UK folks are all too well accustomed to Americans getting all the big cons. Alternative Press Expo? San Diego? It's just not fair. So, when the UK Web and Minicomix Thing rolled around again this year, how could any of us resist? Finally, we not only had something the Americans didn't, but we had it *first*.

Here's a small taste of what it was like.

Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques is a stylish, indie-rock sitcom. Marten, a young, navel-gazy music nerd, finds himself with a dilemma: a hot, sassy woman with subcultural clue has moved into his apartment.

As 2004 packs its bags and prepares to turn over the keys to the new year, we thought we would take this opportunity to look back at certain significant or just really amusing webcomics-related news stories throughout the year.

If we missed your favorite event, feel free to add your own thoughts.

Quasi-autobiographical comics come with a risk alert stamped on the box: "Warning: may be needlessly introspective, self-conscious, ceaselessly overnarrative." "Show, don't tell" becomes "Tell, tell, then show your head. And other heads." The desire to impose story upon life, unassisted and unmitigated, pollutes the anecdote. (Alternatively, one might simply make everyone housemates and inject giant robots, at which point all bets are off.)

As a practicing liberal foreigner, I often seek out topical gaming humour with political undercurrents and boobies. Substantial, voluminous, unAmerican boobies. Those boobies should be attached to hot anime chicks, like the ones which are popular with the teen girls who shop at bookstores! They make me feel like Ben Affleck --

The jaded webcomics consumer is well familiar with the idea: a creator takes extant intellectual property, then makes it her own.

One of the things I learned, pretty early on, is that I don't want people in my space. Maybe a single person, and then only on the grounds that there are certain relationships one can't easily conduct when one doesn't let anyone into the house. You can come over for coffee, or for anime, or for whatever it is we've decided to do. Then, you will have to get out, because it is my bloody space.

"Any female[...] has had to work ten times as hard as her male counterpart to be accepted in their organization. She will be more able, will react quicker, and will generally be much more dangerous. Kill her first." -- Starr, "One Man's War," Preacher

Girl geeks may never have had it better, but that doesn't mean we're altogether finished yet.

Last month, we spoke of arcane wonders. We learned what XML-based web content syndication is, how it works, and a few ways in which webcomic creators might make use of it. In this installment, we're going to expand on the possibilities raised briefly in the last article, and hopefully correct some misperceptions about how syndicated feeds are used by readers.Last month, we spoke of arcane wonders.

Previously on Comixpedia, Xavier Xerexes provided us with a brief overview of syndication methods for online comics. Today, we're going to be looking at XML-based syndication methods, such as RSS, in a bit more detail.

What?!
Let's get our baseline terminology out of the way first. RSS is a markup language based on XML, but what does that even mean?