Morgan Wick

Reinventing Webcomics and Comic Syndicates

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And now it’s time to pull together pretty much everything I’ve said about the state of webcomics over the course of the past three or four months. (All of what, two or three posts?)

In a recent interview with Fleen, Brad Guigar let slip a hint as to some of the advice he and Scott Kurtz would have given comic strip syndicates if any of them had taken their consulting offer:

This whole conversation is about an innovation that I’m introducing that’s — to the best of my knowledge — unseen in webcomics at large. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s also a completely new way to envision a webcomic.

Take a look at how Scott has re-purposed his Web site. If you look closely, you’ll see some very important changes in how he’s positioning himself to his readers. He’s not just a webcartoonist. He’s pushing towards something greater than that. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that we were offering the syndicates.

He’s referring to the recent Penny Arcade-ization of PVP, hiding the comic behind the front page and pushing the news post to the front. At first glance, that seems to be all that’s changed; all the navigation elements relevant to having a webcomic are still there, including a presumably-updated “new readers” page. There’s considerable advertising and store shilling, but it’s hard to tell how Scott Kurtz is “pushing towards something greater than” being a mere “webcartoonist”.

But the plan clicks together into place when you scroll down to the very bottom of the page. There, you see a list of “projects” beyond PVP that Kurtz has his fingers in. Similarly, the top of the front page flashes three “featured projects”, none of which are the comic itself. It’s clear that what Kurtz (and I suppose, by extention, Guigar) have in mind isn’t quite the sort of webcomic-as-community I hinted at a while back, something that is very much seen in the single most popular webcomic on the Internet that Kurtz knows very intimately. Rather, Kurtz seems to be more in the business of building himself as a brand. If anything, it’s less Penny Arcade and more Morganwick.com.

I couldn’t begin to tease out what exactly these mad geniuses have in mind that would change webcomics forever. But I certainly have to wonder how exactly this would apply to newspaper comic strips and their syndicates. Would Kurtz and Guigar want syndicates as a whole to ape the new PVP, or individual comics? If the former, I’d imagine it would involve creating the idea less of a soulless corporate syndicate and more of a club of comic creators sitting around and shooting the breeze, perhaps working on other projects with one another.

The latter approach, which is probably more likely, would involve giving individual comics more of an identity than all but the most popular comics currently have on the syndicates’ web sites (and suggests a very different approach than the one I laid out), which even if any syndicate had taken the Kurtz-Guigar offer, they might be loath to do. It would involve encouraging comic creators to start blogging, to build a connection between themselves, the fans, and the comic that helps to tie them all together, to humanize the creators and make the comic just one aspect of the relationship between themselves and their readers – the most important aspect, maybe, but only one nonetheless.

To help understand what’s going on here, let’s consider one of the most successful newspaper comics still running, Dilbert. Scott Adams was always one of the more web-savvy of creators (printing his e-mail address in his comic before anyone else) and his comic’s site in many ways reflects his ability to nimbly shift into the modern digital age. There’s a lot going on here: the comic is in the center of the page, but there are also elements at the top linking to “mashups”, “animation”, Adams’ personal blog, and the store. Below the comic are three links to three different parts of the site: the blog, the “featured strip” in the archive, and a plug for the most recent book collection. Below that, then, are a couple other links.

It’s a very well-designed site that clearly reflects a lot of wisdom taken from webcomics and even some of what Kurtz is doing. But how might we make it better? One thing that jumps to mind is to push the blog to the front page. If the comic is then pushed to another page like Penny Arcade and PVP, everything on the site is tied closer together with the creator and the fandom, with Adams becoming the main personality and the comic forming one part of it, with perhaps the first panel of the current comic appearing in a little space alongside the blog. “The Dilbert Filter” should probably be moved to a more prominent location, perhaps a sidebar alongside the blog; note that all three elements are roughly analogous to elements on PVP‘s site. The comic, blog, and store are the three most important elements and the ones most emphasized on every page.

