Thanks for reading.

12/31/11

If you follow me on Twitter or LJ, you may know that I've been particularly frustrated by my scanner recently. Readers of this space will already know that through the years of AKOTAS the scanner has developed the idiosyncracy of occasionally failing, requiring it to be reset by being left unplugged for half an hour. Well, early this month there was an instance when it didn't reset even overnight. This was the last days of the sketch hiatus. But I'd worked up a buffer: As a result of the failure, the last sketch update and the first two or three regular updates were drawn by mouse, days ahead of time. But when I started on the first regular Sunday update for after the hiatus, I grew so unsatisfied with mousedrawn art that I tried the scanner again and it worked. The last sketch update's original pen-drawn version did run, barely scanned and colored on time, but the first three regular updates ran in their mousedrawn form. Nevertheless, I resolved to replace the scanner as soon as possible, with a new scanner or a drawing tablet for my computer or both. A generous reader has sent me a Tiger Direct gift card as a birthday gift and a new scanner/printer is picked out at this time. Meanwhile my wife got me a drawing tablet for Christmas. The second panel of yesterday's AKOTAS was the first thing I drew with it, and today's was the first AKOTAS to be entirely drawn with it. Now, I had a tablet once about ten or twelve years ago, which I didn't stick with because I didn't feel it gave me that much more control than a mouse. But that was probably an early, rudimentary, inexpensive one. This one is taking a little getting used to. It seems to take longer to draw a panel with the tablet and stylus than it does to draw the same panel with a pen or pencil; but part of that is because I do things at the same time as drawing on the screen that I can't or don't do while drawing with a pen - like coloring as I go, or closing shapes so they can be colored with the fill tool. The art itself isn't as spontaneous as pen drawing yet, but it's better than mouse drawing; that'll take some new reflexes or just to learn to relax. But I'm confident that I'll be much happier and faster drawing electronically with something the size and shape of a pen than with something the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: General Protection Fault, Nukees, Newshounds, Spacetrawler, Girl Genius, LitBrick

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: Scenes from a Multiverse, Blue Milk Special, The Gutters, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, LuAnn, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Devil's Panties, Narbonic, Schlock Mercenary

Webcomics I read weekday evenings: Questionable Content, El Goonish Shive, Striptease, Dinosaur Comics, Medium Large, Girls With Slingshots, Shortpacked, Wapsi Square, Sheldon, Devil's Panties, Help Desk, LitBrick, Real Life, PvP

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: xkcd, Two Lumps, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Bruno, Little Dee, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Starslip Crisis, Darths & Droids, Let's Be Friends Again, Bruno, Little Dee

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Station V3, Sinfest, Skin Horse, Peanuts

Webcomics I read Sundays: Get Out of My Head, Three Panel Soul, Hijinks Ensue, Zortic, Count Your Sheep, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, Megatokyo, Head Trip, Irregular Comic

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Boxjam's Doodle, Punch an' Pie, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, My Name is Might Have Been, Dandy & Company, AppleGeeks, No Room for Magic, Li'l Mell, Breakfast of the Gods, Something Happens, Butternut Squash, Sketchies, 13 Seconds, Anywhere But Here, Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, Kismetropolis, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Green Avenger, I Draw Comics, Reasoned Cognition, Perry Bible Fellowship, 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, Brian Roney's Webcomic Reviews, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Mr. Myth, Comixtalk 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.
Early British Kingdoms - Arthurian Bios.
Historia Ecclesiastica.
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.