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Tracy White is a pioneer of webcomics.  Although she may not be as well known as James Kochalka and his American Elf series, Tracy's TRACED is an equally powerful set of stories about self that marks out a unique piece of journal comic territory.  From working on the early website GURL.com to being named one of Scott McCloud's personal top twenty webcartoonists, (and from our archives: Tracy did the cover art for one of our earliest covers in August 2003) to more recently receiving a nomination for Best Online Comic at this year's Ignatz Awards, Tracy's work has had a consistently interesting and moving presence in webcomics.

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Pokey the Penguin is a charming surrealist webcomic that celebrated its 10th year anniversary this past February.  Pokey wanders around the ARTIC CIRCLE (and not the Antarctic with the rest of his penguin bretheren) with his buddies: Little Girl, Headcheese the Hippo and Mr. Nutty the Snowman.

Justin Pierce reviewed the comic for ComixTalk back in 2003, summarizing things with this pithy statement:

Yes, it's true. I AM POKEY, too. How 'bout you?

All of which got me to thinking, what the world needs now is an interview with Steve Havelka, the alleged creator of Pokey the Penguin.   But since the only way I found to contact someone connected with Pokey was the pokey@yellow5.com email address and I got a response from the PENGUIN himself, I figured why not go with that?

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Daniel "Merlin" Goodbrey is one of the artists I know both myself and Frank "Damonk" Cormier were pretty into when ComixTalk launched in 2003.  So it’s a bit surprising to me that we’ve had a 5 year lapse in interviewing him.  These days Goodbrey has a day job teaching at in the School of Film, Music & Media at the University of Hertfordshire with a focus on Digital Animation.  And far from disappearing these past years, Goodbrey has continued to create memorable work on the web and in print as well as continue to experiment with hypercomics and other experimental notions in comics.  And not unlike the direction of "webcomics" as a whole, Goodbrey has increasingly blurred the lines between web and print in his creation of comics.

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Clint Hollingsworth creates the adventure saga, The Wandering Ones, which has been on Keenspot for its entire existence. The comic is set in the future after a manmade disaster leaves most of the world's population dead.  With more than 8 years of updates it's pretty epic in scale now. I caught up with Hollingsworth about still working on the strip, sticking with Keenspot and what's next.

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In the early half of the "naughts" Barry T. Smith appeared in webcomics with Angst Technology, a funny webcomic about a small videogame company.  He also created a webcomic about paintball called Weakend Warriors and one about a comic book shop called Sorry, We're Open.  All were pretty solid efforts and he certainly had a decent-sized audience for the time (for example, Angst Technology showed up at #9 on the initial "Most Read" list we did in 2003). He took a pretty big break from comics and only recently returned with his comic called InkTank.  I've been enjoying the new comic and was happy to get a chance to interview Smith about his return.

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I noticed this month that the webcomic Ménage à 3 had posted a note that it’s archives were now searchable by dialogue and was surprised to see a link not to the OhNoRobot service but one I had not heard of before… WordOwl.  WordOwl was created by Peter Spicer earlier this year and it compiles transcripts and provides a searchable index for several webcomics (11 at present).

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