Thanks for reading.

3/28/10

Occasionally in this space I've bemoaned that I might've preferred that I'd done AKOTAS not in realtime but in the sort of suspended chronology Charlie Brown and Superman live in. I suppose I thought this because that's how I viewed the work I'd done before in home journal comics and in home and internet fanfiction comics (and still do in internet fanfiction). During the AKOTAS-2 hiatus, a regular reader posted to his LJ (but didn't tag it so I can find it and link) observing - complaining, really - that that's preceisely what AKOTAS-2 was. He missed the sense of progress in the characters' lives that real AKOTAS has. That, of course, had been one of the draws to me for using that format during the hiatus. As soon as the hiatus was over - with the very first update out of it - that reader was again compelled to blog about it, to the effect that the sense of progress he missed so much had returned with the strip's real format, from the word go. Perhaps this comment was the reason that I didn't run with the years-prepared text post I had planned to run when space Merlin departed Excalibur with Nimue observing that I had finally reached the point in the characters' lives which I would have chosen if I had gone with a suspended chronology, the point when the characters' lives don't really change much again for years until the beginning of the end. And perhaps that's because that was when I began realizing that I lose interest in AKOTAS when there's no sense of progress. Pretty much ever since the culmination of the Roman war, and definitely since the return from the hiatus with Lancelot's wild man stint concluded, the three leading characters have been left with little to do in a realtime retelling of Malory unless they figure in an episode of the tales of Tristram as they have this week. I plan to bring in some episodes from the Old French Vulgate which Malory left out, but on the whole nothing really happens to Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot until after the Grailquest. In T.H. White this period of time is dealt with by starting the chapter after Lancelot's departure from Carbonek, after his madnesss, with a sentence something like, "Fifteen years later Camelot was still where he was." I'm thinking that another six-month hiatus that skips years of the characters' lives shall be in order at AKOTAS' ten year mark like it was at year five... (Though I don't think I'll do AKOTAS-2 again.) After all, when my dailies were pencil journal comics I was chronicling a story in a way, even if it was a real life story and I was writing only the gags to spice it up. Even the fanfiction cartoons are about characters who have longterm stories going in one way or another. So I'm thinking that maybe, despite all the disclaimers that've appeared in this space since 2004, I was more interested in the storytelling than the gagwriting all along.

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, Spacetrawler, 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, Medium Large, 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, MythAdventures

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

Webcomics I read Sundays: Three Panel Soul, 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, 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.