On a bustling Friday night at the mall recently, I wandered into the Barnes and Noble to see what was new.

My wife and I set a small allowance aside for ourselves, for fun non-necessities we want to purchase now and then. Not surprisingly, most of mine gets spent on comics and graphic novels. I have a fairly set pattern when I go to one of these massive bookstores, and I was following it to a tee that night despite never having been in to that particular store location. First, I perused the magazine racks, checking out all of the latest Hollywood gossip, video game reviews, incredible toys I wished they would have been making when I was a kid, and of course, the new issue of Wired. From there, I scanned the bargain book tables on my way over to where they keep the computer books. I then proceeded to swear a lot about how expensive all the programming books I wanted were. Once I was done there, my next destination was the science fiction racks, where I would of course find the graphic novels and... manga?

Since February 2001, fans of complicated and intertwining relationships have been reading the adventures of an ensemble cast originally in a strip called Coolville and recently reincarnated as a strip called Intershadows. Defying easy categorization and cliche, its characters often take off into their own metaphorical inner landscape. On top of that, the author herself is having a relationship with another webcomic creator, Justin Pierce of Killroy and Tina. Kathleen Jacques recently gave us this interview about Intershadows and getting into the heads of her characters."

Audrey, the main character in Benjamin Rivers' Empty Words is a Registered Practicing Nurse in a long-term care facility. She is a new employee, and has just experienced her first on-the-job death, an aspect of the job that she finds difficult to deal with. In fact, she's having trouble dealing with her job period, with what she sees as the warehousing of old people until they die -- so much so that it is starting to affect her relationships with friends and family.

It’s been almost a year since our last effort to measure the webcomic audience. While in a perfect world we would have spent that time developing proprietary measurement tools capable of providing a highly accurate list of webcomic audience numbers this, in so many ways, is not a perfect world. Plus, we spent the development money on Mexican vitamins. But that alas is another story.