The name is Mark Iradian, aka BloodKnight.

Anyways, I just thought I'll introduce myself because I'm bored. That, and since I'm writing a webcomic, I might as well know how the hell the community works.

Newsflash! Seattle Times notes "Penny Arcade takes razor-sharp jabs at video-game industry". Actually it's a love-fest of an article noting the rise of Penny Arcade and their venture into hosting a video game conference, PAX, in Seattle. The article notes that the PA folks laid out $35,000 for the conference (they expect to make a small profit according to the article).

That majority of webcomics that die the long, lingering Death of Promises of Updates to Come - let's say, ones that update daily. How long do they generally go before the missed updates start? How long after that do the updates cease, generally?

How long does a new guy have to be at it before experienced readers will realize they can take him seriously?

I guess it's shaping up to be a MT-kinda day on the bloggy. Something ... Whatever is a new series by Dan Hernandez who has previously worked on Bongy and a journal comic. With only a couple of installments so far it's hard to peg this new MT series but it's a very good effort already.

Modern Tales has been presenting Open Book by Jon Morris (Morris did the April cover for Comixpedia). This webcomic started on Jon's own site but it continues on MT. An anthology of short stories, this work seems to clarify the "jon-morrisness" of his work even more than his initial work on Jeremy, simply because he is moving around topics and genres now yet still preserving the dream-like coloring, the cartoonish yet emotionally expressive characters, including a great knack for getting dialogue right.

If you haven't been following this it's worth putting on your to-do list.

Indy Magazine most recent issue is up and it's fascinating. Coincidently coming out at the same time as the McSweeney's look at comics, this only adds to the overwhelming number of articles on comics I have to finish reading and hopefully share some thoughts on.

It's also worth noting that the old Indy Magazine had a database of publishers in comics (click here) that I haven't seen duplicated elsewhere. Is this type of resource available elsewhere (I'm fairly sure that this database is no longer being updated)?

Jeph Jacques, author of Questionable Content, has announced that he will be leaving his day job at the end of next week and attempting to make his comic his new full-time job as of September 6. QC will have a new Monday-Friday update schedule and is already featuring new merchandise for sale in its online shop.

Modern Tales: The Ralph Buncheby Dorothy Gambrell is my favorite alternate universe. The idea of rendering countries as people living in a neighborhood together isn't particularly original in and of itself but Gambrell managed to pack a nice balance of over topical references and personal relationships reflecting international relationships to make this webcomic entertaining as well as provoking.

The Webcomiclist.com has added a number of graphs to the site, showing when webcomics update and how popular they are (example1, example2). There are also a number of graphs which can be found here; for example, it appears that Wednesday is the most popular day to update on.

An interview with Ted Rall. Love or hate Rall he pulls no punches. If every editorial/political cartoons in America were as bracing as Rall we would all pay more attention to the form.