Order of the Stick is back. It was only gone for month while creator Rich Burlew took a break to “recharge his batteries” Since we’ve gotten two excellent installments from him in as many days, I’ll say the wait has been worth it.

I tweeted about this earlier but I felt it deserved it’s own post for several reasons. One is Order of the Stick was one of the first Web comics I ever started reading when I discovered the medium six years ago and has remained one of my favorites for the whole time.

The second reason I wanted to push Jason’s Midnight’s last post off the front page, so that all Internet will know what a lazy fartknocker weiner he is (I don’t know how long I’ve been wanted to use the word fartknocker in a post, but it sure feels good).

Finally, I mention it because today’s strip leads into something that I really want to talk about. One of the reason Burlew has had the success he has is that he truly knows how to walk the line between new and old fans. Let me paint the picture for you. Order of the Stick has been around a long time. A really long time be Web comics standards. It’s 674 (as of today) strips long. And these aren’t gag-a-day strips. These are full pages that tell one continuous story.

One.

Continuous.

Story.

A lot has happened in this strip. Pretty much all of it has been good. But that means nothing to the new comer. A archive coming up on 700 strips looks really intimidating to some one who hasn’t already read through it a dozen times.

Still just about every strip that he’s put up has been one that I could show to someone who doesn’t read it without fear of them not enjoying it. They may not understand who these people are and why they’re fighting green-skinned ninjas but they get at least one of the jokes in the page and that makes them willing to read another, and then another and then another until one day they have a goldfish named Belkar. And it works. I know of at least two people who have started reading OotS because of a random link that I sent them.

There are a lot of long form story comics that don’t do this. Granted they usually have a lot fewer panels per page and therefore has less of a chance to do this sort of thing. But still, all it takes is a clever bit of dialog and you’ll be fine.

In an ideal world every page would have something for the new reader. A funny line, a cool turn of phrase, a panty-shot. Something. Anything, really, that will make my reading you most recent page an enjoyable experience. If have fun reading a random page, there is a much, much higher chance that I’ll hit that all important first button, and give your comic the chance it deserves.

That’s my rant for today. If you have any other examples of comics that do this well, ones that fail at it miserable or anything else you feel like saying, please use the comments section below. That’s what it’s there for.

Wizard interviews three webcomics creators—Scott Kurtz of PvP, Chris Onstad of Achewood, and Lora Innes of The Dreamer—and talks some serious nuts and bolts: What’s your traffic, how much do you pay for hosting, how do you build your site, and what do you use to draw the comic?

Apparently not everyone shares my aversion to scrolling; Von Allan did a poll and found that 80% of respondents weren’t bothered by it at all. I guess I’m in the minority.

And here’s a big-picture piece by Jake Forbes: Four Challenges for Digital Comics to Overcome. Forbes is a veteran comics editor whose credits include the best-selling comic Fruits Basket. (Yes, it’s manga, but the top manga outsell most other comics.) Anyway, upon reflection Jake comes up with a more concise list; both are worth a look.

The Monsters of Webcomics show is up at the Museum of Cartoon Art in San Francisco, and the local media is on the case with both the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Station filing reports this week.

Lori Henderson reviews the online manga anthology SIGIKKI. Speaking of which, in this article, Japanese publishers basically admit that they can’t do much about scanlations, illegally posted fan translations of manga, through legal means, so they are fighting back by putting their manga up on the web themselves. It’s so crazy it just might work!

Alex Dueben talks to Jonathan Rosenberg about Infinite Typewriters, the print edition of Goats, at Comic Book Resources.

Delos reviews >Will Write for Chocolate, a charming little webcomic by writer Debbie Ohi.

Johanna Draper Carlson picks up on an interesting tidbit: Platinum no longer owns Wowio, although it doesn’t seem to have moved too far away; Platinum’s president and CEO, Brian Altounian, formed a holding company that bought it in July. Flashback Universe has an interview with Altounian that’s more about the site strategy than the financial side. (Via Fleen.)

The Ignatz Award nominations are up, and the slate for best online comic comprises Dash Shaw’s Bodyworld, David King’s Danny Dutch, Joey Alison Sayers’s Thingpart, Vanessa Davis’s comics for Tablet, and Cayetano Garza’s Year of the Rat.

Here’s my cranky take, from a reader’s point of view, on webcomics site design at Robot 6.

Smith Magazine, which hosted the webcomic A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, is launching another high-profile webcomic: The Pekar Project, featuring the work of Harvey Pekar.

Merlin Mann is the guest on the latest episode of Webcomics Weekly.

Larry Cruz is going on hiatus for a few weeks, but he leaves us with an interesting Q&A post about webcomics in general.

Spike talks Templar, Arizona, with Lauren Davis at io9, and Johanna Draper Carlson chats with Erica Moen, creator of DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary at Publishers Weekly Comics Week.

Sheldon Vella discusses his suprise at the success of Supertron at MPD57. (Last three links via Robot 6.)

Chris of The Ego and the Squid is the guest on the latest Ninja Consultant podcast.

Not awesome: A magazine devoted solely to the topic of preventive maintenance. Totally awesome: A magazine devoted solely to the topic of preventive maintenance and illustrated by Will Eisner. If anyone can make grunt work exciting and sexy, it’s Will, so the Virginia Commonwealth University Library has truly done a public service by putting the full archive of Eisner’s work for PS Magazine online.

ICv2 notes that the number of comics available on mobile devices has doubled in the last two months and gives a bit of background on who’s doing what.

