It's easy to say things like Art is Expression. Or Art is Perception ...is Catharsis ...is Truth. (...is etc.)

But here's the not-so-easy conundrum: when you allow others to take a peek at your Art, how are they supposed to react? How are they supposed to give an opinion? More specific to this publication, how are they supposed to give a review?

Think about it – who out there is perfectly at ease saying they’re qualified to render a critical judgement on Expression, Catharsis, Perception, or Truth?

Enter Erika Moen's DAR: A Super-Girly Top-Secret Comic Diary. Enter the conundrum.

American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka compiles five years of Kochalka's journal comic into one volume. Most narrative artforms engage in at least some bit of hyper-reality, that is condensing stories to leave out the boring or nonessential parts. What can we make of a book then, that is comprised entirely of bits and pieces, and is just as likely to leave out important events as include them?

In Real Life, Greg Dean has incorporated practically everyone he has ever met into a character for the webcomic. Okay, maybe not everyone (as Dean explains below). Real Life ran for a long time on Keenspot before Dean went independent. We gathered ten of the readers questions and sent them to Dean who answers are below the fold.

Thinking about starting up a webcomic? Has the thought ' Hey, if they can do it, so can I!' ever crossed your mind?

You've been reading my comic, haven't you?

Before you start looking around for a place to host a comic (or wondering what hosting is and if it requires deviled eggs) or thinking about what kind of comic you would like to do, there are some simple things you should be aware of. Proceed with caution, my friend, for the trip down into webcomic creation is a perilous path!! But avoid these pitfalls and you'll be fine.

Since this month's theme is autobiography, I was hoping I could get personal for a bit with you.

Ramon and Rob of Butternutsquash have been delighting readers with their highly-caffeinated comic strip for a while now. They were nice enough to grant Comixpedia an interview.

There are certain webcomic genres that seem to dominate the online world as much as the superhero genre dominates print comics. Any simple search will yield a seemingly endless list of gamer comics, college life comics, fantasy comics, slice-of-life comics – the web comic genre list goes on and on. But it’s quite a different thing to search for comics that deal with the self as source – or what is more commonly described as autobiographical. Aside from examples created by well known webcomic authors (for example Scott McCloud’s My Obsession with Chess and James Kochalka’s American Elf), most webcomic creators seem to pass over this method of conveying a visual story.

There’s a very good reason for this – it’s hard to do, and you can louse it up easily.

Putting the 'crap' in narcicrapssism

Pull your shirt up.

I don't care if you're at work. Go for it. If you're wearing a button-up shirt, just undo the bottom couple of buttons and pull 'er open a bit. C'mon. I can wait.

(singing tira lira lura, tira lira ly, tira lira lura, it's an Irish lullaby...)

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.)

Gene Yang has been doing intensely personal, if not strictly autobiographical, comics for years now---with his Gordon Yamamoto stories, his Loylola Chin stories, and especially American Born Chinese, all appearing in Modern Tales (and Gordeon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks has been published as a graphic novel).

He was kind enough to grant us an interview and talk about the many aspects of his work.