Thanks for reading.

11/10/09

Today AKOTAS has 2000 updates. They haven't always been my work (five out of two thousand have been guest art), and they haven't always had punchlines. But, since AKOTAS started two thousand days ago, there's been something new here for every day. When David Morgan-Mar hit 2000 Irregular Webcomic strips about a year and a half ago, he compiled a possibly incomplete (and edited since) list of other webcomics with 2000 strips in their archives at that time. Gary Tyrell at the webcomics blog Fleen saw it and postulated that, even if Morgan-Mar's list missed some, there were at most about two dozen people in the world who've put up 2000 updates to their webcomic. This is probably still true, though there'll be a few more now than then, even besides me. Tyrell further noted that it's about the same number of people there are in the world who've been to the moon (orbiting counts). Pride compels me, however, to note that I don't know of anyone else with a 2000-update webcomic archive who meets, as I do, all three of these criteria: not aspiring to make their webcomic their day job no auto-update software never missing a daily update I'm the only one who made it to the moon, not as part of a space program, but in a capsule I built out of a garbage can. Heh heh heh. ***** Today's is the gag I had just written when I complained in this space on Arthur's birthday in 2004 about obligatorily linear storytelling. This gag couldn't have been executed as a flashforward sometime before now - it could not be removed from the time for which it was written - and maintained its impact. ***** Readers of this space will remember that my original plan for the working sabbatical that became the run of AKOTAS-2 was to start it at update 2000 and run it for two years. Then I started it six months early at AKOTAS's fifth anniversary, because I was feeling just that burnt out. A month ago after five months of AKOTAS-2, I realized I was feeling just that ready to go back. I'd been through an end-of-semester crunch and it hadn't felt as bad the few preceeding semesters (leading to the hypothesis that those'd felt so bad because of the job I'd had then). A reader on my LiveJournal friendslist had commented in passing in his LJ how much he prefers the real AKOTAS to the sabbatical format, which I never doubted held true for almost all or all of you. And I was beginning to miss line drawing, and being able to draw cartoons in more than one setting. I thought, I could come off the sabbatical at update 2000. That'd be a great way to do something cool for update 2000 without producing an artificially Very Special Episode Number Two Thousand. But there was a corner I'd written myself into. The reason the hiatus had been planned to last till autumn 2011 was because the cliffhanger on which I'd left AKOTAS was contemporary Merlin's death. Merlin couldn't be written out of the other two major arcs till Nimue turned fourteen and became of age for those milieus, because people today may find their story creepy inappropriate enough as it is. And, in the real-time paradigm that's always been one of AKOTAS's raisin deeters (pardon my French), Nimue wouldn't be fourteen till October 2011. I thought, I could skip two years. End the hiatus with update 2000, but skip the two years between then and Nimue's scheduled fourteenth birthday. But that'd be a violation of the real time paradigm. I thought, I could end the sabbatical at update 2000 without skipping two years. This would give me the chance to add back fairy tale Lancelot's return to Camelot after his Wild Man years, and maybe show space Gareth's virgin quest after all. On the other hand, those two things were already skipped in my mind and those of anyone who reads these newsposts; and if I really wanted to do Gareth's virgin quest in realtime then fairy tale Gareth could do it once Lancelot was back. I thought, I could just keep on with AKOTAS-2 till October or November of 2011 as the sabbatical was originally conceived to do. Then I asked myself, "Would the readers rather skip two years, or have two more years of AKOTAS-2?" ***** Today is also Sesame Street's 40th anniversary. The air is sweet.

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

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: General Protection Fault, 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, The Adventures of Brigadier General John Start, 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.