Johanna Draper Carlson wonders why anyone would make a motion comic and looks at the difference between the Marvel and DC strategies at Comics Worth Reading.

Here’s the demo for Panelfly, a new mobile comics reader app; Scott McCloud finds it a bit disturbing.

It’s a dramatic tale, full of thrills and uncertainty, with a happy ending: MyRomanceStory is putting their comics on the iPhone, and their press release, intentionally or not, fits the genre to a T.

The NBM folks are a bit more staid about their venture onto the iPhone, but they have an interesting twist—while most publishers sell a chapter at a time for 99 cents, NBM is selling full graphic novels for $6.95 to $9.95 a pop.

Sean Kleefeld finally got a cell phone, but it’s a Dare, not an iPhone, and he’s wondering if anyone is making comics for it yet. I haven’t heard of any. Readers?

At the Boys Next Door blog (which focuses on yaoi manga), Nikita reviews vol. 1 of Games With Me, by Tina Anderson and Lynsley Brito, which is available only on Kindle at the moment.

Lori Henderson takes a look at the newest iteration of the Sony E-reader at Manga Xanadu.

Quill & Quire asks: Is Kindle more environmentally friendly than dead-tree books?

Creator Kyle Hurlbut found that sales went up after Apple made him raise the age rating on Fallen Justice #2 from 9+ to 12+.

Sony will launch a comics reader for the PSP in December, with comics available for purchase from the PlayStation store. Reportedly Marvel, IDW, Image, and Archie have signed on. JK Parkin has more at Robot 6.

Comics apps for mobile phones are coming out at a dizzying pace, and now there’s a site to help you keep track of them: Find Comic Apps lists new releases and old favorites in a convenient single location. (Via downthetubes Mobile Comics.)

Cherise Fong interviews creators and publishers of comics for mobile devices and discusses the potential for spreading comics worldwide at minimal cost at CNN.com. (Via Robot 6.)

Creators, if all this talk is making you feel like you should be putting your comic on mobile devices, here’s an article for you: Lemuel Pew goes over all the options (including doing nothing and letting people just read your comics on the browser on their handheld), with a thorough discussion of the pros and cons, at Webcomics.com.

JM Ringuet’s cellphone graphic novel Stolen Suns is now available in the iTunes store. Link is here. (Via The Beat.)

Also new at iTunes: Marvel’s first Spider-Woman motion comic and Alterna’s American Terror: Confession of a Human Smart Bomb.

And R. Stevens’s LoLBoTs is available on the web but formatted for easy viewing on cell phones. Why has no one else thought of this? (Via Fleen.)

Here’s a milestone worth noting: iVerse Media reports over one million served.

Brad Guigar and the Halfpixel guys have started something they call Webcomics.com University, which will feature lectures by noted creators. First class is tonight; Professor Scott Kurtz will talk about line quality.

Amazon.com has announced the Comic Strip Superstar contest, in which one lucky/talented creator will get a book contract with Andrews McMeel and possibly syndication through Universal Press Syndicate and Uclick—very multimedia. The info is up at Webcomics.com, where Brad Guigar doesn’t just run the press release, he takes a critical look at the terms that creators may have to agree to. Gary Tyrrell has some misgivings, and he and Gordon McAlpin now have a twenty dollar riding on the outcome.

Seth Kushner interviews Kevin Colden, creator of Fishtown, for the latest edition of NYC Graphic Novelists.

Jackson Ferrell This Week in Webcomics interviews, in comics form, Blank It creators Aric McKeown and Lem Pew.

Josh Neufeld is doing a book tour to promote the print edition of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. David Welsh turns in the latest review of the book at Precocious Curmudgeon.

Shaenon Garrity has some self-publishing tips for those who are thinking of putting their webcomics into print. This is not the usual top ten, and she has some good ideas, like this point about cover design:

From about the 1880s to the 1930s, people were really good at design. You can’t go wrong ripping those people off.

Heidi MacDonald features a video preview of Longbox, which is being touted as “the iTunes of comics,” at The Beat.

At The Webcomic Overlook, Larry Cruz reviews Dreamless (written by Bobby Crosby and illustrated by Sarah Ellerton) and David Reddick’s Legend of Bill.

Here’s the big news of the day: MySpace Dark Horse Presents is back! One of the early and more successful publisher webcomics sites, MSDHP went dark in the wake of massive layoffs at MySpace. Comic Book Resources has the deets on their triumphant return.

Phil and Kaija Foglio delivered their Hugo Awards acceptance speech for Girl Genius in the form of a comic. Cool!

Kyle Latino went to Chicago Comic-Con and had his portfolio critiqued by Howard Chaykin and Mitch Breitweiser. Rather than crying into his beer about their comments, he did something constructive and created a webcomic illustrating the principles he learned in the critique.

Meanwhile, Adam Kushner’s critique of the print edition of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge for Newsweek ends up being a critique of the graphic novel medium as a whole. I still can’t figure out whether it’s a rave or a pan, but I do think that Kushner needs to read more graphic novels. I think he’s missing out.

Brad Guigar harnesses the teachings of behavioral psychology to suggest strategies for a successful gag strip. B.F. Skinner would approve.

Congratulations to Bryant Paul Johnson on reaching 500 episodes of Teaching Baby Paranoia. If you haven’t read this one yet, you’re missing a treat—it’s sophisticated, pseudo-historical humor delivered in digestible bites, often accompanied by misleading footnotes. Check it out!

Delos reviews Quirk’s Evil Little Webcomic at Art Patient.