There’s a new trend that some creators are taking, mixing published works with online in a fairly short timeframe; no waiting a year for a reprint here! Jeff Rowland is pushing new Wigu adventures as books, then will be making stripped-down content available for free afterwards. Over on Webcomics Nation, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better followed a subscription approach mixed with print copies, but has recently thrown open the gates on his archives and the current content. Go buy the first two issues so he’ll be able to print more.

Nothing Better is the story of growing up and letting go and making that big leap into college — and life, and Page has got it nailed. There’s the disgustingly chipper RAs that you want to bitchslap, the horrors of campus jobs, textbook sticker shock, and the certain knowledge that college is the time you can reinvent yourself. Nobody knows you from high school, you can finally be cool, and someday at a reunion, have your revenge.

Page has also taken the narrative step of setting the story at a religiously-affiliated (though fictional) school, which makes it easy to bring in the fact that when you’re new and unsure of yourself, there’s somebody waiting to recruit you to their way of thinking; it’s been a while since I was in college, but even then, this sort of thing was kind of forceful. Kudos to Page for exploring what many people would just step away from (Do lines like God wants us to be together really work? ‘Cause the rationalist in me thinks it would suck if they did).

The story is developing at a nice pace, with a full page delivered three times a week. Presently, we’re about three pages into issue #5 (about 75 pages in all), so you’re at a perfect point to jump in; there’s enough backstory to get to really know the characters and get good and hooked for future installments. Not to worry, though, Page has a nice fat buffer, having already worked up the cover for issue #6 and part of issue #7’s art. Art which, by the way, equally invokes Terry Moore, Chynna Clugston, and Alex Robinson, none of whom is a webcomicker, all of whom you should be reading. In fact, Alex Robinson provided the perfect taglilne for Nothing Better when he described his own work (to his wife, on their first date) as, “Like Archie with swearing and sex.”

Sounds great to me.

Crowfeathers is a pretty good manga style comic. It’s a bit mythic, it’s a bit western, it’s a bit fun.

Crowfeathers also is rather less PG-13 than it claims to be. There’s a fair dose of violence in most episodes as well as rape, murder and racism.

The artwork is fairly well executed in the manga style, and the writing is pretty decent. The characters ring true and are not too exaggerated. The storyline is fairly standard for the genre – a coming of age story where great events are portented and a young pig boy may grow up to be… well, okay not quite that standard. A young crow boy grows up to be an evil bounty hunter and is punished for it, but presumably will be redeemed by the close of the saga. Likely he will also resolve being abandoned by his father and fall in love.

Lots of strips have archives that stretch back into infinity — backstory, characters, plots, and plenty more. But like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said once, Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Thus, Quill. Twelve panels, three characters (four if you count the cat), fourteen words, one complete story complete with classic slapstick gag. Even the art has been reduced down to the absolute minimal line necessary to convey shape and emotion.

The creator, Michael Maihack, has other strips on his site and they’re good, too. Seed is a beautifully-illustrated adventure tale; Cow and Buffalo is funny, funny, funny. But Quill? It’s like Picasso’s peace dove: nothing left to take away.

I first heard about Josh Mirman because of Disposable Parts.

He wrote and drew Stubble for roughly four years, and Punks and Nerds for a little more than a year.

The last few weeks, though, he seems to have started to lose his focus a bit. Okay, more than a bit. In fact, despite some hints, it looks like he’s completely given up.

If we want to dig a little deeper into why, the evidence in his LiveJournal is pretty clear. Josh Mirman no longer wants it as bad as he did. It’s all about the money.

Or maybe he’s just gone completely crazy.

Here‘s the breaking point. Right there is where an artist loses his love. And it’s all your fault, Internet!

“At the crossroads of the academic and the asinine” is how Bryant Paul Johnson describes his webcomic, Teaching Baby Paranoia (Modern Tales subscription required for most of the archives, but a few free examples are to be found). Once a week, he takes us on a trip into the hinterlands of bizarre phenomena, secret history, and all-around weirdness. It’s copiously documented with footnotes, historical references, and citations to original sources.

Don’t believe a word of them.

Oh, sure, the stories he tells (like today’s intersection of antiauthoritarian philosophizing and supple human leather) sound just weird enough to be true. But mark my words, Johnson is making it all up. Also, you cannot, in fact, spell asshole with A, C, G, and T. He’s lying to you.

Except when he’s not. And that’s what’s so cool about Teaching Baby Paranoia: the storytelling skill that convinces your brain 100% that some improbable oddity just might be true, and mixed with the knowledge that the items so implausible, so easily disproved, dammit, end up being on the true side of things.

Maybe. Damn.

Most of the artists who use our contact form to entice us to read or review their comic also include something else. They apologize for marketing their strip – and usually in the contradictory form of “sorry for the shameless self-promotion”. If you’re apologizing, you’re not shameless, sorry!

TK Longmire sent us just such a missive yesterday – and guess what? It worked. This is the lesson for the day. If you want to make money off your comic, then you need regular readers. In order to get any readers at all, you must market your strip!

TK’s comic, Tasty Human Meat starts out being about a guy and his robot roommate. Despite this fairly pedestrian setup, it gets quirky fairly quick.

