Shortly before going to bed last night, I saw a thread on Story-Games about cobbling together an RPG based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics.

Result: Last night, I dreamed that I was reading the sixth Scott Pilgrim book, and there was a bit where one character says of another, “She decided not to show up since she’s already got two minor consequences.”

Though now that I’ve run the idea through my mostly-awake brain, I suppose Teenagers from Outer Space would make a good starting point. On the other hand, the video game aspects of the books would work pretty well with a leveling-up system like d20 or Microlite20.

MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, NYC’s top event for indie comics. I’ve been going every year since the first one, but I totally forgot to do a list like this last year.

Books

• Octopus Pie volumes 2 and 3, by Meredith Gran.
• Templar, Arizona volumes 2 and 3, by Charlie “Spike” Trotman.
• Piracy is Liberation book 001: Information Wants to be Free by Mattias Elftorp.
• Never Learn Anything From History, a collection by Kate Beaton.
• The Mourning Star vol 2, by Kazimir Strzepek.
• Pretty Little Book by Lucy Knisley.

Floppies

• Inbound issues #1 and 2, a Boston-based anthology magazine by the Boston Comics Roundtable.
• 252-Z: Law of Monsters by Carter Allen.
• The Spring 2009 issue of InkStains, the anthology magazine published by the School of Visual Arts comics department.
• Las Aventuras de ¡Quixote!, by Pat Woodruff. This was also on the SVA table.
• Papercutter issues #1 and 2, a comics anthology from Tugboat Press of Portland, Oregon.
• Yeah, It Is by Leslie Anne MacKenzie Stein. I’m actually not sure whether to categorize this as a floppy or a book, since it’s got an ISBN. I think my dividing line is the binding — this is saddle-stiched, so it’s a floppy.
• Pixu #2, an anthology comic by Becky Cloonan, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, and Vasilis Lolos.

Minis

• Comic-Strip Movies #4: Bury Me Not, by Luisa Felix, who has a pretty good hard-sell technique. Good thing the comic was only 50¢.
• Jobnik Manifesto, a little freebie from Miriam Libicki.
• Harvest is When I Need You Most, Only What You Take With You, and And Don’t Forget the Droids, a trio of adorable Star Wars-related anthology minis edited and designed by Shelli Paroline.
• Sordid City Softcore, by Charles Schneeflock Snow.
• Geraniums and Bacon #5, by Cathy Leamy, who was next to Charles Snow, and laughed at my jokes.

This year was the first in the new venue, the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th and Lex, which has one big internal space, much more convenient than the three smaller spaces at the Puck Building (no link because their website has annoying automatic sound). A bit warm, though. Ran into, jeez, practically everybody, which highlights the superiority of one big space for socializing and networking.

Two or three different people asked me if I had done any comics lately, which has me pissed off at myself for having done practically no comics at all in like twenty years. I clearly in some way emit the aura of someone who ought to be making comics.

Everyone who plays RPGs oughta go read Dylan Horrocks’s short comics story, “The Physics Engine”. I’m especially thinking of jimhenley and bruceb here.

Looking over the Hugo noms, I’m a bit grumpy over the “Best Graphic Story” category. Two out of the six nominees are other-media tie-ins (Serenity and The Dresden Files), which, well, given the relative sizes of the book, TV/movie, and comics fan bases, I can’t help but suspect that those two were nominated not so much for their quality as for the popularity of their franchises.

Still, I can’t really complain, since I didn’t bother to fill out the nomination form. I’ve fallen woefully out of touch with the current SF scene (I’m currently in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s latest, but before that I was reading Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration from 1982 1967). I am pretty good at keeping up with what’s going on in the indie comics (even if I don’t buy very much) and webcomics scenes, though, so I figure I should make an effort this year to keep track of my reading for next year’s awards. So here’s what I can remember of what I’ve bought recently:

• Angora Napkin by Troy Little.
• Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe (aka Scott Pilgrim vol 5) by Brian Lee O’Malley.
• Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil by Jeff Smith. This came out in floppies last year, but I just got the paperback collection.
• In the Flesh by Koren Shadmi, a collection of shorts stories.
• RASL: The Drift by Jeff Smith. Again, the collection just came out in January, but the floppies came out last year.
• Platinum Grit vol 1 by Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy. Yet another case where I don’t know if it’ll be eligible. The webcomic’s been up for years, and there used to be a self-published (through Lulu.com) dead-tree edition, but this collection just shipped this month, and I think it’s the first time all this material is available under one cover.
• Update: And on Friday, I picked up North World vol 2 by Lars Brown, which is also a webcomic.

