Webcomics

Given that she was the Person of the Year for 2011, and enjoyed a bestseller with her Hark! A Vagrant collection, it's no surprise that Kate Beaton has been getting lots of offers lately, ranging from children's books to television work. Thus it will also come as no surprise that she's going to be spending less time on her webcomics to work on some of these opportunities:

Another birthday being celebrated today is the web collective ACT-I-VATE which launched six years ago. Meaning a baby born that day would now be in school. Yikes. Founder Dean Haspiel celebrates here. It's been six years of some outstanding comics and memorable parties; THE ACT-I-VATE PRIMER is a really gorgeous book well worth tracking down if you don't have a copy.

In honor of his birthday yesterday R. Stevens released a DRM-free ebook of his very first Diesel Sweeties collection.

The video game company behind the popular PROTOTYPE series -- NOT the comics company. Dark Horse will create a three-part story bridging the gap between the original Prototype and PROTOTYPE 2 which comes out this year. The series will be released digitally, starting February 15th. Creators include Paco Díaz, Chris Staggs, and Victor Drujiniu.

The acclaimed Portland-based Study Group 12 anthology is starting up a web comic portal for several of their contributors, with regular series & one-shots...

This interview with Chris Onstad about his hiatus from ACHEWOOD could almost have come under our previous belt-tightening post.

Bruce Handy and Dan Goldman give us the lowdown on the ongoing War on Christmas via a webcomic at Vanity Fair. --

A war on Christmas? A harrowing and real thing, if you ask the values police. So we sent leathery war correspondent Bruce Handy and grizzled war cartoonist Dan Goldman to record the frontline combat for posterity, in the manner of their Civil War–era Harper’s forebears. Where we lay our scene: a suburban mall, its Santa’s village defended from invaders by his little helpers. (What follows may contain graphic elf violence.)

The Romanian webcomic Fredo and Pid'jin, has been a big success for its creators Eugen Erhan and Tudor Muscalu, this piece at Next Web tells us, if by success you mean lots of links on Reddit and Digg. What emerges is the story of two guy with a dream and a webcomic about two evil pigeons out to conquer the world. Things looked low, but then a guy who works on the Simpsons came and told them they were on the right track, energizing them to carry on. But...questions remain:

Piskor has a new strip up at Boing Boing that examines the similarities between these two American artforms.

They are infrequent and thus all the more precious.

In this as always charming outing for Tablet Magazine, Davis explains the ins and outs of engagement rings.

Among the lists of Twitter-base comedies, roast spin-offs and other hapless men in a hostile world of supermarkets and doorknob comedies,Comedy Central announced one deal based on a webcomic, namely CYANIDE AND HAPPINESS, the generally amusing stick-figure theater comic by Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, Matt Melvin and Dave McElfatrick, all of whom will exec produce. The show is described as "a half-hour animated show featuring the twisted humor of a world populated by glorified stick figures." The CYANIDE crew has already been producing shorts and an iPhone app, so this is just anther step in their world conquest.