Alpha Shade is a wonderful blend of history, fantasy and science fiction from two brothers: Joe and Chris Brudlos. Al Schroeder interviewed them about their website, their working methods and their plans for their webcomic Alpha Shade.

What does your title mean? Why Alpha Shade?

In preparing my article, A Practical Guide to Collaboration, I sent out a survey on collaborative experiences. I received considerably more information than I was able to use in the article, much of it far too interesting to leave unpublished. Presented here are some additional highlights from the survey.

In this month's Essence of... Ping Teo puts a visual spin on this issue's theme of collaboration. Here's looking at webcomics, kid.

I blame Frank Miller.

Back in the days B.F. (Before Frank) the comic book Editor Gods had decided that the job of making a comic book should be broken down so that hordes of different people worked to create it together. This way the people who were best at these specific tasks could put out more work. After a while it got out of hand, with jobs like Plotter, Scripter, Penciller, Inker, Colorist and Letterer (eventually they would have broken this job down even further: "Ted, you letter the consonants. Bill, you’re on vowels, and sometimes 'Y'").

Then along came Frank, who blew the doors off, and suddenly every artist thought they could write.

Steven Frank’s Spamusement is summed up well on its front page: "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!" It’s a simple concept that goes a long way.

Where most of us would automatically hit "delete", Frank has appropriated the detritus of his inbox and given it new life, recycling his junk mail into single-panel, often silent comics entirely based on the subject lines of his daily pile of spam.

Welton Colbert was once respected and feared all at once as both a comics creator, and a sequential arts historian. He has come out of retirement to share his wealth of knowledge with a new generation of artists. This month, Welton takes a look at the place where unbridled creativity and friendly competition collide, Strip Fight.

One of the most liberating facets of online comics is that it has made it easier than ever for creators interested in working collaboratively to find each other. No longer must writers troll local comics shops and art schools in the hope of finding like-minded artists. Instead, they can go straight to a large community of comics creators, where geography is no barrier. They can get to know the people they hope to work with, and everyone can see samples of each others' work on their websites before committing to any sort of collaboration. All in all, the Internet has allowed for more people to experience more productive and rewarding collaborative experiences.

Mel Hynes and James Grant do a comic together called Two Lumps, which is the self-proclaimed anti-Garfield. Grant is also (in)famous for his prior webcomic FLEM. Eric Burns interviewed both of them about working together on Two Lumps, collaboration in general and Grant's secret plan to get on Keenspot.

This month's "Feeding Snarky" represents a milestone, at least for me. Up until now, the columns -- for better or worse -- have reflected my critical opinions as an observer and consumer of webcomics. They were, naturally enough, my opinions on the subject, and they came from an outsider's perspective.

This month, however, the theme is "collaboration," and that's a topic I have -- dare I say it -- first hand experience in. In fact, I have experience both in collaborating on a webcomic and in not collaborating on a webcomic, and therefore I can speak to the advantages of having someone on hand who knows what the Hell they're doing with a pencil.

To solo or not to solo is not a question that many webcomics creators even bother to ask themselves. Most webcomics seem to be solo efforts by a single creator handling both the art and the writing. If this is in fact true it is no surprise, as both webcomics and small press print comics are generally thought of as a means for a creator to develop his or her own ideas without interference or outside pressure to craft a certain type of comic. It is in fact one of the wonderful things about comics, that the medium has such respect for the the lone creator speaking his or her voice through a comic.

Having said that, however, there's no question collaboration has played an important part in webcomics.