It’s not clear how long Mike Reed has been cataloging the various forms of Flamers out there.

But his work is just hysterical. The art is really well executed, and he’s got a consistent style and a lot of visual appeal. The writing is pithy and to the point.

I like this a lot.

This is a complicated post to write. It’s a follow-up to an earlier post about ClickWheel.

And between then and now, T Campbell and I have had some mostly unnotable miscommunications. So I’m hesitant to write negative things, because in general I prefer not to be misunderstood and it might seem that I’m making a personal attack (which, I promise, I’m not).

But I can’t worry about that – I have to write what I think needs to be written.

ClickWheel, as it stands, is not providing any value to the end user.

None. There is nothing that ClickWheel itself is providing that gives me, as a reader, any reason to come back.

I said I would follow-up on ClickWheel when I’d given it a fair trial, and looked at the comics on the iPod screen. I’ve done that, but I can’t say I gave it a fair shot. I couldn’t.

The download process takes too long.

Flat out, it takes too long and involves too many non-intuitive steps. If I want comics on my iPod, I want them there for the same reason I want everything else on my iPod – for later use. And unlike movies or videos, I can’t imagine reading the same three-page gag strip more than… twice. So the only thing that I’m going to put on my iPod is stuff I haven’t read yet, that I want to read later. Like on the bus to school, the train to work, at the airport waiting for a plane, etc. But I don’t want yesterday’s comics, or comics from last week. I want today’s comics. And I don’t want to spend twenty minutes copying them all to my iPod, one at a time and manually – because I’ve got to catch that bus!

The process of copying a comic to your iPod is as follows.

1. Go to ClickWheel.
2. Find the feature you want, and the episode or set of episodes you want.
3. Click the download button.
4. Receive a zip file, or perhaps on a Mac an archive in a different format.
5. Unpack the zip file.
6. Import the directory into your iTunes photos.
7. Sync with your iPod.

At least, this is what I’ve had to do. Nowhere on the ClickWheel site, or in their forum, have I found actual instructions for the end-user.

Nowhere.

Everything I see is focused on the comic creator, not the reader. The FAQ is focused on the creator. The marketing message is focused on the creator. The end user appears to be an afterthought – if we build it, they will read?

The only value that ClickWheel provides at all to end users is the content. And there are some big names providing content, so a lot of it is probably pretty great. But it’s too painful to get at. How many of you would read as many webcomics per day as you do now, if you had to manually download and extract each strip?

But here’s the thing I’ve realized. ClickWheel is Beta. It says so right there on the main page! It’s not the modern bazaar style open source development use of the word beta – where beta means “The things that work, they work the way they are supposed to and everything else doesn’t break anything”. It’s the old-school use of the word beta – use at your own risk and let us know everything that breaks, cause we’ve still got a lot of work to do.

So the problem I have is mainly expectations.

I expect that someone with a name as wide-spread as T Campbell won’t waste that name by rushing to grab mind/creator share before there’s something of use and substance. Although, let’s be clear, T Campbell is only the editor of ClickWheel – so he’s not responsible for the technology. He’s responsible for helping creators explore this new and possibly valuable channel for their content – or whatever it is that a webcomics “editor” does these days.

And I expect that something that claims to be “a whole new way of using your iPod, and a whole new way of reading comics” would actually have some technology behind it above and beyond basic CSS/HTML, with some RSS thrown in. (And the RSS doesn’t seem to be sufficient for the RSS reader in iTunes to respond in a more natural way – perhaps because of the archived format of the content?)

Neither of those expectations have been met, but that’s because I read “Beta” with the new meaning, not the old meaning. In the old days, nobody ever installed anything that was labeled “beta” unless they got paid for it, and had an extra computer.

So I’ll follow-up with ClickWheel again, when they are out of beta.

In the mean time, I wonder what the creators who are signing up are expecting? If someone like me, who is very technical in many ways, finds this tool so cumbersome to use… What are the regular iPod users going to do? How many comics readers who got a shiny new video iPod for Christmas are going to use this to explore the new (to them) world of web comics? And how many regular webcomic readers are really going to go through all the hurdles to make the jump here, when the content is so frustrating to get at?

