You know that dark weight of disappointment that forms in your tummy when someone you really admire does something ridiculously irritating and when it comes time to call them on it you actually end up feeling worse about that than what they did in the first place? Give me a clear and present enemy any day and I can face it with bravado. That being said, let’s talk a little bit about what happens when you purchase products from your favorite Webcomics only to find the process of getting said items to be a demoralizing and strained experience.

Webcomics have found a very wealthy pocket to pick from in regards to merchandise. Swag has been made especially popular by quirky t-shirts labeled with inside jokes that only another reader would get. Selling swag has made it possible for some artists to quit their full time jobs and work on their comic full time. For many popular comics, they don’t even handle the process of selling swag anymore because it’s so daunting.

So two months ago I purchased a poster from one of my favorite comics, one I’d read since the archives were in double digits. Two months, $20 dollars later, weeks of silence, a handful of emails and I still don’t have the poster. My confidence is waning while my disappointment grows. I’m curious now about how comic creators deal with the art side and the business side of what they do, and is mixing the two worth it in the end? It’s a subject I plan to explore in depth in the very near future. I like the comic and respect the creator too much to be a vile consumer whore and rip it to shreds until I feel vindicated. However, I do feel it is an important subject to bring more attention to.

We want to be loyal readers and support our artists so that they can continue to bring us what we love and continue to enjoy doing what they do. I hold out hope that most people have very good experiences, and that mine is the exception.

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.

SO I guess Christopher C. Livingston’s nefarious plan worked out pretty well. By posting a comment on Fleen and linking to his comic, he managed to devour my allotted studying time this evening and also compelled me to write this post about him.

(Note: Writing Fleen posts is also not considered studying.)

So Concerned is a video game screen shot comic. I know, I know. The phrase isn’t exactly synonymous with quality web comic production, but Chris could be on to something here. First of all, he’s using Half Life 2, which is a pretty darn versatile game engine. Each panel of the comic is composed in the same way as any comic. Chris manipulates the world, right down to the facial expressions, to show us exactly what he wants us to see. This isn’t just some kid pressing print-screen while playing Diablo and then entering “funny�? speech bubbles.

Secondly, the writing is actually pretty funny. At first it seems like there is going to be a lot of lame Half Life jokes, but instead the strip winds up poking fun at the game in a lot of fairly original, but more importantly, entertaining ways. The drawback to this is, obviously, that it won’t make a lot of sense to you if you haven’t played Half Life 2. lets face it though, it isn’t the only web comic out there dedicated to a particular game/hobby/lifestyle. I mean come on, Librarians even have their own web comic now.

As game engines get more sophisticated, I think the potential for this sort of comic will increase, and although things like concerned and Flintlock’s Guide are entertaining, it would be nice to see something of this ilk that could appeal to a wider audience. That said, if you played through Half Life 2 and enjoyed it, Chris Livingston has bound to have at least one strip in there that will make you laugh.

My feverish haze is making it difficult to write this post, but I’m sure the pain killers are playing a major role in impeding my writing abilities as well. Whatever the case, here is my review on “Faking Life”.

“Faking Life” is the continuation of Emo, both written and drawn by Nate Lee aka: N8 Dog. The main character of the strip is a psuedo-autobiographical version of Nate, pursuing a fulfilling life after college. If you want the back-story of Nate, I suggest going through the Emo archives, since that comic focused on his college career. “Faking Life” started on March 13th of this year, which makes it a rug rat in the adult world of web comics. Luckily for Nate, he’s been through the usual newbie pratfalls with his other comics.

Nate is now stretching his artistic boundaries by dabbling in flash animation. I applaud him for pushing himself, since many artists get stuck in one particular style or medium. This is a solid comic with an artist who contains copious amounts of potential. I’ll be keeping my eye on “Faking Life”, simply because it has captured my attention like an ancient monkey-god working at Starbucks.

It is a very big deal when a Webcomic comes to a purposeful end. Many comics just taper off into non-existence because the artist no longer has the time or the will. So when a creator makes it a point to bring their comic to an end, even though it’s because they want to move onto different things, it’s commendable. Creators might be doing this work for themselves, but they’ve brought us along for the ride. So with that, I give you a fond (and a little disturbing) farewell over at My New Mommy.

Dig into the very lowest scrapings of what makes us human and you’ll find soap opera-like stereotypes that make up the width and breasts of the cast of My New Mommy. When a middle aged man wins the lottery and his wife dies, why not marry a Vegas stripper? The kids remain unconvinced of her mommy-hood, but that’s nothing compared to the guy with the gun. Turns out I’m a little late to the party for My New Mommy. Owen Dunne’s wrapping up its run starting May 22^th with the last 6 strips.

With the closing up of MNM, The Beevnicks are jumping in to fill the gap. There’s even a nice grin and nudge transitional nod to My New Mommy to kick things off. There is dark and sleezy humor here and at least one character I absolutely love to hate.

The last comic Dunne ended was Nippleshine Manor, a vulgar, obscene and depending on your disposition, hilarious comic. It has some vague resemblance to British nobility and eccentric old people but mostly it just makes you feel dirty. Why can’t more people learn how to use “Fecal Saturnalia” in a sentence? NM is not for the easily offended. Or people with classic good taste.

What I learned about Dunne from the comics over at You Damn Kid! is that not only can he write familiar, believable kids but he writes agreeable, dysfunctional grown ups as well. Dunne is one of the few comic writers that I think could write fiction as well as he writes comics.

