Nominees for this year's Ignatz Awards were announced. In Promising New Talent, Svetlana Chmakova of Chasing Rainbows (www.girlamatic.com, www.svetlania.com) grabbed a nomination.

In the Outstanding Online Comic category:

American Elf, James Kochalka, americanelf.com
Apocamon, Patrick Farley, e-sheep.com
Desert Rocks, J.J. Naas, dr.ungroup.net
The Pain … When Will it End?, Timothy Kreider, thepaincomics.com
Tailipoe, Craig Boldman, craigboldman.com

Hello all,

This is J.P. Sloan, and thought I'd post the obligatory intro post.

I do the comic Sawdust, over on Keenspace. I've been reading Comixpedia for two months, now (late bloomer, I know), and I'm finding time to scroll through several forums lately.

I see some familiar faces around here, and from different comics and forums. And I'm liking a lot of the feedback I'm reading thusfar.

So, hi, and carry on!

Jon Rosenberg writes how the Wall Street Journal picked up on his effort to hand out Republicans for Voldemort stickers outside the Republican convention. Not a bad publicity effort for Goats (how much overlap is there between the Goats audience and subscribers to the Wall Street Journal?) as the Journal actually wrote a bit about the webcomic as well as the sticker campaign.

http://www.mamut.com/dibujantes

I'm checking it out now. I wish I knew spanish. We can only auto-translate so much of the webpage.....

Okayokayokay, so I posted a few other places before introducing myself here. I'm SORRY alright? I didn't read the directions! That's because I CAN'T READ!! Now you've found out my dirty little secret. I hope your all happy... you basniches...

Anyway, I'm the writing side of a duo that puts out the webcomic Cheshire Grin and ComixPedia came highly recommended by a few other webcomic creators I know. So, here I am and there you are and we are us AND I AM THE WALRUS... *ahem*. Sorry. I do that sometimes.

So... yeah...

I'm here now, expect too see me all over the boards discussing, arguing, and making wise-arse comments. It's what I do.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

The Guardian reviews Art Spielgelman's In the Shadow of Two Towers. This is a really detailed piece with the depth I don't think you usually see given to comics.

(link from bugpowder)

WirePop is now almost a year old! The first and only subscription site to offer nothing but great Manga-styled comics is opening its doors to new talent once again.

Who gets tattoos? Well, according to this website, awesome people! The creator of Daily Dinosaur Comics has put together a page with "the express purpose ... to encourage more people to get crazy drawings burned into their skin." If you have any pictures of webcomics tattoos, you might consider telling this guy about it.

Neil Cohn has started a forum on visual arts theory. Just getting underway so it might be a few days before the place is humming but I suspect it will indeed hum.

In fact, I already found a link there to a blog on visual arts that may be of interest when it too begins to hum. Visual Culture and Language is Professor Kevin Brooks new blog.

Okay, my wonderful (sometimes) service provider gives me a great, huge list of usage statistics, updated daily and archived monthly. Now, while these are pretty nice at keeping up with trends, noticing when we're having spikes, tracking down people who link in to us (and thanking them) and what not, I'd still like to know roughly how many READERS we have; how many people come by to read our comic. Now, I could probably got through and count the number of different IP addresses, assuming that similar IP addresses refer to a single dial-up user at different times, and guesstimate, but that's a heck of alot of work for not much return.

Do any season professionals have a rule-of-thumb regarding translating daily visit and page request numbers into a "I have roughly this many readers!" number?