Yesterday morning my presence in a juror pool was required by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while I ended up being excused for what must be one of the more random of small-world reasons (I had designed and printed holiday cards for the partner of one of the attorneys involved), it led me to come home and find out what comes up when you go looking online for “webcomics” and “jury duty.”

This idea worked out well; I’m still looking for new work to read since I’m determined not to write a column about the same webcomic more than once. (I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but I will name-check, relentlessly: High Maintenance Machine is back from hiatus! Hurrah! A new long work titled The Lower Kingdom from Bryant Paul Johnson is in the works! Hurrah! Gary got namechecked and pixellated! Hurrah! I got namechecked! Yikes!)

In sifting through the results, I found comics that extolled jury duty and others which used it as just one of many bad things which can befall someone, but I landed on John Rios’s Dead Days, which I’d never read before.

There’s a story about jury duty, obviously, but the comic, started in 2004, tackles a wide range of topics in relaying the day-to-day life of two college guys, like online social networking, cramming, superheroes, ridiculously funny wooing, car repair, and …icky girls!

The strip gets a little meta from time to time, as many do, but I really like the blocky style of the artwork, even in color, since it reminds me a bit of some of the other webcomics I read. It also wasn’t too difficult to read through the archives, since they’re well-organized, and the strip finds a good middle ground between 4-panel strips traditionally composed with an end punchline and longer continuing stories (as well as sometimes breaking from that 4-panel structure).

If only I’d found it before I went in for jury duty…

There was possibly going to be a story here about webcomics gettin’ appropriated for a t-shirt, but the parties involved have resolved things amicably, so pas de drama. While I’m happy on the one hand for all involved, it robs me of the opportunity to whip up Goldmanesque levels of hype (along with my server stats). And since the Goldman story appears to be in a permanent holding pattern, we’re a little shy on news today.

It appears that I have been immortalized in pixels, so y’all can stop emailing me about it. For the record, I am honored, and my wife thinks it’s the funniest thing she’s seen. It was our wedding anniversary yesterday (which fact I believe was unknown to Superintendant Stevens), and this was a nice present to the both of us. And curiously enough, the young lady in the last panel bears a passing resemblance to my wife.

Speaking of anniversaries, yesterday was also the 1-year mark for Autumn Lake. It’s been around 13 years less than I’ve been married, but it’s got 100% more mesh trucker hats, so call it a tie.

Oh, and to keep Jamie ‘n’ Fred happy: Filth Hole.

News!

• Updating the status of Little Dee, Chris Baldwin informed us yesterday:
  

  Not much to update really. Little Dee will remain at comics.com until at least June 4th. Everything else remains the same. :)

  Upside: Little Dee remains on comics.com and gets eyeballs from that channel. Downside: The status of the strip vis-a-vis permanent syndication remains up in the air. Hopefully, UM will give Baldwin a definitive answer soon (and more hopefully, it will involve large sums of money spent to promote the strip, resulting in it being placed in 2000 papers by the end of the year and earning Baldwin some well deserved huge canvas sacks of cash money, complete with little dollar signs on the outside).

• Randall Munroe has a gift for visualizations; following up the rather topological-formalist map of the internet, today he adds a rather Middle Earthy map of online communities (at this scale, Fleen is approximately 0.000327 pixels on your screen). Want to read all the small labels? Pre-order here.
• Anne Gibson would very much like you to know that Online Comics Day is May 5th (that would be Saturday), which is the same day as Free Comics Book Day:
  

  The site has a rich tradition, and we invite you to participate on our new site in our new format.

  Past incarnations have essentially been a hub where comic creators all created Online Comics Day comics that linked to the hub, and the hub in turn linked back to randomly-cut lists of the sites. The main goal of having a comic hub site was simply to say, “Hey, look! People are writing comics! And they’re posting them on the internet!”

  Having listened to much of the feedback from last year’s event, we decided to try something *very* different this year. We decided to make the site this year about more than just a hub site. That functionality’s still there, but we also created some stubs — stories that invite you, the comic reader/writer/author/artist/fan, to tell us about how you currently support online comics, and about upcoming events where you will be spreading the word to readers and non-readers alike.

  Please come join us in celebrating online comics on May 5th. Registration is now open and we’re looking forward to seeing you.

Mailbag!

• One of the better pieces of shameless self-promotion we’ve received lately:
  

  Dear Sir, Madame, Potential Customer, Potential Advertiser, Web-Comics Professional, Close-Personal-Friend:

  You have been carefully and meticulously selected to receive a sneak peek at The Boids, a hilarious and well-drawn web comic by Larry Merrill (him of Toyzville and Dog Each Day) and Steve Campbell (me of Turn Signals on a Land Raider and Every Nine Minutes) that is set to launch on 7 May, 2007.

