This is a cool innovation. The newly renamed More Fun (now called Smithson) has a new episode up that has a "drag" navigation, somewhat like you can do with a PDF in Adobe Reader. Now do I want to have to read all of my webcomics this way? No but it's a great idea and it certainly gave me a feeling of holding the webcomic in my hands which, when you think about it, is a neat trick.

The webcomic satire institution Checkerboard Nightmare turns five years old this week, and to celebrate, it's ending.

CxN will definitely return in a new form, but the strip for November 11, 2005 marks the end of its existing continuity. Read from the beginning of the storyline that's sure to be the most important moment in human history ever.

Checkerboard Nightmare by Kristofer Straub is a part of Blank Label Comics.

Freaks N Squeeks will reach it's 500th strip this thursday, November 10th, a day that will live in infamy, or at least a suburb of infamy.

"500 seems like a big number to me," said Patric. "I reckon we ought to do something special for it... oh hey... there's that membership drive going on right now too..."

Although normally, a subscription to the archives of the webcomic is $20 per year, from November 10th to the 17th, the entire archive of FNS will be opened up and free to everyone. And up until the 17th you can subscribe to FNS for only $15.

Roughly 18 months ago, Comixpedia held a community interview with Chris Crosby and Darren Bleuel of Keenspot. I'm not going to systematically revisit that interview today but I thought I'd point out some interesting changes since then.

In the interview, you asked who Keenspot's competitors were and Crosby responded "We're competing with anybody and everybody. O­n the web our goal is to continue to be the top webcomic publisher, and in print our goal is to become a top graphic novel publisher." Keenspot has continued to roll on and despite the further diversification of webcomics publishing (small collectives, WebcomicsNation, subscription sites, etc.) Keenspot still has as much a claim on being the top publisher of webcomics as anybody does.

But back then Crosby pointed to Keenspot Premium as a lifeline during the online ad market slump. Although Premium is still offered by Keenspot, it's hard to shake the impression that it remains little more than an afterthought for Keenspot. Keenspot has also shut down it's Keenprime fee-based hosting service since the interview. Keenspot really does seem to be defined by "free" (i.e., advertiser-supported) services in contrast to other entities such as Modern Tales that continue to experiment with a mix of free and subscription approaches.

A second point of interest is that even at that point in time, Keenspot had already transitioned away from publishing in the "comic book" format and was moving into more of a "graphic novel" format for print versions of Keenspot webcomics. With the presence of on-demand publishers like Lulu, an open question is how successful does Keenspot's print operation remain for Keenspot and its creators.

And although not mentioned in the interview there has always been Keenspot's continuing efforts to license it's creator members' properties to Hollywood in which there was a success story this year with Owen Dunne's You Damn Kid. Given the niche that comics as a whole occupies in the American pop culture landscape, it will be interesting to see how the press reports on Dunne's creation if it makes it to the living room screen (and of course we are hopeful that it does!). Will webcomics share in some reflected glory or will the press ignore that angle?

You'll Have That and Viper Comics have started the YHT Book Club over at the Viper Comics message boards. Stop by the new forum and discuss your favorite books. Every month we'll feature a new YHT Book of the Month and display it on yhtcomic.com!

If you can't get the reclusive creator of Calvin and Hobbes to talk to you, well you can always do an interview with Bill Watterson's mom!. Join the Jawbone podcast, as it goes "in search [of] an American cartooning icon, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson."


* Hotness of Bill Wattterson's mother not guaranteed.

Farawayistan is a cute, single panel webcomic which pairs often simplistic, child-like drawings with straightforward observations of the world. You probably need to read through the archives for it to grow on you, just one perhaps isn't enough to convince you of the charm of this project. For myself, I think the charm is in its general niceness. It's Exploding Dog-like without any pretense to visual or linguistic irony.

Jeph Jacques, creator of Questionable Content blogs some advice for the aspiring webtoonists of the world. Well worth reading for anyone interested in starting a webcomic. (link from Phil)

T Campbell blogs that he and Brian Daniel (creator of Surviving Mars) are tackling the characters of Gaming Guardians in a guest story for that webcomic.

Tom Spurgeon has a story on the move of the Harvey awards from MoCHA to Baltimore's Comicon. Spurgeon speculates that this may negatively impact the more indy-friendly SPXPo held in Bethesda, Maryland which hosts the Ignatz awards. I don't know enough about the history of the SPXPo to tell whether it's "stagnating" or not but one option would be to move SPXPo to Northern Virginia. That wouldn't change a thing about the geographic location of SPXPo, but it might help end the constant (and to my mind, irrelevant) attempts to link it to Baltimore's superhero-style convention.