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8/8/09

I don't usually have cause to regret that I created and maintain this website with the relatively rudimentary, merely as-of-1997-HTML webbuilding skills that I have. Today I wish I could do CSS and stuff. Today you may notice that there's a new button at the top of the site's main page, and a new banner link below the site navigation buttons, both linking to the site of the Museum of Cartoon Art in San Francisco and advertising their Monsters of Webcomics exhibit that runs from today till December 6. Guess what: three Arthur, King of Time and Space cartoons will be included in a slideshow of webcomics in the exhibit. The webcomic blog Fleen posted a little while ago that the museum's curator, Andrew Farago (known to readers of Narbonic and Skin Horse as "the cartoonist's husband"), has an exhibit running on several of the biggest names in webcomics, including Girl Genius and Achewood from the webcomics links at AKOTAS. Farago was also putting out a call for webcartoonists to submit three samples of their work to be featured in a slideshow within the exhibit. I contacted Farago, was sent the submission requirements, and sent him three image files, which were accepted to be included in the slideshow. I wondered whether the MSPaint-produced cartoons might not be rejected on some sort of art quality grounds; but either the jokes themselves, AKOTAS's rep (?), or the conversion of the files to JPEGs per the submission guidelines (??) were enough to overcome any inclination to shoot the messenger. What does that have to do with my webbuilding skills? It means, of all the buttons and the banners on the AKOTAS site, only those on the index page are links to the museum's website. It would take editing more than 1900 files by hand to make every appearance of the image files on AKOTAS pages into links. Then in December I'd want them all edited back. Sorry. It wasn't until I mentioned the slideshow to my wife that I realized that this is something I could put on a resume. The things that are the most important to me are so rarely significant to anything like a majority, or even a plurality, of the rest of the world that the thought hadn't occurred to me. You probably want to know which cartoons were used. Well, in picking them I decided to use the first one (because it sets up all the others), the best straight joke I ever wrote (at least for AKOTAS), and (the only one that gave me trouble) a joke that highlights the love triangle as the central theme of the strip, preferably from the space arc, preferably with a time zone change. They also needed to stand alone pretty well, since I can't know what order the slides will appear, and whether mine will appear in a row together. These are the ones I sent:

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, General Protection Fault, For Better Or For Worse, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: El Goonish Shive, AppleGeeks, Achewood, Striptease, Punch an' Pie, Digger

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, Starslip Crisis, Count Your Sheep, Dinosaur Comics, Girls With Slingshots, Shortpacked, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Real Life, PvP

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Fans, Two Lumps, Dandy & Company, Goats, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Darths & Droids, Megatokyo

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

Webcomics I read Sundays: Breakfast of the Gods, Something Happens, Three Panel Soul, No Room for Magic, Li'l Mell, Zortic, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, xkcd

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Boxjam's Doodle, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, My Name is Might Have Been, 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.