  We have contacted you because we have met, IM’d, e-mailed, or otherwise contacted you at some time in the past and we feel like we have a deep, personal connection to whoever you are. Or, if you are in a position of some note within the web comics community, and people who read web comics might be listening to you, and we thought you might want to have a look so that you can tell the masses of your readers to also read The Boids. We will, in turn, be linking to whatever project you have going, and driving huge waves of web traffic to your site from The Boids.

  Link exchanges don’t normally entice me to action, but the Larry & Steve Show sent me a sampler of their new strip, and I gotta say, I liked it. Good joke pacing.

• Aaron Johnson writes about his webcomic, What The Duck, getting some attention in the regular (albeit special-interest) media:
  

  Jack Howard, of Popular Photography Magazine, has written one of the more comprehensive articles about What the Duck to date. Check it out on the PopPhoto.com site.

• Darren Gendron wonders:
  

  How do you launch a new webcomic? Well, the first thing you need to do is get some nice tunes.

  The Expert’s Guide on How to Kill Things That Go Bump in the Night got together with the Season of Nightmares, a Seattle-based Rockabilly band, to make their album, Monster Mash into the Fifth Dimension the official soundtrack.

  Here’s the result of these two monster-loving creations.

• Want tools? Check out this press release:
  

  Harknell, the webmaster of the Onezumi.com webcomic site, has just launched his new website, AWSOM.org, which is devoted to making it easier for Artists and Webcomic creators to get their art online.

  The focus is on news, tutorials, and custom WordPress plugins that make it simpler for non-technical people to set up and maintain their own website. The emphasis is placed on the needs of Artists, but anyone who wants to get a website up and running can benefit from the information presented.

  If you have been having problems getting a website set up, or you know anyone who is, please send them over so they can start on their journey to becoming Internet Famous.

Internet Famous. I like that. See you all tomorrow.

Any day that starts with an email from Scott McCloud (philosophical question: if McCloud ever gets a postage stamp, do you prefer Young Scott or Slightly Less Young Scott?) is probably gonna be pretty good. Let’s hear what the guy has to say:

MCCLOUD/MAKING COMICS 50 STATE TOUR UPDATE:
DATES FOR MAY & JUNE

31 states down, 19 to go! Starting May 1, The Making Comics Fifty State Tour moves into into its last third with stops in eight northern states and two Canadian cities.

Spanning thousands of miles, the long-anticipated “northern leg” is certain to be the biggest challenge yet faced by comics’ most adventurous family. The trip to and through Alaska in June will be over a thousand miles of driving alone!

Stops include lectures in Toronto ON, Sioux Falls SD, Portland OR, and Juneau AK; seminars in Portland and Alaska; and store signings and other events in Toronto ON, Detroit MI, Iowa City IO, Missoula MT, Moscow ID, Seattle WA, Vancouver BC and Portland OR.

Scott McCloud and his family continue to make waves at every stop, commanding strong attendance and, in some cases, standing-room only crowds. In the last eight weeks alone, four lectures (in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois) were packed to capacity and beyond. In one case, three overflow simulcast rooms were set up when the main hall was filled. In another, dozens of fans sat in the aisles or on the floor to hear McCloud.

Next stop, Free Comic Book Day at Green Brain Comics in Detroit (May 5) and Toronto for a lecture and store appearance at The Beguiling (May 6 and 7). Details at the Making Comics Tour Page.

If you haven’t had the chance to see the McCloud & Co. roadshow, definitely do so. And for God’s sake, look at that map — slip the family a couple of donuts for the ride or something.

In other news: Digger. 400 strips. Still my favorite wombat-themed comic, with unforetold levels of awesome every Tuesday and Thursday.

Finally, There are unconfirmed reports that the borders of Wheatonia are expanding. Citizens are urged to stay calm, and seek shelter behind plastic sheeting and duct tape.

Even though, what with all the drafts, discards, and such, it’s only the 753rd one published. Now we’ll see who actually reads down here, and who just scans the headlines. For those readers among you, a few notes:

• More webcomics need Hey-O! as a punchine; click that link for fine workplace humor from Paul Southworth.
• Speaking of the workplace, is anybody hiring? Experienced webcomic creator (and guy who can take a lot of crap without going postal) needs a job. Please send gifts of booze, money, or firearms directly to Mr Boyd.
• We are still waiting on the promised update from Dave Kelly on the Todd Goldman happenings, but one would be remiss not to note that it’s been eleven (11) days since we received our C&D, ten (10) days since our lawyer asked for details as to what content was annoying to Mr Goldman, with zero (0) specifics yet received.

