It's gaming month and that means that blah blah blah disappointing lack of female characters in comics about gaming blah blah blah my D&D experiences blah blah blah; too many people doing gaming comics about two college roommates blah blah blah women like shamelessly slaughtering orcs too occasionally blah blah game reviewer for Computer Gaming World named "Scorpia" who was really cool blah blah blah and once in awhile you found a woman who games with other women rather than a small cabal of smart-mouthed male characters against whom she is set as the "sane/reasonable" character who tries to be one of the boys but ultimately adores shopping blah blah blah PvP blah blah only computer game I've ever enjoyed was The Longest Journey and blah blah blah Final Fantasy blah blah why aren't there more chicks doing this stuff already.

Okay, I really needed to get that first paragraph off my chest. I feel much better now.

Let's face it: business has not been good in the comics industry during the last decade or so. However, despite this, there has been a swelling of diversification amongst genres, creators, and publishers, and maybe even a little upswing in the public's perception of comics. And, there is plenty of talent around too – arguably more than there has ever been. This summer, Scott McCloud quipped, "I'd be willing to debate that there is more talent now concentrated in people named 'Jason' than there were talented people in the entire industry when I entered it twenty years ago." So, if the industry now has a great deal of talent, diversity, and freedom of expression, why are things still only so-so for its status and prosperity?

A "Sadistic Shoujo" manga with an Angelic Layer theme, Rules of Make-Believe is another one of those webcomics that surprised everyone last year – starting out of nowhere, and gaining notice faster than a speeding broadband connection, Ju-Lian and co.'s work is a quality-rendered webcomic that's about a very specific game, without being a gaming comic. Leah Fitzgerald had a quickie chat to pick Ju-Lian's brain about the whole thing, as well as gloss on gaming and sprite comics, too.

I skipped the 80s growing up. This was surprisingly easy, as I was born in 1980 and didn't get much of a pop culture knowledge base until I was 13 or so. That, a lack of anything but cartoons and reruns on my TV diet, an abuse of my parents' music and choice in movies, and an obsessive streak that had me trying to read every book in the library, kept me from experiencing much outside of things done before I was born.

So it is without any nostalgia or bias against this decade that I beg you, comics artists, to stop drawing 80s fashions!

Russ Williams' Ko Fight Club is a constantly evolving webcomic that samples a wide and extremely diverse set of topics for its subject matter. Williams describes Ko Fight Club as "eclectic comics about Go, board games, the Bench, Watchmen, Fight Club, Shakespeare, Esperanto, and Toki Pona." 'Eclectic' does not do justice to the range of topics and styles found in this webcomic. In fact, at his best, Williams is the Spike Jonez of webcomics, mangling culture high and low into something recognizable yet different from the norm.

Stickler and Hat-trick, in association with Comixpedia present…

Stickler and Hat-trick at the Keyboard

This week, they review PENNY ARCADE, created by Gabe and Tycho!

( Tonight's show is sponsored by Bigger than Life™ Prunes. Enhance the size of your after-dieting effects today with new and improved expanding prunes!)

Stickler: Welcome to a new year of At the Keyboard!
Hat-Trick: This week we're taking a look at one of the biggest and most successful webcomics out there, Penny Arcade, created by Tycho and Gabe, which updates on M-W-F schedule.
S: Well, let's just get this out of the way. PA is a great webcomic. When we were asked by Mr. Editor who lives under our couch to review Penny Arcade, I was a little nervous…
HT: We volunteered, dumbass. Thanks!

Above all, I love good stories.

Artful narrative.

Games of Wit, Battles of Rhetoric, and the Art of 'You Suck'

Hey you – yeah you with the nose.

You suck.

No, wait. Wait. Let me try that again.

You suck, like your momma on my d*** last night.

No, no, wait. Still not quite right.

You suck, like your momma on my d*** while your gf was giving her a tongue dive.

There.

Now I feel I have successfully refuted your position on Austin's stance on the Sense-Datum Theory.

Disagree?

The mere mention of video games often evokes images of a solitary white ball bouncing between two vertically moving white paddles, with that distinctive Pong sound. Maybe it evokes images of a large gorilla hurling barrels at unsuspecting Italian men instead. No matter what you think of when you think video games, it is undeniable that games as a whole have affected our culture over the last 20 years. In the late 1970s, games like Pong revolutionized arcades, and in the 1980s, Nintendo revolutionized our living rooms with Super Mario Bros. Our generation grew up with names like Atari, Nintendo and Sega. The culture of video games has boomed in the past 5 years with the recent console wars between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. With the increase of video game fans came an increase in people writing and drawing about their favorite video hobby: enter Gaming Webcomics, a genre that is not so easily classified. What are Gaming Webcomics, what are they all about, and where are they going?

David Anez has been messing with pixels before messing with pixels became cool. His landmark Sprite-based comic, Bob and George, actually wasn't even supposed to BE a comic about a hero and cast of characters awfully similar to a certain Capcom game. It inadvertently became one of the first Sprite webcomics on the web, and certainly the first one to really pioneer and spark the masses of Sprite comics out there now. Almost four years after this "accidental" genesis, Anez tells us about how it all started, and why his webcomic is exactly what it is.