Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Update.. Update.. Downdate.. Down with the date? The date is down?
This enlightening update title is brought to you by Sen's brain, which is not officially awake until two hours from now.

Ahem.

That picture that I posted yesterday.. Well, it's a bit of a preview of something I want to do with this myOtaku. However, I'm not sure if I can do it yet, so I'm still in the testing / thinking-about-it phase. I don't want to start anything that big if I can't follow through with it.

I don't have much else to talk about today, so I'm just going to rant about webcomics. Lucky you!

A few months ago, I was introduced to the world of webcomics by a friend (I believe it was VGcats, which, as the name implies, is a comic about video gaming cats. For the longest time this was the only webcomic I read, simply because I found the game parodies to be so deliciously satyrical.. But then, once I had read through all of the comics several times and needed my fix of too-hot-for-the-newspaper comical goodness. I went over to the links page on VGcats, which has many, many links to a nice variety of webcomics. The first one that caught my eye was Megatokyo, a cheery little manga-style comic about the zany misadventures of two American gamers named Piro and Largo who end up stranded in Japan. Not exactly comedy (anymore), but it's an interesting story that's rather inspirational to me. American gamer dude makes a webcomic that people often mistake for an official Japanese comic. Piro is to manga as Eminem was to non-oldschool rap (Damn you, Vanilla Ice..! *shakes fist violently*). I would like to do something that someday.. Except in Japan, of course.

A few weeks later, I then bought in to the major hype- I began reading Penny Arcade. The series started out a tad dull, unlike VGcats (Which was hilarious from the get-go), but by now I laugh like a crazy man on pot at 95% of all new comics.

One day I was searching for Kill Bill pictures on Google (for a banner that never got off the ground), when I came across an interesting little comic. Click here, if you want to see it. And so, out of another day with nothing better to do, began reading Movie Comics, which turned out to be an awfully dull, predictable, piece-o-crap knockoff of Penny Arcade without the social commentary and good humor. It was only then I realized something very important- Most webcomics start off as Penny Arcade knockoffs. It was a trendsetter, it set the bar for all other comics- it seems that unless you're trying for a serial series like Megatokyo, you're gonna end up with two guys on a couch playing games or talking about something. It's odd.

And yet I just began reading Ctrl + Alt + Del, a comic that has some interesting, close-to-Penny-Arcade-but-not-in-a-bad-way moments. I wouldn't care about all of the comics being Penny Arcade-esque, if they would put some interesting commentary on their sites, as Gabe and Tycho do on their homepage.

So now I take my leave, and in my passing give you the formula for a general webcomic:

One crazy fanboy + One analytical, down-to-earth person + A couch + a television + a computer + an Xbox = potential money-getter.
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