I think I can summarize it in one sentence:

Webcomics should be free.

I've talked, a few columns back, about Superguy. Superguy was (and still is) a mailing list for amateur fiction, started in the late eighties. Not really 'fanfiction,' since the stories and characters were original, but instead a wholesale satire on superheroes, Superguy let people who loved the media, or loved humor, or just loved typing a chance to build an audience, create, experiment, learn the craft of writing, and in general build whole new worlds. Also, there was a supernatural talking fish.

The British have a different sense of humor. There’s no easy way to explain its subtleties, but it’s the reason shows like Red Dwarf and Coupling failed miserably when "translated" for an American audience. Perhaps it’s the almost-casual mixture of normality and weirdness, or the quirkily irreverent characters, or the knowing self-parodies – or maybe just the Brits’ readiness to lampoon anything, including taboo subjects like religion, in such a way that it comes across as cutely inoffensive.

This month's summer-themed extravaganza, Welton Colbert reviews Whispered Apologies in an all-Ryan webcomic collaboration!

When you talk about infinite canvas, you’re walking a fine line between cliché and getting publicly attacked as an artsy-fartsy idealist. Still, while the majority of webcomic artists stick to tried and true printed page formats, a few have emerged to really try to grasp the narrative possibility of digital space without descending into pretension or inaccessibility. In the case of Demian5’s When I am King, the creator manages this in addition to plenty of dick jokes.

Flamewars are certainly fairly common in the small world of webcomics, and this month's column will be devoted to the one that took place at the beginning of June. The instigator was this strip by Penny Arcade, which in turn was a response to this Comixpedia news post. Things soon escalated as more and more people became involved.

Although a public brawl such as this is usually made up of hot air, there are often at least some interesting discussions within it.

This week at Modern Humor Authority, Kristofer Straub pokes at the motivations behind webcomic awards.

Remember Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the campy horror video from the days when Jackson himself wasn’t so terrifying? Complete with zombies, Vincent Price, and dancing, Thriller crossed genres and became a huge success. Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose’s horror humor comic Spook'd, hosted at Movie Poop Shoot, provides a similar experience, only in two-dimensions.

In one of my previous articles for Comixpedia I spoke of the hierarchic structuring of the comic industry and alternative viewpoints to democratize those hierarchies. I asserted that change cannot flow top-down from corporations controlling the industry or from technological innovation, but rather from a reorientation about the conceptions of the medium. This piece explores one way that we as individuals can potentially alter the perception and organization associated with this medium: through vocabulary. People associate with the world greatly through the words they use, and different expressions can largely determine the way in which they relate to concepts. Thus, by reframing the vocabulary associated to "comics" we can alter the perceptions and considerations that they create in our culture. This issue is by no means new to comics, though the approach taken here will develop a deeper and more expansive solution than those proposed in the past.

This week at Modern Humor Authority, Kristofer Straub pokes at the motivations behind webcomic awards.