I guess it’s no surprise that there aren’t that many sports-themed webcomics. After all, the sports jocks and comic nerds are like the two subsets that supposedly never cross. And when they do, the outcome can be disastrous.

Sports teams are also specialized (football fans aren’t necessarily curling fans) and regional… so if you do a comic about, say, The Boston Red Sox, then the only people reading are likely going to be the Boston natives who follow baseball. Still, they do exist. In honor of the Big Game, the resumption of the NBA season, and whatever hockey is doing right now, here are some sports webcomics that might get you pumped up for the weekend.

Buzzer Beater by Takehiko Inoue

Buzzer Beater is the only webcomic on Wikipedia to be filed under the category of “sports webcomics.” It is also one of the oldest and most successful webcomics. It debuted in 1997. It went on to print in Shonen Jump and eventually got turned into an anime. Seriously, though, it’s a can’t miss premise: Earth wants to prove that they’re still competitive at basketball, so they play some mad hoops against aliens who look like devils. So… basically Space Jam. But with way more awed gasps about getting “immense air.”

Small Market Sports by Bill Charbonneau

Small Market Sports is, essentially, sports radio talk distilled in comic format. Except with radio personalities replaced by talking balls. This puts ‘em slightly higher on the cuteness scale than the Hockey Night in Canada guys … but slightly lower than the hosts of the Dan Patrick Show.

Sports Guys by Greg Eales and Tony DiGerolamo

This comic seems to be about a bunch of poor fans who seem to be all suffering from a bad case of lockjaw and esotropia. It’s nice that they found a bar where they could bond over their shared illness. And fantasy football.

Boxer Hockey by Tyson Hesse

This is some bizarre quidditch-like sport that involves dudes with any sort of blunt objects, a goal, a frog, and a lot of hitting. Is it fair including some totally made up sport for this list? Well… once you include intergalactic basketball, all bets are off.

Well… maybe not technically, but in the aftermath of her book’s success, she is pursuing other opportunities and idling her site for now. From Hark! A Vagrant:

I’m working on a comic now, but I wanted to get this out, because the website has been idle for a little while.

The success of the book and everything I’ve done so far has been just amazing, and because of this, I’ve been given opportunities for other work, different projects. These range widely – anywhere from children’s books to television work. I’ve been lucky. But I’ve been pacing the room about what decisions to make. To be honest with you – and that’s the point of this message, I just want to keep you informed. You come back here to see what’s new! God bless ye. Anyway: to be honest with you, I’ve taken on freelance work in the past years and that’s been well and fine, but I’ve never given other long term projects a chance, because I can never detach myself from the website. If you wish I had the ability to make comics faster than I do, you’re not the only one. As much as I love them, they’re a slow moving vehicle from blank page and no ideas to a finished update.

This is a funny job. Webcomics are often cited as the future of comics and the internet and I don’t know what else, but the fact that no one has retired from them yet means that I, at least, rest a little uneasy in these shoes sometimes if only for the lack of having a dependable compass by which to steer the ship. I just want to make the best decisions I can, so that I will be around longer, making drawings and comics and writing and other things that I hope people will enjoy. I’m not sure what will work out with these opportunities that have come my way, and I guess I can’t really say much about them, but I think I’d be a fool if I didn’t give them a try. So I am going to! Whatever I can let you know, I will.

The website schedule for Hark has never been.. uh.. something to set your watch to, I know, and here’s the news I am sad to give: it’s going to slow down more. At least for now. So that I can give some other things a chance. It’s a little scary, and who knows, maybe I’ll fall on my butt right away and we will be back on track here next month. I don’t know. But I’ll keep you informed.

Good luck to Ms. Beaton. It seems like you’re living the dream.

(h/t Robot 6)

Through its relatively short lifespan as a genre, webcomics have proved they can do things just as good as any other form of media can. They can make you laugh. They can make you cry. They can make you poo your pants when you get a surprise animation of a creepy anime zombie girl. They can make you find the goodness in humanity through the flooded streets of New Orleans, and they can make you feel the frustration of trying to find a loved one in Iran.

And, yes, webcomics can teach. Moreso, I suspect, than conventional print comics can. There are a lot of webcomic creators out there — such as Kate Beaton and Randall Munroe — that actually respect the intelligence of their readers. They’ll give you a set up using an obscure historical figure or an advanced calculus mathematical equation and trust that you’ll laugh even if you don’t get it at first, and that you’ll do more research if the subject piqued your interest.

