Featured Links
May 14, 2001

Featured link of the week: Choose Your Own Carl

It's "the Web's only Fully Interactive, Multiple Path, Reader-Written, Death-Obsessed Comics Extravaganza!" Carl was a throwaway character created by Scott McCloud for his seminal 1993 book, Understanding Comics. When McCloud went online in 1998, he created an interactive online comic featuring Carl. McCloud created a 121-panel grid with standard beginning and ending panels -- shown here -- and each week asked readers to suggest what should appear in the next panel. The results were often bizarre but always highly entertaining. CYOC was finally completed in February of this year, but the final product remains available at scottmccloud.com, along with several other very entertaining online comics.

Other online comics links :

• Hearts and Minds - Before McCloud wrote Understanding Comics, he created one of the best comic books of all time: Zot! Zot! was about an eternally-optimistic teenage superhero from another dimension. When the series ended, McCloud held out the possibility that he might return to Zot! at some unspecified point in the future. He finally did in 2000, when he resurrected the character in an online comic for the online comics news site Comic Book Resources. "Hearts and Minds" recently won a Squiddy award (given by the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics for Best Online Comic.
• Matt Feazell - Matt Feazell is a cartoonist who writes and draws comics almost exclusively with stick figures. His art is crude beyond description, but he's a good storyteller and very funny. He posts new material every Monday.
• Wood Chips of the Damned - Some might argue that this isn't a comic because it uses photos instead of drawings to tell the story, but those people are wrong. There's a long tradition of making comics using photographs,  and I would argue that this Buffy the Vampire Slayer parody fits into that tradition. It's funny.
• Tony Isabella's Online Tips - Technically, this isn't a online comic, but rather an online column about comics. But let's not quibble. Isabella is a long-time writer of comics -- he's probably best known for creating Black Lightning, who once appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit played by Sinbad -- who pens a thrice-weekly column about the comic book industry. Or whatever else happens to be on his mind. I like him because he's a dirty hippy liberal like me.

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