I also just bought Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole last week, but it came out in 2008.

Oh, and anyone reading this who lives in Brooklyn, specifically Prospect Heights or northern Park Slope? Let me recommend Bergen Street Comics, Brooklyn’s latest high-class comics shop. Like Rocketship, it makes space for weekly floppies but is mostly there to sell books. And Bergen offers a loyalty program ($20 store credit for each $100 spent), which I don’t think Rocketship does.

Looking through some old Alarums & Excrusions zines, I found the following in a comment I wrote back in May 2002:

Actually, I’ve got some ideas about running a Ranma-like game, and they require some different mechanics. […] At the core is a token mechanic, where each character has disads that he can trigger (or that can be triggered by other characters). Triggering your own disads gains you a token (I’d probably use poker chips) in the GM agrees that your PC was actually disadvantaged, or it was funny. Triggering someone else’s disad requires you to give that player a token. Some special powers might also require paying a token to use for advantage. This mechanic simulates the stupidity of the Ranma characters — they often fail to do simple, rational things because they lack the tokens to pay for them.

The Aspects mechanic from Fate and Wheel of Fate would work well for this.

I could swear I saw a martial-arts Wheel of Fate game out there somewhere on the web a few weeks ago, but Google hasn’t found it for me.

Hey, everybody! The MoCCA Art Fest is this coming weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm, at the Puck Building, on Houston St a block east of Broadway. Admission is $10/day or $15 for the weekend. Who else is going?

This was a very purchase-light MoCCA for me. I’ve spent the past few weeks sorting through books, packing some, throwing away others, and I can’t look at books now without thinking about the fact that I don’t have space enough for the one’s I’ve already got. And worse for floppies and minis, which I can’t just stick on a shelf.

So my self-imposed limit this years was: No floppies or minis, only books with actual spines. I only bought six or seven, and left them over at the Brooklyn apartment, since why bring them to Jersey City only to box them up and bring them to Brooklyn in three days. So, this year’s MoCCA haul:

Books:

• Sordid City Blues, by Charles Schneeflock Snow, who I also got to chat with.
• Abraxas and the Earthman, by Rick Veitch, an SF treatment of Moby Dick, which ran in Epic umpteen years ago.
• Scott Bateman’s Secret Sketchbook of Shame, by Scott Bateman and shame. I think it’s been a few years since I’ve seen Scott.
• Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, by JP Stassen.
• And two or three other books, which I’ve already forgotten. This here’s a placeholder, and I’ll go back and fill it in at some point when the books and I are in the same state.

I missed out on getting a copy of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, the Fletcher Hanks collection (about which Coop said “looking at those panels is like eating a whole bag of Cheetos made of heroin.”). It sold out on Saturday.

Ever since I pretty much stopped buying big-company superhero comics and comics in pamphlet format, I often find myself complaining that there’s nothing new for me to buy at the comics shop on Wednesdays. These past couple weeks, I’ve had the opposite problem. Enough has come out that I not only have a backlog of unread comics, but there’s stuff I still need to buy that I haven’t because I don’t want to carry that much weight home all at once. Here’s some of the recent stuff:

Bought and read

Fell, vol 1: Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith
Cop gets transferred to the seamy side of a fictional city. More likable than most Ellis protagonists; in this book it’s the setting that provides the over-the-top nastiness. As with Global Frequency, each chapter is a stand-alone story, which doesn’t matter as much in a collection as it did in pamphlets, but as long as Ellis is following the pamphlet-then-book business model, that seems like a good plan. Templesmith’s art looks like low-rent Sienkevitch, and I eventually figured out that all the characters’ hands aren’t all spindly and crippled-looking for a dramatic reason, Templesmith just draws hands that way. Can you tell I’m not a Ben Templesmith fan? Still, the art mostly serves the setting well.

The Clarence Principle by Fehed Said and Shari Chankhamma
Cute goth comic. Clarence seems to have killed himself — he wakes up in the afterlife in a bathtub with slashed wrists. Much quirkiness follows, leading to an ironic ending that wasn’t really sufficiently supported by the preceding material. Maybe it would have seemed more plausible if I were an antisocial teenage goth.