Take, for example, Sydney Padua’s 2D Goggles (subtitled The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage), a webcomic about two historical characters that I hadn’t thought about since my high school BASIC programming class.

The comic centers around the legitimately fascinating figure of Ada Lovelace. Wikipedia tells us that she “was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the ‘World’s First Computer Programmer’.” Well, hot dog!

Adding to the legend is that she was also the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron. You know, the guy who is infamously the origin for the term “Byronic hero”? The kind of guy who, as a former lover described it, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” … and yet cultivates an undeniable aura of bad-boy sexiness at the same time? Honestly, that sounds like a superhero (or supervillain) origin if I ever heard one … only it turns out to be real.

She teams up with the flighty genius Charles Babbage to create the analytical machine, the world’s first computer that runs on giant punch cards. Ms. Padua characterizes them as mad scientists. Despite the gender politics of the Victorian Era, the two are on somewhat equal footing, united by their unique understanding of abstract mathematics. Babbage is a genius, but he retreats into his own personal world of math and equations. Lovelace is more outgoing, but has black moods that mirror those of her infamous father.

Together… they fight crime!

… well, the fight crime as often as the Aqua Teen Hunger Force fought crime. Which is to say, never. Ms. Padua’s blog reveals that this was a one-shot gag that imagined a more exciting future for Ada Lovelace instead of the real life tragedy of her early death at 36. Fans really embraced the idea of action packed of Lovelace and Babbage, and Ms. Padua complied.

The adventures feel like a series of self-contained Looney Tunes episodes with little continuity needed between episodes … or indeed, between even chapter breaks.

To get an idea of the free-for-all-nature of 2D Goggles, let’s take a look at one of the latest stories: Charles Babbage acts on his annoyance over street musicians. In retaliation he develops a harmonic disruptor that creates a destructive interference to destroy the offending instruments.

However, this only causes more problems. The street musicians take marching orders from swingin’ dude named The Organist, who retaliates by turning all of London into a giant instrument and making everyone dance. Meanwhile, Lovelace struggles with her own newly found passion for something completely irrational: poetry.

So you’ve got a healthy irreverent attitude toward historical figures, math and engineering as the basis of smart and clever jokes, and a solid cartoonist doing the artistic chores. It’s set in the visually fascinating of Victorian England. It could probably be described as steampunk, but the most annoying aspects of that genre — the unnecessary addition of flywheels and goggles — seem to at least make sense here. Given my affection for Victorian stuff and my enjoyment cracked historical recollections, 2D Goggles should be the mutt’s nutts! The bees knees! And other British colloquialisms!

And, to my surprise… I’m not 100% on board the 2D Goggles express.

I’m not quite sure why I feel that way. I think I’m a bit thrown off by the juxtaposition of the long from text with the artwork. Much of the humor comes from Lovelace and Babbage are such brainiacs that what passes for scintillating conversation in their circle goes far over the heads of everyone they meet. To accentuate the joke, we usually get long, tortured reams of explanation that show how far away they two are from holding normal conversation, complete with charts and diagrams. And while a decent illustration of how normal people would have trouble following geniuses, it does feel a bit like a reliably overused go-to-gag straight out of The Big Bang Theory.

In fact, most of the jokes center around the same three things: Babbage hates street music. Lovelace hates poetry. They build machines more complex than the task needs them to be. Running gags are fine and all, but resorting to the same goofy themes just feels so … twee.

There’s a gag when Lovelace — realizing that Queen Victoria cannot truly understand the ramifications of their analytical machine — decide to make her happy by printing out a cute kitty. That’s the strip’s most monkeycheese gag … except for the one that actually involves monkeys. I know, I know … it’s funny because it’s the queen and she’s easily distracted by shiny objects, and Lovelace and Babbage are totally acting like the overly self-important programmers of the modern day. Still, it didn’t ring true to me mainly because the punchline is simply that the queen is an idiot and the programmers are pompous. Because 3 chapters was a long way to get there.

Padua also comes from a traditional animation art style. It’s very attractive, admittedly. She has a good sense on how to design each character so uniquely that you can guess the personality just at a glance. Lovelace looks always on edge, Babbage has a manic edge to him, and Queen Victoria looks like a wide-eyed child.

