...and when Litchfield pulls out a gun out of nowhere in comic 97 amidst the flames of the burning theater while Author and a pregnant-but-not-really Kate stand at his lunatic mercy on center stage, you can't help but feel both torn and satisfied – as if this had to happen, no matter how much you grew attached to...

Wait. Perhaps it's best if we start this review at the opening credits.

Liz Walsh is 26 years old and a fairly recent graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where she studied computer science and earned her geek spurs. She grew up and still lives in Ottawa and describes herself as a "creative, passionate, thoughtful, antisocial, ambitious, [and] short temper[ed] (*grin*)" type of person. Her webcomic, Tao of Geek, is about geekery of all stripes, from computers and video games to role-playing games to anime. Walsh is a fan of geeks and her webcomic shows it.

"Geeks can be funny. Geeks can be serious," says Walsh. "It's all in who they are. They're more than just fanatics of some games, or people who dream in C++. They've got minds. They've got family. They've got friends. They've got personality. They can be the person that has aspirations of being on the stage based on how well they roleplay Garok the Mighty. They can be the person whose impeccable logic (from long nights of programming) lets them win any debate they enter, even against tenured politicians. They can be the person who creates a media empire based on the fantasy world they created during those long lectures at school. They can be *anyone*."

Creators make webcomics. Cool tools make the webcomic community go round. Here's to the geeks, the code monkeys, and the computer science students who come up with ingenious hacks to help creators automate publishing and fans find a webcomic's latest update.

I - Finders, Keepers!

In the days before I discovered webcomics, I worked an office job where I generally had at least a couple of hours each day when there simply wasn't anything useful for me to do. Of course, I was still expected to look busy. I couldn't exactly put my feet up and open a book. In fact, when I wanted to read, there was really only one place I could go. And that was – you guessed it – the bathroom. Yes, I confess – I too have spent many hours hiding in the loo with a book.

Jeff Darlington is responsible for one of the longest-running and most popular geek webcomics ever to exchange packets with your modem – General Protection Fault. Having started out innocently enough in 1998 with what looked like a gag-a-day strip with tech- and geek- humour, Darlington sneakily managed to take his webcomic to crazed serial heights, with the now-(im?)famous year-long mega story arc "Surreptitious Machinations".

Webcomics are constantly being compared to comics made available in print mediums: pros and cons, webcomics breaking into print, print on the web, etc. Much of this discussion is generated from people who read and create webcomics, and is written in defence of webcomics. Oddly enough, it's not as if you hear the masses screaming that webcomics are inferior to print. Maybe it's simply inferred by everyone, the same way comic fans infer that their favorite medium is supposed to be inferior to prose or movies?

So maybe I'm just giving everyone a reason to argue their point when I say that right now, I consider webcomics to be not as good as other mediums.

As everyone knows, chief among the benefits of producing an independent webcomic is the freedom from any sort of editorial input or criticism. In the absence of the editor's stifling presence, a comics creator can maintain a pure artistic vision, and is thereby free to reach his or her full potential.

That seems to be the prevailing opinion, anyway. That editors might actually have useful skills and services to offer is a little-considered possibility.

Among special interest webcomics (about gamers, otakus, college roommates, etc.), only geek comickers are required to understand the underlying machinery and environment on which their webcomics reside. The rest of us are proud if we can successfully register our domain name and paste a generic PHP script into our Frontpage HTML code. But true geeks should be knowledgeable enough to code their own HTML, install a back-end database, and write custom scripts that seamlessly tie everything together. If they can't manage at least that, then how can we be sure they're really geeks?

Mean What You Say, but Never Say What You Mean

Continuing down last month's David Mamet trek towards an aesthetic of creating comics....

Brian Michael Bendis is a big Mamet fan. When I read a Bendis script a little while back, I was really impressed; I liked it because it read like a script to a comic, not like he was trying to impress anybody. It wasn't full of witticisms and fancy descriptions, it was bare-bones writing that provided a structure which could be turned into a comic.

What I liked about Bendis' script was that it was made up of panel descriptions like: "Shot of guy's face." And "Same as 2." "Same as 2, closer."

At first, every growing-up-thinking-comics-scripts-should-look-like-Alan-Moore-scripts bone in my body reacted against this. Wait, I thought, shouldn't Bendis be saying what the face looks like?

There's been a lot of talk about webcomics as a business lately. More than ever before, webcomics are sustaining themselves and their authors through their hard work and promotion. Exciting times seem to be right around the corner for the industry as a whole.

But if you're not a webcomic guru with tens of thousands of readers, what then?