Thanks for reading.

12/14/06

You may be asking yourself, "When Scott Kurtz of PvP appears as a contemporary arc character in AKOTAS - when Serenity and Wonder Woman director Joss Whedon appears as a contemporary arc character in AKOTAS - when the tv series Eureka is supposed to have Morgan in its cast - why invent a comic collective that's so obviously just Joey Manley's Modern Tales under a fictional name?" Well, for the same reason contemporary Arthur (or Superman, or Homer Simpson) lives in an imaginary city. It may become dramatically necessary to attribute actions to Arthur's collective's chief, or events to the history of the collective, that manners or libel law dictate not be attributed to a real person or webcomics collective. I don't really expect any such situation to arise, and in fact I considered not making up names. But there'll come a time when Arthur will move into a phase of his life when there will be such dramatic necessity (many many years down the path Merlin's setting him on tomorrow), so I decided I might as well start now. No, Arthur has not really been invited to join Modern Tales, nor have I. Nor is it likely that it shall be offered to me, or that I should accept if it were offered. Webcomic collectives' goals and mine don't match up. (Manners, fairness and full disclosure compel me to note that it's Joey Manley's free message board site at TalkAboutComics.com that hosts AKOTAS's discussion forum. And I've been considering the possibility of creating a mirror site at Manley's Webcomics Nation Free. (Also, I don't believe salability is actually one of Modern Tales' criteria [except insofar as quality work can be assumed salable]. When I first drafted Arthur's dialog, the offer had come not from Modern Tales Today Fables but from Keenspot Swellpoint, where salability is a criterion. Then I decided manners and fairness compelled Arthur's offer to have come from Jose Macho instead of from Harry Hope, but I still decided to leave the salability bit in. ...Perhaps thereby justifying my decision to invent a collective.) I'm actively disinterested in making a business of AKOTAS. I already have a job - one with health care benefits and retirement plans, which matters when you're about twice the age of most webcartoonists. Now, I might sell the property outright (except for Aihok and Effex, who've been with me since 1977) if I got a good enough offer, and start a new webcomic. (I even know what the new webcomic's premise would be, and if no one ever buys AKOTAS that's possibly the premise I'll start drawing in 2029 if any, so don't bother asking now what it is.) But the offer'd have to be really good. Retirement good.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Shortpacked, Scary Go Round, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic, Real Life, Peanuts

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Theater Hopper, Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Todd and Penguin, Pibgorn, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: AppleGeeks, Achewood, Kismetropolis, WIGU, Striptease, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, Anywhere But Here, Starslip Crisis, Questionable Content, Devil's Panties, Schlock Mercenary, Narbonic

Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Sinfest, Bruno, Boxjam's Doodle

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Two Lumps, Zortic, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Home on the Strange, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Girls With Slingshots, The Green Avenger, Dandy & Company, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Megatokyo

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Medium Large, Station V3, Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Sheldon, Little Dee, PvP

Webcomics I read Sundays: xkcd, Minus, Smithson, Something Happens, Li'l Mell, Butternut Squash, General Protection Fault, Perry Bible Fellowship, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Mac Hall, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, No Room for Magic, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Whovian Observer, Gossamer Commons,

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Living Comic, Online Comics Day, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Comixpedia and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.