LEGAL
If you haven't read enough about how bad the new Tokyo Pop contest contract is read Tom Spurgeon's straightforward breakdown of the various flavors of crap contained within it.  (Lea Hernandez also has links to most of the posts on the subject here.)

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Will Wheaton and Greg Williams have a webcomic up about nostalgia -- Star Wars action figures to be specific.

Joe Infurnari who does the Eisner-nominated webcomic, The Process, announced he will also be posting a new webcomic titled The Transmigration of Ultra-Lad on the ACT-I-VATE site.

DEAD TREES
Comics Worth Reading has a short review of the print collection of the webcomic America Jr.

Word Balloons has a review of Kean Soo's Jellaby book.

The Chemistry Set webcomics collective is set to publish an anthology of their comics called No Formula.

SWAGALICIOUS
I really like this t-shirt from Dorothy Gambrell (Cat and Girl).

NOT WEBCOMICS
NerdWorld has a post up about the freshly released Penny Arcade game and the almost here Homestar Runner game.

LEGAL

Lea Hernandez (and lots others) has been commenting on how bad the new contract from TokyoPop for their superstars of manga contest is.  Does every freaking comics publisher now hold "contests"?

INTERVIEWS

The Scienteers intervew Josh "Girly" Lesnick.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

Hey! New Boxjam's Doodle!

Hey! New update to Fear My Dear, the sequel to Dean Haspiel's Immortal.

Another interesting article from the early mists of ComixTalk time (our March 2003 issue) is T Campbell's article on Webcartoonist community. Campbell considers the extent of dialogue amongst webcomic creators and compares it to subcommunities in art, movies, etc.

I've also begun preliminary work on a potential article for later this year and I'd like as much help from everyone as possible.  It's a 100 Greatest Webcomics kind of article - the idea being something like a "you've gotta read these 100" before you die (or 100 to recommend to others to read)...  Make suggestions and argue with me (and others) over a draft list here in the new forums.

The Scienteers have a short review of the wrestling comic, Rival Angels.

Brandon Carr posts that the lack of updates to the Weird Adventures in Unemployment comic is due to health issues (his and his computer).  I've been trying to do an interview with Carr - I think his computer problems have been part of the reason that hasn't come together yet.

D.J. Coffman (creator of Hero By Night) has been blogging about a new comic he's working on that will feature the band, the Flobots.

NOT WEBCOMICS

On the heels of Penny Arcade's game, now we get a Strongbad game too? And for the Wii!?  EXCELLENT.

Weezer's video for the song Pork & Beans is a veritable ROFLcon of Intertubes memes and famous-for-fifteen seconds folks. 

AWESOME!!!!

A nice writeup of Randall Monroe and his webcomic xkcd in the NYTimes Media & Advertising section.

Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.

 

“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.

The Penny Arcade video game -- Penny Arcade Adventures Epsiode One: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness -- was released this week and I felt it was my duty to purchase said game.  Until I hear otherwise I'm going to assume this is the first videogame to be based on a webcomic (as opposed to a webcomic based on a videogame, a la Sam & Max).

I played it for a couple of hours last night and really enjoyed it.  If you like Jerry's writing and Mike's art then you'll more than likely get a huge kick out of experiencing them in this new interactive environment.  The game itself is a retro-but-updated version of those older point and click adventure games that used to dominate the PC.  And while I have no idea if the game is a good value for $20 it is chock full of content with very funny bits tucked into all kinds of objects in the environment.  The game has two modes - the 3d interactive environment part and then the 2d choose your words mode where you interact with characters (which cleverly invokes the comic origins of Penny Arcade).

I've read that the "fighting" system emulates Final Fantasy but since I've skipped the whole FF thing I wouldn't know.  The fighting is okay and for someone who isn't at all into twitch-anything like myself I liked that it wasn't incredibly difficult to master.  I also appreciated the ridiculousness of the "fighting moves" you see from various characters.

For other reviews check out metacritic and joystiq.  Joystiq also has an interview with Jerry Holkins.

Michael May's Stock Footage is a pretty entertaining comic.  May takes suggestions for movie titles and turns them into comics:

[Y]you email me with your favorite movie or movie character and I'll make a comic. I don't care if it's art house, obscure or not even made yet. Popular, unpopular, unwatchable - I'll still make the comic and put it up here.

This is a great concept and May is often able to come up with some very funny spins on the selected movies.

Well for me at least -- I am already loving the Malcolm Gladwell/New Yorker storyline in Scary Go Round that starts here.

While I'm pointing out cool comics from today -- David Willis adds another notch to his belt-of-comic-parodies with this scary hard-to-tell-it's-a-parody Mallard Fillmore.

Journalista! alerted me to the fact that the ComicShout script has SQL injection vulnerabilities that are unpatched.  The script author has also made it clear that he isn't going to fix them so for anyone using ComicShout -- better move to another script. 

One suggestion is to move to Wordpress + Comicpress.

Moovak's Guest Strip Project is rolling along featuring entries from several well-known and some should-be-known artists.  For a collaborative project, the story is hanging together pretty well so far too.

The project is set up to raise money for the Make-A-Wish International Foundation, but right now it looks like the "donation" links aren't working -- hope to see that fixed soon.