MILESTONES
A shout-out to the conclusion of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge which was an amazing webcomic - telling the story of several different people in the midst of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.  There will be a book next year from Pantheon Books.  Congrats to creator Josh Neufeld - this is one of the best works of the year so far and I hope everyone has given it a read.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
D.J.Coffman is working on a (politically-minded band) Flobots-inspired comic called Rise of the Flobots: Architects of Change.  Simil;ar Coffman art but definitely a different vibe for him than previous work.

WEIRD
Desmond Seah's webcomic Bigger Than Cheeses is often pretty funny.  Lately though he's spent an inordinate amount of time mocking a particular scene and storyline from Tim Buckley's Ctrl-Alt-Del.  I don't think there's much of a legal problem using the one bit of art from C-A-D in Seah's comic (perhaps a taste problem but I'm not going there...), but when you do it over and over and over and over again... I don't know what my point is, but it's beginning to feel like an Andy Kaufman sketch or something.

WARREN ELLIS
Why not give Ellis his own category - he gives me a reason to write about him enough.  I forgot to mention this bit on Freak Angels from last month:

When we started FREAKANGELS, some webcomickers were heard to say “weekly webcomics suck.” Like there was only one way to do a webcomic, and that the daily newspaper strip was somehow inherently superior to six-pages-a-week. Even now, I’m not seeing a lot of weekly webcomics. If you know of any, stop by freakangels.com/whitechapel and tell me about them. Hell, maybe we could generate a weekly programme guide out of them.

Weekly comics don’t suck. You can read them anytime. You can wait for weeks and read several episodes at once. But it’s nice, I think, to have landmarks in the week. Friday is FREAKANGELS day. You don’t have to be there at 12noon UK time when Chief Mechanic Ariana pushes it live. But it turns out that tens of thousands of people like coming over here on the day a new episode goes live. FREAKANGELS Friday. And I like doing that for people.

Weekly webcomics are great when they give you a satisfying chunk of an update like Freak Angels' six pages does.  Update no more often then you can keep up with and design your update "chunk" plus frequency to both ensure you can keep up with the schedule but also so that you can break up your story into satisfying chunks.

2007
Pete Abrams celebrated 10 years of Sluggy Freelance, and Ellie Deyneka wrote about finding an audience for her webcomic The Paranormals.

2006
Rich Stevens strikes a deal to syndicate Diesel Sweeties to the newspapers (he ended that arrangement in 2008), musician Thomas Dolby wrote about the use of his lyrics in a Wapsi Square comic, and Bryant Paul Johnson was one of the finalists for the Science Idol comic competition.

2005
The Comixpedia.org encyclopedia site was just getting started, and Brad Guigar was organizing a webcomics telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief.

2004
We were in the midst of the first big site overhaul at ComixTalk...

2003
The manga anthology site Wirepop added Eversummer Eve to its lineup, and we recommended readers check out Warren Ellis' Artbomb comic site.

BUSINESS
Blogger/superhero Cory Doctorow writes about his dandelion theory of distributing his stories and why he doesn't like micropayments.

The Beat reports that Elephantman is now available on iPod comic site Clickwheel (full press release after the jump)

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Comics Worth Reading likes Dennis West's Backyard Frontier: the story of a boy and his alien.

REVIEWS
Chris Mauter posts a review of the Penny Arcade collection: Attack of the Bacon Robots! that originally ran in TCJ.  Interesting but a few quibbles - I'm not much of a videogame player and I don't think it's true such knowledge is needed for every PA strip (a few yes, but far from most) and clearly this book was intended for the PA fan (i.e, the completist), not to attract new readers. (I almost forgot that Modern Humor Authority ran the definite review of this book - check it out here.)

DARK HORSE PRESENTS
Wow - The Dark Horse presents on MySpace this month kicks all kinds of sass: Nothing Nice to Say by Mitch Clem, Achewood by Chris Onstand, Beanworld by Larry Marder, and new stuff from Liz Greenfield: Steak and Kidney Punch.

INTERVIEWS
Jennifer Contino interviews Jessica Hickman the artist on Otis Frampton's Oddly Normal.

Rick Marshall interviews Bernie Hou of Alien Loves Predator -- now working on a new webcomic If You See Something.

How about a Wednesday round-up of webcomic-related stories you might be curious to peruse? Yes?  Good...

AHOY THERE BE PIRATES!
Tucker Stones tucks into the issues surrounding online piracy of comic books.

SCHOOLS IS IN

Lea Hernandez dishes up lettering lessons at Panel and Pixel.  (And Mark Evanier offers a tip on how to use the letter "I" in most computer fonts.)

INTERVIEWS
ComicNewsi interviews the Philadelphia Phablist, Evil Inc.'s Brad Guigar; and Eliza Feliz of Alice in Nightmareland.

Jennifer Contino interviews Daniel Merlin Goodbrey on his comic Necessary Monsters.

Chris Arrant interviews Roger Langridge about his new webcomic Mugwhump The Great which debuts this month on ACT-I-VATE (h/t Journalista!).

Mark Mason has an interview with Jennie Breedon of Devil's Panties (h/t Journalista!).

MILESTONES
Missed it but Andy Weir's Casey and Andy wrapped up at comic # 666 last month.

AWARDS
Meet your panel of judges for Frumph.net's Webcomic Readers Choice Awards:  Philip M. Hofer, JT Shea, Kurt Sasso, Tony Camper, and Steve Hamaker.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

The Scienteers round-up the world of Drunk Duck comics.

Scott Kurtz and Mike Krahulik paint! 

This new art for Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis is indeed bad ass, Bill.

Shortpackedblowschunks.com!  David Willis strikes again.

Yesterday, another good round-up on the latest Wowio payment issues from Comic Book Resources.  There doesn't seem to be any new news though; publishers (which in some cases is the creators themselves) were supposed to get paid on August 15th.

Platinum/WOWIO is blaming the delay on the merger and makes it sounds like at least some of the publishers are getting their checks.  CBR quotes a Platinum representative as saying, "Payments are going out as quickly as we can get them sent."

This announcement by Oni and 60Frames of linking some new comics to some web videos just scream "gimmick" to me.  Or am I supposed to believe that the artists involved got together and said "This story just demands to be told in both comic and video form!!!"

Also, Jennifer de Guzman thinks people writing about comics should write better and broader.  I can see that.  Although you're never going to get people who are hardcore into superhero comic books and its culture to write (or read) about anything else.  Luckily there's lots more to comics these days though...

Make your plans now! :)  Well it does look interesting and if you're already in the neighborhood OF Ravenna, Italy on October 10-11th, I'd bet the Komikazen comics festival will be pretty cool.  More details in the official press release below:

Google gets Scott McCloud to do a webcomic to help introduce and explain Google's new web browser Chrome.  It's very well-done and very McCloudian (he's not credited until the very end but you know right away it's him, or someone trying to ape him).

And Scott McCloud has a page up on his own website about making the Chrome comic.

It's funny that a webcomic (ignoring McCloud's comment that it's a comic -- it is on the web) about a browser is McCloud's big webcomic project of 2008 but it is well done.  Not many could make a comic about building a better webrowser be compelling but McCloud just about pulls it off.

Time to wrap up the August issue and launch the September issue.  Happy Labor Day and good luck to those returning to school this week (or even if you're already there!).  Our cover art this month is from J.