Sun, 2007 Feb 11
Some Comics
One of my favorite comic strips and one of my on-and-off favorites have jumped ship from comics.com, and now are featured on their own websites. The former, Sheldon may be the most consistently funny comic currently running. The humor reminds me a great deal of Douglass Adams, because it is enhanced by, well, knowledge. And particularly geeky knowledge. The other strip is Barkeater Lake, which I’ve blithered on about before.
On Sheldon’s website, the author/artist, Dave Kellett, keeps a blog, in which, amongst many other things, he discusses how the website is going. The blog is not the easiest to navigate, so I gave up finding the article, but as I recall, Kellett noted that the reason he had moved Sheldon to its own website was financial, and it has successfully brought him more money than hosting on comics.com. I don’t know the reasoning behind Barkeater Lake’s move, although I assume it is similar. (Barkeater includes a blog as well, which I haven’t looked through).
The single websites seems to encourage feature-added environments. On Sheldon’s site in particular, this includes a forum, full archives, the ability to purchase original artwork, etc. Which means I actually spend time at the website, as opposed to read the strip and go on at comics.com.
So, all that to say, this brings to light one of the deficiencies in the process of information aggregation on the internet, best represented, I think, by RSS feeds (which somebody assumedly uses). Aggregation can be very nice: I read most of my favorite comics at one website, for example, but of course, it can also be very limiting, forcing the strips to fit their web presence within a pre-defined system. Which statement is not at all original or particularly revelatory. But I felt like making it. That’s all.