  We have, however, seen our typical monthly server traffic go up by a factor of six (6) as a result of people — at last count, one hundred twenty-on (121) of you — coming by to post angrily about Goldman’s various behaviors, so that’s all right.

Editor’s note: Robert Anke is the creator of Running In The Halls; he teaches 5th and 6th grade somewhere in the great vastness of America.

Like most teachers, I steal liberally. If it gets the job done and kids like it, I’m a low-down, pilfering lesson thief. But I’m also a comic artist. So you know, really, deep down, I’m a pretty good guy.

Anyway, sticking with tradition I was left with no choice after coming across an article in Fleen that caught my interest: a guy at a Library using comics as a tool for teaching writing? How cool is that? More importantly: how come I didn’t think of it, and why am I not using it RIGHT NOW?

So I went into class the next day with the spoils from my latest heist and a handful of my comics. I blanked out the text from several that I thought would lend themselves to a wider variety of interpretation and ran off bunches o’ copies of each. I sent an email to the staff with a link to the article, hoping to inspire, and set to work…

…herding Nicolas (we’ll call him Nic for short since he doesn’t mind, and that’s not his real name anyway).

Nic’s autistic. Within that spectrum he’s high functioning. In his case that means he’s successful — with regard to standards set for him in his independent education file — if someone’s standing next to him reminding him of the task at hand, is helping him with a subject he finds interesting, doesn’t require him to write, and gives him a good, long break every ten minutes or so. As you can imagine, teaching writing to a child who’s physically able, but chooses not to write, can call for some inventive measures. I was hopeful. He likes comics (he’s a pretty good guy too).

Usually Nic spends a good portion of his day in the company of our resource teacher and her aides. There he receives the small-group and individualized attention, and constant refocusing, necessary for him to reach his goals. If he stays with our larger class he requires so much redirection from me it’s actually a detriment to the class as a whole. But, on occasion, when the content will be something that hooks him, I keep him with us and hope for the best. And literally, we win some, we lose some.

But we didn’t lose that day.

Wow.

That kid, as well as all the others, wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It was amazing. Just as readers take their past experiences and combine them with text to create subjective realities within the pages of books, the kids took in the illustrations, put them in their brain blenders, and came up with an incredible array of interpretations. The teacher in the room adjacent to ours had even more renditions. It seems the blanked out comics provided a training wheel effect that had just the structure and all the freedom necessary for a truly successful writing lesson. We could see almost immediately how this method of teaching could be used to hone in on various modes such as narratives, summaries, or persuasives as well as the many facets in the craft of writing itself: organization, precise word choice, voice, etc. The possibilities are … well … really, as wonderfully messy a science as teaching writing is, you could say the possibilities are close to endless. Now if someone would just write those lessons down and put them in a place accessible enough for us to steal, we wouldn’t have to make ‘em all up as we go.

Film at eleven.

Hey, anybody notice the extra verbage when mousing over an Achewood strip in the past couple of days? Give that sucker a click, and there’s a new feature to rate the strip on a scale of 1 (funnier than anything the newspapers) to 5 (brilliant like a million exploding suns).

There’s also handy code to embed the strip on your own site, and the archives now show thumbnails of the strips instead of merely the titles, along with summary statistics (rating and vote count). Looks like most strips only have about 30 votes, so get crackin’ people. I demand to know if my assessment of the Greatest Achewood Strips Ever matches the wisdom of the crowds.

The entire thing is run by a company called Assetbar, is called Acheworld, and features the greatest Terms of Service ever:

From the desk of Chris Onstad

Hi, this is Chris. I fixed everything, and I want to explain how.

We’ve all seen it, and we’ve all been confused. The world is changing so quickly that only nine year-old boys with “Wiisâ€? in both pockets actually know what is true any more. I’m 31, and most days, I care so little about what “del.icio.us” is that I can barely get out of bed. But this is different.

This is Achewood’s answer to that confusing glut of inscrutable text messages, video game blogs about RSS feed ringtones, and pictures of a kitten saying “IM ON UR HOTDOG EATING UR MUSTARD.â€? In only a few months’ time, this paragraph will mean nothing. There has never been a better time to put your money on information decay. Or to hedge against properly structured English-language paragraphs.

Come deeper into Achewood. Talk amongst yourselves. See a picture of a cute girl from Nova Scotia, or a boy named Hellos4Hubert. Send messages to one another. For almost six years we’ve been flat, but now there’s a basement. I want you to go there, and I want you to have an information party. Because that’s what the Internet was supposed to be, before money and Paris Hilton fucked the whole thing up.

