Some relatively quick links for y’all:

It looks like summer is the time for webcomics reviews, ‘cuz they’re popping up like rabbits, son.

• A reader of the Webcomic Overlook emailed me and suggested that I take a look at Rice Boy. I gotta say, I like that reader’s tastes, as Rice Boy, from a quick glance, looks great. Good ol’ Jackson Ferrell beat me on the review front, though, and he has glowing praise over at This Week in Webcomics. Check it out!
• Meanwhile, Elle Dee takes a look at Ellerbisms and the honesty it takes to do a good journal-style comic.
• Tangents takes a look at the admittedly off-the-beaten-track field of choose-your-adventure webcomics in Aetheria Epics. I haven’t read the comic yet, but I’m pretty curious as to how the system works, actually.
• Delos at Artpatient.com takes a chance on Xylia Tales, which looks like some mystical Victoria era gaslamp fiction.

Delos also did a side by side between search results from Bing and Google. It turns out that this site is in the Top 20 results when you google “webcomics.” Huzzah! I shall now vow to bad-mouth Bing every chance I get until either this site shows up on their search engine or Bill Gates ponies up that protection money.

MPD57 stirs up the pot by posting an e-mail from a reader who suggests that Zuda have a separate section for experimental comics. Sounds reasonable to me, actually.

The first Zuda published book, Bayou, made the AV Club’s comic review section, by the way. It got a B grade.

It’s hard to know what to make of Bayou: Volume One (DC/Zuda) in its present form. The breakout offering from DC’s webcomics experiment zudacomics.com, Bayou reads like a story designed to fill unlimited space. Even at 160 pages, it feels like the mere beginning of a story, an impression only reinforced by some sketches of characters and locations not to be seen until later chapters. It also feels unsatisfying in its present form, but mostly because there isn’t enough of it. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, where the white establishment keeps racial restrictions in place with violence and miscarriages of justice, Bayou focuses on a black girl named Lee whose father is arrested after her white playmate disappears. Lee knows he had nothing to do with the event, however, and she goes searching for her friend in a world populated by helpful-but-cowardly monsters and malevolent forces straight out of an Uncle Remus tale. It’s a captivating, frightening environment, and while Bayou’s story sometimes suffers from poky pacing—or at least it feels poky, with so little of the story available so far—it makes for a provocatively sideways look at an ugly slice of American history…

And while we’re on the AV Club, they posted a blog entry in early May detailing why you shouldn’t pay attention to grading systems, as, most of the time, it’s pretty meaningless.

Lisa Barone hates bloggers! You and me both, sister! I … oh. Anyway, despite having a very confrontational slant (her blog — yes, I know, ironic what what — is on a site called Outspoken Media, after all), I think she does offer tips on how you can make your blog interesting. Rule #1: stop being emo.

Finally, I was kinda disappointed that Joe Dunn was less than fully thrilled by Up (in the accompanying movie review). It’s OK to go against the grain … Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern is up there with you (no pun intended). But, seriously, man, you gotta see it without a bored nephew in tow. Those little punks ruin everything. (I have to say, I gotta agree with my wife that adults will enjoy this movie more than kids, so I kinda understand why they might get a little fidgety through the middle acts.)

Brigid Alverson’s article at Robot 6 on concise writing seems to be all the rage today. Here’s an excerpt:

I call this the Zuda Test, because I formulated it while reviewing the comics at Zuda.com, DC’s webcomics competition site. Each month, I and my Digital Strips colleagues Steve Shinney and Jason Sigler read all ten of the comics at Zuda and discuss the pros and cons of each one.

Month after month, I found myself making the same complaint: After eight pages, I had no idea what was going on.

Eight pages should be enough space to establish the setting, introduce one or more characters that are worth caring about, give some sense of what the comic is about, and get the story rolling. This is obviously most critical for longer stories, but gag-a-day creators would do well to establish their premise and characters clearly as well.

A surprising number of stories flunked this test. Many jumped right into the action, often starting off with a complicated fight (Zuda creators love a good fight) between utterly unknown characters, leaving me unsure who to root for.

Each Zuda page includes a space for a text-only synopsis, and that is where I would often find finely crafted, intricately thought out backstories and alternate universes.

Unfortunately, that’s not where they belong. They belong in the comic.

It’s easy to see how this can happen, especially when a writer has been thinking about a story for a while and is already mentally living in that world. Things that seem natural or self-evident to the writer may simply puzzle the reader, and the wise writer will anticipate that and answer questions before they become distracting. (Having an outsider read the comic with fresh eyes is an excellent way to anticipate this.)

It’s not necessary to clutter the story with text boxes or clumsy expository dialogue. (“Bill, don’t forget that you’re my brother!” “That’s right, Sue! And Dad sent us here to the Planet Zorgov to retrieve our family’s uranium stash before it disappears in the coming apocalyptic explosion.”) It’s OK to introduce a complicated premise a little at a time or to start the reader out in the center of the action and then pull back a bit. But after eight pages the reader should have a sense of where the story is going and who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Notably, both Brad Guigar and Heidi MacDonald agree with her. However, as much as I respect Ms. Alverson and as much as I agree with several of her points, I cannot agree that the first 8 pages are the most important pages of a webcomic.

I agree that Ms. Alverson’s philosophy works for Zuda contestants, where the Zuda format forces writers in a linear progression. That is, comics MUST start at page 1 and the readers must follow the story page by page. The Flash format forbids anyone from skipping ahead to later chapters. In that case, yes, the standard rules of literature apply, and the hook must be established from page 1.

But most webcomics aren’t limited by Zuda’s hard-coded (and unwieldy) Flash-based Zuda browser. Hence, more often than not readers are introduced to elements that happen further on down the story. I personally was introduced to my favorites, — Gunnerkrigg Court, Scary Go Round, and Octopus Pie — in medias res. Later chapters were posted by enthusiasts, I was hooked onto the worlds and characters, and then later I would skip back to the early, more primitive chapters. In a sense, the hook itself didn’t need to be at the beginning.

Establishing the hook far better applies to, say, book stores and comic book shops. We naturally skim through the first pages to see if that’s what we want to read, and then, in those short moments, decide whether or not we want to go forward. But is that the case with long-form webcomics? With the browser environment, we are far more at liberty to jump around to see if the story gets any better in later chapters.

Granted, there are plenty of comics out there that could greatly benefit by fixing their first 8 pages. There are some comics I can name that probably aren’t getting the audience they deserve because the intros are so weak. However, I think they can just as easily make up for it by generating buzz for a much talked-about story in later installments as they would be re-writing the beginnings.

The 8-page rule, by the way, kinda falls apart with print comics, too. X-Men is one of the most popular titles out there. But did its success, spurred in the mid-’70s, have more to do with the team fighting a living island (in Giant Sized X-Men #1) or with the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of the Future Past in later issues?

I think the problem may be, rather, with the Zuda format than with the storytelling abilities of webcomic writers.