A bit of Comixpedia-promotion here. If you haven't been checking out the all new weekly webcomic jam here at Comixpedia, please do. The current jam is heading into it's final installments and will wrap up with the end of September. The most stirring dairy-based heroes and villians since Dorkin's Milk and Cheese.

Bill Duncan is already organizing another one for the month of October - if you are interested head over to the jam forum.

Alexander Danner writes a mash note to Narbonic. I'd say something snarky but I happen to agree with Danner's take on the continuing quality of Garrity's work.

A recent story in the Guardian Online tackles the emerging trend of online charity or cyberbegging and includes a couple of paragraphs on R K Millholland's efforts:

When Randy Milholland set up his online comic, he was updating it nearly every day. But real life inevitably interfered and he didn't have time to draw as often. His readers started to complain, so he gave them an ultimatum: pay him what he earned last year - around $13,000 - and he would quit his job and work for them.

"It was intended as a way to get people to shut up," he said. "I assumed they would just grow quiet and let me do my thing. Instead, I got $2,000 in the first day." The average donation was $5 - but with a lot of regular readers, he raised the total in less than a month.

Another program to read comics that fetches images directly from servers. The creator's FAQ acknowledges some of the tensions such programs create for the artists who create webcomics:

Q: Don't you rip off the artists when you view the strips, but not the ads?

A: Ad revenue on the web is so low these days, comic artists have already added (or completely switched to) many other support models. And I encourage everybody to make those models work for them. Please buy books or T-shirts, join their clubs, tip them money, do visit their homepages and click on some ads... I do regularly!

These programs appear to be here to stay - how will they impact the "free" model so many webcomics, even highly successful ones, continue to employ? Is bandwidth cheap enough that a program such as this that can "rip" an entire archive of image files will not cause financial problems for creators? What other issues surrounding distribution of webcomics are on your mind this week?

Are you up for the 5 Questions of Doom!!!! Mwhahahahahaha!!!!!

I haven't had a chance to check this out, but I found the link somewhere this morning--BBC Cult Presents: 2000AD and British Comics Interviews (apologies to whomever I'm not giving credit for first finding this link). Looks promisingly interesting.

Over at SUPEROSITY.com they celebrated Chris Crosby's 27th birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday to the keenest webtoonist ever!

And a few days earlier Ghastly of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic celebrated his 39th. Happy Birthday to the ghastliest webtoonist ever!

The September issue of the Webcomics Examiner is up. The "cover" comic was cute. More on the contents later today if I have time to read them.

UPDATE: Joey Manley reads the latest issue before I get a chance too. His take is probably right on the money.

A couple of thoughts this morning on Michael Jantze's break from the syndication model. I had an exchange of emails with his wife Nicole yesterday. Apart I think from a naive enthusiasm that the Jantzes were trying something new in the world of comics (although everything in the world of webcomics is still "newish" Jantze is trying out several revenue strategies already pioneered by others) she seemed to be passionate about working with Michael to support his ability to continue creating The Norm. Without naming a specific figure she did say that Michael desired to match his salary (from syndication revenues I guess. Any takers to try and calculate something like that?) and that as of yesterday they were 10% to that goal.

Scott McCloud weighed in on Tuesday with a supportive comment. T Campbell was also supportive in concept but made the fair point that we can "subscribe" to every comic (he indicated he would be giving his money to Jamie Robertson instead. Robertson, while never syndicated, is in a similar situation to Jantze).

I also noticed that the pitch for money on The Norm subscriber page is pricey by webcomics standards. I will be interested to see how that goes? Is Jantze asking too much? Are other popular webtoonists asking too little? How much cache comes from being a previously syndicated cartoonist?

UPDATE: Saw that Eric had also posted some similar thoughts on these recent developments earlier this week.