The Devil's Panties doesn't have the Devil in it, and makes only the occasional reference to panties, but Jennie Breeden never promised anything. A recent art school grad who spent last summer as the arts counsellor at a camp, Breeden recently got a job working at a comic book shop. Her strip revolves around tales of going to bars, to work, as well as the hijinx ensued through three girls not afraid of the world outside.

And it's all (mostly) true.

Todd Webb published his first series of minicomics about his job as a stockboy when he was still a teenager. Barely out of his teens now, he's had The Goldfish and Bob published by BlindWolf Studios and he's hard at work on a new book with his friend Harold.

Like A Disease

Three AM on a Saturday and I am barely conscious. Sleepily, my fingers tap across the keyboard, editing the html code on the screen before me. I upload the page onto the server and hope that the third time will be the charm. Alas, no; the link between the main page and the latest archive page is still broken. I am dead tired and just want to go to bed. Still, I am compelled to stay awake by one thing alone; the comic. I can't let myself go to bed before I finish updating my webcomic.

It’s like a disease sometimes.

On April 12, 2002, BBCi ran a story on the works of Scott McCloud, discussing both his own works and the potential for online comics in general. The comments from readers at the end of the story were – on the whole – positive, but one, from a 'DV' in Ireland, derided McCloud for thinking above what he called "the essentially trashy nature of the medium."

He is, in a sense, exactly right.

Imitation of Life is a journal comic that acts as a blog, or, a web log for those of you not up on the lingo. It chronicles the day-to-day events in the life of its writer and artist Neil (who never gives his last name on the site), as he struggles to cope with the hardships of law school in Pittsburgh, PA. Sometimes metaphorical, sometimes gruesome and introspective, Imitation gives the reader a look into one man's life that is, in all accounts, real.

Woe, the eternal struggle, the painful decision that will color a reader's perception of a given webcomic forever... but a decision that nevertheless must be made: does one start with the cast page or the archives?

It all started early one spring as exams were wrapping up. My group of university friends, together 8 months of the year, were once again facing the harsh reality of being ripped away from each other, from Saskatoon to Timbuktu. Rather than trying to send emails to everyone (there were quite a few of us), we all got livejournals and started blogging, with the promise that we wouldn't tell the people at home (or wherever we were spending the summer) what we were up to.

Some of us were more successful than others.