So Chris Baldwin over at Little Dee pointed us (and by “us”, I mean, “the population of the intarweb”) at a promising new strip called Pirate and Alien. It’s still relatively new, so hop over and take a look at the archive, then we’ll talk. It’s cool. We’ll wait.

Okay, first things: creator Tyson Smith is typically the art half of a brother act that has several comic/music/movie projects under its belt. Normally his brother Ian does the words, so it’s encouraging that Smith seems to have an ear for dialogue, and a strong enough sense of character that the titular Pirate (Filthy Jerome to you) and Alien (not yet named) feel like different people. He even left enough character over for the Pirate’s parrot, Bartholomew. The art has a loose, scribbly feel, like Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen with a more controlled line. Smith’s use of color in broad swaths is also pretty Hartesque, which isn’t surprising given the indy comic work that the Smith brothers have produced.

That link to Emily is important about now, because it’s got a hint of J. Otto Siebold in it, which you want to keep your eye on. It’s the common element between Smith’s work here, and the rest of his portfolio, which has a J. Otto-meets-John A. feel to it. It’s impressive that Smith is able to shift between such different styles, as most illustrators using the, uh, Illustrator style come off as highly derivative of Stephen Silver or those Esurance commercials (which themselves are more than a little derivative of everybody’s favorite Girl Spy; call your solicitor, Mr A!).

Where were we? Right: good characterization, art that evokes (but doesn’t mimic) some standouts in various fields, and booty. And thus far, Smith has avoided the cliches of ninjas and monkeys, so bonus points for originality! Oh, and Baldwin? Dee better be safe, or we’re going to have words.

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.

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.

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

Once you’ve mastered the art of Legibility that my cohort is illustrating for you (at great length, no less), you can start to hope to reach the act of sheer magic that is Jenn Manley Lee‘s Dicebox.

The artwork in Dicebox is simply exquisite, and it’s no wonder. Her process could only be described as insane did it not produce such amazing works. Notice that she casually mentions printing bluelines on Bristol. She goes from sketchbook to computer back to paper and then back to computer again! And then takes the time to create customized color palettes for each of her characters and it still on average only takes her 14 hours or so to create a page! No wonder Dicebox was nominated for an Ignatz Award, but it’s really too bad she didn’t win.

The artwork is only half of what makes Dicebox so very very well done. The other half of the story, if you’ll forgive me, is the way she tells the story itself. Each chapter seemingly illustrates only the middle part of the events that take place. Most chapters picks up several days or more after the end of the last chapter. Granted, some of this is merely a device to skip endless pages of sitting in a spaceship travelling around. But there’s still the sense that important moments in the lives of and in the relationship between Griffen and Molly have occurred. These are real people, with real lives that go on whether you’re watching or not. They eat, and bleed and fight and have sex. (so, yeah. Not safe for work.)

This is a comic that could survive on just the artwork or just the story. But together, they are just sublime.

One of the more interesting works of journalism being produced these days is the Arcata Eye Cop Log. It’s always a good read, and it produces at least one chuckle every week. But when you purchase the books, and read them in one big sitting… the schadenfreude and sheer volume of human stupidity just piles up and exponentiates and you find yourself laughing at almost everything – even stuff like “2:27 p.m. Child Welfare Services relayed toxicology tests on a newborn baby to APD. Methamphetamine was detected in the infant’s urine.”. It’s tragic – but in situ it becomes hilarious.

Stephen Heintz‘s Acid Zen Wonder Paint is much the same way. Taken individually, you might only laugh at one or two panels. But as you start to work your way through the archives, you build up to a state of hysteria. The jokes are inane, absent, juvenile and sometimes bizarrely cruel. Did I mention juvenile?

But as you read through the comics and as you read the comments, it starts to melt your brain and you remember what it was like to wander out of your dorm room at 3 am after finishing that paper you should have started three weeks ago and finding a couple of guys in the tv lounge who had spent the whole night smoking pot and you start having the funniest conversation of your life.

Since AZWP is really only worth reading in batches, it’s probably good news that he’s going to update twice a day – at least for this first week of the new year.

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!