The March of the Webcomics

Back in town with a rolling update for Friday (and the weekend). Should be new cover art and articles up on Sunday.

HEADLINES

If you missed it check out Comics Worth Reading's interview with Chris Crosby over Diamond's rejection of Keenspot's participation in this year's Free Comic Book Day. Crosby's various comics entities have participated in FCBD for several years now so it is surprising that they will not be allowed to participate in this year's event. If the given explanation are true, however, it's just more evidence of how insular the thinking of the monthly comic ~~book~~pamphlet industry is by restricting their promotional event to existing direct market titles.

BUSINESS

Satstu.com has an article on the state of the not-growing newspaper comic strip business. It also has a link to Chicken Wings which is a webcomic aimed at the aviation industry. In 2008 I'm going to predict that if there's enough public interest in something there will be at least one successful webcomic about it. How much public interest in a subject is enough? That's something I hope we can all get a better handle on this year – maybe with actual numbers and demographics.

CONGRATULATIONS

Congrats to Jeph and Christi on their engagement. And hope everyone caught Jeph's pretty cool little reader-participation holiday comic. My gift to the happy couple is that something happens in Questionable Content this year. I keed, I keed…

JUSTIFY MY HYPE

New Years Day, Goats wrapped up its multi-verse saga with Jon in charge of hell? The first comic in the next storyline is up now… Don't let anyone kid you – combining consistently funny updates with a (somewhat) coherent storyline is hard. Throw in some actual character development – that's ISO 9000 there, baby! Last year, Goats began to hit a stride of humor and unpredictablilty in a just-plain-fun story – let's hope Rosenberg can do it again in 2008.
A long way off but a firm date in May for the wedding of Brent and Jade should shake things up at PvP. PvP is more sitcom than storyline but every now and then Scott Kurtz successfully mixes up the elements of this long-running strip.
SMBC is brillant. I love the punchline picture / set-up text jokes (kind of a reverse humor-fu) – here's one of my recent favorites with the added wha! of mixing D&D and sex. Probably too PG-13 to ever fit comfortably in newspapers but somehow it'd be great to sneak this into mid-America's breakfast reading.

COMRADES IN ARMS

CONGA: The collective network of great artists is a pretty nifty site – not sure if its a collective or just a site spotlighting artists but either way its full of wonderfully cool art.