In short, come in and enjoy Achewood in a slightly new, slightly different way. The old way is still there, but this way has more girls. (Girls, I’m counting on you.)

The Finest Things to us All,

Chris Onstad

PS: Yes, we are actively developing new features, and requesting your feedback. Here’s what’s in store:

* ALT tags for strips will be included in Acheworld.

* The Achewood blogs will be incorporated into the interactive content, so you can say what you think about what Ray thinks.

* Much, much more.

Okay, that’s not the really ToS, but that’s what you get when you click the link on the registration page. The actual Terms of Use are your usual legal doublespeak and if you can make sense of them, congratulations. Me, I’m just glad to know that the Greatest Achewood Strip Ever is the one where Ray Gets Sort Of Stoned. I personally prefer Let’s Say Good Stuff About Ray’s Dick, but I can live with the crowds on this one.

And considering that Achewood is often ahead of the curve on a lot of things, one can only wonder if other webcomics will be looking to provide compatible services. Watch this space for updates.

Edit to add: Yes, Achewood and Dr McNinja have both had alt-text for a long time. It’s what’s new in the Achewood alt-text that’s importatnt: links to Acheworld.

I’m kind of fascinated by online social networking systems, and I’m particularly intrigued by how they function as promotional tools in all kinds of different ways. It doesn’t surprise me all that much anymore when I run across someone online who I’ve actually met in real life, but there’s always, for me, a moment of dissonance between the actual person and their online self (or selves). It makes me think about how characters are constructed; I’d thought of it as a process alien to me, as someone who does an autobio comic, but then I realized that the dissonance I described above is always amplified when those roles are reversed and someone finds me. Plus I don’t really look like how I draw myself.

It also got me thinking about how the subjects of most of my recent posts have been almost entirely selected through a system not so different from social networking. For example, I started reading Planet Karen in part because there was an ad for it on Teaching Baby Paranoia, which I started reading regularly because I got friended on both Comicspace and Livejournal. How embarrassingly hypertexty. I have a similar path to Minimalist Stick Figure Theater, all the way back through to these guys, the gateway drug of my webcomics experience. But the subject of this week’s column—Eric Schlegel’s Skipping Out—came from one of my new co-workers, Patrick (who’s apparently a bit of a rockstar), in the midst of a discussion about MySpace (he’s a fan; I’m not).

So I decided to write about it this week, because it is not something I think I would have found on my own, even though I do know about Prism Comics, who have a good list of webcomics artists. However, this review’s going to be brief since there aren’t a whole lot of archives to this strip–apparently it’s only been online for a very little while even though Schlegel’s been drawing for much longer. It’s an interesting webcomic to me since the artwork’s very different than the kinds of things I’ve written about in the past, plus it has taken me a while to warm up to lettering that’s not hand-lettered.

In truth, Skipping Out feels fairly nascent at this point, and that’s part of the appeal. Most of what I’ve been reading are well-established webcomics that have found their footing and their niche, and are great at what they do. As for Skipping Out, I’m waiting to see where it goes with the characters and the satire, since the model it seems to be following (and might be inspired by) are other slice-of-life strips like Dykes to Watch Out For, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green and Leonard and Larry. However, you’ll have to start here and work your way back to the front page in order to read them chronologically since the running joke about the hair works a bit better in context.

Still catching up on back correspondence, so please consider the following:

• Nerdgod Randall Munroe has been invited to speak at MIT; they do seem to have a liking for webcomics there, don’t they?
• 44 Union Avenue is a webcomic by Mike Witmer that I was not previously familiar with. Witmer’s a member of the Hyena Comics collective been self-syndicating to a few newspapers, and Witmer recently informed us that 44UA has been picked up by GoComics, in one of the web-syndication deals that we’ve seen a lot of lately. Wtimer reports that this deal allows him to do exactly as he’s been doing with respect to characters, archive (I’ve still got a year and a half’s worth to plow through at Witmer’s site) and merch; the only thing he can’t do is sell the strips to another online site without referring them to GoComics. Interesting deal, maybe a stepping stone to print syndication, and we’re going to keep our eye on it.
• New Webcomic That Looks Interesting: Lunarboy by Jarrett Williams. I couldn’t say exactly why, but it puts me in mind of Scott Pilgrim, and that’s never a bad thing.
• Continuing the Lunar Theme: Dan Scannell is putting out a minicomic, The Man On The Moon, to promote his webcomic. For two bucks (US), you really can’t go wrong.
• Irregularly updated and only five installments so far, but Shallow Betties is apparently taking the University of Puerto Rico by storm. The interesting part here? Word about the comic is spreading mostly via Facebook, which opens up new questions in that discussion of social networking sites we had a little bit ago.