Still, I’m not quite sure it’s the appropriate one to use for this kind of comic, mainly because everyone has to be drawn in a style that exaggerates their emotions to a wild degree. There are many, many scenes of the characters looking slack-jawed and bug eyed. There is no room for subtlety.

It’s a comic where everyone takes everything to be a big deal. It’s almost like they’re always yelling… which, indeed, is probably the case since everything ends in exclamations. It’s very tiring. In comparison, one of the most charming things about Kate Beaton’s Hark A Vagrant! are the slow burns a lot of her illustrations imply. If someone I staring out with a bug-eyed expression, you get the sense that he’s been standing there for quite a while and the realization had slowly dawned on him. In 2D Goggles, people go crazy for no reason like a pack of crazed chihuahuas.

Maybe this is why my favorite character is perhaps Isambard Kingdom Brunel (good Lord, that’s a man’s name). In real life, he’s a celebrated engineer who design several steamships and England’s Great Western Railway. Here, he’s the no-nosense guy who lends and air of practicality. Best of all, he doesn’t do crazy reactions shots. He has the aloof demeanor of a man who just does not give a f**k. He just sorta stands around, cool, collected, with a “who are these buy-eyed weirdos I have to share this comic with” look on his face.

And yet, 2D Goggles is smarter and better researched than your average steampunk webcomic. This is why I’m recommending the comic despite giving it a rather average grade. For all my complaints, 2D Goggles is rather unique, and you’ll certainly learn a lot about British history by reading it.

I also tried the “Lovelace and Babbage” app, by the way, and the comic looks better on the iPad than they did on my desktop. The dimensions of the panels were clearly optimized to the screen. The downside is that downloading issues can get pretty pricey, especially for a guy like me who also tends to drop a lot of money into Comixology’s pockets.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Ryan Andrews tells the story of an elderly couple and an onimous plant in the short 5-part webcomic, Sarah and the Seed. Why does Aaron have dreams of eldritch horrors? Why does Sarah have a strange demeanor of preternatural blissfulness? Read the comic and find out, heroes!

There must be something in the waters of Nova Scotia that makes its residents really embrace history. Kate Beaton, one of the most prominent names in webcomics currently, made it big by sticking modern slang in the mouths of respected figureheads of history.

She’s not the only one, though. Once upon a time, a resident of Halifax became a staff artist for the venerable retailer, Hudson’s Bay Company, in Winnipeg, where he drew ads for ladies’ corests. Later, he would move to comic strips. His first job was illustrating the adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. However, being a true artist, what he really wanted to do was work on something that was his own creation.

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst loved this man’s pitch so much that he offered him ownership of the strip, a rarity for the earlier work-for-hire era in comics. Incidentally, this is the third time Hearst factors into this feature. It’s kinda uplifting to know that one of the world’s biggest media tycoons was deep down inside a huge comic nerd.

That cartoonist went on to pen the adventures of a knight in King Arthur’s Court, someone whose adventures are still featured in newspapers to this day. His name was Hal Foster, and that comic strip is Prince Valiant.

(Incidentally, this piece is going to lack the usual links, mainly because my main reference site for newspaper comics — the I Love Comix Archive — went down because the hosts got spooked by SOPA. Sigh.)

Now, I’ll be honest with you… Prince Valiant is one of those comic strips that I’ve never really dug, despite being aware of it since I was a wee El Santo. I mean, now that I’ve taken a look at a few strips, I’ve become so genuinely intrigued that I immediately sent off for my own Prince Valiant hardcover to lazily breeze through.

Valiant is unique. There is no other strip in the newspaper like it. The drawings were always intricately detailed, there were no frames bordering the panels, and all dialogue and action was conveyed in text. Everyone’s posed like they’re in a Renaissance painting. Still, it’s a hard strip to like, especially when you’re a kid who just wants pages and pages of explosions and fist fights. Valiant looks and feels … stodgy.

So it was a huge surprise when an older co-worker (in his late 40′s) and I got to talking about comics, and he mentioned that his favorite was Prince Valiant. That threw me for a loop, because I didn’t think that there had been any actual Prince Valiant fans since, oh, 1960 perhaps?

Still, looking back at the Prince’s glorious history, it’s pretty apparent why there’s an appeal. First of all, there’s that unconventional use of prose and images. Not everyone’s a natural comic reader. Some people do rather like reading prose. And those people were well serviced by Prince Valiant, which is closer to being pictures with captions. The format does impart a sense of class, doing justice to its Arthurian setting in a way that the traditional frames-and-word-balloons format can’t.

