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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In the world of web comics there are so few places that we can call home. From the moment we started putting up squiggly lines we have all understood that those who would follow us will come because they want that quick laugh or the easy access. Such a nature is both the greatest appeal and our worst nightmare. If you don’t update every day or at least when promised you can lose half your readers over night, just because you got caught in a snow storm. At least you’re just as likely to get them back by having an outstanding next strip but the losing and gaining of readers will give even the greatest comic gray hairs, unless you shave.

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I’ve recently entered the real world. The world where people have careers, offices and even their own staplers. It’s a beautiful thing. However, as I sit a my desk and try and figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing, I get a lot of great ideas for comics. Ideas that, knowing me, will never see the light of day.

So while I may not be drawing as many comics as I would like, I have been able to listen to a few more Web comics podcasts, which is nice. A relatively new show (three episodes to date) that I’ve really enjoyed and would like to share with everyone is Comics Coast to Coast.

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It’s highly likely that Ninja Bunny by Philip Spence has been written about before in this space, but it wasn’t by this cape-wearing webcomic afficionado, so deal with my thoughts on the incidental silliness of the Bunny one more time.

Of course, these write-ups have to be birthed from somewhere, and this edition comes courtesy of a milestone for Ninja Bunny, the 200th strip milestone to be perfectly exact. After only a year and a half’s existence in the ‘Tubes, this achievement seems to be a big one, but truthfully, it’s not hard to make yourself seem bigger and better than you really are on this, the Internet. Post something for a year or so, send the AP your press release, and voila! You’ve got yourself a milestone, regardless of content, quality, or frequency of updates! What remains is to decipher said milestone and see whether it is truly something to celebrate.

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It’s been a long time coming, this update. Every time I sat down to write about… well, something, I just lost the motivation after opening the WordPress page. Since then, there’s been enough news popping up for a proper update, so why not? I’ve chosen tonight to put up posts here as well as on my own personal blog, so let’s just see what happens together. I’ll start things off with this teaser panel from the latest Digital Unrest. Good, good stuff.

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I’ve noticed I started a lot of posts with apologies for the long period of time since the last one. I’ve decided not to do that this time, largely because I doubt I’d mean it. I’m becoming sort of a jerk.

Anyway, I just going to drop a quick link here to Randall Munroe’s ‘ the creator of XKCD ‘ report on his lecture at MIT. From what I could tell from his blog post and can imagine from these pictures, it looks like it was one heck of a good time. According to Slashdot, the audience was bombarded by balls. Sometimes I hate not being? on the East Coast. Usually not, but sometimes.

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The main point of Free Comic Book Day seems to be to get people into their local comics stores, but the free comics serve another purpose as well: It’s a way to check out new work you might not otherwise see. So now that FCBD is over, here are a few of the freebies that I found online, all of which are worth at least a look.

The FCBD people have put short samples of six titles online using ettitude’s reader: You click on a corner of the page to turn it. The best of these is Fantagraphics’ Unseen Peanuts, because it crams so many strips into such a short space. I really thought this comic was the best of the bunch, and the six-page online sampler has enough of Charles Schultz’s “lost” strips to be satisfying. Thom Zahler ladles out a generous eight pages of Love and Capes, the funny and very amiable romance between a superhero and a bookstore owner. Continue reading →