Dilbert is an example of a comic that could adopt the community approach, namely built around the workplace and all the idiots who inhabit it. Reader submissions have always been a big source of material for Adams. A message board would be an excellent addition here, for people to trade stories and the like. The comic could remain the main attraction, but the rest of the site could be set up to facilitate interaction among the fans and with the author. Dilbert could take some cues from User Friendly in this.

Thinking over this, I’m beginning to realize that as much as the news posts may be the real attraction of Penny Arcade, as much of a reason to put it on the front page as anything is to make Gabe and Tycho seem less like webcomickers and more like guys who make webcomics. It makes the creators look less like webcomic-producing machines and more like real people. Gabe and Tycho have taken this to an extreme, where the comic is really just an illustration to go along with the news post, but the same principle applies to a lesser extent to what PVP is doing (and for that matter, Ctrl+Alt+Del and The Order of the Stick as well), and to an even lesser extent to all webcomic news posts. Pushing the comic off the main page helps the site feel like more than a holding place for the comic. Good web design says visitors should be able to get to the content they want with as few clicks as possible, but if the syndicates want to try to make their creators feel less like soulless corporate hacks, good web design may go out the window, in favor of giving the comic a genuine “home page”. (And not one like what Garfield has; that one makes it seem more like a soulless corporate enterprise, while also proving the point that putting the comic on the front page doesn’t have to be the default.)

So yeah, as much of a lapdog for Bengo as I can seem sometimes, I have to praise Kurtz and Guigar here. They may very well have hit upon a rather fruitful approach to reinventing webcomics, and while it may seem like an odd blueprint to use comic-strip syndicates as the guinea pigs for, that may say more about the syndicates and their clients than about the blueprint, Kurtz, or Guigar. Still, I can’t help but wonder if what I said back in February might be more useful to the syndicates, given their culture and overall business model and the entirety of the landscape facing them.

UPDATE: Guigar himself clarifies his remarks in the comments. Also, I am left in complete awe at seeing him comment on my site.

Fun fact: The code for an overdose of sopor slime on Alternia is 418.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized Tavrisprite.)

Okay Hussie, now I know you’re just screwing with us.

There are no words I can come up with that can add anything to this. The only explanation I can imagine is that this is some sort of practical joke at the expense of the fanbase.

I mean… just… where do you even go with this? What can you do with this beyond the sheer lunacy of the very idea of throwing Vriska AND Tavros into Jane’s Kernelsprite? What’s next, will Roxy’s sprite be prototyped by Eridan and Feferi?

Either the in-comic death of the author is having effects that are spreading into the comic itself, or Hussie is high enough right now to put jelly on a hot god.

I hate my life right now.

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3:45 PM: I enter class hoping to find some sort of idea I can use as a jumping-off point for a post today.

4:15 PM: I find said idea and also realize I intended to write a post taking off on another idea I had. I begin writing the latter.

4:45 PM: Break time. People move positions such that I find myself in a place where I can’t get anything done for the rest of class.

5:50 PM: Half an hour of struggling to read a comic for a future review in the library.

6:25 PM: Leave campus.

7:25 PM: Get home, realize the school across the street is going to be making it impossible to get serious work done for the next two hours, and my mom and company aren’t helping.

9:40 PM: Mom and company start watching TV, which means I have more time where I’m not going to get stuff done other than having dinner.

10:30 PM: Mom and company stop watching TV. Naturally, I goof off a little in front of the TV myself.

11:30 PM: I finally get back to starting to write the post again, FIVE HOURS after I last attempted to work on it, intending not to allow me to rush myself… only to find I’m in no state to think coherently about it.

And you wonder why I wouldn’t be a fan of my current living and work situation.

(No lecturing me about working on my blog during class, please. Thank you.)

Windows Security Tools Missing after Malware/Virus Infection – How To Restore

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I’m starting to become a convert to the cause of Macs.

I spent much of the past week trying to clean up after my computer got hit with some malware, and I’m still not completely sure it’s entirely gone even after running multiple anti-malware and anti-virus programs for HOURS of my life I’ll never get back; two Windows background programs trigger anti-virus warnings and warnings from Windows Firewall when they shouldn’t, and I still can’t get to microsoft.com or any part of it without being redirected to a Hotmail login screen, on my laptop only.

