James Turner is too busy being awesome I guess and put up a contest to be the guest artist for Beaver and Steve for a month.  I thought, hey I love Beaver & Stever and while I probably won't "win" anything it'll be a good exercise to try and draw the comic for the contest.  So here's my first shot. 

What do you think?  Should I submit it? Or try again...

AWARDS

Shaenon Garrity shares her thoughts on some of the winners of this year's WCCAs and her general low opinion of the award as a whole.

DEAD TREES

Dark Horse is bringing out a Wondermark book.  The world now asks itself: can anything stop David Malki!??

MILESTONES

Bigger Than Cheeses is 7 years old this month.

Hockey Zombie turned 3 years old this month.

FLEEN catches that Byrobot is two years old this month.

TOOLS

Web Worker Daily had a round-up of free graphics tools available around the web.

C'MON FEEL THE HYPE

Rick Smith has a new webcomic up: Yehuda Moon.  It's very "Smith-y" and if you liked Smith's past work you will like this.

Savage Critic dishes some love to Octopus Pie.

El Santo tackles Megatokyo.

Comics Worth Reading has links to Findig Elim and other christian-themed webcomics.

INTERVIEWS

Broken Frontier has an interview with Joe Infurnari, the creator of The Process.

The Scienteers had an interview with creator of cute comics Ryan Sias.

An interview with Tasmania-based comics creator Madeleine Rosca who has two comics out from Seven Seas Publishing: Hollow Fields volumes 1 and 2.

A moment of silence for the passing of a great writer and visionary: Arthur C. Clarke.  I can still remember picking up books from him and Ray Bradbury at a very young age (7?) and while not completely understanding everything I read, being overwhelmed by the sense of imagination, and of possibility.  I think my favorite Clarke novel was/is Rendezvous With Rama in part because it was a great fit for me when I read it (middle school I recall) but also for the sweep of it.

INTERVIEWS

Journalista! catches an interview with Gods and Undergrads creator Monica Gallagher.

Journalista! catches an interview with Fart Party creator Julia Wertz.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Gary Tyrrell covered the webcomics panel at the recent SPLAT confab (FLEEN had a more general post on SPLAT here) in New York City with an extensive write-up on the more interesting comments from the panelists: Dean Haspiel, Raina Telgemeier, Rich Stevens, Ted Rall, and Collen Venable.

Uber-blogger Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) writes up his 17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you.  All pretty common sense stuff worth thinking about when you're trying to build buzz for a project, but one stuck out to me because I've still considered hotlinking images to be "bad form":

Don't worry about "bandwidth stealing." There's an enormous fooforaw among site operators about people who "hotlink" to images -- linking directly to images on an external site, rather than to the page the image came from. Dear site operators: Here's a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. Back in the paleolithic era, inlining could add up to real money. If your hosting company is charging you enough for bandwidth in 2008 that you're still worrying about it, you need a new host. With your URL in your images (see above), every one of those inlining events is just a way of directing traffic back to your site. An inlined image is LOTS cheaper than a Google Ad, and far more targeted. (The same goes for handwringing about "framing" -- including an external site inside a frame on a site, rather than just linking to it.)

TUTORIALS

Drawn has links to Jim Zubkavich's multi-part digital painting tutorial.  Really excellant stuff.

COLLABORATION, HO!

Drawn has the scoop on the forum-driven comic Awesome Justice Storm:

An off the cuff comment by a community member about the creation of a team, snowballed into a full fledged project. Community members submitted entries for the team, and then voted on membership for Awesome Storm Justice. The top eight vote-getters secured a space on the team.

Manga, Manga, Maaanga!!!

Drawn links to Pablo Hidalgo's comparison of the original Star Wars comic books versus the more recent manga versions.

I've always liked Bill Bickel's Comics I Don't Understand page - today's update asks about a recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.

Man, this is starting to get routine.  R.E.M. is the latest band to release its new album online.  TechDirt reports that they've made it available through iLike (a popular social networking application) even before the actual album is physically released.

Over at the Daily Cartoonist, Alan Gardener links to a post from entrepeuner Dawn Douglass who has been working on starting an online business for cartoonists (Douglass' business is called INKswig and she indicates she hopes it launches in early May). 

COMIXTALK

If you blog about comics (your own or others) you can now have those blog posts automatically show up here at ComixTALK too - just add the feed from your blog to your account here at ComixTALk and we'll automatically recreate your blog posts as Talk Posts here at ComixTALK (with a link back to your own blog in each post here).  Click here to add a feed and click here if you need help on figuring out what is the feed for your outside blog.

As always thanks to the sponsors this week which include The Learn to Draw the Human Figure course, The World Famous Laugh Factory in Hollywood, the graphic novel Cash & Carry and the webcomic hosting service ReformedReality.com.

PODCASTANETS

A new Webcomics Weekly from the HalfPixel crew on building community around your webcomic.  (Also if you've missed it the HalfPixel crews book How To Make Webcomics is now available in stores.)

Gigcast coverage of the 2008 WCCAs ceremony.

Digital Strips has a new podcast that considers whether I Can Has Cheeseburger? is a comic.

INTERVIEWS

Elanor Cooper interviews Sarah Ellerton, creator of Phoenix Requiem.

Jim Zubkavich was a guest on the Llama Report podcast recently.

NOT WEBCOMICS

Will the movie of Speed Racer score or suck?  Nerd World has links to even more trailers.

Comic Foundry has some photos from the upcoming Watchmen flick.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BLOGS

Prompted by awards season (WCCAs, Eisners)  Mr. Myth takes a look at where webcomics fit (or not) into short form and long form comics.