My one complaint is that navigating the site and all the comic archives is maddening. There is no rhyme or reason to it. That being said, the range of funny this guy can do is nothing short of amazing. But all of his comics and characters are not universal for everyone. If you don’t like the shock value of Nippleshine, try a little home grown You Damn Kid!. It’s a web comic buffet over there.

Blank Label Comics turns one year old today! Fleen congratulates the six hardy pioneers who left the comfort and safety of Keenspot to strike out on their own. Perhaps uniquely, BLC didn’t evolve over time via accretion — the individuals in the collective set out to build a group of ‘tooners that would have skills that complemented each other. Thus, Straubian web-design benefitted from Guigarian media savvy, and so forth.

The initial group of Kristofer Straub, Brad Guigar, David Willis, Paul Southworth, Steve Troop, and Paul Taylor was soon joined by Greg Dean, Howard Tayler, and Dave Kellett. Individually, they are mighty webcomickers; together, they are nigh-unbeatable, just like Voltron. In the year past, there have been 23 podcasts (complete with theme song — more things in life need theme songs), a charity event, a half-dozen books (and Straub just announced a new one today), and giggles o’ plenty. Oh sure, the fast life of webcomics — the groupies, the fast cars, the drugs — could still overcome these starry-eyed idealists. All it takes is one Yoko and they could become the Spinal Tap of the internet funnies in the blink of an eye … and that would be awesome. But today, we salute them, and wish them much success.

Until, y’know, the Yoko thing.

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.

Sunday comics. Bigger, better, colorful editions of your favorite strip to sink your teeth into on a relaxing weekend afternoon. Well, sometimes. But it isn’t the syndicated artists’ approach to Sundays that we’re looking at. It’s the web comics. Obviously.

A lot of web comics don’t include weekends in their update schedule, even some of the biggest ones. They are clearly of the opinion that the Sunday tradition does not apply to them. Many of these people have jobs and would probably like to have some kind of social life at the weekends. I suppose we have to respect that. No one is going to suggest that web comic creators are obliged to engage in a practice that a lot of syndicated strips don’t even bother with any more.

For good of for ill, there are some on-line strips out there that try to bring us a full blown Sunday strip every week. I know there are people out there who think that web comics should be moving away from the conventions of printed syndicated comics, but a good artist and writer can really make the day of rest a day to look forward to for his/her/their readers.

Howard Taylor, for example, is a man who knows his Sundays. For Schlockers, Sunday is the day where they get to see the panoramic space panels, the gigantic alien shark, or armed troops being air dropped onto an apartment block. This is what it’s all about. A good comic should be full of good writing and good art 7 days a week, but the truly talented and the truly dedicated (some might say truly crazy) creators will take the opportunity to add a little spectacle and fit it seamlessly into the plot.

Bill Watterson once did a whole storyline in Sunday format. It was one of the defining moments that got me into reading comics. It showed me the potential of the medium. Maybe because the Internet itself has given so much new potential to comics, some creators have forgotten the impact a few more rows of panels and some extra color and shading can have on a reader.

So here’s me on the road for work during a week when not one, but two different webcomicky books should be arriving at my home, just crying out for review. Woe is me. I suppose if I can’t read the new books, I can at least point you towards Stripped Books, where Gordon “Multiplex” McAlpin pays homage to The Book in a series of nonfictional documentary projects.

When something book-related occurs in the greater Chicago area, McAlpin does a multi-page comic about it — a reading, a release party, a speech, all are fair game for McAlpin’s recounting of the event. Most amazingly, McAlpin adjusts his own artistic style to match that of the author or book in question. Thus, Jon and Lane go to Barnes & Noble! looks like The Stinky Cheese Man, Perseopolis 2.1: The Story of a Signing looks like Marjane Satrapi’s award-winning autobiographical works, and Stephen Mitchell on Gilgamesh looks (to me, anyway) like the very naturalistic art of Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze comics (okay, Greece and Troy, not Uruk, but close enough).

Stripped Books is on hiatus at the moment so that McAlpin can concentrate on Multiplex, but he promises it will be back — in any event, he’d pretty much have to wait for something bookish to happen before he could draw it, wouldn’t he? So if you’re an author in the Chicago area, do something so he can document it for us! In the meantime, check out the past events; there’s some good stuff there, and it’s well worth an afternoon surreptitiously browsing at “work”.

I’ve mentioned in the past how it’s unfair to judge a blossoming new comic during its early stages of life, even when the creator may be brave enough to request a review. Well, I’m about to blatantly ignore my own advice by telling you about a very youthful comic that’s just riddled with the aged.

Chris Jones could doodle on a napkin with a sharpie and I’d covet it. There is something delightful in the very round and emotive characters he draws. The comics and illustrations he works on animate with whimsy and quirky neurosis. He could do a comic about hanging out in a waiting room and it’d be entertaining. And to my good fortune, he has.

His newest work, Grumps, follows the mocking world of two old men and their zany nursing home exploits. He shows that in old age there are still hot nurses to chase and paw at, there’s always time for drugs and swearin’ and every adventure must be shared with your best friend. With every wrinkle and every sagging breast I’m convinced that nursing homes are the hippest place to be. Man, being old looks like a riot.

Even the website itself is professionally done. There’s an air of sitcom influence to the masthead. Even the layout and fonts seem expertly chosen to promote a specific look and feel. I get the distinct impression that Jones probably knows his way around marketing his work and that having a complete package, right down to the background color, can make all the difference in the world. This comic may be new, but it’s going to look amazing in book form.

Note: Because of the way the Grumps website is set up, I cannot link to any specific comic page. Don’t be shy though, go over and check it out.