My policy is to link to web-available comics rather than copy them here unless I want to focus on a particular frame or other detail. This next thing is kinda borderline, even more confusing because (to quote its legal notice) “Cat and Girl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License”, and I’ve been too dumbed down lately by LOLmemes to effectively parse that.

Anyway, a condensed (like Campbells Soup) version of a recent Cat and Girl:

And probably the greatest turn of phrase ever in Achewood (assuming you have followed the plotline of The Great Outdoor Fight):

And, of course, this frame from the co-creator of LOLBOTS must be immortalized:

PZ Meyers, biologist, godless liberal and science blogger has raised the (sarcastic) outrage flag over a couple of cartoons about Atheism (one from my personal fave Bizarro).

A quick search of all the newspaper comics that were searchable found damn few other Atheist references…
“Reality Check” had something similar to Bizarro, but different:

“The Buckets” made an interesting point (that probably got some nasty letters from non-atheists):

The always thought-non-provoking column filler “Graffiti”:

“Soup to Nutz” scores with the classic ‘if you’re going to insult religion, make sure most of the readers think it’s somebody else’s religion’ gambit:

The only “Pearls Before Swine” to come up in a search for ‘atheist’ was part of a story arc about a cookie with its head bitten off:

And here’s the only thing a search for “godless” brought up:

Of course, webcomics should be a little more open-minded. The main character in “Nukees” is an outspoken and frequently argumentative atheist (and, apparently, a dopelganger for the strip’s creator).

“Irregular Webcomic” seems to believe that atheists are people too (or at least Lego People).

Good ol’ D.S. may not believe in God, but it believes in Dog.

And, of course, Goats KNOWS that God is dead, because its main characters ate Him.

I’m surprised I didn’t find more in the ohnorobot webcomic search. Anybody have some totally obvious examples that will make me thoroughly embarassed that I missed?

My very first adventure in writing about comics (as well as my first piece to be weblished at MSNBC.com) was about the return of Opus the Penguin to the Sunday funnies, in the form of a ficticious interview with the beloved waterfowl. This resulted in minimal fame or fortune but many more opportunities to write for the site’s Entertainment section AND an exchange of emails with Berkeley “Don’t Call Me Berk” Breathed that remained the closest I’d ever come to a Legendary Newspaper Cartoonist until Diesel Sweeties got syndicated and I glommed onto a third-teir position in rstevens’ entourage.

Naturally for a cartoonist whose career began back when there was still some hope for the medium we call krispy kleenex, his attitude toward web-based comicking has been at times described as (a) reticence, (b) reluctance, (c) avoidance, (d) abhorrence or (e) run-away-screaming-like-a-little-girl-ance. After much delay, he finally accepted a place at the comics.com portal last year, but his is the last Sunday comic to be updated, always after all the krispy kleenex have been dropped in all the bushes.

But now, Breathed has made a deal for the latest opus of Opus to appear at Salon.com, alongside Carol Lay’s WayLay, Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug and Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World, home of another comic penguin.
Along with the announcement comes a non-fictitious interview with the comicker, containing some fascinating stuff:

1: He thankfully puts to rest the rumor that he might consider killing off his trademark character.
2: He sadly puts to rest the rumors that there may be an Opus Movie in the next umpteen years
3: He astutely assesses the satirical value of the current Administration
4: He offers a piece of obvious advice to would-be kid-lit authors: “If you write it, draw it”
5: He explains WHY he doesn’t want you to call him “Berk”.

But he doesn’t explain the incredible break with continuity in the latest comic with his “Bloom County” character of Binkley returned to child size three years after it was revealed that he had grown up, experienced ‘a disastrous first kiss’ and become a Tibetan eunuch monk.

I have written before about 9 Chickweed Lane’s slide into weirdness, but Brooke McEldowney’s other comic, the web-based Pibgorn has somehow slipped between the gaping cracks of this irregularly scheduled blog.

For those of you living under different rocks than I have the last five years, Pibgorn is a renegade fairy who believes “there must be more to life than depositing dew drops on dandelions and sleeping under mushrooms.” Her romance with a mortal human church organist becomes a triangle with a sultry succubus (is there any other kind?) who at first tries (and kind of succeeds) to kill her, but ultimately becomes reluctantly committed to protecting her. For almost four years, Pib bounced around various fantasy scenarios (as well as borrowing from such sci-fi as “Men in Black” and “Quantum Leap”) and even added as a cast member Chickweed’s otherworldly oddball Thorax, all the time pulling out all the stops with trippy, phantasmagorial and semi-erotic (as much as comics.com would allow) full-color comic art. Then, in early 2006, McEldowney took an extended detour into a 13-month-long re-creation of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” using the Bard’s original words, a 1920s-30s New York setting, and all the major characters of BOTH Pibgorn and 9 Chickweed Lane as the play’s cast, followed by a fourth-wall pulverizing series of ‘interviews’ with the cast and the temperamental director, Brooke McEldowney himself. After that, Pibgorn settled back into its fairy-mortal-succubus triangle, interrupted by yet another previously-unexplained otherworldly influence when the comic was suddenly and mid-cliffhangerly removed from the comics.com site.