The worst part, though, was that the virus apparently wiped all of Microsoft’s tools for protecting against malware and that sort of thing from the registry. That wouldn’t have been that bad, except Microsoft seems to be slow on the uptake about this for some reason, because I had to spend copious amounts of time hunting through various forum threads for every single program (not helped by the aforementioned microsoft.com issue) where the correct and rather simple solution was almost never the first one suggested and often reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows was brought up, often by supposedly trained Microsoft professionals, before some random dude shows up and solves the problem in a single link – always a link to a .reg file that, when run, puts the necessary stuff back in the registry automatically. (Not that I’m not considering reformatting and reinstalling anyway, given how far-reaching these tentacles are.)

So, in the possibly vain hope that no one else has to go through what I went through, I provide this handy list of the requisite .reg files to restore these programs to the registry. If I’m missing anything that should be there but isn’t, leave it in the comments. You may want to back up your registry before making any changes. Before starting, open the Start menu and click on the search box or “Run”, type services.msc, and run it, then verify that the below services are missing from the list.

Windows Security Center: wscsvc.reg (located inside ZIP file)

Windows Firewall: bfe.reg AND firewall.reg (You will need to run regedit from the Start menu search box or Run dialog, find the folder “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\BFE”, right-click on it, choose Permissions, and give at least yourself and possibly “Everyone” “full control” using the Add button; then go back to services.msc, find “Base Filtering Engine”, click it then click Start on the left side of the window, then click Windows Firewall, and click Start in the same place)

Windows Defender: windefend.reg

You will need to make sure to restart your computer after running these.

Unlike with the green sun, though, I don’t think there was no way it could have been presented clearly.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized anniversary laziness.)

Once again, I goofed up in my reading of a Homestuck flash, and once again I’d like to shift the blame to how confusing said flash was. But I don’t think I can do so entirely, because there’s a lot that snaps together, both about the flash and about all of Act 6, once it’s properly understood, right down to that long-unexplained “wriggling day” reference… while also raising as many questions as it answers.

It seems that Roxy and Dirk are, in fact, native to the time “years in the future” (over four centuries in fact!) when the Condesce/Crocker has ruled for some time and flooded the planet. That explains a lot about what we’ve seen over the course of the act, well beyond just what Hussie points out here. It puts into perspective Dirk’s future tense here vis-a-vis what we learn about the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff franchise in Act 6-2 (to the point it’s stunning in retrospect that it wasn’t glaringly obvious at the time for that reason alone). It gives an alternate explanation for why Roxy and Dirk know so much about the game, and explains the depth of Roxy’s commitment to the notion of the Batterwitch (and the witch’s copious appearances in the history of said franchise).

On the other hand… besides what it just plain doesn’t explain (namely, the lusii on Jake’s island, and the nature of the childhoods of Roxy and Dirk), and why they would withhold this aspect of themselves from Jane and Jake (I’m not convinced by the explanation Dirk gives), there’s also the fact that it renders the three-year gap the kids are making up completely meaningless. Even if Roxy and Dirk are ultimately the same age as Jane and Jake are at the time they’re communicating, the game is just as objectively tied to their timeframe as that of Jane and Jake. Then there’s the question of whether God Cat is shuttling between two time periods, if he’s screwing with people at two different points of his life, or whether there are two God Cats, and the question of whether the troll Jake saw has anything to do with the troll Roxy saw (which the subsequent intermission seems to give evidence for).

There’s also just how much technological prowess Dirk has contributed to the past, namely the robots sent to Jane and Jake, and the fact that Dirk (and his auto-responder) can control them (and detect their activities) remotely, which seems like it completely screws causality to bits. And then there’s the whole question of how these two time periods got so synched up in the first place, to the point that not only can Dirk serve as Jane’s server player, but so can his auto-responder, which screws up causality even more. (Well, more than it usually is in Homestuck.) The explanation we’re given in the intermission, “Trollian-like technology”, only raises the question of why Roxy and Dirk can’t simply contact Jane and Jake at any point in time they wish; clearly, the two timeframes are synched somehow.

