The Devil.

How scary is he, really?

Okay: war, death, disease, famine, telemarketers – they're all bad... but Satan himself? He doesn't seem to be doing much recently. Watching The Exorcist these days, the 70s fashions inspire more terror than the pea-soup-vomit or the little-girl-blasphemy. In the face of real-life monsters like terrorists and serial killers, the cackling flames of the Devil can seem downright quaint. Bottom line is that, in this secular age, we just don't think much about Lucifer anymore.

But he's all over the webcomics.

The main problem with creating something new is avoiding the cheap shortcuts. It's hard as hell, if you're working on a webcomic, not to eschew the hard work and blood, sweat and tears of what we more refined sorts call "thinking" and fall back on those old familiar crutches.

I've always been a Hallowe'en kind of kid. Christmas, yes, fine, but Christmas doesn't give you the opportunity to coat yourself to the elbows with pumpkin gore. Nor, in anticipation of 12/25, does one feel authorized to spend large amounts of money on cosmetics that aren't used in a normal social context anywhere excepting the better geisha bars, and maybe some parts of Dixieland. Yes, Hallowe'en is a green light for every morbid-minded, artsy, exhibitionist kook to inflict their aesthetic on a world that otherwise has very little place for people whose favorite movies universally involve some combination of Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, and Johnny Depp ¹.

Is Death a popular guy? Does he have lots of friends? Does he enjoy his job of collecting the souls of the newly deceased and ushering them to their final reward, or does he secretly yearn for something that makes him feel better about himself? These might be, and sometimes are, the issues covered in Dorothy Gambrell’s Modern Tales strip, The New Adventures of Death.

Jon Morris may claim "the things he writes and draws make people sad," but he has had a hand in several well received webcomics. Starting with the Ignatz nominated Jeremy and moving on to current anthology project Open Book, Morris continues to expand the scope of material he brings to his particular style and approach to comics.

Tycho and Gabe are the creators of Penny Arcade, arguably the most widely read webcomic ever. Besides practically pioneering the genre of "gaming webcomics" Tycho and Gabe have experimented with every kind of business strategy devised for webcomics including advertising, donations, merchandise, and in the good old Dot-com boom days, getting paid by video game review websites to run Penny Arcade webcomics.

Without further hullabaloo, Tycho and Gabe answer your questions:

As I sat back looking at some of my work recently, trying to figure out how to spontaneously get remarkably better at writing believable, effective dialogue, I glanced over and noticed a journal where I keep some of my poetry. My mind strayed back to my community college creative writing classes, where I read those poems in front of twenty or thirty people and then got critiqued by each person individually.

The most amazing thing to me about poetry is that thirty people can read a poem and have thirty completely different reactions to it. Everyone goes into a poem with different backgrounds and emotions, and draws whatever they need from it at the time. Looking back at the various panels of artwork I'd drawn, devoid of any word balloons, I realized that comics have at least as much potential as poems to fulfill those basic emotional and psychological desires.

In my last column I discussed the merits of good dialogue and the painful way that most comic dialogue sounds when read out loud. The response to the column was the best I've had so far, with quite a few e-mails and posts responding at length about it.

So, what is this column morphing into?

Question: What do you get when you cross a stand-up comic who specializes in one-liners and puns with a habitual psychopathic murderer?

Answer: A serial kidder who really slays 'em by repeated club gigs.

Alternate answer: Butch.