early webcomics gallery
Joe Average’s first anniversary strip features characters from 37 other strips. Can you help me name them? Some have fallen off the Web.
there are domains and domains
keenspace.com, a free hosting service for comic strips, changed its name (not long after it was founded) to comicgenesis.com; but the old name still works, as do comicgen.com and (I just learned) toonspace.com and webcomicspace.com. Well, mostly.
Mostly it doesn’t matter whether you look at foo.comicgenesis.com, foo.keenspace.com or foo.comicgen.com; you get the same content. But sometimes images don’t show unless the address is foo.comicgenesis.com.
What’s going on here? Apparently these domains are not transparent synonyms for each other; but why would they be (flawed) mirrors?
second-guessing by halves
Early strips of some webcomics carry the author’s much later comments. Christopher Baldwin (Bruno) and David Willis (Roomies!) are reposting old series that ended. David Morgan-Mar’s (Irregular Webcomic!) schedule these days is two new strips and five comments on old strips each week.
If it were me, I think I’d want to keep coming back to older strips, with ever decreasing frequency. Perhaps like this:
if n even:
n /= 2
comment on n
while n even:
n /= 2
add n to backlog
else:
pick a number from backlog; remove it
comment on that entry
And so it reiterates
In the last couple of years I’ve looked at thousands of webcomics. Sometimes I wish I’d kept a list of those whose first page is captioned “It begins” or “So it begins” or “And so it begins.”
cross-drafting
Gail Simone asks:
Question of the day: if you could have one piece of art drawn by any living comics artist, not to sell, what artist and what character?
I haven’t followed (paper) comics in a long time, but several possibilities come to mind; in rough order of seriousness:
- Churchy & Owl (from Pogo) by Bill Watterson
- Adam Warlock and Gamora by Walt Simonson
- … with Thanos by Kate Beaton
- Dr Strange by R Crumb
- the Bat-family by Dorothy Gambrell
- Cheech Wizard by Dave Sim
I’ve seen such changes
How old do you need to be to understand this gag from 1978?
sic transiverunt webcomics
About a dozen years ago I made a page of links to my favorite webcomics. Looking at that list now, I find that twelve that are still going (though a few are very sporadic), ten have stopped but remain accessible through a system of tubes, and eight have vanished:
- Fluble by Christopher Mastrangelo
- Bobbins by John Allison
- When I Grow Up by Jeff Rowland
- JoBeth by BJ Hiorns and Joey Hetzel
- Shaw Island by Zach Stroum
- The New Adventures of Bobbin! by Joycelyn Yik
- Catharsis by Jen Boeke
- Everyone Drunk But Me by Laura Beth Brandt
Other favorites now missing include
- Malfunction Junction by Matt Milby
- As If! by Amy Hebberson
- Life on Forbez
- meh~! (mathematically enhanced hares) by wing mui
- Warp 9 to Hell
- Knowledge Is Power by Laura Chapple
- Yourmometer by Hobbes (Laura LeGault)
- Killer Robots from Space by Adam Greengard
- Don’t Forget to Validate Your Parking by Mike Le
- Cyberbooty by Tony B
- everything at Graphic Smash, Modern Tales, ComicSpace, Webcomics Nation, Girlamatic, Activate
Maybe when a favorite series stops updating for a year I ought to save the content for myself before it vanishes!