It also suggests some interesting things about the origin of the game in this universe: namely, that Roxy must have hacked it off the Crockercorp servers after the invasion. Moreover, I can’t help but think the company planned on this, and that may help explain how the time periods got synched up, because Jane’s room contains an advertisement for the “alpha” game she’s about to play, but that game appears to only exist in the future. It’s possible that the Condesce imported the game itself from either the kids’ or trolls’ universes – and if the former, that may provide an excuse for how it’s pre-set up for the eventual arrival of the kids, down to what appears to be largely read as an unorthodox method of entry.

What happened in the intermission that just concluded? Well, the Wayward Vagabond was revived by a doomed-timeline god-tiered Feferi almost in passing. We learned not only that no one will prototype their sprite before entering the new session, but that there won’t even be a battlefield when we get there, destroyed by the Courtyard Droll for unknown reasons. We learned some really weird things about how the Scratch works, and it makes the troll session sound really, really unusual, in that it was the post-Scratch session that produced all the players for both sessions. We saw universe-warping god-dogs chase sprite cats. We got names for the two trolls encountered in Act 6-2, and seemed to confirm that they are, in fact, from the pre-scratch troll session.

And most weirdly of all, we got Hussie’s author avatar getting killed off by Lord English… and proposing marriage to Vriska. Yes, Hussie is indeed prone to trolling his fanbase.

I think I’m getting sick of Hussie’s penchant for these sorts of “everything you know is wrong” shocking swerves. “Roxy and Dirk are actually from the future! The guy making the comic in-universe is dead!” It’s just a random twist thrown in to make us ooh and aah at his ability to pull off a twist, with the former complicating things as much as anything. It’s the sort of thing that has me seriously considering dropping Homestuck. We’re two sub-acts in and I still don’t feel as connected to these characters as I have to the kids and trolls. I’m mostly holding out hope that they will finally show up in the new session soon. You have no idea how relieved I was when the intermission started – back to the characters we’ve actually been following for nearly three years! I never intended to be a regular reader of Homestuck, and if the kids and trolls don’t show up soon or the new characters don’t give me a reason to care about them, I may be one no longer.

Fox Sports Takes Over Saturday Nights

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I’ve figured Saturday night, so abandoned by the broadcast networks, was an ideal sports night for some time. Way back in 2005, I believe it was, I wondered why a college football game between Virginia Tech and Miami (FL) with massive BCS implications was airing on ESPN. It made so much sense for ABC to air college football in primetime, and this was a perfect example of a game that would easily have aired there under the circumstances. In other words, I had the idea for “Saturday Night Football” before ESPN did. (If I’d only known how ESPN would treat ABC in subsequent years…)

When “Saturday Night Football” was announced, I wondered if other sports would colonize Saturday primetime, perhaps even to the point of it becoming as sports-saturated as weekend afternoons. It happened in bits and pieces here and there, but I have to admit I didn’t initially have much of a reaction to Fox revealing they would be giving virtually their entire Saturday slate to sports. I guess I just figured it was inevitable at some point.

The surprise is that it is Fox taking this step. Up until recently, Fox seemed to be the network that still cared about Saturday the most; while ABC and NBC aired movies and CBS aired reruns, burned-off shows, and “48 Hours”, Fox had a consistent, ratings-producing lineup of “COPS” and “America’s Most Wanted”. But “AMW” was all but cancelled, turned into a series of occasional specials, this past fall, and now Fox is cutting back on its “COPS” order to give the night over to the sports division, which will fill it up with baseball, NASCAR, UFC, NFL preseason games, and in the fall, regular-season college football for the first time in Fox’s history (and potentially one NFL divisional-round game come January).

