Saturday was your big chance to be part of history, to join in the 70th annual Burt Reynolds day.

I remember the first time I celebrated Burt Reynolds day. It was, in fact, Saturday.

I was sitting in an odd little pub, having beer with Byron of Team Special Olympics. “Today is Burt Reynolds Day”, says your intrepid reporter, “You should participate!”

In a flash, Byron produced some bristol board and a blueline pencil, and had whipped out a number of extra fine quality comics that not only featured the man of the hour, Burt Reynolds, but also had wit and charm that made the entire bar fall on the floor and roll around on that sticky sticky surface laughing uncontrollably.

And I knew that I was in a moment of greatness and that nobody there would fail to remember Burt Reynolds Day, and that I had witnessed a tiny slice of history being created.

If only Byron had posted his comics.

P.S. Buy! Buy! Buy! (this message brought to you by D.J. Coffman)

Ordering info is imminent. You NEED to buy this.

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.

But most importantly, Girls With Slingshots is pretty funny.

Give it a whirl.

So, blasphemy and idolatry are hitting the webcomicsosphere pretty hard. Lots of issues here. Could be a consulate or two gets burned, when there’s good and bad guys everywhere and the up yours attitude comes out (not that the up yours attitude isn’t warranted under certain circumstances).

Case in point, from eviscerati:

Alex has five cartoons in all, and has made them available via links on a page that you must deliberately click to view (with warnings for those comics that depict Mohammed, to minimize any offense given to Shi’a Moslems). The one posted here is my favorite of the lot.

Except some sources claim that Shi’a Muslims are less categorically strict about the depiction-of-Mohammed thing. Unless they’re not. I’ve got free-speech cred out the wazoo and I’ve casually studied Islam for a dozen years, but I’m still having a problem getting a handle on this. Are the guys out rioting the Muslim equivalent of Fred Phelps (no link; go look up the nutjob on your own time)? I think what’s needed in this discussion is maybe a different perspective. Check back tomorrow; could be interesting.

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.

You’ve decided you want to make a webcomic. Yay! Good for you!

Now you need to decide what kind of webcomic to make.

The single panel gag-a-day strip looks like it’s easy. All you have to do is, every day, think of a joke and then draw it.

That’s not hard at all! Jokes are easy – just whatever makes you laugh at the time. And you know how to draw… why, everyone knows how to draw.

So you start your comic, and you put it out there. And maybe you do some minimum of marketing other than telling all your friends “Hey, I started a webcomic, isn’t it keen?”

But guess what?

Single-panel gag-a-day comics are hard. Very Very Hard. They are hard to get right, they are hard to maintain.

There’s no room for character growth, because you don’t really have characters. There’s no room to tell long stories, because you’ve only got one panel. There’s no room for artistic growth, because there’s nothing driving it – the joke is the point of the strip, not the art. So if the barn doesn’t share the same perspective with the road leading to it, and the pig sits on a different horizontal plane than the guy applying the wrench… It doesn’t matter. It’s a pig being adjusted with a giant wrench! That’s got to be funny, right?

And six months later, you’ve been doing a daily strip, and you’ve got less than 100 regular readers and you don’t know why.

You would have been better off starting out with two guys on a couch playing video games.

Because then you have room to grow, and room to learn, and room to change.

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.

So it seems that there’s a newspaper comic out there called Unfit by a guy named Mike Belkin; don’t feel bad — I hadn’t heard of it either. Anyway, it seems that Belkin is looking to reduce his role and have somebody else take over the art. What’s interesting about this is how the artist search is being conducted: Scott Adams of Dilbert fame posted an open call in his blog, and got about 80 serious entries. Those got posted, and from votes and comments in the blog, the list has been cut to 15 finalists.

One of them is Dave “Alyson Hannigan’s favorite cartoonist” Kellet (no, we’re not ever going to stop linking that story; did you not see that photo?). Says Kellet:

… opportunities are increasingly rare in the land of syndication, so I thought I’d draw up two quick samples. In any case, those two quick samples made it to the final round of “voting”… so I thought I’d spread the word. Folks can vote by commenting on Adams’ blog [at the bottom of this page].

PS: By no means whatsoever would this mean the end of Sheldon … it’s just a new project that I’d be taking on.

Now I’d be more than happy to point you all to Kellet’s entries (which are currently ranked below some much less quality work), just based on the fact that he does some great webcomics work, but two other things are motivating me today. First is that Kellet added:

Please ask that folks avoid ballot stuffing, etc. That kind of shit gets really old on web voting. I’d really like their vote only if it’s genuinely the one they’d pick.

That’s a stand-up guy right there. Dave Kellet is like the Thomas Edison of having integrity. The second is that if Kellet wins this gig, I’m going to hit him up for an interview about what syndication is really like, and follow up with him at regular intervals to see how having a boss meets (or doesn’t) his expectations. Heck, I’ll be talking with him anyway about the siren song of syndication, what he would want from it, and how it fits in his plans to conquer the world from the comics page. Check out the contenders, vote for Kellet if you like his work best, and watch this space for more information.

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.