The Homeless Channel by Matt Silady
Drama about a 24-hour cable TV channel devoted to the homeless. The writing is pretty good, especially the dialog, but the art (high-contrast photo-based) is crude enough that I had trouble telling the major female characters apart for much of the book. (There’s only one major male character, which is pretty unusual in itself.)

Bought, but not yet read

• The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar
• The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschemeier
• Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

I’d been waiting for The Rabbi’s Cat to come out in paper for, I dunno, I guess a year now, yet I went ahead and bought The Three Paradoxes and Exit Wounds in hardback. I picked up Ivan Brunetti’s Misery Loves Company in hardback too. I think I’ve jumped some internal hurdle that kept my from buying these things in hardcover. Price may also be an issue — Exit Wounds is only $20, and The Three Paradoxes is $15.

Not yet bought, but I’m planning to

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (out in paperback, sez Amazon)
• Casanova, vol 1: Luxuria by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá (maybe; it’s a $25 hardcover, a bit pricey for seven issues)
• Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

How many of you remember Big Numbers?

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, there was a big self-publishing movement in comics. The big year was 1988, which saw both Dave Sim’s Toronto meeting and Eastman and Laird’s Northampton (Massachusetts) Summit; the latter was where the “Creator’s Bill of Rights” was drafted. For a while it seemed like everyone interesting in comics was starting their own company and publishing just what they wanted to publish and hoping that somehow profits would come out of it. Looking back, it seems a bit like a precursor of the webcomics scene.

Alan Moore’s company was called Mad Love. Mad Love published the AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) one-shot, two issues of Big Numbers, and (as far as I can tell) nothing else.

Big Numbers was going to be Moore’s magnum opus, the work that made Watchmen look like a kiddie book. It was planned as a 12-issue series, set in Northampton (England), using metaphors from fractal mathematics to examine the lives and activities of the town’s residents as an American shopping mall opens up. The writing was Moore at his sharpest. The art, by Bill Sienkiewicz, was gorgeous.

The series stopped after two issues. Sienkiewicz couldn’t handle the workload, and his assistant Al Columbia took over and, I dunno, I’ve heard rumors about Columbia destroying his own art and quitting the project, but I don’t know if they’re true. Moore considers the project cursed, and doesn’t plan on finishing it. I hadn’t expected to ever see anything more.

Till today, thanks to eurotard. Here:

• Ten pages of Sienkiewicz’s art for issue #3 (unlettered, and not ten contiguous pages, sadly)

• Moore’s script for the first eight pages of issue #3

So Spider-man kills Mary Jane by fucking her to death with his radioactive jizm! Seriously, that’s a plot point in issue #3 of Spider-Man: Reign. Set 35 years in the future, a sort of Spider-Mannish rip-off of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, so it’s not in mainstream continuity, but still. I guess they figure Warren Ellis sells well, let’s all try that gonzo shit.

No, no spoiler warning. Do you worry that a loaf of moldy bread or a carton of rancid milk will spoil? No, you don’t, because they’re already damn spoiled.

This is why I don’t read superhero comics. Much.

Locas
by Jaime Hernandez

I never knew why I wasn’t a bigger fan of Love and Rockets. Jaime Hernandez’s artwork is brilliant — I remember poring over issues back in my SVA days, stunned at the perfection of his lines. And his pages are full of gorgeous eye candy; Maggie Chascarrillo is (to my eyes) the sexiest comics character ever. But somehow I lost track of the story and lost interest in the comic.

Lucky for me a collection came out with all of the stories of Maggie, Hopey, Penny, Izzie, and the rest, in one great big hardcover. I bought it a couple of years ago, but had trouble reading it because of the sheer size of the volume. At the time I lacked a comfy chair for reading, and would read in bed, where this massive tome was just too unwieldy. And when I got me a comfy chair, I’d lost track of the book. Till a couple weeks ago I hunted it down, moved by having read Ghost of Hoppers.

So now I’ve read it. Jaime’s art is still brilliant — crisp lines, large expanses of solid black, complex faces and emotions rendered deftly in a few simple lines. And I’ve got a handle on what was throwing my younger self off. It was the panel transitions. Jaime is very fond of unusual transitions. It’s common for him to skip away from a scene in progress for one panel as a non-sequitur, then shift back to show some time has passed. Or to have dialog flow as if one panel is directly following another, while the images shown indicate that more time has passed. As a young nerd, used to direct storytelling, this sort of thing confused me, but now I can appreciate it. And having years’ worth of stories in a single 780-page collection makes it easier to piece together the character’s motivations than when I was reading it in little bits, months apart.