I expect that by the end of the decade, all four major networks will have largely turned their Saturday nights over to sports. A key could be the upcoming Major League Baseball contract renegotiations. Fox has already greatly increased their inventory of primetime baseball games, to be branded “Baseball Night in America”; I expect baseball will, with whatever network they shack up with, make primetime the core of the main broadcast package (certainly only the holder of the baseball contract can reasonably expect to reliably fill Saturday nights with anything worth showing for much of the summer), possibly even to the point of inverting Saturdays. Right now most games not airing on Fox are in primetime, partly due to Fox’s exclusivity preventing Extra Innings from carrying any game in their window. I could see a situation develop where most games are played during the daytime on Saturdays with only those games picked to air on the network playing in primetime.

Options abound for the other three networks for optimizing their Saturday primetime, though some of them depend on picking up more contracts and renegotiating existing ones. ABC already airs some NBA playoff games in primetime; they could experiment with airing a few high-profile regular season games there as well. The SEC’s contract with CBS and ESPN restricts CBS’ ability to air more than one primetime game (it took a lot of hoop-jumping to get LSU-Alabama aired there this year), but that contract may have been reopened as a result of realignment, and CBS could air some college basketball games in primetime on a regular basis. NBC is probably the least well-equipped of the networks to fill out Saturday nights due to their lack of suitable contracts, but they could air more Stanley Cup Playoff games in primetime on their main network on Saturdays if Canada’s CBC (for which Saturday has always been “Hockey Night in Canada”) would rather have them there, and have Notre Dame put more and better games in primetime.

One interesting side effect could be a potential bright spot for people like me who bemoan the march of sports events off broadcast. If broadcast networks decide they would like to get the higher ratings for sports events on Saturdays at all costs, they could nab sports events that might have aired on cable otherwise. Obviously there’s a limit to how low-profile you can go before it makes more sense to stick with what they were doing before, but you could see events that would otherwise have aired on ESPN show up on ABC, NBC Sports Network events airing on NBC, and so forth. Reports of the death of sports on broadcast appear to be greatly exaggerated.

An open letter to the Internet Explorer team:

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If I exit Internet Explorer, and certain processes/pages don’t close for whatever reason, and I have to use the task manager to close them…

…then when I reopen Internet Explorer, the pages associated with the processes I had to close manually shouldn’t be the only ones that reopen.

Of course, what you should really have is an option to automatically resume the last session upon starting again (instead of hunting through the menu unless it crashed) like, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER BROWSER IN EXISTENCE.

(Still ticked off after planning to write a big post about Fox’s new Saturday night sports experiment and get a few other things done besides and instead spending most of my free time all day having to wipe the SAME piece of malware off my computer TWICE…)

Wha… what’s this? It… it’s an ACTUAL WEBCOMIC REVIEW on Da Blog! Oh, happy day!

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(From The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Click for full-sized resurrection interruption.)

For whatever reason, despite – or perhaps because of – their popularity in comic books and among nerds, superheroes are not that popular of a subject for webcomics.

Oh, there are webcomics, even reasonably popular ones, about superheroes; it’s just that none of them have ever reached the level of popularity of a Penny Arcade or xkcd. Moreover, even fewer play the concept entirely straight; at the least they tend to be painfully self-aware of the tropes of the genre. Either it flirts with other genres, deconstructs the trappings of superheroes, or is constantly joking about those trappings, perhaps all of the above.

So perhaps it’s not too surprising that perhaps the most well-known superhero webcomic is a straight-up parody.

It’s kind of hard to describe The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, and not because it’s just completely random. No, Wonderella is hard to describe because it’s undergone considerable evolution over the course of its run, without really changing much at all. That may or may not make any sense, but it never underwent anything remotely approaching Cerebus Syndrome, yet the characters and nature of the humor underwent considerable evolution regardless.

Wonderella is a superhero who, well… does anything but go superheroing, and she’s not even above doing a little of that, though rarely in the typical fashion (I can probably count the number of times she’s actually depicted on-panel using her alleged powers on one hand). She doesn’t particularly care much for it either, preferring to lie around and get wasted, and often borders on the sociopathic. The only person she doesn’t completely mistreat is probably her sidekick, although her relationship with her archvillain can take on vaguely romantic overtones. At least in the strips that made the comic popular, she’s also incredibly entitled, is only concerned with how much she can milk her brand for, and is utterly ignorant and uncaring about anything that happens in the broader world, especially outside the United States… in other words, she’s what a conservative thinks a liberal cariacture of an American is. As such, many of these strips take on a rather satiric tone.