Second, there’s that admittedly stunning art. Foster was a fantastic all-around artist. His strip boasted some great looking architecture, meticulously detailed clothing, and epic clashes. He had a keen eye for adding shadows to heighten drama. Hal Foster is said to have put 50 to 60 hours working on a single strip, and it shows. The results look less like a comic and more like a Gustave Dore woodcut.

Perhaps Foster drew on his own immigrant experience when creating the origins of Prince Valiant. They were, after all, both strangers in a strange, yet still familiar, land. Both got a big career boost from admiring patrons: Foster with Hearst, Valiant with Gawain and, later, King Arthur.

The Prince Valiant comic strip starts off with Val as a little boy from the far off land of Thule (said to be in Scandinavia). His father and mother, the King and Queen, were exiled to the new realm of England … where they are not exactly welcomed with open arms. So the locals exile them to a local swamp. Prince Valiant, though, is a naturally jolly lad, and he makes the best of the situation.

Like, um, fighting dragons. (Google Image Search failed to bring up the original Hal Foster strip of Prince Valiant fighting a dragon, which I’m told looked like a plesiosaur. So have this latter day 2005 image instead, where Prince Valiant fights a couple of plesiosaurs lake dragons.)

Eventually he gets in good with the Knights of the Round Table, becoming friends with Sir Gawain and serving as his squire, where he gets to go on some crazy adventures!

The fantasy elements would eventually be reduced. As the story developed, Foster realized that the character development took such a turn that Prince Valiant deserved a more realistic take. “Realism” being relative.

Much has been written of how Prince Valiant is not historically accurate, cobbling together imagery from different eras. Open Letter Monthly writes:

Since the time of young Val’s earliest adventures is well-established in the strip – when little more than a boy, he journeys to the court of King Arthur intent on becoming a knight of the Round Table – those details of dress, armor, and especially castles (no previous comic strip had seen the like of Foster’s castles) were not, strictly speaking, accurate. The armor should have been composed of Roman cast-offs, and the castles should have been dumpy little affairs behind drab walls, not those soaring Norman confectioner’s pieces that fill the pages of this book. Such anachronisms prompted small avalanches of correcting letters from fans, but Foster took it serenely – he acknowledged from the beginning that his concern would be to give his readers the Arthur’s England they imagined, not necessarily the one that might actually have existed.

But, come on, when has a strictly accurate representation of King Arthur ever been all that compelling. After all, by all accounts, the guy wasn’t real in the first place. The modern version of the legend was popularized by Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and those dudes traded on the medieval images like crazy. If you get too serious, you get that Kiera Knightly King Arthur movie. So, OK, maybe some people liked it … but to me, the story of the familiar High Middle Ages visuals robs the story of the charm. Give me the Camelot of Prince Valiant, Excalibur, and Sword In The Stone any day.

Besides, the loose interpretation of history allowed for some interesting adventures. Valiant would meet and marry Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles. After the marriage, she would get kidnapped by a Viking raider. Valiant pursued them halfway around the world, finally arriving at Niagara Fall for the climax … arriving in America about 1000 years before Columbus. Valiant and Aleta reunited, and they spent some time there hobnobbing with the local Indians. America would also be where Valiant’s first son, Arn, would be born.

That’s Xena: Warrior Princess levels of crazy, yo.

Still, through it all, Prince Valiant is a world of swashbuckling and derring-do. Good men battle evil. Flagons of ale are raised. Valiant remained ever true to his name. And, for some reason, he and his wife never visually aged despite technically being grandparents now. It has, for generations, served as a visual starting point for what many imagine fantasy stories to look like.

Prince Valiant is also the source of several enduring elements of pop culture. One would be Flamberge, a.k.a. The Singing Sword. The sword would eventually make its way to several animated parodies, first appearing in a couple of Bugs Bunny cartoons (one cheekily entitled “Prince Violent”) and eventually in a rather memorable scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The most famous aspect of Prince Valiant, though, is definitely that terrible, much-mocked haircut of his. It’s officially called a “pageboy,” but I’ve always like the “Prince Valiant” better. I mean, when you say “Prince Valiant” you know exactly what it is.

Of course, once styling that haircut was none other than movie star Robert Wagner, who played Prince Valiant in the 1950′s movie.

I’ve heard the movie wasn’t that great.