Also, coming at the story as a young SF reader, Love and Rockets defied my expectations of coherent world-building. Jaime’s stories are set in a world with rockets, superheroes, and monsters, yet these things generally occupy the fringes of the narrative. It’s like a modern third-worlder’s experience of the Internet — he may know it exists, and know one or two people who’ve used it, but it’s not part of his everyday life. If you’ve got the SF reader’s habit of taking background details and trying to work out from them how the story’s world works, Love and Rockets will confound you as much as a Gabriel García Márquez story.

This is probably less of an issue for readers with wider tastes, or who are used to Japanese manga storytelling techniques. Speaking of which…

Ode to Kirihito
by Osamu Tezuka

I just ordered this through Amazon recently. It’s a Tezuka work from the early 1970s, about a doctor trying to find the cause of a disease that gives its victims dog-like faces. (It also generally kills them with respiratory shutdown after a month or so, before any furries out there get too excited.) The beast-like appearance of the disease’s victims brings out the beast-like behavior of normal people confronted with something unusual; there’s plenty of betrayal, slavery, bigotry, rape, murder, and insanity in these 822 pages.

Tezuka’s artwork is at times simple like a child’s cartoon, or stylized like modern art, or toned and realistic like a photo. His layouts are sometimes conventional, sometimes wild and inventive. Shaenon Garrity has a longer review, with page scans, which is what initially drew this book to my attention.

Last night I went to four different comic shops to get the two new Paul Grist books that shipped this week: Jack Staff vol 3 and Kane vol 6. Cosmic on 23rd had sold out of Jack Staff and never got Kane, but they did have All-Star Superman #6. I went down to St Marks Comics, which had Kane, but they’d also sold out of Jack Staff. Then I remembered that I’d walked right past Forbidden Planet on 13th without checking it, so I walked back, and they’d sold out too. World, I’m happy that Jack Staff is selling well, but could y’all hold back a bit till I get my copy? I walked back down to the NYU Starbucks to rest my feet and read Kane, and then walked up to Jim Hanley’s on 33rd, and they had Jack Staff. Yay! Total distance walked: about four miles.

Today I just walked from the WTC PATH station to Pearl Paint (to pick up a half-pan of Winsor Newton rose doré), and back (3/4 mile each way). And to and forth from home to the Grove St station, which (Google Earth tells me) is almost half a mile each way, so that means I walked five miles yesterday, and 2.5 today, which is why my feet hurt.

And I’ve somehow lost nine pounds since November.

Anyway, Volume 6 is probably my least favorite Kane volume of the series so far. What started out as a straight cop drama (which occasional comic relief) is being invaded by superhero tropes — a military super-solider suit, a blind assassin, etc. And a lot of the issue is given over to repeating Kane’s past history as revealed in other volumes. We get a couple of scenes of Oscar Darke interacting with other crime bosses, but one of them is tangled up with the stupid implausible super-suit plot.

The Jack Staff book is much better. As a superhero book, it’s unabashedly full of goofy and melodramatic superhero elements, and they’re fun as hell. How can you not love a criminal genius named Brain Head? Not to mention the WW2 German supervillain Kapitan Krieg. And all the other usual Jack Staff supporting cast — Tom Tom the Robot Man; the Q Division; the Freedom Fighters; Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter; Detective Inspector Maveryk; the Claw; and best of all, an appearance by Morlan the Mystic (who is clearly based on Alan Moore). As with the earlier Jack Staff books, the various storylines are presented in little pieces, three or four pages at a time, making it a bit of work to keep up with, but also giving the reader very much the feel of reading a whole line of books from a small comic publisher, with little crossovers and meta-plots.

And both books are full of Grist’s top-notch page layouts.

Yeah, I’m trying to do one of those draw-something-every-day things.

Discovered today that the grayscale marker under-drawing really doesn’t work well with the Inktense over-painting. The shadows come out all desaturated — somehow the grayness of the ink overcomes the dissolved pigment on top of it. Weird. I had some inkling (yeah, yeah) of this after yesterday’s drawing, but today just confirms it.

