Category Archives: metapost

Metapost: SOPA Protest Blacks Out The Internet

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So apparently a whole bunch of sites are going dark tomorrow as a protest to the SOPA anti-piracy bill being floated around in the US Senate. What is SOPA? That would be the Stop Online Anti-Piracy Act, which is set to come down HARD on anyone using copyrighted material.

So, tomorrow, little known sites like Reddit and Wikipedia are among the sites participating in an online protest that envisions a world with … NO SPRINGS!

Want to view cat photos with misspelled captions in Impact font?

NO SPRINGS!

Or use the world’s largest online encyclopedia to complete your term paper?

NO SPRINGS!

Wait. Did I say “springs”? I meant “no internet.” Why did I think of “springs“?

A Softer World is in on the protest, so if you’re looking for photographs with tenuously related captions on ‘em… no dice, my friend. Meanwhile, David Rees of Get Your War On has put together a special Get Your Censor On to show how internet censorship will lead to more Yellow Pages.

WordPress users can apparently join in using a plug-in. The Webcomic Overlook will be open though, partly do to laziness, partly through a fear of plug-ins.

I know, I know. I probably should be more concerned since I reprint webcomic images for my reviews and I use what is quite possibly a copyrighted image on a famous luchador as my avatar. But, well, I prefer to soldier on and adapt to different rules and regulations as time wears on. Man, I’m still suffering combat fatigue from the Napster Wars.

Metapost: It’s over 2 Million!

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I popped into my stats page this morning to find out that the page view count on this site is (switching to gravelly Vegeta voice) OVER 2 MILLION!!!!

That’s … wow. Honestly, when I started out this site, I didn’t think I’d ever break 200,000 page views. Thanks for everyone who has every dropped by to ever hear me talk about this funny phenomenon of comics on the web. I love having you guys drop by, whether you agree with my opinions or not.

Now for another 2 million! We need to to train … IN THE GRAVITY CHAMBER!

(EDIT: Heh. And what do you know. This is also my 700th post. It’s Milestone Thursday, baby!)

Metapost: Welcome to the end of the world

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Happy New Year’s 2012! Sorry for not being on this site the last couple of weeks. As you may have guessed, the holiday was a busy, busy time.

2012 will bring reviews like normal, but with more and more webcomics transitional to “mainstream” from “obscure” I think I’ll switch my focus to lesser known comics this year. That’s not to say that I’m not going to review some notable Harvey Award winners like … guh … Least I Could Do.

In fact, I did try reading LICD over the Christmas break to get a head start. Worst. Christmas. Ever.

I was also too busy to do an end of the year re-cap like I did last year. Maybe I’ll find time this year … if we survive that long. Just make sure that they’re not building three arks over in China, is all I’m saying.

(As a side note, 2012 is one of those movies that my wife just cannot watch without getting uncomfortable. From my point of view, it’s a goofy movie. It didn’t occur to me until last week, when my relatives and I were looking at old pictures, why watching disaster movies is such a grueling experience. I’d forgotten that, growing up, she was very close to the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which means she lived through a very tough time of canned sardine rations, ash that was literally knee-deep, and the sense that you could die at any moment. It was a sobering thought.)

Happy 2012, y’all!

UPDATE: Where is El Santo?

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Well, I’m almost back. I spent most of October off because I thought I’d be traveling… and that didn’t really happen. (I was really hard at work, though, honest.)

And then November came around and I thought I’d try my hand at NaNoWriMo again. If you want to check it out, 40K words of Lord of the Undersea is online and unfinished. Believe it or not, I was on pace to get at least 50K words of my terrible, terrible novel done by November 20.

Unfortunately, I got word a couple of weeks ago that my mom collapsed from a heart condition, and I booked a last minute flight to visit her so I could be on hand during her surgery. And things were going well, until she started vomiting the day before Thanksgiving and we had to admit her to the emergency room. She’s still in the hospital, and I’m still 2300 miles away from home taking care of her.

Thus, I never really finished my NaNoWriMo novel, being that my brain was clogged up with much more important things. I have been reading up on webomics, though, and I should be back to reviewing sometime next week.

Thanks to everyone for visiting this site even though there was very little new going on!

Heads up all…

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Heads up… I’m taking a break from reviews in October (and maybe November… I’m playing around with doing NaNoWriMo, the 50K word time-waster, this year again). I’ve got a lot to do in real life right now, and webcomic reviews are going to have to take a back seat. I may come back shortly Halloween time to take a look at some spoooooky webcomics (including, perhaps, finally posting that Red Light Properties review I’ve been working on since, oh, the beginning of the year). But beyond that, I don’t know. I’ll be traveling a little, loving a little, dressing up to scare impressionable kids a little… all that stuff.

Thanks to everyone for reading the Webcomic Overlook. And fear not! The Webcomic Overlook will be back.

For fans of Know Thy History

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If you’re a fan of the Know Thy History feature I publish around here, the AV Club did a pretty fantastic primer on newspaper comics today. It’s mainly an overview, as comic history is too deep to cover in only a span of two pages, but it’s a highly informative piece about some of the most important strips to see print in newspapers. I was also happy to see The Yellow Kid, Buster Brown, Polly And Her Pals, Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and Li’l Abner all get mentions, which means I ain’t too far off the rocker when it comes to picking entries for my own feature.

Here are what AV Club considers to be the essentials:

1. Peanuts. At once accessible enough to be widely popular and personal enough to be poignant, Charles Schulz’s long-running, still-funny strip is what just about any newspaper cartoonist would love to have as a legacy.

2. Calvin & Hobbes. Too short-lived by half, Bill Watterson’s beautifully drawn journey into a oft-bratty child’s imagination made comic-strip fans out of people who rarely pick up a newspaper.

3. Gasoline Alley. Tip a cap to Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly and to notable Frank King fans Joe Matt and Chris Ware for reintroducing the lovely, novelistic Gasoline Alley to a generation that had never seen the strip in its heyday. Exciting, funny, and moving, the King run of Gasoline Alley is top-tier entertainment, regardless of the medium.

4. Krazy Kat. Like the best art, Krazy Kat defies easy analysis or explanation; it just emerges from its own peculiar space and proceeds to be.

5. Doonesbury. The longevity of Garry Trudeau’s sprawling, politically astute strip may have worked against its reputation some, as even comic-strip fans have come to take it for granted. But the longevity is also Doonesbury’s strength. Its characters have grown and changed with the world they live in, and there’s scarcely any major event of the past 40 years that hasn’t been dealt with by Trudeau in his strip. It remains as fresh—and important—as today’s news.

Metapost: Heads up

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Just a heads up: I had been totally been expecting to go on an overseas business trip this week. It’s since been canceled. However, I’d been preparing to go all week long, which meant I didn’t have time to read any webcomics. (Got all the time in the world now though. Rrrrrrr….)

That’s not to say there will be a review up at some point. It will be in a slightly different format than you’re used to, though.

But really, I just wanted to try out this nifty new “Status”-type post.