Or, to be more accurate, one particular woman. If you've been following the fantasy webcomic The Spires you could be forgiven for thinking the Lady Jeste is just a disagreeable little socialite, indulged solely because of her elfin good looks and her insatiable sex drive.

Or, to be more accurate, one particular woman. If you've been following the fantasy webcomic The Spires you could be forgiven for thinking the Lady Jeste is just a disagreeable little socialite, indulged solely because of her elfin good looks and her insatiable sex drive. Oh, and her ability to kill people without the slightest hint of remorse, obviously.

But that's only the tip of this particular iceberg. Look in on today's instalment at Broken Voice Comics and you'll find she's about to start revealing just what made her the woman she is today. I'm not saying it'll help you like her. But, well ... at least you'll begin to understand her!

AWARDS

• The judges for next year's Eisner awards have been named. They are Bookazine Company pop-culture category director John Davis; comics and prose writer Paul Di Filippo; California retailer Atom! Freeman; Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff Jensen; and California librarian Eva Volin. (h/t Journalista!)

INTERVIEWS

• An interview with Lisa Jonte, comics creator and editor of Girlamatic.

WARREN ELLIS

• Does anyone know when Warren Ellis' upcoming Freak Angels is going to debut? UPDATE: Wow - that was almost psychic - Warren Ellis in a post to his email list this morning said the webcomic would launch in February 2008.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

• The Comics Reporter reviews a recent Cul-De-Sac comic. This new/old strip by Washington Post illustrator Richard Thompson is quite good. Thompson brings to the comic years of experience creating comics for the Washington Post Sunday magazine. (You can read it online here.)
• Journalista! points to a review of the new Marvel DCU comics service in the LA Times.
• There is one of those "let's pretend we're not telling anyone about our million dollar web campaign" kind of marketing campaign going on for the next Batman movie.
• Ryan Estrada has a story running on the Penny and Aggie webcomic site.

ComicPress 2.1, the latest version of ComicPress, accomodates the new Widgets and Tag features introduced in the last two major releases of WordPress as well as various other improvements.

ComicPress continues to help webcomic creators create their websites and publish their comics with WordPress. Modified versions of the theme are now seen at such Webcomic sites as Scott Kurtz's PVPonline, Chris Harding's new We The Robots, Warren Ellis' upcoming Freak Angels and even the creative use of it for a comic podcast as seen at Around Comics.

The theme is attractive enough to be used as is, but simple enough to be customized the way you want it with a little CSS know-how. By creating your website with WordPress, you are taking advantage of one of the most popular and well-produced content systems as well as tapping into its vast amount of support and its wealth of addons.

I have a "rerun" of my older article Fight the Comic Aristocracy over at Sequart. It deals with the the "aristocratic" structures that are in the comic industry and the democratizing force that the notion of "visual language" can have in contrast to it. I used the term "aristocratic" there pretty much to stand in for "Bourgeoisie" or "elitist", but in a somewhat broader more abstract sense. In

Hey all! I posted pictures of my recent trip to the Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio! You can check out the pictures here!