The loyal fans of Pibgorn were up in arms. The more weary followers of the comic just saw it as another creative meltdown. McEldowney started a LiveJournal blog to assure his fans that Pib would return and later point out where: the rival newspaper-domnated comics portal gocomics.com.

The gocomics debut was a very-soft-reboot to the beginning of the new post-Shakespearean story, leaving the loyal audience waiting to get back to the point where it left off. But also raising the question “Why the switch?”

Some rather convincing circumstantial evidence appeared in that LiveJournal outlet between the exit from comics.com and the debut on gocomics.com… although, interestingly, those posts have since been deleted. Ah, but nothing ever really disappears from the Web, thanks to the Internet stalker’s best friend, the Google Cache.

McEldowney gave a demonstration about the ‘challenges’ of dealing with editors by showing three versions of the last frames of a recent strip. In it, the naked Geoff is being ‘attended to’ by the sexy/demonic Drusilla.

Geoff: Where are my swimming trunks?
Dru: Oh, hereabouts. But first, let me check you for broken bones.,, Now, does this hurt when I squeeze it?

Version #1 (which he was not surprised was rejected by the comics.com editor)

Geoff: Hey! There are no bones there!
Dru: Patience… Patience.

Version #2 (also rejected)

Geoff: Hey! There are no bones there!
Dru: Call me thorough…

Version #3 (what was weblished on comics.com)

(Also, the words “broken bones” in the previous frame were replaced with “fractures”)
Geoff: I think you need a copy of Grey’s Anatomy.
Dru: I’m not interested in Grey or his anatomy.
Obviously, a far inferior gag, especially considering the popularity of the Grey’s Anatomy TV show.

So, I waited with baited breath for that comic to come up in the gocomics.com stream. And this Wednesday it did… and…. it was Version #1for the win!

Now, this means one of two things. Either gocomics.com has promised and delivered Mr. McEldowney a much freer hand OR he slipped it in instead of the previously weblished #3 and the gocomics editors weren’t looking because, hey, comics.com already ran it. Which would explain why he pulled the blog entry… to hide the switch from the editors. If so, YOU’RE BUSTED! If not, I apologize for impugning your integrity.

In another deleted LiveJournal post, Brooke McEldowney says…

In the parry and thrust of life, I have neglected to address one little issue that has arisen among my readers – that is, the canard that I hate the whole stinking lot of you and think you’re a gaggle of saw-toothed boobs and beefwits. This observation arose over my commentary about reader reaction to my Pibgorn version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (now dubbed, by some of you, “A Pibsummer Night’s Dream”). I tried to be clear in defining what made a reader a beefwit in my estimation, i.e., the disposition to rain down invective and verbal abuse because I was imposing Shakespeare on the unprepared mind.

Allow me to illustrate the distinction between beefwit and non-beefwit, as selected at random from my mailbag during the run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

BEEFWIT: “Knock it off! What kinda hitshed are you?! Dump this fake old English carp and draw me some body-painted naked babes, you sock-cucking jerk!”

NOT A BEEFWIT: “Frankly, although I appreciate your effort at a new setting for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ I find, all things said and done, that I prefer a more classical interpretation, something in line with Royal Shakespeare Company productions of earlier years. In addition, I believe the employment of Elizabethan English in the context of a cartoon has not been your most successful enterprise, you sock-cucking jerk.”

My personal opinion of the “Pibsummer” series is: I applaud Mr. McE’s effort to bring something Shakespearian to the masses, with the knowledge (I hope) that it involved traversing a minefield of cultural problems, and was happy that he chose the one play in which I had had a minor role in a College production. There is nothing inherently wrong with changing the locale as he did, in fact, it is so common that the fake-news source The Onion recently had an article titled: “Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended”. Some of the ‘casting’ was excellent, Pibgorn as Puck, Thorax as the Duke, but the inclusion of characters from “9 Chickweed Lane” in some of the roles just felt strange. Like making the amateur theatrical troupe an “all-girl group” (an intriguing and literate translation from the all-male acting profession of Shakespeare’s time) except for Chickweed’s Amos. And having Edda and Seth as two of the star-crossed lovers. And changing Hermia’s father Ageus to mother Agea, just to include Gran (I must admit… that one bothered me because in the College production I alluded to above, I played Ageus). But for anyone who reads Chickweed (an overwhelming majority of Pibgorn’s readers), it was a distraction. One other thing from my experience with the play: in the final act, the performance for the Duke by the amateur actors, while considered very comical in its time, is terribly anti-climactic for modern audiences. My College production edited it down severely; Pibgorn seemed to drag it out. And then the ‘post-production interviews’ not only collapsed the Fourth Wall like Building 7 of the WTC, it also gave the impression that McEldowney would do anything to further delay returning to Pibgorn’s regular format. And when the ending is the worst part, it’s hard to remember all the good parts that came before. And that’s my message to Mr. McEldowney, you sock-cucking jerk.