I speak of “the strips that made the comic popular” because I’ve noticed a definite shift as the comic goes along. Now a good number of the strips that come along are parodies of other things. Wonderella’s sociopathy is still there, and she still tends to be rather ditzy, but seems to be considerably toned down, and certainly seems to be less often the focus. I’m also seeing something closer to straight-up superheroing cropping up more often. There are some similarities throughout the run of the comic, especially Aaron Pierce’s penchant for rather surrealist humor, which could take the form of a seemingly stream-of-consciousness procession in the earlier comics, and all in all the shift is probably imperceptable if you’re not looking for it, but it’s definitely there.

Wonderella is funny enough that I originally intended to write this review to make clear that, despite what may have come across in some of my past reviews, I don’t have anything against pure humor comics without much story, so why can’t I get excited about it now? It’s not that it’s bad, or even that it’s not good. Perhaps it’s just that it’s not consistently funny enough, not consistently laugh-out-loud funny, to maintain my interest, especially considering it updates only once a week, meaning it has the same problem that befalls all comics with that infrequent an update schedule (no jokes about Order of the Stick, please). You might think that means it doesn’t take that much additional toll to add it to my RSS reader, but what it really means is that I’m not really receiving enough bang each week to really justify it.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that I just can’t get into the newer comics the way I could the old ones. That may sound like I’m accusing Wonderella of jumping the shark, but honestly I can’t really detect any decrease in quality to go along with the shift. But it no longer seems like Wonderella is the focus of her own comic, but more a conduit for the larger sorts of stories Pierce wants to tell. A lot of the time in the parodies, you can swap out Wonderella for someone completely different and it’ll read much the same way. It’s possible that, like many webcomic artists, Pierce ran out of stories to tell with his original concept and branched out into whatever stories he wanted to tell that he could shoehorn Wonderella into. Which I guess really does sound like I’m saying it’s jumped the shark, but I really do feel like the more recent comics haven’t really slipped that much from the older ones, though it is the case that Wonderella is less interesting as her sociopathy becomes de-emphasized. Still, the newer comics just aren’t quite my cup of tea.

Would I have put Wonderella in my RSS reader back when Wonderella’s sociopathy was still the focus? Maybe, but the fact remains I can’t get into it now. Wonderella has lost its heart, the reason for its appeal in the first place, and what’s left is something of an empty shell. Perhaps that’s something you might still find funny, but for me there’s nothing there, nothing to make any sort of impression on me, certainly not coming once a week.

First impressions of Jim Rome’s new show

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Because of classes, the ESPN shows I watch and the inability to switch channels with no one home, I wasn’t able to see the first episode of Jim Rome’s new show on the CBS Sports Network, Rome. I did, however, watch the second episode on Wednesday, so what’s my verdict after what I said about his ESPN show, Jim Rome is Burning, a while back?

While the show’s structure is fundamentally the same as JRIB, it seems to have embraced the rushed nature of Rome’s takes and has condensed them considerably. JRIB normally saw four takes in the first segment, maybe five. That Wednesday, I saw seven different takes in the first segment, and that only lasted about six minutes. During the last segment, I saw a total of nine takes, almost tweet-length, or short enough for PTI‘s Big Finish, during the last segment; on its predecessor, rarely was there even three “Final Burns”.

This simple change turns out to produce two segments good enough for me to watch on a regular basis. Back in December, I threw out a whole swath of potential changes to the opening segment, from no longer reusing takes from his radio show to ditching the music in the background to getting a cohost to introduce each topic. Several other changes have been introduced – for example, Rome is now sitting down in the first segment, though it’s harder to notice than you might think – but as it turns out, all it took to improve Rome’s show considerably is one simple change with ripple effects on other aspects, as the topics now seem to flow better.

