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5/28/05

I read and participated in Tuesday's discussion at The Living Comic on Dinosaur Comics. Dinosaur Comics, you need to know for the sake of this essay if you didn't already, is the webcomic with which Ryan North pioneered the re-use of the same six panels every day with only the dialog changed. (Well, I say pioneered but I'm not aware that anyone else has followed North on this trail.) What was it that Dr. McCoy said after he announced tribbles are born pregnant - "It seems to be a fantastic timesaver"?

In a Socratic dialog Occultatio and two friends also with Greek-sounding nicks arrive at the conclusion that there's no accounting for taste. The vote on Dinosaur Comics seems to go two-to-one against. Occulatio in particular speaks of having read the archives and not finding the humor. I posted this comment:

I don't know why I keep it - unless it's for moments like this, of which this is the first - but I have a list of about a dozen webcomics whose archives I started and which archives failed to engage me after I was partway through. Daily Dinosaur Comics went on that list just last week. But then, that's easily the sort of gimmick that works just great when you look at it only three or seven times a week but grows old fast when you read thirty in half an hour. Perhaps I ought to try reading it daily for awhile in order to give it a fair chance.

I wonder whether all webcomics are best experienced in the eyes of the new reader by massive consumption of their archives - some, no doubt, but all? I've also been finding my webcomic-archive-reading stamina to be easily run out lately, which I presume to be a growing susceptibility to CRT fatigue. Plus a couple of the webcomics on my failed to engage list are in the Daily Grind, so I'm reading them daily now without having finished their archives, and at least one of them does make me laugh sometimes. So I'm adopting a provisional policy of adding new webcomic finds to my daily lists without having read the archives first. So, you'll notice in the links section below that the archives I'm in the middle of list has disappeared (one of the current entries of which was a reread) and that Dinosaur Comics now appears in lunchtime reading.

No, I'm not going to name anything else on my failed archives list (unless, as in this case, something genuinely interesting is to be said). And this policy change probably means my reading lists are going to explode, so if and when new links start appearing there you can't presume correlation with the failed archived list.

(While I'm at it, I'll mention that you can't know the be-all and end-all of my opinions of fellow Grinders by reading my links list. I read all active Grinders daily from the main Grind links page, except those Grinders I was already reading when I joined the Grind, who remain in the lists of individual links. Only when the Grind is over will I decide which other Grinders I'll link to individually and will continue to read.)

Webcomics I read mornings: The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge,
Peanuts, General Protection Fault, Todd and Penguin, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Kevin & Kell, Real Life
Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly,
Questionable Content, Daily Dinosaur Comics, Dandy and Company, Queen of Wands, Narbonic
Webcomics I read evenings: B.C., Pearls Before Swine, Count Your Sheep, Loserz, Schlock Mercenary, Sinfest, Irregular Comic, Little Dee
Webcomics I read bedtimes: Something Positive, Midnight Macabre, Bruno,
Rolling With the Punches, Wapsi Square, Medium Large, Alice!, Sluggy Freelance, PvP
Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Checkerboard Nightmare, Gossamer Commons
Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Theater Hopper, Girl Genius, Megatokyo
Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: Digger, AppleGeeks, Skirting Danger, Striptease, Penny Arcade
Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Her: Girl vs Pig, Get Out of My Head, Order of the Stick
Webcomics I read Mondays: The Whovian Observer, Butternut Squash, Stuff Sucks, Pibgorn, Fish Institution, Boxjam's Doodle
See also Talk About Comics, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List,
Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Comixpedia, The Living Comic 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.