Also realized that I just plain like inking. Laying down those blacks is just tactile joy.

And I had a minor realization about comics plotting — that of all the stuff going into a comic, plot is the least important, and it’s only my teenaged imprinting on strongly plotted SF stories that makes me think otherwise — but it hasn’t really come to anything.

Also finally listened to the legit release of Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine, and yes, it is different from the leaked release. (Do Brits wince slightly at “different from” like I do at “different to”? Good.) Not only are there two tracks on the legit disk that weren’t on the leaked one (and one on the leak that isn’t on the legit), the actual arrangements are different. So even if you’ve got the leaked album, it’s worth getting the legit one, especially since it’s currently on sale for $10 at Virgin.

And speaking of sales, Barnes & Noble is having an online post-holiday sale. I’d been waiting for Jaime Hernandez’s Ghost of Hoppers to come out in paperback, but the hardcover was on sale for just $5!

Y’know why Japan has such a kick-ass comics industry? Because straight black hair is so damn easy to draw, is why. Assuming they don’t just slap a random polygon onto someone’s head and color it green or something.

Also, this looked a whole lot better before I put those black rectangles in the background.

And no, this doesn’t count as ambitious.

At the after-presentation dinner mission the other week, Gary Tyrrell of Fleen asked me the obvious question — what webcomics do I read? Me being the sad, silicon-dependent sod that I am, I was only able to recall four or five out of what I figured were a couple dozen webcomics. A few days back I got fed up with how badly Safari was performing and switched over to Firefox, and as part of that migration exported my Safari bookmarks, giving me an opportunity to pull the webcomics section out into a list. Turns out I read about 40 webcomics, though a few have stopped updating.

For those of you who are going to gloss over the whole list, let me just strongly recommend two comics right here: Templar, Arizona and Scary Go Round. These are the two that you’re most likely not to be already reading, but should be. Descriptions below.

OK, on to the list:

