Belphegor

Somebody needs to do a visual reference to old Looney Tunes sight gags. They need to be named, catalogued, and preserved, if only to make the point I’m about to make easier. Friz Freleng had this one sight gag that I’ve always called Five Doors; it must have been a particular favorite, because he used it at least three times that I can remember, but he first used it in Little Red Riding Rabbit. All togther now: “Hey Grandma, I brought a little bunny rabbit for ya TA HAVE!”

Five Doors consists of Bugs and the Big Bad Wolf (or, in later cartoons, Yosemite Sam, or Tweety and Sylvester’s fingers, “walking” at the end of his arm) chasing each other in and out of five doors, three of which are at the top of a set of stairs, and two below. The music rises and falls as they run up and down the stairs, in and out of the various rooms (and just because Bugs runs into door #2 doesn’t mean he won’t come out of door #5 on a different floor).

What always struck me about Five Doors is how extravagant it was; it’s well known that the Schlesinger/Warners animators had to bring in their cartoons to within eight frames of exactly six minutes. There was no editing, no fat to trim, every single one of 8640 frames had to move the story forward. And Five Doors took upwards of 25 seconds of screen time, at the end of which, the characters were essentially right where they started. So how did Freleng justify it? It was a luxury — sometimes, you just have to put in 25 seconds of well-timed music and animation that doesn’t particularly serve the story. It’s just icing on the funny cake.

Paul Taylor does something similar in today’s Wapsi Square. There’s been literally weeks worth of his dark storyline, with dead gods and the end of the world and portents of danger. He’s been doling out the hints of what’s going on at a furious and satisfying rate. But sometimes, you have to put all that aside for a day, and draw a big ol’ wide panel of hot girls dancing. Five Doors is funny and all, but this just might be better. Plus, in the midst of all the dark exposition: Porky Pig reference!

So we’ve been getting a fair number of newsbox mentions, blog links, trackbacks, pingbacks, humpbacks, whatever, since Fleen started up.

Today, Fleen makes it into an actual strip.

Creators take note: we may be geeks with fragile egos, but name-checking us in your strip and giving us originals will not impair our journalistic integrity even a little bit. For us, providing the matches for fights and flamewars is reward enough.

I first met the great Diablo at Dor-Con 17. I didn’t get to spend much time with him there, but he was gracious enough to autograph my Chia Pet.

I’m very excited, therefore, to present the following interview with Diablo about his magnum opus, megaGAMERZ 3133T.

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You might have seen it at Comixpedia, or at their home page — the Webcartoonist’s Choice Awards have announced their timeline for the year. What struck me about the announcement is the scheduling: nominations open on 15 May, with the awards themselves dropping on 17 July. The logical question here is, “Why are awards for achievement in 2005 happening closer to 2007?” For answers, let’s hear from WCCA Chairman Mark (Zortic) Mekkes:

There are a couple of reasons that it’s set when it is. For one thing, it’s a quieter time of year for everyone. People have more time to look at nominees than they do immediately following the holidays (like now). The other main reason is to coincide with ComicCon. By announcing the results just before ComicCon, it gives people something to discuss, brag about or debate in San Diego.

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Comic conventions are always a good thing. They’re a great opportunity to meet and greet other artists, smell the fans, and get really really drunk (while still being able to deduct it as a business expense!).

In particular, conventions can go a long way towards helping a nascent collection of rabble gel into a full blown community – and the UK Web And Mini Comix Thing has been trying to help that process along for the last three years. Fleen has only ever heard good things from those who attended – that it’s a positive experience and a good thing in general for the UK indie comics scene.

But the thing about conventions that most people don’t know is… they can be an excruciating ordeal to actually run. They say you don’t have to be crazy to run a convention, but they also say it sure helps.

We received the following response from “Thing”, when we asked for a press release about the upcoming UK Web And Mini Comix Thing 2006. This is presented almost completely unedited (we corrected or at least Americanized spellings, and added links and removed some leading and trailing text that was not directly related – but otherwise this is verbatim what we received).
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There are neat things for you to see and maybe to buy!

John A. has released the cover to The Retribution Index, the forthcoming Scary Go Round book #4. Since it has been scientifically proved that SGR equals wonderfulness, you should start counting the seconds until the release of this book. Count, damn you!

Penny Arcade’s forthcoming collectible card game has what looks like finished box art over at the PA newsbox (scroll down to the fourth item). Congrats also to Hawk from Applegeeks; I met him by random chance at SPX ’05, and we talked a bit about the coloring job he did for Gabe’s card art. Looks like a damn fine job, too.

With a post-mortem celebrity resembling that of a mutant Princess Diana, the Cyclops Kitty makes an appearance in today’s Questionable Content. Now normally, an in-strip t-shirt design has the potential to become a money-spinner for Jeph Jacques, but he notes:

To answer everyone’s questions, yes that is a little tribute to Cy the Cyclops Kitty on Raven’s shirt. To answer a lot of people’s second questions, no I will not be putting that design on t-shirts to sell. The notion of profiting off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten is, to put it mildly, distasteful.

Naturally, not everybody shares his sense of restraint, so if you were planning on trying to profit off the posthumous fame of a goddamn kitten, get in line. Seriously, this one just feels forced. The only thing that strikes me as less necessary would be if one of those 1000 or so Batgirls was also a cyclops kitty. Please don’t take that as a suggestion.

The Bears vs. the Packers. The Redskins vs. the Cowboys. The Army vs. the Navy. Labourdonnais vs. McDonnell. Fischer vs. Spasspky. Laver vs. Rosewall. Borg vs. Connors. USA vs Russia at the 1980 Olympics.

Sam vs. Jeph.

Sam Logan and Jeph Jacques have been going at it, pen to pen, tete e tete, nose to grindstone in one of the dirtiest and longest running webcomics rivalries ever. It started out innocently enough as a marketing device, but now… puppies are getting kicked.

It seems unusal that two creators who write such similar comics would be out for blood. Particularly when Jeph is such a whiny emo shoegazer. (Sam Logan, that amazon-wish-list-hacking, baby painting, easter egg stealing fiend, made me say that.)

I had a recent opportunity to try and reconcile these two and attempted to convince them to settle their differences like the gentlemen that I know they are.
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So Howard Tayler, mad scientist behind Schlock Mercenary, has opened a new website devoted to an ostensibly-fake foodstuff a foodstuff that one might think existed only in a fictional universe, but which has made its way into our own reality, draped in gooey perfection.

Recipes, discussion of various cheeses, and a tribute to cast-iron that would make Alton Brown moist are to be found here.

This could be the start of a trend. Already, Greg Dean, Tayler’s Blank Label-mate, has shifted his life (and update schedule) to attend culinary school. Could there be more webcomickers making the leap to food-themed endeavors? Because that could be awesome. Or sad. Guess it depends on what’s cooking.

From R Stevens, regarding the sudden unavailability of the delightful iheartpixels:

OK, so I made a goof! I used a third party to register my domain and do my hosting for i heart pixels. It was a momentary lapse of do-it-yerselferness. SUDDENLY, THE DOMAIN DOES NOT RESOLVE after 2 really good days of traffic. And guess what? I can’t point it where I want. Lovely. So, I solved this the way I solve most of my problems – atomic warfare. Please change whatever bookmarks/links/boners you may have to iheartpixels.org

You heard the man. Point yer boners here.