Bit of sad news to start your morning out with. Highly DS recommended strip “Dawn of Time” creator Michael Stearns announced today that he’ll be cutting back updates from MWF to once a week so that he can focus on his art career.

I guess we’ll have to sate our selves on the adventures of the lovable Dawn and her even more loveable triceratops companion Blue just once a week until the comic takes off and becomes the weekly syndicated Saturday morning cartoon that it deserves to be.

You can check out our review of the strip here.

Somehow in a matter of days my Google alert, for webcomic news, went crazy. There were at least 15 but half of those were for the constant Digg updates on xkcd or the Weekly Webcomiq Wrapup from Joystiq. Both of which I stop bothering with because I just get tired of being bombarded. Now for something completely different.

It looks like webcomics has a fan at Chicago Now in GeekToMe. Don’t know about the name, as there’s something inherently annoying in calling webcomics Geek related. Anyways it appears he mentions small comics every Wednesday with little fanfare except that it’s mentioned on a site that gets hundreds of thousands of readers. Not bad.

The fourth annual Webcomic Holiday Postcard Fundraiser has begun where a whole bunch of webcomic artists have teamed up to create a set of classy holiday themed postcards! By purchasing any holiday themed postcard set, you’ll be donating to Child’s Play, a charity that collects toys and donations for sick children each holiday season! These high quality 4.25″x6″ postcards feature original art from Chris Malone, H. Caldwell Tanner, Steve Napierski, Tina Pratt, Brian Wilson, David Stanworth, Jamie Noguchi, Jen Brazas, Mohammad F. Haque, Scott Ramsoomair, Shawn Handyside, Vinson “Bleedman” Ngo, Yuko Ota.

Normally I don’t mention when a site does nothing but show a specific strip. I find that slightly silly and showing a complete lack of writing skill, but then every once in awhile the strip is worth reading. This time I’m linked to a new comic called Oatmeal.It took me 30 min to get past the ghastly artwork but the writing is so enjoyable I learned to read without using my eyes. This one in particular had me howling as it’s similiar to my past experiences dealing with clients.

Newsarama gives an interview with APE Entertainment’s Submissions Editor, Troy Dye, and the writer of a new APE webcomic, Elton Pruitt. Whilte talking about UFO Anthology: Encounter with the Unknown Newsarama discovers that APE has an existing small collection of webcomics, believes in alien life, every parent has a story to scare the children, everyone loves their readers doing their work for them, and that all it takes to be successful in any new project is to do your best.

The newest webcomic critic, El Santo, has a new editorial up on ComixTalk. Not my cup of tea but he does take a very long and in-depth look at the Zuda comic Azure. Apparently it’s an apocalyptic webcomic that doesn’t leave anything to chance. If you’re going to destroy the world why not throw everything you got it? Well El Santo goes further and talks about the artwork, setting, and writing with enough detail to wet my appetite but enough to convince me to read the comic. Although I could probably get by with a few fight scenes from the sneak peeks he shows us.

Remember that webcomics community I was just praising? It’s opportunities like this that make that group such a good one to be associated with.

Via yet another tweet, Scott Kurtz has asked all bloggers to help spread the word about his latest calendar, featuring a Skull plushie traveling around the world, which will help to improve the lives of many Cambodian children.

Nothing more to say about it that hasn’t already been said: it’s a product you were probably going to buy anyways and it benefits a great cause. So click here, get your calendar, help out the children of Cambodia, and tell a friend.

Just a friendly reminder to all you aspiring webcomickers out there to send your strips to digitalstrips@gmail.com so we can give ’em a once over to see if we’d like to use them in a future podcast! We’ve gotten a lot of submissions recently and many of them are going to be featured soon so we can share these relative unknowns with the rest of you ‘Net navigators out there!

As a disclaimer, however, entering your strip does not mean a review is forthcoming. We take a look at the overall quality and determine, based on many complicated algorithms, whether or not we will review the comic. I say this not to discourage but because, if we were to do reviews of strips that didn’t measure up in terms of technical skill, they would be a) too numerous to count and b) overly negative.

So if you think you’ve got the chops to stack up with the big boys, submit your comic to us! If you want more shows, we need more strips, so you’re really only helping out yourselves in the long run.

Finding webcomic news during Thanksgiving is probably the hardest time of the year. It’s not hard to figure out why when I see how much effort I put compacted into a couple of days instead of the months used for the end of the year. Mainly it’s exciting that The Geek is back with a new person in the world. Have to publicly give him Congratulations since I have such a public forum.

There are so many of these out there but this one is slightly different because it doesn’t try to be anything more than personal opinion. El Santo went through and picked at least 4 I heavily enjoy, another 3 I’d not heard of before and one I never understood why people love it so much. Have to say I disagree on a couple but then El Santo picked 2 that are no longer updating, but definitely deserve to be on everyone’s must have read list.

Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan bring you a sweet story for children, old Mrs. Johnson lives happily alone in the forest. She loves to knit sweaters and mittens for her grandchildren in the city. One day her solitude comes to an end when her mischievous forest neighbors reveal themselves in a delightfully colorful fashion. Who took her yarn, and what have they done with it? “Mischief in the Forest” will be 40 full-color pages. The story is written by Derrick Jensen and illustrated by Stephanie McMillan. The money raised here would be used for printing the book, and if they raise an amount higher than our goal, they’ll use it either for a higher print run and/or promotional costs.

The 2nd Annual Calamities of Nature guest strip contest has begun. Can you feel the excitement in the air? After last year’s contest, Tony decided to do it again and picking the 3 best strips submitted by December 11th. The 3 winners will have their comics featured as the December 14th, 16th, and 18th updates. These comics will get a place in the archive, along with a link to the winner’s website (for examples, see last year’s three winning comics). In addition, each winner will receive the choice of a signed copy of the volume 1 collection or a shirt. If you don’t win, you’ll still be compensated for your hard work. All other submissions (of reasonable quality) will be featured individually in the blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays and have their comics saved in the gallery.