However, it only produces two segments like this. The fact is that the show completely grinds to a halt in the middle two segments. “Goin’ In” seems to come closer to restoring the original intent of the Forum, but it’s a jarring contrast to the fast-paced “Rome Wants” segment that follows it. Considering the pace the rest of the show goes at, it’s worth wondering whether the bookend segments have been made too fast. Ultimately, speeding up Rome’s takes only serves as a band-aid to the larger problem, to the extent that the show really feels like a series of disconnected segments than a cohesive whole.

One thing Friday’s and Monday’s shows, which ditched “The Newsmaker” interview segment in favor of a second “Goin’ In” segment, put into focus for me is that “The Newsmaker” grinds the show to a halt more than “Goin’ In”; the latter segment actually makes sense as a way to go more in-depth on some of the topics covered in brief in the opening segment. Perhaps that should be made the case full-time, but there’d be even more of a contrast if “The Newsmaker” was placed in the penultimate spot and immediately followed by “Rome Wants” (though two “Goin’ In” segments full-time is probably overkill).

At least when the show was on ESPN there was limited space in the schedule for it to air; on CBS Sports Network, there is no excuse for the show not to be a full hour. Do you know what airs on CBS Sports Network in the 6:30 ET timeslot immediately following Rome? A re-air of the episode of Rome that just aired! The only conclusion I can come to is that CBS is anticipating adding another sports talk/debate show in the following time slot at some unspecified point in the future. If the show doesn’t expand, though, and “The Newsmaker” is going to be kept, I would suggest at least trying moving it to the penultimate segment.

Also, Rome really needs a better phrase to start the show with than “Let’s do this”.

ComicMix “Webcomics March Madness” Tournament Blows Up

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I’ve become fascinated with the “March Madness”-style tournament the ComicMix website has been running, partly because such a structured excersize is right up my alley, but also because it’s blown up into something no one could have ever anticipated, one that’s gotten multiple webcomickers’ competitive juices flowing, helped by the increasing cash prizes for comics making the Final Four. I only ever heard of it because of various webcomickers’ linking to it.

The site did much the same thing last year, but that stayed fairly self-contained and saw several fairly obscure webcomics having considerable success. That’s far from the case this year; the only comic in the Sweet 16, let alone later rounds, that I didn’t recognize is something called Romantically Apocalyptic, which knocked off the likes of Girls with Slingshots and defending champion Erfworld before finally falling to Goblins in the Elite 8, in a George Mason-esque run that would be like if a 14-seed in the NCAA Tournament somehow reached the Elite 8. The very first round saw every contest get more votes than the final round last year, and it’s only gotten more so from there; one particularly important creator has been Andrew Hussie, whose linking to the tournament has caused the site to repeatedly crash (which seems to be the case with everything MSPA touches). I’m positively scared of what they’re planning next month. I can’t imagine what this thing is going to look like next year, but I’ll probably be following it closely every step of the way.

When the final four came down to MSPA v. Gunnerkrigg Court and Goblins v. Order of the Stick, I figured for all the world that this gigantic showdown would, against all odds, come down to the two comics I currently regularly follow (although more on MSPA next week), MSPA and OOTS. However, in the end, that didn’t end up happening; Goblins managed to survive against OOTS, while the showdown between MSPA and the Court came down to an earth-shattering, apocalyptic, site-crashing showdown that, when the dust cleared and the site came back up, ended with the Court prevailing by a grand total of forty-six votes.

Now the final battle is in progress between Goblins and the Court, which if you wish and are familiar with the comics, you can take part in (or at least follow) here. Neither are comics that I myself have reviewed, but they’re both comics I’ve considered. In fact, I’ve had plans to review the Court and Questionable Content in some order since 2009, and when they met in the Elite 8 I decided to use the result of that matchup to at least help determine which to review first. Now, however, I’ve decided that the winner of the tournament, whichever it is, will be the subject of a review in two weeks’ time. Both I intend to review before the end of May, but this will determine which gets the immediate spotlight, and which I end up delaying until next month.

What? Of course I’m still a webcomic reviewer. Why are you laughing?