Thanks for reading.

12/31/06

Longtime readers will recall that I keep a "filler reserve" of cartoons to run on days when I can't produce a new one, that I like to run out the filler reserve in December because they all have the present year's copyright date on them, and that I can only do that on weekend days while a contestant in the Daily Grind if I wish to remain a contestant in the Daily Grind. Shorttime readers will have figured out that much from the top cartoon today. What still bears explanation is that, this year - what with the contemporary arc revelation surrounding Arthur's eighteenth birthday two weeks ago - there was too much going on for me to remember to spread the year's leftover fillers one-a-day on weekend days. So I'm running them all today. What also may bear some explanation is that D.J. Coffman is a jerk. Sometimes. When he feels like it. Which is most of the time. ... Okay, it bears more explanation than that: D.J. is a fellow Daily Grinder. At the start of the contest he was one of two contestants who truly took to heart the admonishment at the message board for us to start "trash-talking" each other, and most of us were quite taken aback. D.J.'s humor style generally is much more Stone and Parker than Parker and Hart, and despite (or because of) our discomfort he went with it. Over about a year and a half he probably succeeded in offending the rest of us at least once each, and loved it. For some of that time he also was always the first contestant to call the rest of us on a perceived violation of the Grind rules; in most cases the judges ruled in favor of the other party, and in most of those cases D.J. failed to let the issue drop in a timely fashion. But D.J. is one of the few of us who actually makes his living at cartooning, and his changing professional life led him to drop out of the Grind a few months ago in favor of other concerns. He's doing exactly what he wants with his life and I say all power to him.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Shortpacked, Scary Go Round, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic, Real Life, Peanuts

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive, Theater Hopper, Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Todd and Penguin, Pibgorn, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: AppleGeeks, Achewood, Kismetropolis, WIGU, Striptease, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, Anywhere But Here, Starslip Crisis, Questionable Content, Devil's Panties, Schlock Mercenary, Narbonic

Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Sinfest, Bruno, Boxjam's Doodle

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition, Two Lumps, Zortic, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Home on the Strange, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: Girls With Slingshots, Dandy & Company, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Megatokyo

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Medium Large, Station V3, Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Sheldon, Little Dee, PvP

Webcomics I read Sundays: xkcd, Minus, Smithson, Something Happens, Li'l Mell, Butternut Squash, General Protection Fault, Perry Bible Fellowship, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Mac Hall, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, No Room for Magic, The Green Avenger, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Whovian Observer, Gossamer Commons,

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Living Comic, Online Comics Day, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Comixpedia and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.