My muscles tensed. A cold sweat broke over my brow. The next few minutes would be do or die.

"So long story short," said Joey Manley, "You want to edit this thing?"

Since I started editing Graphic Smash, and even before, I’ve seen a lot of action, from "widescreen" superhero epics to old-fashioned 1930s-ish serials to Matrixesque cyberpunk to melees between talking rats and wombats. I’ve seen a lot of great action.

And honestly—I’ve seen a lot of bad action. Cartoonists sometimes rush into things, when that should be the action star’s job. So let’s puzzle this out a bit. What makes good action pulse and throb?

In this month's column, Ping Teo brings us The Essence of... Webcomics Time Loss. Oh, the pain!

Dave Roman delights audiences of all ages with his comic Astronaut Elementary, where the future looks like your grade school in zero-g. Originally over at Girlamatic, Roman has moved to Webcomics Nation. Despite his recent engagement to fellow webcomic creator Raina Telgemeier (see How We Got Engaged) he took the time to answer our questions.

This month, many participants in the Daily Grind participated in "Draw like another grinder" week. Inspired by the occasion, Welton did a long overdue review of everybody's favorite Ironman Challenge.

Sokora Refugees is one of the most popular webcomics out there, and Tokyopop's print version is one of the best-selling States-produced manga out there. The two creators of a strip that combines high school angst with high fantasy, Segamu and Melissa DeJesus, gave us a very interesting interview.

It's back to school time, which has me hopping around like a bunny on crystal meth. I work at a school, so had many, many long days behind me. For most of the rest of the world, however, August is a time of bittersweetness. Even folks who don't operate on an academic schedule any more know that summer is waning, and autumn is coming, and it's time once more to prepare ourselves for a slide into winter.

Webcomics have been receiving a surprising amount of mainstream media attention this year. The Washington Post column, which was reprinted in several other papers, and the G4techtv feature on the WCCA both painted webcomics in a fairly favorable light. But when the New York Times critic Sarah Boxer's article on Infinite canvases and webcomics was published in August, it was not perceived as an endorsement of webcomics by most. It immediately gave rise to some furious discussion, most of which focused on whether the article was well-researched or not.

The Pen to Web Tutorial is a very basic resource for starting webcartoonists, covering the process of converting your pen-and-paper lineart into a fully-rendered comic strip using recent versions of Adobe Photoshop.

This week at Modern Humor Authority, Kristofer Straub takes on… HUMANITY! Or at least, those members who play with wikis.

It takes a special kind of person to be a teacher in today's world. With the horrors and plain out-and-out nuisances you hear about constantly on the news (including low pay, angry parents, belligerent students, etc), one wonders what kind of person would willingly embark on this career path. Now take that brave person and have him also able to see the world from the viewpoint of the children he's instructing; able to see things through the eyes of innocence, without the burden of maturity and worldliness tainting the rose-colored glasses they're wearing.