As the daily newspaper page becomes an increasingly boring place, original and experimental comic strips have moved to two frontiers: the World Wide Web and the free weeklies. Some occupy both spaces at once. So it is with Elliott G. Garbauskas' Buttercup Festival, a sweetly sardonic strip that appears in a handful of weekly newspapers and on its own website, where it has attracted a cult following.

If the popularity of Boy Meets Boy teaches us anything, it's that webcomics need more hot, shirtless young men making out with each other.

It's official: webcomics are better than print comics.

After three successful years, Mason "Tailsteak" Williams recently ended his metatextual webcomic 1/0 at the 1,000th strip. He currently produces comics and miscellaneous ruminations at his new site, http://tailsteak.tk.

Here's the deal. I work for a manga publisher, Viz LLC, purveyors of such titles as Phoenix, Inu-Yasha, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and Shonen Jump. I'm surrounded by manga and the attendant detritus of Japanese pop culture for eight hours a day, five days a week. I like it. A lot.

And yet I don't like most manga-style American comics.

Derek Kirk Kim, the creative force behind Small Stories Online, has his first print comic collection coming out next month - Same Difference and Other Stories, collecting all the episodes of "Same Difference" from the site (with a new font) and some other work.

I draw a comic strip about mad geniuses. You know, evil-scientist types, with the insane laughter and the bubbling vats of unwholesome chemicals and the tampering in God’s domain. One of the themes I try to get across, and probably don’t most of the time, is the idea that genius isn’t just a matter of brains. Genius, the real rare deal, is all about seeing the world in a way no one’s ever seen it before.

Jason Shiga’s a mad genius. A real one.