Yeah, yeah, I usually mix “good news” themed posts with some visual reference to Professor Farnsworth; I just felt like it was more important to use tentacles today.

• Sad news from Portland, Oregon to share with you: one of the most brave, brutally honest journal comics is wrapping up:
  

  Hey dudes, good news!

  Or maybe good news?

  I’ve decided to end DAR!

  Okay, bad for me, good for Erika Moen … let’s get some more of the announcement taken care of:

  [H]ere is my Official, F’reals Announcement. The final strip will air on December 28th, 2009.

  I’ve been working on this project for about six years old now. It started my sophomore year of college as a 20 year old student and has seen me through my first love, finding my queer identity, my first heartbreak, my first rebounds, traveling to another country, depression and medication, having stupid adventures, meeting the man I’d eventually marry, re-structuring “my identity”, graduation, working in the real world while struggling to keep making art which brings us to today where I’m a 26 year old self-employed happily married woman.

  Oh, and I guess there were some dick ‘n’ fart jokes in there too.

  I’m extremely grateful for the wonderful opportunities and experiences and connections that have come into my life because of this ridiculous comic. After six years, I feel emotionally and mentally ready to move on.

  But don’t worry! DAR! was not my first comic and it is so far away from being my last. Making comics has been my passion for over a decade now (Hell, I even graduated from college with a self-made degree in comics) and I can’t see a time when I’ll ever stop.

  So that’s all right, then; Moen is still putting out a second volume of DAR! comics, and at the link above, you can sign up for an email notification when each of her new projects gets off the ground. I’m going to miss the crap out of DAR!, but I’m really interested to see where she’s going, and will enjoy the ride. The link to DAR! will remain in the sidebar for as long as the comics exist, or until a new project is even awesomer. Thanks for sharing so much of yourself with all of us, Erika — it was extraordinarily generous of you.

• As long as we’re talking about good things (and if Hurricane Erika decides that wrapping her comic is a good thing, I am officially On Board With That Shit), how’s about the cover of Hope Larson’s next graphic novel, Mercury? Two immediate thoughts:
  1. That’s freakin’ beautiful
  2. I am reminded of when Larson and husband Bryan Lee O’Malley both started getting notice for their early comics work, and my assessment was that it was Larson that was headed for superstardom; I Heart Scott Pilgrim’s Head as much as anybody, but seeing this cover makes me stand by my original judgement more than ever
• Know who’s got the weirdest career arc out of webcomics of anybody? Steve Troop. Just as Tiger Woods is getting all radioactive and dropped by sponsors, Nike busts out a new set of commercials that don’t feature humans (with their tendencies to attract the wrong sort of attention), but rather puppets. Puppets designed by Steve Troop, that is. The video of the first commercial can be seen hereabouts, with another six (and another 20 or so puppets) on deck for release as basketball season progresses. None of Troop’s signature aliens sighted yet, but one may hope … one may hope.
• Finally, it’s my understanding that a new Dresden Codak has been sighted in the wild; I can’t verify from the handheld but interested parties are urged to check for themselves.

Hey, lookit that: Todd the Squirrel is being … well, Todd … and pissing off a classy lady-squirrel. We’re a long way from the first Achewood strip, nearly as long a way from when Todd was first introduced, and the denizens of Achewood have had many ups and downs in the meantime. It’s been a stellar eight years, where one can say without hyperbole that the worst, most perfunctory Achewood is better than most anything else being created today, and that the best achieve a kind of weird poetry. Fleen thanks Chris Onstad for taking us along on the journey.

• If I worked out the math correctly, today is both the five year anniversary of Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots, and tomorrow will be strip #800. To celebrate, today’s installment features nightmare horrors from the deepest recesses of Hell (aka clowns). Yay? But then there’s this: half off original strip art through Sunday Friday, sorry!. Some of my favorites are already gone, dangit.
• Speaking of “dang”, news comes to us this day that come Spring (northern hemisphere) next year, Little Dee will be wrapping up after nearly five years (no blog permalink, but it’ll be there for a while):
  

  I am sad to tell you all, but I will be ending Little Dee in early spring of 2010 (exact date not yet set). I have loved drawing and writing Little Dee, and love the characters. But I feel it is time for me to try new things.

  I first started thinking about it summer of 2008. I realized that I was feeling I had told most of the tale of Little Dee and her friends, and that I have other stories outside of them to tell, more characters and worlds to create. And that I loved Dee, but if I didn’t make sure I had new paths to walk, that I would one day wake up and feel stuck and feel it a burden. I never wanted that.

  We at Fleen love Little Dee (the strip and the character), and will be sad to see both go; but if there’s a clean conclusion to her story of life in the woods with the critters, then it’s all good. Her story had a beginning, a reeeaaallll long middle, and now it will have its end. To lighten the mood, what say we start a pool about how the strip will end. Be the first to comment with a short description of how you think the strip will wrap up, like Dee talks or Dee finds her parents again and if you’re right, you win the admiration of your peers and the thanks of a grateful nation. I’m gonna take Vachel finally snaps (art direction by Quentin Tarrantino). Don’t believe me? Check out the first strip here, or the fifth one here; that boy’s a cauldron of seething rage.

  But in Dee’s place, something new will rise. We’d heard the rumor of an adorable sci-fi comedy strip with lasers, but now Baldwin has a site and progress reports up for Spacetrawler, and it looks like he’s getting script feedback/edits from a bevy of talented people, including webcomics mainstays Dylan Meconis and Mike Russell. Sign up now, avoid the rush.

• If you don’t follow them regularly, you might not know that there are a couple of media analysis places that generally get things right. Yesterday, one of them — MediaShift from PBS, focusing on digital media — turned its eyes on webcomics and the mechanics of indy-art businessin’, and spoke to some familiar names. Worth checking out.