Topical humor always tickles my funny bone. I live in Michigan, and in Michigan there is a certain reputation for being frigidly cold. Now, like every other place, they also say that if you wait five minutes the weather will change. But for the last two days (and tomorrow as a third) it has hit 90 degrees with a heat index in the mid-90s.

Michigan doesn’t get heat indexes.

I thought I would share with you a particular story-arc from the archives of Loserz – strangely enough, a webcomic set in Michigan. I am lucky enough to have friends with cars who also have parents with pools. Good thing, too, because there weren’t enough people around this weekend for a proper waterfight.

Loserz, created by Eric Schoenek, is the story of three friends who are (according to the header) “Cynical Punk-Ass Teenagers.” They love video games, Jodie loves Sex, Eric’s hat is always changing, and Ben is lovesick. They’re the best of friends (but not in an ooey-gooey way). But that’s neither here nor there, because we’re talking about a WATERFIGHT.

Jodie, Eric, and Ben are joined by Max and Cecil, and the entire thing has a vaguely Calvin and Hobbes-esque feel to it, which the author admits in his commentary. But what makes this arc most enjoyable is not the jokes, but when it gets read.

Enjoy it as a beginning-of-summer treat. Hopefully, there will be other romps in the park like this one, all over the internet, which can take our mind off the fact that computers like to shut themselves down when they over heat.

Well, it is late late on Friday night. Saturday morning, really.

Just getting in from your hot date? Decided to check your blog before you hop into bed? (Hopefully with your hot date?) That’s hot.

Dating is an all consuming topic on many levels. For teenagers, it is something that has to be navigated in very precise manner. For example, there is always the possibility that you’re hanging out with the wrong person and everyone else might decide that you’re gay.

Now, of course, you have your hot date. But others are not so lucky and have to worry about finally going on the date of the girl/boy of their dreams. Make sure they don’t see your blatant celebration. They may think you’re interested.

And then there’s the problem where if you are gay and then other people are uncomfortable it. Or aren’t uncomfortable with it, but have just had bad experiences involving it. Or are fundamentalist Christians and disown you.

Then again, your girlfriend may be exorcised and then blown up by old ladies who don’t want you to fall into sin. At least the best part about this is that when your good friend is nearly killed in a drive by shooting, she’ll be there to greet her in the underworld.

Keep this all in mind when you decide if you still like your hot date in the morning. Beer goggles are dangerous instruments.

I am a feminist.

Don’t hit the “x� or the back button yet. Give me a chance. I’m not a feminazi, I’m not out to break balls.

I just am of the opinion that there are certain rules and institutions that discriminate against women. Consider that of a graduating law class, the gender ratio is 50/50. But of the lawyers who make partner in a firm every year, the ratio is more like 90/10 in the favor of men. This has to do with the expectation of 100 hour work weeks from lawyers, combined with the expectation of female domesticity. (Thank you, Joan Williams.)

Comics don’t require 100 hours per week. Sure, they do require dedication. Both genders can dedicate themselves to things. So, I am confused.

I read about 20 comics over the course of the week. And of those, five of them are created by women. Am I just looking in the wrong place?

I’d love to see some recommendations from the readers out there. Show me your favorite comics created by women. Tell me why you like them. I’ll start writing posts about them.

I think this is a win-win situation for all.

The first rule of creating a webcomic, Gary reported, is to create a schedule and stick to it. In the original posting, this spawned much discussion and additional rules – but let’s consider this first rule.

What if you don’t stick to a schedule?

In my first review here, the lack of a clear update schedule was one of the final straws in the camel’s back as to why the Canadian Creation Myth would not be given a return visit from this particular IP address. But there are plenty of comics in my cache that don’t have a regular update schedule, but stay in my bookmarks.

What make a comic worth waiting for?

9th Elsewhere is a comic about a girl who has some serious self-hatred. So much, in fact, that is impairs her ability to write – her artist’s medium – and so she has been recommended for dream analysis by a team of muses. But no one wants her and her problems – they transferred her from unit to unit, until they gave one muse who has effed up too many times one last chance – with her. It wouldn’t be a good set up unless they were expecting him to fail.

So, Eiji and Carmen set off for an adventure in Carmen’s subconscious, to find out the reason that she can’t write anymore.

Jokes like having a train you have to be so self-actualized to ride makes it clear that this comic is smart reading – the creator, Caroline Curtis, obviously knows her psychology. And to be absolutely truthful – the story is arched and plotted as a graphic novel, so the story is more fulfilling as an archive than as a biweekly update. But there hasn’t been an update at all since March.