And then he switches to a series called Alternate Universe Comix, which takes place after a nuclear holocaust turned everyone into sealife.

TK has given us an entire world, with melancholy, schadenfreude, office life, teen bravado, communists, and everything else.

Under the sea? Yeah. That’s where I’d like to be. Thanks for a good comic, TK.

One of the questions that comes up around here is, “How do you decide what webcomics to talk about?” Jeff’s mentioned the idea of following links until you hit something interesting, and there’s also the contact form that creators use to let us know what they’re up to. And sometimes, people make an open call for comment. And by god, that’s when Fleen responds.

Up next: The Mulberry Gallows Project. On first glance, it’s pretty primitive, but there might actually be something worth discussing below the surface. The creator, Adam Marien, identifies TMGP as his first attempt at a comic, and it shows. Where it shows isn’t so much the art (there are plenty of established comics out there with visuals that are no better), but the unevenness. Case in point: the seventh strip has a bleak humor that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in Dinosaur Comics or A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. A better execution and it could even be brilliant. But just two strips later, you get something that’s totally pedestrian.

For every bit of self-referential surrealism, you have an example of pure, distilled ordinaryness. Or, more optimistically, every bit of ordinary is balanced by well, I’m not sure, but there’s potential there. Marien needs lots of practice. He needs to find some consistency. But with enough of both, someday TMGP could erupt as the mutant love-child of Twisp and Catsby, megaGAMERZ 3133T, Ed The Sock, and ergot.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Continuing from yesterday, what’s needed in the current argument over religion and cartoons is a positive example. It should be possible for one who is observant in a faith to make fun of that faith, its adherants, and its traditions. To poke humor at one’s self and fellow faithful (especially one’s ex). To be able to admit that faith is a slippery thing and that you can try hard and still come up short of doctrinal perfection. To explain, if necessary, what makes such things funny. Heck, to play with stereotypes, too.

Welcome to ShaBot 6000. It’s a two-character play, essentially, featuring:

… a pious Jew who purchases a robot to work as Shabbos Goy for his household. The inquisitive robot, ShaBot, decides that he is Jewish, and is therefore unable to fulfill his duties as servant. ShaBot spends his days asking questions about Judaism, trying to find logic in a religion that sometimes DOES NOT COMPUTE.

That’s courtesy of creator Ben Baruch, who no doubt would like all the ladies on JDate to know that he’s very attractive.

Surely he’s not the only person who can do this. There have to be others devout in their beliefs, that can show the world that they’re willing to laugh at themselves. On the off chance that you (yes, you personally) were considering rioting to get me to not disrespect your religion? It’s a hell of a lot simpler for all concerned if you put that energy into jokes. I’m never going to understand the full details and implications of any religion, Orthodox Jewish or otherwise (but there’s a nice story about growing up Orthodox here — scroll down to the 3rd story); it will always be alien to me. But if you can laugh at yourself, we can meet halfway. So start looking through the Hadith, Bhagavad-gita, Lotus Sutra, Tao Te Ching, Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book of Mormon, or Book of the SubGenius for material, pick up a pen, and do some toons.

Then we can all get together and make fun of Scientologists.

It has previously been that these pages have written about Kean Soo’s journal comic, exitmusic; there was a brief mention there of his current project, Jellaby. At that time Jellaby was on hiatus, but it’s been back for a couple weeks now. It’s high time we talked about it. Jellaby is giving Little Dee a run for its money as the most Calvin and Hobbes-esque webcomic; where Chris Baldwin tends to work with short storylines of a week or two interspersed with gag-a-day strips, Kean Soo has one big story in Jellaby: the story of a sweet feisty little girl and her monster.

Portia, the girl, is kind of isolated — half by being extremely bright, and half by circumstance. One night she finds weird dreams besetting her, and outside the window is … well, we’re not sure, but I’d say it’s a lost monster child. And lost children mean you gotta do what’s right, even when things get dangerous. Or worse: when Mom could find out that your new monster is very, very hungry. Funny thing about those lost kids you find: they learn lessons, like how bullies need to be dealt with. That’s Jason, by the way, getting hassled by the big kids; he and Portia don’t seem to like each other too much at the moment, but there are some really nifty short stories that imply at some point, Jason gets to be friends with Portia and Jellaby.

And when you’ve made your way through the archives (there’s not much, what are you waiting for?), check out the Jellaby art. Some of it’s from enormously talented artists and friends, but I think the best is Soo’s “Homage” line. He’s imagined Jellaby and Portia into well known bits of comics and animation, with surprisingly good results. There’s a book version, too, which has the single coolest feature in the history of indy/small-press comics: you can cut a Totoro-inspired image out and paste it back into other pages to make a pop-up book. It takes about two minutes and it looks great. So what are you waiting for? Get cracking on the archives, watch how a lonely girl and lost monster help each other grow up. It’s heartwarming. It’s beautifully drawn. It’s stunningly original. It’s just plain fun.

There’s nothing more to say about The Far Side.

PorkWrench tries to say it anyway.

Petie Shumate seems to have.. Well. No. Perspective is not there, good linework is not there, the best that can be said about the artwork is that it’s consistent.

For a gag strip, most of the jokes are trying too hard. Or too obscure.

Move along, nothing to see here.