So I’m minding the Blank Label Comics booth at Comic-Con, and this nice young man walks up to me with an octopus…

While at WorldCon I made the acquaintance of one Lawrence M. Schoen who was wearing a small, plushy buffalo on his shoulder.

I’m thrilled to see Schlock Mercenary listed at #1 on the recent Wired Blog Network post about webcomics. Unfortunately the entry is entitled “Ten Great Webcomics You Should Not Share With Your Kids,” which kind of undermines my whole “family-friendly” claim.

At the end of the Episode 28 Writing Excuses podcast I mention a metaphor that deserves credit-where-credit-is-due.

One of the best parts of WorldCon for me this year was getting to drag Phil and Kaja Foglio in front of the microphones for Episode 28 of Writing Excuses. It has been my privilege to spend lots of time with them at Comic-Con a month ago and then again at WorldCon in early August.  That experience serves to tell me that the fifteen minutes of this episode don’t approach the tiniest portion of “enough time” when learning at the feet of the Foglios. What’s here is gold, though. Go listen!

Oh, and if you’re not yet reading Girl Genius, head over there. You’re in for a deep-archive, victorian-corsetted, steampunky, gaslampy, fantastic treat. With long red hair, welding goggles, and giant robots.

Nuke Tom Smith.

Nuke him with MONEY.

Songwriter and performer Tom Smith was injured on stage in late spring. His livelihood depends on him traveling to conventions and performing, but now he is trapped in a wheelchair undergoing physical therapy.

He’ll be fine, but he is missing the 2008 convention season entirely, and is racking up medical expenses instead of income.

Schlock Mercenary has finally embraced the promise of its premise and stepped into the twenty-first century. There is a Schlock RSS feed, which includes the strip, footnotes, and navigation buttons, and which can be consumed just about any way you want to consume it.

Hey, who wants a Schlock Mercenary RSS feed?

(I sure do!)

Programmer and Schlocker extraordinaire Mark Shieh has cobbled something together for all of us at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS. This feed won’t give you anything except the comic (no footnotes, for instance), but Mark is working on that.

Try it out! Let’s see if we can BREAK it. Programmers LOVE that.

Let’s lead off with a picture, shall we?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I provided all of the Denvention newsletter comics. They’re all in this post after the “Read the rest of this entry” link…

I had a great time creating these. I think my favorite was probably the most self-serving of the bunch…

There are two new episodes of Writing Excuses up that I haven’t blogged about. The first, Episode 26, talks about the Horror genre about which I know a lot less than Dan Wells does.