Over the past few months, I have started exploring the world of web-based comics with increasing seriousness. I now have at least a small circle of strips I am reading regularly. The three that have me most excited (to the point of going to the website at 11pm and impatiently hitting the refresh key to see if the next day's comic has posted in the last few minutes) are:...

For some time now, I have been fascinated/enchanted by this image , a T-shirt design available at the Dinosaur Comics store. I can't quite put my finger on why I find it so compelling. Is it the mixture of delight and anxiety on the pork chop's face? The plonkingly obvious statement offered as discovery? The fact that the perfectly mundane word 'meat' becomes, in this context, vaguely disturbing and maybe a little obscene? ...

One of the happy fringe benefits of my Wrens trip was shopping in the enormous Barnes & Noble at Newport on the Levee, where I picked up Scott McCloud's latest: Making Comics (2006). Like its predecessors, Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2000), Making is a treatise on the art of comics in comics form. Taken together, these three books might well comprise the most significant effort at media criticism since McLuhan....

As it turns out, Nation States did not hold my interest very long (the dopiness of the daily "issues", the tediousness of the UN Resolution process, and my reluctance to get involved in any of the many meta-games orbiting the game conspired to quash that for me). However, I stumbled across another low-commitment online game that seems to hold promise: Urban Dead, a "zombie apocalypse" MMORPG. The premise is pretty simple: you're in a quarantined, zombie-infested city; you can be either a survivor or a zombie. If the former, you try to stay alive, find supplies, and kill zombies (zeds). If the latter, you kill humans (and turn them into more zombies). Game play is non-graphical and fairly rudimentary, though there does seem to be some active development going on to create more interesting and diversified playing options, as well as several sets of helpful Firefox extensions to provide enhanced interface features. ...

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So I spent a significant chunk of the past few days devouring the entire 560-strip run of Questionable Content. I think I had glanced at it a couple times before without getting snagged, but this time, having been referred by Les Orchard's link in my del.icio.us inbox to #557, a meditation on 'cowboy bottoms' and therapy techniques, I was intrigued. Backtracking a bit, I started getting interested in the story arcs and character development, but I think what nailed it for me was #545: Conversational: ...