After a Presidential Day Weekend Lull time for more Blind Date II webcomics:

• Our first post-Presidential Day-weekend comic is from Whitney June Robinson, creator of Alma Mater and Nathaniel Payne of Evil Avatar Webcomics. A mysterious visitor to Alma Mater - who could it be?!?
  

• Our second comic for Tuesday is from Petie Shumate (Girl/Robot) and John Troutman (Flint Again). It's probably happened to you - a long night of carousing leads to waking up with someone surprising. Not this surprising though...

And to the rest of our Blind Date II participants keep sending in the finished comics to me - I'm posting them in the order I receive them.

Last year sometime I came upon "Comic Party", a manga and animé series based on a Japanese video game about, of all the strange things, creating and selling amateur comics (i.e., doujinshi). "Comic Party" is very uneven, ranging from really great to head-stabbingly dull, but until somebody makes The Great American Self-Referential Webcomic, it's as close as I've seen to depicting what being a webcomic artist is actually like.

(TokyoPop is publishing a domestically-grown take on the same idea, titled "DramaCon", actually, but it's still about doujinshi -- just Yankee doujinshi.)

One of the interesting cultural differences is the concept of the "comic circle." In the manga world, if "Comic Party" and "DramaCon" are any indicator, the prevalent model is for teams of people to work on a single title as a club. But in webcomics, teams seem to be very much the exception rather than the norm. Most of the webcomic artists I know (myself included for many years) do most or all of the work themselves, from the writing to the art to the HTML of their websites.

Some do it because they're control freaks and want it all done exactly their way; others do it because they can't find anybody else willing to help them out. There seems to be a certain indicator of status when you've reached the point where you get a "t-shirt guy" or webmaster who'll take over some of that work for you.

We're working on the next issue of Comixpedia which we slated as the "Short Story Issue." If you have short story webcomics you'd like to bring to the attention of Comixpedia post a comment here.

The whole idea of a short, self-contained story in comic form is pretty straightforward to me. It has a beginning and end which rules out not only unending serialized sagas but also most one-off gag strips which really don't have much of a story to tell. I'm sure we could argue about that latter point but I think it's essentially true.

Which brings me to the WCCA category of OUTSTANDING SHORT FORM COMIC which you might think is intended to recognize short story webcomics. Not true! It's actually intended to "recognize comics with shorter formats with regular gags, or beats to its story to reflect each individual strip. Traditionally these comics fit (but not restricted to) 'Comic Strip' formats."

Two things: one, not having a category to recognize excellence in short, completed webcomics is a big omission. Not only is that a fairly distinct form hard to compare to other more sprawling works, but by definition, such a category would have the benefit of being comprised of completed works. Two, given its definition it's hard to understand what Outstanding Short Form Comic recognizes that Outstanding Comedic Comic does not. Nevertheless if there is a need to recognize "short form" comics as described by the current WCCA category, why not recognize the actual individual instance, i.e., the Perry Bible Fellowship strip for such and such a date. That would help to distinguish Short Form from Comedic Comic and more clearly tie it to its purpose.

Ceremonies are here for now. The big four award winners are:

• Comic - Perry Bible Fellowship
• Newcomer - Lackadaisy
• Artist - Tracey J. Butler
• Writer - Ryan North

I had several ideas for the name of today's comic. A few were "Misguided Heroism", "Fighting Non-Crime", and "Action Onomatopoeia". However, no matter how many names I come up with and how funny they are, I always come up with something completely different when I actually post the comic.

Friends, eh? They're there for you when you need them, they never let you down and ... and they'll talk about you in the pub as soon as you leave the table!

Which is exactly what happens to someone in Lee Munday's frighteningly funny slice-of-life comic The Lumbering Dead this week. Who are we talking about? What beans were spilled? You can find out in this week's instalment at Broken Voice Comics but you'd best get over there quick. Go on - he'll be back in a minute!

This reader isn't really a blogger. Certainly not a political blogger. And he isn't a cartoonist. But he does read blogs and he does read political cartoons. But not together. And he wonders why. Blogs are the darling of the "New Media". They break news, offer commentary, and rake muck 24/7 outside any editorial control. They are kinda like newspapers last century.

Like a digging a tunnel one spoonful at a time, I've slowly but surely been working on yet another site redesign. It'll be much more unified and easier on the eyes, and hopefully more practical for me too. Despite its simplicity, it's taking a bit longer than I expected, so I wanted to put this notice up here to fill the dead air a bit. I've got a lot of unrelated work to handle, but it's been fun, taking a bit of time here and there, to teach myself a few things about Cascading Style Sheets and modern web design. No more endless tables-within-tables, and cross-platform nightmares!