Thanks for reading.

8/2/09

There's something that perhaps ought to be addressed for former King Arthur In Time And Space readers; or even current KAITAS readers, if the links in the discussions at the beginning of the AKOTAS sabbatical intrigued any of you who hadn't read KAITAS before. I noted at the beginning of AKOTAS-2 that, while it's a product of the same exercise as KAITAS, there would be differences. One of those differences is how AKOTAS-2 treats Star Trek: Enterprise. Or will treat it, if it ever does. When Star Trek: Enterprise debuted, then called merely Enterprise, I'd been posting fanfiction stories and cartoons globally replacing franchise proper nouns with King Arthur legend proper nouns for a year or two. I'd also plugged in Greek heroes for superheroes, Egyptian gods for rebel alliances and their imperial enemies, a martyr in for a Slayer, and Robin Hood and other British Isles legends in for 24th-century Starfleet crews. When it came to a 22nd century Starfleet crew, my first thought was to plug in the legends of Maximus/Macsen, replacing a starship captain predating Kirk with a conqueror from Welsh legend predating Arthur. But Macsen ended up instead the KAITAS analog of Dylan Hunt before his time displacement, and I did something else with Enterprise: Having enjoyed working King Arthur into an existing, complete Star Trek series, I decided it'd be fun to give Enterprise to Arthur himself instead of someone who predates him - and work him into an ongoing series as it went on. Enterprise assisted me in this endeavor by introducing in its pilot/premiere an ongoing story arc of a "temporal cold war". This allowed Nimue, inheritor and operator of Merlin's time machine at this point of KAITAS chronology, to put forward, in-text, the KAITAS version of Enterprise as not a previous history but an alternate history to the KAITAS version of Star Trek, due to a time-travelling adversary. (On a different, metatextual level - that is, in the KAITAS "imaginary screen canon" notes - I posited that the imaginary tv show Excalibur was a new Arthurian space opera from a new creative team and studio, not related at all to the imaginary tv show King Arthur in Time and Space. But this is one of many details that's not important right now.) Okay, jump ahead the history of AKOTAS to when I conceived this wacky idea of a working sabbatical. Part of the attraction of reviving the KAITAS exercise for what's come to be called AKOTAS-2 was that the Star Trek revival movie would premiere before AKOTAS-2 went live. But, lo and behold, the revival movie brought into Star Trek - and my exercise - an actual, in-source alternate history due to a time-travelling adversary. Although part of the attraction of doing AKOTAS-2 is that I can reprint KAITAS cartoons with minimal editing, presenting AKOTAS's readership with exposition for two alternate versions of the same history - one of which being my own invention rather than derived from a screen work they could reasonably be assumed to be familiar with - just seemed like a Really, Really Bad Idea. So, when I reprint an Enterprise-era KAITAS joke as AKOTAS-2, I edit the uniforms; and if I ever do an Enterprise-era joke in AKOTAS-2, Macsen will probably get to be the starship captain.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, General Protection Fault, For Better Or For Worse, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: El Goonish Shive, AppleGeeks, Achewood, Striptease, Punch an' Pie, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, LuAnn, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Devil's Panties, Narbonic, Schlock Mercenary

Webcomics I read weekday evenings: Questionable Content, Starslip Crisis, Count Your Sheep, Dinosaur Comics, Girls With Slingshots, Shortpacked, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Real Life, PvP

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Fans, Two Lumps, Dandy & Company, Goats, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Darths & Droids, Megatokyo

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Station V3, Sinfest, Little Dee, Skin Horse, Sheldon, Peanuts

Webcomics I read Sundays: Breakfast of the Gods, Something Happens, Three Panel Soul, No Room for Magic, Li'l Mell, Zortic, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, xkcd

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Boxjam's Doodle, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, My Name is Might Have Been, Butternut Squash, Sketchies, 13 Seconds, Anywhere But Here, Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, Kismetropolis, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Green Avenger, I Draw Comics, Reasoned Cognition, Perry Bible Fellowship, 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, Brian Roney's Webcomic Reviews, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Mr. Myth, Comixtalk 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.
Early British Kingdoms - Arthurian Bios.
Historia Ecclesiastica.
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.