I’m not the type to email or spam creators for updates, so the page has been quietly sitting in my favorites, hoping that the project would get picked up again, because there is a story, there are characters, there is an intelligent person putting a lot of thought and time into something that she is not making any money off of. There are no t-shirts related to 9th Elsewhere.

A comic is worth waiting for, it seems, when it has caught the imagination. 9th Elsewhere is original in concept, witty in execution, and fascinating in content. I wait patiently for updates, but perhaps it is time to take it off of my day-by-day list of links, and put it into a “check occasionally� file. Waiting is worth it, but no need to be teased.

However, there was an update only three days ago with promises of summer updating… hope springs eternal for webcomics one thinks was lost.

I hate message boards. The threads, in my opinion, are impossible to keep straight as people are replying to absolutely everyone. Then, every time you turn around you’re behind again because more people posted.

Needless to say, I don’t read message boards. I’m actually not really that big on becoming part of a throng of fans on a comic either – I read them for the stories, the characters, the art. I’m a bit of a purist that way, or maybe I’m just lazy and don’t need this particular aspect of my internet addiction to take up that much more of my time.

But when a webcomic changes style, loses dialogue, and becomes creepy as all hell – it pays to make a trip to the forums . Or the livejournal community. Or anywhere else where people are discussing the comic.

Wapsi Square’s forums are the only ones that I have had a chance to visit on a regular basis. As Monica figures out just how she fits into this supernatural (and yet completely natural) world around her, the fans are figuring out what allusions that Pablo is making. The way the story of Wapsi Square unfolds, with so many clues and allusions, it pays to pool brain cells with other readers to try and guess what’s going on.

Message boards are not the heart of the comic. The heart of the comic is definitely what you see on the opening page of the site. But the community of the comic, what makes webcomics a complete interactive experience, comes from the message boards.

If you’re a veteran webcomic and forum reader, look at the message boards in a new way. How does it contribute to your experience and understanding of the comic? If you’re a n00b, try looking at the boards – they can probably help point you in the right direction and clarify any questions you may have.

Oh, and as per Gary? Happy Birthday Blank Label.

My first webcomic was MegaTokyo back when I was a fifteen-year-old. My friend sent it to me, swearing that she would one day get me drunk and drag me onto a plane to Tokyo with her. In order to go through the archives on my dial-up connection, I would open ten pages at a time, and while they would load, I would do my math homework. If I got interrupted, I had better have bookmarked where I was.

The latest webcomic that I have begun to read is Scary-Go-Round. Now, normally, I would take an afternoon’s procrastination and read through an entire archive, but the Dreaded Real Life has been horribly distracting as of late. Work, sleep, Fleen, sleep, work; repeat.

So, really, I’d just like to sing the praises of the ability to tag the comic that you left off on, so that when you return to the site you can continue from where you stopped reading. It saves you from memorizing comic numbers, dates, or the titles of story arcs. It makes leaving and coming back to comics easier.

I love you, archive tagger-thing. I’m sure you have a proper name, but devices with “thing” in the name are so much cooler and mysterious and awesome.

One of the biggest criticisms of the hit show Friends was the fact that they never seemed to work. They lived in two large, two bedroom New York apartments – even with rent control, it was hard to believe that they could afford things if they never worked. It is, in fact, a common criticism of television shows, the idea that the characters don’t live realistic lives. Not all shows can take place on a deserted island.

Webcomics are, by their very nature, a little bit ridiculous. I haven’t run into a drama yet, at least one that isn’t also a fantasy (and also adventure-y), and so we get little episodes of absurdism that probably don’t happen anywhere in real life. I think that slipstream as a literary movement is probably dominated by webcomics. The academics just don’t know it yet.

Rob and Elliot aren’t quite the same kind of ensemble cast as Friends. In fact, it’s just the two of them living in their apartment, and they’re not too terribly fond of their neighbors. In fact, they don’t often notice that they’re there, and when they do they’re often in some sort of argument.

And Rob clearly has a job. He works as teacher of English as a second language, and his work crush (and his failings at acting on it!) forms a rather large plot. Of course, work is only interesting when you’re teaching English to foreigners using 90s television shows.

Work is only interesting when you have a cool job, like writing the music for porn. (It’s a real job, guys. Enough to get news articles written about it. Scarily enough.) And to be fair to the characters of Friends, they did have jobs – we just didn’t see them often enough, because even if they had trouble with their bosses, none were quite as creepy as the Dean of Rob’s school.

ETA: [5:37 pm EDT] It was brought to my attention in an email from a Mr. T Campbell who has informed me that there is an online directory of webcomics, which shows that there are plenty of webcomics that are dramas, and not fantasies. I just haven’t read any of them.