Perhaps.

But you can’t argue that Wagner didn’t get the otherworldly dorkiness of that haircut down.

Well… more than one thing. The other part of that is that manga is alive and well… in digital format. His article on io9 zeroes in to the main ailments plaguing the modern manga industry, and it’s potential salvation in the digital world. A few excerpts:

Manga sales in America have dropped 43% since 2007, an even bigger drop than domestically produced comics and graphic novels, suggesting that more than the bad economy is to blame. A few doomsayers like Toren Smith had claimed for years that the market was headed for a bust since publishers were glutting the market with too much junk.

…

But the problem isn’t just about fickle Americans — the Japanese manga market is hurting too. Sales of manga magazines, the traditional delivery medium for manga in Japan, peaked in 1995, and have been falling ever since. Graphic novel sales remained steady longer, but have also declined.

Manga is hurting the way that all print media is hurting — but in some ways it’s worse, because manga is ill-equipped to adapt to New Media. Like American comic books, manga started out as cheap entertainment for kids, but while American comics faced their dwindling readership by turning into an adult collector’s item with color, thicker paper and higher production values, manga magazines (and to a lesser extent, graphic novel collections) still use cheap ink and cheap paper to cram in as much pages-per-yen value possible.

This makes them an anachronism in an era where newspapers, phonebooks and pretty much any disposable printed media seem inconvenient at best, and environmentally irresponsible at worst. No matter how cheap you make it, you can’t get people excited about grimy newsprint anymore: in 2007 the Japanese company Digima founded the first free weekly manga magazine, Comic Gumbo, which they hoped would be funded by advertising, product placement and graphic novel sales. But like free weekly newspapers everywhere, they discovered it was hard even getting readers to pick them up, and both company and magazine went out of business after 48 issues.

And yet, manga is still popular: it’s just all being pirated online. A Google search for “manga” returns seven “scanlation” aggregators and zero manga publishers in the top ten, while searches for “comics,” “books” and “graphic novels” turn up stores and publisher sites, and even a search for “anime” turns up mostly legitimate sites, apparently thanks to FUNimation’s aggressive use of DMCA Cease & Decist notices.

…

The truth they don’t want you to know, perhaps, is that publishers are unnecessary; Japanese self-publishing is booming. The traditional model of manga success, as promoted in Bakuman, is all about getting picked up by a big publisher and enduring harsh hazing and having your manga ripped up by your editor in front of you to teach you humility and so on. (What do you expect a manga in Shonen Jump to say?)

But the Japanese market for dojinshi (self-published manga) has grown massively over the last 20 years, even while the mainstream has stagnated, and although most dojinshi is porn, there are also big original hits like Onani Master Kurosawa, which started out as a not-quite-Death Note parody with lots of (off-panel) masturbation, but became so popular it’s been adapted into a voice drama.

And self-published online comics are starting to become hits and get turned into anime, such as Kyo no Nekomura-san, Boku Otaryman, Tonari no 801-chan, and of course the most successful of them all, the megahit Hetalia.

Some digital artists have even produced their own international editions, such as Yoshitoshi Abe’s iPhone and Kindle manga and the digital manga magazines/collectives Gen Manga and Comic Loud.

Though of course time spent self-promoting and talking to readers is time away from the drawing board, artists who publish their own stuff are probably going to have more street cred and have less problems with piracy, as opposed to the traditional big-publisher model of secretive artists guarded by their publishers and working in isolation from their fans.

…

As digital media inevitably takes over, the two big questions are (1) whether the big publishers will survive, and (2) what essential “manga-ness” will survive in manga itself. Perhaps the expectation of free content online will mean that publishers spend even more time courting licensing opportunities, like with Broken Blade, an anime based on a manga from Flex Comix’s online magazine Comic Blood.

But digitization definitely empowers individual creators, even as the digital format pressures changes to the detailed B&W artwork and long-running melodramatic narratives that produced manga’s Golden Age. Still, maybe the future won’t be so different after all; the dominance of scanlations does show that there’s a huge audience for poorly scanned, low-res JPEGs of B&W art designed for print. The manga market is still much bigger than the American comic and graphic novel market, so don’t count it out yet. While One Piece, Bleach and Naruto stagger along on their creaky geriatric legs, new manga are waiting to step out of their shadows.

