Suppose Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher decided to do a manga.

The result might be something like the work of Shintaro Kago currently up at Same Hat! Same Hat!!

Your hosts, Ryan and Evan, specialize in offbeat manga, and most of what they post is either absurdist four-panel strips or the not-for-the-squeamish genre known as ero-guro (as in erotic-grotesque).

Everything on Same Hat is something you will never see anywhere else, but recently Ryan and Evan have found a few comics that are artier and at the same time more accessible than much of their other material. So if you haven’t stopped in already, now would be a good time to take a look.

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In Japan, manga is more than just entertainment; there is an incredible range of educational manga, from business textbooks to Tsundere Linux, in which big-eyed little girls tenderly introduce the reader to … Linux.

So what Pfizer has done is quite logical: They have put a manga up on their site about a guy who uses one of their products. Viagra.

Nisemono?, which ComiPress translates as “Fake?” is only in Japanese, so it’s a little hard to follow. It seems to begin with the hero ostentatiously taking one of the little blue pills in his company’s boardroom, a scene that illustrates why I love manga so much: just taking a pill is a dramatic event, with fist-shaking and changing background colors and lots of sound effects. Even if you’re not sure what’s going on, it’s fun to watch. Then our hero goes off and talks to a pretty girl for a while and has coffee with his skeevy friend, who is obviously giving him bad relationship advice. Some things transcend language.

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Transmission X is a Toronto-based webcomics community that has only been up for a couple of weeks but is already looking pretty good. There are seven comics, each of which updates once a week; the last two comics are set to debut on August 14 and 16, and the others have about 10 pages up so far, enough to get a good sample.

The site has a sleek, uncluttered interface, and navigation is straightforward. No blinking banners, no cleverly disguised “next” button. Almost all the comics are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so they can be read in a single screen, with no scrolling. You know how a lot of people say “I hate reading comics on a computer screen”? I think this site might convert some of them, because it eliminates a lot of the annoying features of webcomic interfaces.

But what about the content? It’s definitely a mixed bag of genres, styles, and attitudes, but overall the quality is high. Here’s a quick look:

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Here’s something new, but with a familiar look: Gal Samurai, a translated Japanese web coming to you free courtesy of Popteen, which is the U.S. version of a Japanese teen magazine.

The manga jumps right in without much backstory, so check out the intro page first for background on all the characters. However, it’s a good introduction to the cliches of shoujo manga. The heroine, Ran, is a fashion-forward high school girl who just happens to be highly skilled in the martial arts, having been trained by her grandfather. (Cute girl who kicks ass? Check!)

She has a crush on her classmate Fujii, who is a TV actor. (Check!) They have been friends since childhood, when both had to deal with the loss of a parent. (Check!)

And in the first episode, someone is going around taking photos of the girls’ panties. (Panty shots? Houston, we have a manga.)

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 In our latest Digital Strips Update (which can be found with all it’s updatey goodness below) it was brought to my attention that there are Web comics on MySpace. I also tried to bring it to the Internet’s attention that MySpace sucks. It’s not the idea of social networking sites that bothers me. It’s the idea of really dumb ones with nothing but really ugly layouts and pictures of teenagers taking their picture in the mirror that bothers me.

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About a month ago, DC Comics announced that it had made a major investment in Flex Comics, a Japanese company that develops comics for cell phones and the web. The news was noted at the time and then disappeared in the flurry of attention that DC caused when they announced their dedicated webcomics site, Zuda.

Keep your eye on Flex, though, because the folks at DC may have something interesting up their sleeves: They may be gambling that people who are accustomed to getting something for nothing will be willing to pay to get something better. It’s a strategy that has already worked for two other manga publishers, and this experiment may be useful to webcomics creators who are thinking about the best publishing model for their work.

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