Gutterfly Comix announced it was shutting down as of November 26th. It's not clear from the brief announcement what will become of the URL after that point.

This article looks like a nice overview of the genre, with good coverage of the earlier entrants.

Melonpool, the sci-fi comedy strip by Steve Troop, scrubbed its archives clean in favor of a brand-new comic book page format. This marks a new chapter in the strip's history, and a great jumping-on point for new readers.

Melonpool launched on April 28th, 1996, and has five book compilations to date. The veteran strip tells the story of the crew of the Steel Duck, a group of alien misfits who crashland on Earth.

Melonpool is a part of Blank Label Comics.

I haven't posted in the forums here in a while, but the blog post about the Fabricari time-lapse thing got me thinking...

what seperates a gimmick from a genuine innovation?

I'll give you that the Fabricari video isn't exactly "innovative" (though extremely fun to watch). But where is the line drawn? When can you say that someone is doing something just to get a bigger audience, and when can you say that an artist or performer or anyone is just pushing the boundaries of their medium?

(I may expand on this later, but I wanted to get the topic rolling)

Fabricari has a new gimmick. Steve Harrison has positioned a camera over his art table and records about an hour of comic making and speeds it up to fit into a three-minute QuickTime movie. Steve intends to create a new movie each week to drive folks over to read the comic.

Newsarama has a story on TokyoPop's partnership with Universal Press Syndicate to bring some manga-style comics to America's newspapers. This story is being framed by recent news about the continuing decline in newspaper subscribership (down 2.6% this year) as a means to reverse that trend.

It is an interesting development although even the comic book industy has already figured out that it needs to grapple with the appeal of manga so the newspaper syndicate are essentially the last major segment of American comic to figure this out. It'll be interesting to see how many newspapers pick up the manga offered through Universal Press.

Adam Burke, creator of Diabolica, the grimbles and The Splendid Everlasting, has also recently tried his hand at a more poltical webcomic, this one called Asleep At the Wheel. It's very funny, although depending on your political point of view, I suppose it also might be very painful.

With all of the news posts yesterday our post about week one of the November issue got pushed down. November focuses on mystery webcomics and we have so far an "Introduction to Writing Mystery Webcomics by Alexander Danner", another installment of Erik Melander's news in review column, "Through the Looking Back Glass" and an interview with the creators of Dada Detective.

Greetings everyone!

I'm brand new around here, so thought I'd just say hey. I am new to the webcomics thing, just trying it out for the first time. I've have 2 webcomics that I started recently:

The first is a humor strip about life in a dorm room. Check it out here:
webcomicsnation.com/hankinstienstudios/dormdorks

The other is a more serious drama about a group of friends in a small town who live across the street from a cemetery. It's page is here:
webcomicsnation.com/hankinstienstudios/cemeteryhill

Feel free to check them out. I'm just getting started with these, and I'm having a lot of fun, although I know I have a lot to learn. I have a forum set up for these comics here:
http://www.talkaboutcomics.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=481

Thanks everyone, I look foreward to getting more involved here, it seems to be an awesome place. See ya!

-Mike

I've got Australia! Come and get me!!

Seriously, this is very cool use of Google Maps.