Gary wrote an interesting post meant to start a discussion about the importance of art in webcomics. The discussion was interesting; the general consensus was that the art should match the style of the strip.

But I like to think that the art is sometimes the best part of a webcomic — little details are what make me laugh. So, I’d like to present a counter point to those minimalist strips that Gary cited. I present the to you The Holy Bibble.

The art style is distinctive, more of a cut-paper glued onto a background, or maybe the felt boards that some of us learned Bible stories on. Luckily, the art isn’t actually cut felt, because then we wouldn’t get the depth of detail that exists in the The Holy Bibble. (Though, Sunday school lesson plans from the Holy Bibble would not be very… G-rated.)

Two major examples of this detail that I’d like to share with you are this:

1. In which Cain is reciting Gothic Poetry, and the Devil answers his “prayers.” Notice Abel in the third panel, walking fuzzily in the distance. In each subsequent panel, we see exactly how Cain murders Abel — unwittingly.
2. Another, this time when Cain is settled in the Land of Nod with his wives, and he thinks about his family back home, thinking that their life is better than sitting in a hot tub with anime chicks. If you look carefully at the artwork, you can see that Eve is carrying around a baby in her old age, one of her daughters is heavily pregnant and worried, and one young child is bullying another.

In both of these examples, the artwork supports the joke — the art is the punch line. What’s interesting about this comic is that they are working from a source text, and so they have to make their work compelling for something other than the storyline. The artwork is a good example of this.

But they’re not above reinterpretation of the Bible, in fact, it is their goal. Cannan and Lucas, the writer/artist team, have a mythology going. They are making this comic because they are prophets, after all. That makes it so much better than other similar projects out there.

And I’m sure that they’re sure I’m about to be smitted. (smitten? smote? I am not a wordbeast yet.)

I found Kawaii Not long before I received the email that contained the backlog of creators who wanted some exposure through Fleen. My bet is, unless you have a Livejournal, you’ve never heard of Kawaii Not. The strip has one vote on TopWebComics.com, number 1068 of 1800 strips. Not the worse, but really not good at all.

Besides not having a lot of high profile publicity the four-panel strip, featuring bright and child-like characters, is hard to find simply because Livejournal obscures its own content. If you search for webcomics by interest on LJ, you find 434 communities and 430 persons. None of them, at least in my very brief perusal, were webcomics.

Then, how did I come across Kawaii Not? Icons.

Livejournal icons are the viral marketing of webcomics, and they’re a bit under-utilized by those creators who do not base their entire production on the LJ apparatus. Icons, or userpics, on livejournal have an option for “comments.” It is customary, common, and polite to credit the user or community that you downloaded the icon from in that “comment” section — as was the case with the distinctive Kawaii Not icons.

When used in discussion communities or other high volume areas (like LJ news posts), are highly visible and their origins are easily discernable. This makes them the perfect billboard for creators to please the fans as well as generate new interest and hits. A typical exchange would go like this:

User 1: “Awesome icon! Where did you get it?”
User 2: “Kawaii Not! It’s a great comic, you should read it.”

Official icons, or permission to use the artwork with proper credit, are an amazing way to market a webcomic to a fanbase who is particularly loyal, who would be willing to chat up the comic, link it, and recommend it. No need to press the readers to vote, no need to exchange links or join a group – have the readers do it. They’re more than willing to help.

On the flip side, if they’re looking for new webcomics, and you see a set of icons that all have similar artwork — check them out. They may be sequential art. Or they may be something else entirely which can also be quite fun.

Truth be told, I’m not sure that Kate Ditzler even exists. Oh, sure, there were entries in the Win A Gig At Fleen contest, and there’s been email between us, but it could have all been an elaborate setup. “Kate” (if that is “her” real name) claims to be single, 19, a student at Michigan State, studying International Relations and Social Relations. That sounds an awful lot like the stereotypical “internet girlfriend” that lonely nerds might make up … the only trick missed is that she’s not from Canada! But wait, “Kate” claims to be heading to London next year to continue her studies via an internship! Oh, sure, I’d like for you to meet my new writer, but she lives in another country!

The only question is, who is “Kate” exactly? An amazing life-like simulation? Or somebody claiming to be her in order to engage in nefarious purposes from inside the Fortress of Fleen? I can only think of one person well-versed enough in webcomics, with layers of influence throughout the land, and even experienced in writing from the POV of a teenage female: T Campbell, you’re busted!

Or maybe not. Everybody say hello to Kate!