The British have a different sense of humor. There’s no easy way to explain its subtleties, but it’s the reason shows like Red Dwarf and Coupling failed miserably when "translated" for an American audience. Perhaps it’s the almost-casual mixture of normality and weirdness, or the quirkily irreverent characters, or the knowing self-parodies – or maybe just the Brits’ readiness to lampoon anything, including taboo subjects like religion, in such a way that it comes across as cutely inoffensive.

Inverloch tied with Order of the Stick for Outstanding Fantasy webcomic at the 2005 Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards and was nominated for outstanding art, web design, and environment design. Sarah Ellerton, the creative talent behind Inverloch, gave us a glimpse into crafting this long-running (literally - 320 pages out of a proposed 750 pages) webcomic.

I've talked, a few columns back, about Superguy. Superguy was (and still is) a mailing list for amateur fiction, started in the late eighties. Not really 'fanfiction,' since the stories and characters were original, but instead a wholesale satire on superheroes, Superguy let people who loved the media, or loved humor, or just loved typing a chance to build an audience, create, experiment, learn the craft of writing, and in general build whole new worlds. Also, there was a supernatural talking fish.

I was in Japan a couple of weeks ago – mainly in a small part of Tokyo. And one of the places we visited is a little shop in Roppongi, just a few feet down one street from the main intersection. (Like any other big city, Tokyo has neighborhoods that are referred to by name – Ginza, Roppongi, Shinjuku, etc.)

My boyfriend had found the place when he visited (briefly) back in April. So, while wandering around Roppongi (which he wanted me to see because it's apparently a popular tourist haunt – complete with its own Hard Rock Café – and has a memorable sort of atmosphere) we decided to stop in at the place where he'd seen a sign that said Webcomics in English (surrounded by Japanese). The sign also says Comics and Internet in smaller letters.

I think I can summarize it in one sentence:

Webcomics should be free.

Phil Kahn's narration of his experience at the Keenspace Meetup (shindig, gathering, what-have-you) in Washington D.C., starting at Union Station. The original proposal to meet came way back in September 2004. Our story begins on Saturday, July 9th, 2005, sometime in the morning…

Ghastly of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic (link NSFW) is one of the most popular strips on Keenspace, lampooning the more adult themes in Japanese anime and hentai, and now he is moving into Web Comics Nation/Adult Webcomics, flexing his creative muscles in new ways. In a chat, he gave us more information about his current comic and his future projects. (NOTE: most of these links are Not Safe For Work.)

When you talk about infinite canvas, you’re walking a fine line between cliché and getting publicly attacked as an artsy-fartsy idealist. Still, while the majority of webcomic artists stick to tried and true printed page formats, a few have emerged to really try to grasp the narrative possibility of digital space without descending into pretension or inaccessibility. In the case of Demian5’s When I am King, the creator manages this in addition to plenty of dick jokes.

This month's summer-themed extravaganza, Welton Colbert reviews Whispered Apologies in an all-Ryan webcomic collaboration!

In one of my previous articles for Comixpedia I spoke of the hierarchic structuring of the comic industry and alternative viewpoints to democratize those hierarchies. I asserted that change cannot flow top-down from corporations controlling the industry or from technological innovation, but rather from a reorientation about the conceptions of the medium. This piece explores one way that we as individuals can potentially alter the perception and organization associated with this medium: through vocabulary. People associate with the world greatly through the words they use, and different expressions can largely determine the way in which they relate to concepts. Thus, by reframing the vocabulary associated to "comics" we can alter the perceptions and considerations that they create in our culture. This issue is by no means new to comics, though the approach taken here will develop a deeper and more expansive solution than those proposed in the past.