Random Internet Discovery

Give yourself a crash course in massage, New Age-style!

I may just go to biweekly webcomic posts for the near future, rather than just skipping one week.

So I am planning on releasing two parts of the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series tomorrow (Friday), but to make up for today, not Tuesday. I probably should just give up and make it a Monday-Wednesday-Friday series, but new developments keep coming in the areas I’m planning on getting to. Doing the requisite reading-up and research on Scott McCloud’s views is the hardest part.

I bought Reinventing Comics today, but I’m not happy about it. It was the only copy left at the store (the third time I’ve been to this particular Barnes and Noble), so I was antsy about stealing it from someone else who might want to buy it; I didn’t have much use for it as a continuing resource (though I may refer back to it on later projects); and I didn’t like frittering away an entire $25 gift card on it. (Now that I’ve been reading it, I have another problem: the paper, unlike my copy of Understanding Comics, is really cheap and dehydrates my hands. This is not worth the same price as Understanding.) I ain’t returning it at this point, but at some point I probably will sell it. HarperPerennial’s own site was the only place online with any interior items from the book, and only bits and pieces of it at that; at this point, given the point of the second part of the book, McCloud should consider just making the whole book available from his own web site for free or at least a reduced price.

Komix! has been one of my more consistent advertisers (it’s at least bid on all three of my square boxes), and I finally decided to check it out this week. It’s a “webcomics aggregator” that allows one to “subscribe” to one’s favorite webcomics; I was attracted to its RSS function, and signed up because of the wording of the description in the FAQ, and then realized that the RSS-feed was comic specific and I didn’t need to subscribe to read each comic’s feed, only to track my current progress through the archives. Which, from an RSS perspective, seems kinda pointless.

But while this obviously makes it easier to keep track of the RSS-free strips I’m preparing to review (and could provide Sandsday with a stopgap RSS feed down the line), strips like 8-Bit Theater and Sluggy Freelance aren’t quite off the hook, because Komix makes a point of adding one new tracked strip every day and the number of tracked strips it has indicate it’s maybe less than a year old. Oh, and “there’s nothing else quite like this out there” (though I doubt that; this site serves a similar if not identical purpose). Sluggy especially gets little to no slack because there is no archive page for today’s strip (only the front page), which means Komix is perpetually a day behind.

(Komix also goes so far as to have discussion boards for “every comic and strip”, which positively scares me…)