• A Softer World — A photo, cropped into three panels, with captions added. Been thinking of dropping this; it’s been a while since it made me laugh, or wince.
• Alien Loves Predator — Amazing comic built out of photos of posed action figures, NYC scenery, and Photoshop skill. Funny, too.
• Bang Barstal — Post-apocalyptic ass-kicking. It’s in the middle of its third story arc, “The Dead”, which is being posted in big chunks rather than one page at a time. I’d start with the second arc, “Racing Towards Home”.
• Bolt City — Kazu Kibuishi’s website, where he keeps a blog and posts updates to his various comics, like Copper, a beautifully drawn and colored comic where each story is a single page long.
• Bruno — Adventures of a depressed twenty-something woman, done as a (usually) single-panel strip. The cross-hatching can get pretty amazing when the artist gets ambitious, which he doesn’t often nowadays since he’s got several other comics going too.
• Bugsport — This comic set in a small New England town where space aliens have settled doesn’t update often, but it’s got gorgeous art. Check out the flying saucers that look like big-fin retro cars!
• Butterfly A superhero and his sidekick. How long since this thing’s updated?
• Cat and Girl — It was the “villanelle sandwich” strip that got me hooked.
• Desert Rocks — Um, actually I haven’t looked at this one in over a year. But I keep meaning to.
• Diesel Sweeties — Funny daily strip starring robots and hipsters. Distinctive pixel art.
• Dresden Codak — I found this one pretty recently, but I’m glad I did. Lovely artwork paired with weird intellectual humor. Check out the philosopher’s role-playing game.
• Flaky Pastry — Weekly extended-story humor strip set in a D&D-like fantasy world; pretty art.
• Girl Genius — Extended story comedy adventure from longtime comics pro Phil Foglio and his wife Kaja. You all read it already.
• Girls with Slingshots — Joke strip. Hazel is a cynical beanpole, Jamie is cheerful and zaftig, McPedro is a talking cactus. There’s lots of drinking.
• I am a rocket builder: An Old House — Actually a bunch of interlocking webcomics. Doesn’t update often.
• Mac Hall — Started as a college strip, currently on hiatus as the creators work on a new direction. Nice art, especially the use of color and blurred backgrounds.
• Miracle of Science — Extended-story SF comic about mad scientists and the cops who hunt them. Oh, and Martians.
• Naut-Cotic — Might delete this from my menu, since it hasn’t updated in forever. Long-form SF story with attractive art in a manga-derived, yet distinctive, style.
• Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life — Irregulary-updating philosophical humor strip about robots.
• No Pink Ponies — Joke strip about a woman who runs a comic store. Good art, but I’m starting to tire of the writing.
• No Rest For The Wicked — Long-form fantasy story using classic fairy-tale characters.
• Normal Life — Natasha Allegri’s LJ comic. Mostly exaggerated autobio humor.
• Ojingogo — Beautiful but surreal. I really wish this updated more often.
• Orneryboy — Sharp-looking, funny Flash comic. I don’t know why, but the main character reminds me of nihilistic_kid.
• Overcompensating — Autobio comic based on the daily life of a billionaire cowboy poet and webcomics magnate.
• Perry Bible Fellowship — Strange conceptual humor with a flexible, adept art style.
• Pibgorn — Another one I may drop. The adventures of a fairy, a succubus, and a pianist. Nice art, but the stories move very very slowly. He’s currently been doing an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s been going on for months.
• PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi — You’d be surprised how many characters from Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon cartoons can be squeezed into a single storyline. Well-drawn, too; the cartoonist does a great job redesigning the characters for an anime look. The second storyline started up a few months back, then stopped after just a few pages.
• PvP — Long-running popular joke strip set at a gaming magazine. Lots of geeky humor. Origin of the “Joss Whedon is my Master” line.
• Questionable Content — Romance, sarcasm, coffee, indie music, and little robots.
• Raymondo Person — Weird humor. Just updated this week, for the first time in months, as I was thinking of dropping it.
• Savage Chickens — Daily single-panel joke strip, starring talking chickens, drawn on Post-It notes.
• Scary Go Round — One of my favorite webcomics. Nice art, and consistently funny dialog. John Allison totally nails the difficult task of giving each daily page a joke so it’s satisfying on its own, while also building long story-lines out of them.
• Skullcano Island — Is that a great name or what? I think this is just whatever the artist feels like putting up, whenever he gets around to it. If you go back to the beginning of the archives there are a bunch of repeating Bizarro-like strips, and then eventually this island-based storyline shows up. I love this drawing style.
• Sordid City Blues — Wide-hipped women compete for the heart of a skinny cartoonist, while a rock musician wrestles with his faith. Currently on hiatus while mister_wolf works on a comic based around St John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul”.
• Space Pirate Apocalypse — Actually the home for whatever comics Ben Bittner makes. “Cooking with Anne” is about scraping together a meal after a nuclear war, “Pirate” is a pirates comic that petered out after a few strips, and “Apocalypse” is his latest, that hasn’t gotten past the first panel.
• Templar, Arizona — I rave about this one a lot. It’s set in a fictional Arizona town, I think maybe in a slightly alternate history, and shows a shy would-be writer trying to cope with overbearing neighbors and a strange neighborhood full of odd little counter-cultures. Spike’s dialog and art are just fantastic, and she’s got a real gift for both characterization and world-building.
• The Tenth Life of Pishio the Cat — Picked up a minicomic at MoCCA this year that started this story, and I was glad to see it continuing, but it hasn’t gotten very much farther. It’s a fantasy about a cat who’s used up his nine lives, and been given a tenth by the divine (and infernal) powers to perform a mission for them. Unlike most talking-animals strip, this one doesn’t gloss over what carnivore behavior is like; Pishio is an utterly believable vicious little brute.
• Wapsi Square — A slice-of-life comic that’s being swallowed by a supernatural storyline. At this point I’m just reading it for the drawings of sexy girls.
• Wigu — The hilarious adventures of a small boy, his family, a pastel space pony, and an talking potato made of poison.
• Zip and Li’L Bit — Well-drawn story about a boy who swaps places with an upside-down version of himself he finds walking around on his ceiling.

I’ve added a couple more webcomics to my trawl:

The Tenth Life of Pishio the Cat
I picked up the beginning of this story in minicomic form at MoCCAfest this year, liked it, and promptly forgot about it till I saw a post about it on onlinecomic.

Dresden Codak
Linked to from Miracle of Science today. I want to be this comics when I grow up! Surreal humor with plenty of scientific hat-tips. Starts out a bit weak, but improves steadily, and after a dozen or so strips he starts developing some continuity. By the current strip, his art’s gotten very nice.