For the most part, webcomics are a 19th-century idea presented in a 21st-century medium.

Readers of The Yellow Kid, back in horse-and-buggy days, saw the strip as lines and areas of color on newsprint. Readers of The Perry Bible Fellowship have an almost identical experience, except the lines are on a screen and they click links rather than turning pages.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is the first webcomic that I have seen that takes advantage of some of the possibilities only the internet can offer.

First of all, let me say that this is an awesome webcomic. Written and drawn by Josh Neufeld, it follows a handful of different characters—all based on real people—as they face the storm. Continue reading →

Comics creator Lea Hernandez has put her graphic novel Cathedral Child, book 1 of the Texas Steampunk trilogy, on the web for free. It’s her way of thanking the comics community for their outpouring of support after her home was destroyed in a fire last year.

Texas Steampunk?

Yes, it’s a great combination of several concepts, a semi-supernatural love story swirled in with a Victorian computer and the mythology of the west. It’s set in Heaven, Texas, where two partners are trying to build an “analytical engine” in an old, mission-style church. Both the computer and the church are known as “Cathedral,” and the natives who work on it are called “cuerpo de Cathedral.”

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The gaming strip, F@NB0Y$, recently ran some guest strips, most of which were the usual fare; take the established characters and give them a character beat to follow or make fun of video game X. Good stuff all around, but one in particular caught my eye, and not because of the content in the strip itself. Reading further down the page, Scott Dewitt’s blog (creator of F@NB0Y$) revealed that one of the fan entrys was by 15 year-old Katie Tiedrich, creator of Awkward Zombie, another gaming satire webcomic that tends to focus solely on Nintendo-branded humor.

I immediately went to the AZ site and checked out the shallow but impressive archives. With a very VGCats/Americanized-anime feel, Katie has harpooned some of the best Nintendo franchises will great skill and hilarity. To find out what the impetus might be for a teenager to undertake such work, and online no less, I hit Katie up on AIM to get the full story. What follows is just what you might expect: a chat with a teenager over IM about video games and the growing danger of pregnant women eating pencils.

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For once, I believe I can agree with Scott Kurtz.

The current issue of PC Gamer features five collector covers of Penny Arcade characters, highlighting the feature in the pages of that magazine on the upcoming PA game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (or PAA: OTRSPOD). If you’ve ever read a magazine, you’ve seen an editor’s note or two and know that they usually expound upon some aspect of the cover story. What they don’t typically do, however, is bash the work or person they have chosen to put on their cover. Apparently, the EIC at PC Gamer didn’t get that memo.

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