cartoons – . . . muttered the ogre

toon trek

A few years ago I decided, having got behind and lost the thread of my favorite webcomics, to start them over; and then developed a more quixotic ambition: to sample as many webcomics as I can find and, more daunting, to catch up (eventually) on the good ones.

I sort the bookmarks by date, and read the oldest first. (I conceived that practice in the early days when crossovers were common.) At the moment I’m twenty years behind; if I can maintain a pace of three days per day, I’ll catch up in ten years.

curious about causality

Without trying, I can think of five webcomics authors who changed their pronouns long after they started posting: Dana Simpson (Ozy and Millie), Joey Alison Sayers (Thingpart and now Alley Oop), Allison Shabet (Deadwinter), Elli Stephens (Goblins), and now Maelyn Dean (Real Life).

Is there something in the ink?

LATER: add Jodie Troutman (Sporkman), Jackie Lesnick (Girly, Cutewendy), Daisy Finch McGuire (Gastrophobia)

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.

Nukees	S.S.D.D	Look What I Brought Home (?)	Superosity
Road Waffles	?	Life at Bayside (?)	Bobbins
Krazy Larry	Ashfield	When I Grow Up
Bruno the Bandit	Avalon High	Joe Average
Pentasmal	Soap on a Rope	Melonpool
?	?	It’s Walky
Awkward Zombie (?)	?	?
Help Desk	Clan of the Cats	GPF
Sinfest	?	?
Everything Jake	Real Life	?
Alice	Funny Farm	The Class Menagerie
Down to Earth (?)	Suburban Jungle	?

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:
    pop a number from backlog and comment on it

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