bit. And as you spend more time doing this, you end up squeezing yourself into this kind of strangely distorted artistic sensibility, where you are shutting down avenues of expression before you’ve even read the street sign.

The second thing is really the same kind of thing. Because you’re thinking about getting this comic printed, you’re usually doing it for money. And so you’re thinking about the mass market point of view – or having to deal with distributors and agents that are doing that thinking for you. And so rather than throwing in a gratuitous piece (that happens to be really funny) about a guy laughing at a girl who’s just admitted to a deep trauma and then forcing her to give him a blowjob… you censor yourself. You say “Just because I think it’s funny, maybe it won’t sell well in Salt Lake City…”. And the more you focus on this, the more you lose track of making the best comic you can make.

The freedom from both of these weird mental distortions that working entirely for the web gives to artists is why I like web comics a lot better than paper comics. Sure, tentacle porn has it’s place too, but it’s not what really does it for me, you know?

Stephen Notley manages to draw Bob the Angry Flower – which gets most of it’s distribution through print (certainly I first saw it in the City Paper… I think?) – without being trapped like this. Like Bob, he really doesn’t seem to consider what other people think before he writes. And he doesn’t seem to worry much about ink on paper, either, or generally the quality of his artwork.

So is it a web comic?

Who cares. It’s funny.

Tim Buckley is one of the growing number of webcomic artists who have achieved enough success to be doing what they love full time, without need or want for another job.

Ctl-Alt-Del has achieved this success through the usual means – good art, consistent effort, interesting characters and well-written story arcs full of twists and surprises. He’s also willing to start a few fires.

Despite being a gamer comic, about two guys who sit on a couch and play video games, Tim finds new and strange stories to tell and characters to introduce, and then kill.

Ctl-Alt-Del is one of the better comics out there, and Tim deserves all the credit and all the blame he gets. You could do a lot worse than to read this on a regular basis. Although rumor has it you don’t want to play Worlds of Warcraft with him.

But the big news these days at Ctl-Alt-Del is that it’s going animated!

This is practicaly unprecedented in the webcomic world, and should be very interesting to follow.

Alexander Danner and Bill Duncan have been collaborating for a while now on Picture Story Theater (Warning, all links from here out are Modern Tales links, and may require a login). They have managed an amazing job of making the art and the writing combine to produce something much better. The stories that have been told vary from the whimsical exploration of “Fantastic Zoology: The Coastal Giraffe” to a cautionary tale of “The Little Bear Who Knew Fear”, but most of their stories revolve around the interacting lives of a set of middle school students, and their supernatural or not-so-supernatural experiences.

Danner’s writing is a wonderful act of minimalism (in fact, the first PST doesn’t have any dialog at all). He also does an excellent job of conveying the idealized and romanticized vision of life as a tweener that anyone who’s grown up still clutches to (if only to try and banish the memories of the peer-induced trauma we actually lived through). His dialog is convincing, and his stories are fresh and interesting.

The artwork of Bill Duncan perfectly compliments Danner’s writing. He explores different compositional and linework styles to match the general tone of the piece – Amy Plays A Game of Chance is composed using only four hues to emphasize that it has no dialog. Duncan reaches a bit into the grotesque side of comics for the opening scenes of Together Again, to illustrate a bit the malaise of Humpty Dumpty, and then softens his focus as the story changes tone as well.

Despite the consistantly high grade art and writing, and the pure professionalism shown by both players, they still manage to maintain the willingness to experiment and change everything that is the hallmark of great web comics.

In short, Bill Duncan and Alexander Danner are a webcomic powerhouse team-up, and it’s worth three bucks for a one month subscription to Modern Tales just to check them out.

EDIT:
A brief follow-up. The interconnected stories about school children is being re-released in a free offering as Portraits of Nervous Children.

It just started, so there isn’t much there yet. But keep an eye out – this is good reading.