Wondermark

Check out: Archive Binge

June 29, 2023September 4, 2009

Listen: I will tell you about David Morgan-Mar. Besides being an astrophysicist, he’s a prolific comics author — and he also likes turning his particular intelligence onto overcoming barriers to reading webcomics. His magnum opus, Irregular Webcomic!, sports one of the most comprehensive navigation systems I’ve ever seen (offering separate navigation options for each of different storylines that interweave, for example) and that’s only one of the approximately half-dozen experimental webcomic projects he’s got going at any given time.

His newest contraption is called Archive Binge, and it does a pretty good job of describing itself thusly:

Have you ever found an interesting looking webcomic, looked at the archive, and thought:

I can’t start reading this! There are hundreds of strips to catch up on!

At Archive Binge you can create a custom RSS news feed for a webcomic, which will take you through the archive, at a rate faster than the new comics update. This lets you get up to date on comics with large archives, without spending hours or days trawling the archive in one go.

Rather than spend a whole day or more bingeing on a comic archive, set up an Archive Binge feed. You can start from the beginning, or wherever you’re up to. You can set your custom feed to deliver a strip every day, 4 strips every weekday, or whatever you want, up to 10 strips a day. Anyone can read 10 strips a day! If you get a spare hour and read the next 50 strips, you can update your position in your feed. You can even pause your feed if you go on vacation, and turn it on again when you get back.

And before you know it, you’ll have completed the archive and be up to date.

So, if you’ve put off the idea of going back through the Wondermark archives due to their scale (or the Dr. McNinja archives, or the Girl Genius archives, etc), Archive Binge is the solution. Even better: you’ve read the newest comics already, so you know it gets better. And don’t forget the mouseover texts!

(Also: fellow comic creators: David’s nonprofit service is offered strictly on an opt-in basis — if you’re interested, I encourage you to participate, as it will help me read the backlogs of your long-running comics.) ANYWAY: ARCHIVE BINGE

True Stuff: A Good Operator

June 29, 2023September 2, 2009

I really enjoyed this brief article in the August 12, 1882 Scientific American, entitled “Requisites for a Good Operator.” In it, a hotshot telegraph operator writes Sci-Am to ask if he might possibly be one of the best operators around, on account of his transmission speed (42 words per minute!). The magazine’s in-house telegraph expert replies with a succinct dismissal of the notion that speed makes the man, and rounds out a description of a good operator that makes me want to take up the telegraph, such is the wisdom and character of the figure it describes. All this with a little sarcasm at the end as well (“You’re playing around and timing yourself on your lunch break, right? Don’t electrocute yourself, genius”). Click the image for a larger version, or a full transcription of the text is after the jump.

Coloring Contest Redux!

June 29, 2023August 31, 2009

use these seven colors only

Last year I held a contest for folks to color individual comic strips for my book Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death. It was so much fun to see everyone’s interpretations of my comics that I’ve decided to do it again!

The terms are almost exactly the same as last time, so get ready for some familiar-sounding description:

I’m inviting you to color one, two, three…up to six of my comic strips. The best entries will be printed in my next collection, Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters (scheduled for release by Dark Horse Books in April 2010), and will be credited to you and, if you like, your website. The best colorists will also receive payment for their work — I’m not looking for free labor here.

You have just under two weeks to participate! ~~I’ll be accepting entries only through Sunday, September 13 (11:59 PM Pacific time)~~ Update: The deadline has passed. Thanks to all who submitted!

Details are below the jump! Good luck to all.