Greg Carter, author of vampire webcomic Love Is In The Blood (formerly Abandon: First Vampire), wrote to me that the comic is bringin on a new artist, who will be picking up where previous artist Elliot Dombo left off. That would be Gina Biggs, famously of Red String. It should be an interesting change in styles. Mr. Dombo’s art was geared more towards action, while Ms. Biggs’ style is softer and slightly more delicate.

Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time in webcomics a doctor has also been a luchador, as Awesome Hospital had Chris Hastings beat by a year. Still, it is a good time to be a luchador doctor, as fireman carries and hurricanranas has finally shaken off the stigma associated with alternative medicine.

I am something of a fan of stories about he software industry. It probably has something to do with taking the driest subject matter possible (programming) and turning it into a story that’s dramatic or epic. One of my favorite biographies is Masters of Doom, the story about the creators behind the revolutionary first person shooter, Doom. It starts off with hard times with the creators being forced the work around the clock in a dank room and ends with a truly remarkable fortunes for its two principle characters: John Carmack went on to become so rich that he amassed enough money to build his own space ship, while John Romero had a momumental rise and fall, going from the rockstar to the laughingstock of the video game industry.

And you can bet that I am totally on board with seeing Man On A Mission, the documentary about Ultima creator and longtime cosplayer Richard “Lord British” Garriott, who also amassed so much money he eventually fulfilled his childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut.

The creators of The Trenches, Scott Kurtz, Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins, also achieved some pretty amazing — albeit less galactic — milestones. Between them, they’ve established one the premiere game expo franchises in the world, emceed the Harvey Awards, were named as Time’s most influential people, and are regarded as the founding fathers of webcomics. Still, I don’t expect this partially autobiographical webcomic about life in the software development industry to arrive at something quite so mind-shattering.

Maybe if one of those lazy bums should get off their butts and build an actual space ship, huh?

The Trenches is staffed by a cast of characters whose noses are represented by various sorts of legumes. Our point of view is anchored by Isaac, a software programmer who’s way overqualified to be testing video games. Still, it’s a tough job market. When you’re living out of your car, beggars can’t be choosers.

We follow Isaac as he tries to desperately get his foot in the door. He finally succeeds when the boss takes Isaac to an Applebee’s, gets drunk, and hires Isaac on the spot. I was going to say that a similar bit happened on the Jaleel White sitcom, Grown Ups, but then I remembered that the boss in that case was a sexy babe, a hot tub was involved, and no one in the world watched that show so I should feel undying shame for even remembering it.

Immediately, Isaac is hated by the people in the company, mainly because his hiring meant someone had to be fired. Chief among his antagonists is Scott Kurtz Quentin McKenzie, a.k.a. “Q”, the team’s Test Lead who’s a big fan of the obscure (and fictional) 80′s cartoon, Lawstar. Isaac makes the mistake of disparaging the cartoon, and he soon finds himself at the tail-end of an office hazing ritual where he has to test a game that doesn’t exist. Fortunately, he finds a friend in Jade Sienna Cora Anders, a veteran who is probably the only normal person in the cast.

If there was a standardized scale gauging the subtleties between Penny Arcade and PvP, The Trenches would fall much closer to the PvP side. First of all, there are no parodies of games, which is the bread and butter of Penny Arcade. The comic is played as a generally straight office comedy with random goofy stuff thrown in. Like, most of the comic will be about the team coming together for crunch time, and then something like a “feral office baby” shows up.

So… PvP, basically.

And naturally, there’s a marketable cute, lovable animal named Mr. Toots. He tests video games because awwwwww wook at the cute widdle bunny wabbit and his cut wittle paws. His presence in the cast that seems to be a throwback to an earlier era of webcomics when everyone was required to have a waaaaacccckky animal somewhere under penalty of death. (Thanks, Pete Abrams.)

All in all, though, The Trenches isn’t a bad comic. It’s shaping up to be on more solid footing than either Penny Arcade or PvP. That’s the way it should be, given the maturity of their creators (despite being the focal points to some of webcomics’ most contentious online dramas, Kurtz, Krahulik, and Holkins have some decent business sense among ‘em). It’s early, so I guess it can be forgiven for being a comic that’s still in search of an identity. Is it going to be a straight-up twisted reflection of the foibles of office culture, like Dilbert? Is it going to be a light-hearted relationship drama? Will it be a comic that’s practically usurped by the cute animal star? Will it…

… Screw it, it’s probably just a rebooted PvP.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5).

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.