I’m going to do a general post on all the stuff that doesn’t need an in-depth post on a (hopefully) daily basis. Let’s see how long I can keep it up.

Ever wonder WHY a certain famous scene in the Original Star Wars looked different in later editions? David Morgan-Irregular shows us.

“Goats” returns from hiatus just in time for the Official Goats Goat to - uh - leave us waiting.

“Wapsi Square” is starting what looks like a very significant flashback for those of us who have lost track of who’s who,and more importantly, who’s WHAT.

The Indexer has finally done for the Seven Dwarfs what she previously did for the Seven Deadly Sins.

GG gives us The Steampunk Starbucks.

In Achewood, even miniature golf is EX-TREEEM.

In what may be one of the highest honors ever given to a webcomic artist, Real Life Comics’ Greg Dean has been named “Best Peasant” at “Spamalot” on Broadway (scroll down). (Is this the first time I’ve shown a real photograph here?) It sure dwarfs Brad Guigar’s honor of his newspaper comic “Phables” being named the Best Newspaper Column in Philadelphia, right?

Hmmm… a “Kevin and Kell” that you don’t have to be anthropomorphic to get…

One of T-Rex’s greatest quotes ever (from last Friday): href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=1014">“The problem with relationships is they involve more than one person”.

Silly question: Why does the “Girls With Slingshots” fund-raising hiatus remind me of a PBS Pledge Break?

All the best stuff in the webcomics I mentioned yesterday, so…

Not because it’s good…

Recycled Mutt & Jeffs from decades ago show that weird is nothing new…

I’m almost Positive that Something Positive’s R.K.Milholland is coming to MY neighborhood. Webcomickers NEVER come to San Luis Obispo. (That’s why I thought this would be a safe hiding place). Still, it’s going to be for a Gaming Con, not a Comics Con, but still… one of the legends in the short history of webcomickery is going to be nearby enough for me to meet personally.

Why don’t I just save the trouble and paste my face on Jason’s body… or better yet, just airbrush out 80% of Jason’s hair. There! It’s Wendell.

Here is Sinfest at its most sinful: Forgive Me Father for I Am a Happy Little Piggy

This Calvin and Hobbes rerun got voted up on the Reddit:

And the comicker behind Drabble discovers the truth…

No, he can’t handle the truth…

The best way to haul out a tired tired old cliche is to make a joke out of reminding you it’s a tired old cliche, right?

Not really.

And this is either SO VERY WRONG or just SO VERY PUNNY:

Gonna get me a Cat and Girl Sticker for the price of a postage stamp. Eight years of comics and the Cat has never LOLed and the Girl has never Gone Wild. That’s good!

Here’s a pretty good handling of the ‘too old to do another sequel’ meme.

Dr. McNinja (or, more accurately, one of his sidekicks) makes another funny: “Wait a second… that was a clean, crisp, caffeine-free 7up, the Uncola, not the Undead!”

Greetings, True Believers! David Willis gives us Iron Man’s side of the story!
This week, Over the Hedge has been punching holes in the 4th wall with a “Mail Bag” sequence, and after some absurd yet unsurprising gags about Hammy’s eyes, Verne’s shell (although adding ‘the old guy’ was a nice touch) and RJ’s annual shower…



…today they entered the realm of ‘Furries’…

I eagerly await the next two days to see if “Over the Hedge” goes totally “Over the Top”…

Everybody who is anybody seems to be in New York for the MoCCA Art Festival, which apparently has nothing to do with Mo Rocca, or even with this tiny creature named Mocha (who appears to be attacking Brock Stalkley’s little brother in this video). Except of course for Mr. Positive, who is just down the street from me at this moment. Now I dearly LOVE where I live, but even I would rather be in New York this weekend.

Back to the funnies…

This has everything I could ever ask for in a comic: Mythbusters + food + software + painful punnery. Yep, it’s nerdgasmic.

Then again, when the great Robot Romance comic brings in cats, babies, sock puppets AND an awesome cameo guest appearance…

And if you’re going to have a Webcomics Battle of the Mashups, you know T-Rex will be in there fighting with Shakespeare, Chekhov (the playwright not the StarTreker), Perseus, James Bond, Pop Tarts and Guns that shoor piranhas, chainsaws and EVEN BIGGER GUNS… What? No guns that fire Pop Tarts?

Geez, everybody wants a piece of the Mythbusters.

Now, if this band broke up and said it was due to ‘creative differences’… I’d believe them.