I'd stopped reading PvP, but John Solomon posted this link on Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad and like a fool, I followed it. Sad, really. Like seeing that funny uncle you remember as a kid later in life as a vomit-encrusted drunk.

PVP - at some point I realized that all the characters except Skull and a couple of minor ones were jerks, and I didn't really care what they were doing.

Arthur, King of Time and Space - The art was already on the low side of primitive, but lately he's been doing a bunch of them in an even more primitive style where the characters are just geometric shapes--the conceit is that this is the style that Arthur-the-webcartoonist uses. The fact is that Arthur-the-webcartoonist is a lazy hack, and Paul Gadzikowski becomes one whenever he posts another of these strips.**

8-bit Theater - was one of the first webcomics I started reading, and is probably still the best and most ambitious sprite-comic...but the funny left the building long ago.

Be warned, it's not for the faint-of-heart, both in terms of the language it uses and just how sickeningly bad some of the comics it links to are (and not in a hyperbolic, oh, I get the vapors looking at bad art kind of way, but a that is disgustingly vile, racist, hateful I wish I hadn't seen it kind of way). And it's funny.

A second caveat is that it's become a group blog, with other pseudonymous authors besides the original John Solomon...and they (Mike Saul and Lilith Esther so far, but who knows how many more they'll add) don't have his talent for invective.

Essential Defenders, Vol. 1 (Marvel Essentials)

by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Len Wein, Gene Colan, Ross Andru, Sal Buscema, Jack Abel, Marie Severin, Bob Brown, Herb Trimpe

A birthday present from Jeff, this volume features the founding of the 70's Marvel super-team: the Defenders, originally an "un-team" consisting of Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk, and The Sub-Mariner, who would briefly band together to fight some world-threatening menace before once again going their lonely separate ways. The first stories are scattered among the various titles the heroes appeared in, plus Marvel Feature, before they were actually given a book of their own.

What's truly remarkable about this is just what a god-awful writer Roy Thomas was. My rose-colored nostalgia glasses don't kick in until well into the series, so it was something of a shock to me to find it nearly unreadable--a wince-inducing mix of bombastic dialog, narration that seems to assume that the art will be indecipherable, and stunningly incoherent plot. The plotting nadir, though, was was probably reached in Marvel Feature Presents: The Defenders #1 (the sixth tale in the book), which really does make me wonder whether Thomas was drunk or stoned when he penned it. Let me try to convey the truly mind-boggling stupidity of this tale...

So far, the decisions have been made on:
Genre: SF
Title: Infinity on 30 Credits a Day
Logo: (see the site)
Collective Name for the Participants: The Infinite Monkeys
Core Cast: Daisy Hoshino, Jimmers, and Jake Starr (see the site for descriptions)

and voting is currently under weigh for the character references sketches for the core cast, favorites icon, and prose description of the opening scene.

You can follow the link to see all the comics that I track...

The web-comic that started it all (for me) is now being mirrored at Modern Tales Strip Lounge.

I'm always looking for a better way to read webcomics, and I've found a new one. The site is called Piperka (Bulgarian for paprika), for no discernable reason, and it's a web comic bookmarker. That is to say, you create a free account and pick the comics off the list of the ones that it monitors that you wish to subscribe to. (If one you read isn't on the list, you can use a webform to request that Kari Pahula, the site's owner, add it. So far this happens very quickly.) You can then visit the updates page and see which of your comics have updated recently and how many updates you've missed. Click on the link and you go to the comic's page--Piperka doesn't copy content, it just links to it.
If that was all there was to it, there wouldn't me much difference between Piperka and just, say, using an RSS reader. Well, besides the fact that Piperka doesn't need the site to have an RSS feed. The brilliant bit, though, is that Piperka lets you bookmark a site partway through its archive by entering the url of the page you last read, and it keeps track of unread from that point on. In fact, it goes that one better and provides a bookmarklet (a snippet of javascript you can make into a bookmark in your toolbar) that when you click on it will update the bookmark on Piperka so that next time you visit the updates page, it counts from the new position.
Up 'til now I've been using Bloglines to keep track of comics updates (and RSSPect to add RSS feeds to the comics that don't have them), but I've had to keep track of archives I've been partway through by keeping seperate bookmarks and adding new ones to mark my new position (and cleaning out the old ones by hand). In addition, RSSPect is pretty good for what it does, but there are some pages that it seems to have trouble detecting changes on (I suspect that they use the same name for the current comic, only changing the name when it moves into the archive, which fools RSSPect into thinking nothing has changed on the page it's watching), and others that change much more frequently than the comic actually changes. Piperka doesn't seem to have these problems (I'm not sure, but I suspect it's looking for the archive to grow a new page as its indicator that a comic has been added), and I'm totally in love with being able to work my way through an archive a few at a time and just supplanting my old bookmark with a press of a button. I also appreciate that I can have dozens of archives that I've marked and I don't have to worry about creating a huge unwieldy menu or having to organize them into seperate folders.
From now on, it looks like I'm using Piperka.

Weapon of Choice

On that note, though, I've finally updated my webcomic !