More web comics!

[avram]

cadhla turned me on to Pibgorn, a color fantasy strip by Brooke McEldowney, creator of 9 Chickweed Lane. Unfortunately, it’s hosted on Comics.com, which only archives the last 30 days worth of strips. (And also the first 20 strips, which in this case are black-and-white in traditional daily format.) The art is lovely, and from what I can tell the stories are interesting (I haven’t managed to read a full one yet), even if the humor is sometimes lame.

I’ve also shelled out five bucks to check out Modern Tales and Serializer.net for a month. (I may pay another two for Girlamatic.) So far there’s lots of stuff I don’t care for, with a few gems. My favorites so far are Streets of Northhampton and American Born Chinese. Teaching Baby Paranoia also looks good, but I’ve only looked at a little of it so far.

Two things that really bug me:

1. The sites don’t use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes in the IMG tags for the comics panels/pages. This means that pages rearrange themselves while I’m reading them as the images download and render, really annoying. There are a couple of ways to fix this, the easiest being to use the PHP getimagesize function.

2. There’s a bug in the navigation for moving within a multi-page installment. When I first hit a new installment, I get a page with no comics, a message telling me that this installment has multiple pages, and a string of linked numbers and an arrow for navigation. The number 1 is unlinked, implying that I’m already on page 1 for this installment. I click the link for page 2, I get taken to a page with comics, and I see that 1 is linked, so I click that, and I get the actual first page of comics content for that installment. This is clearly some kind of bug in the PHP code that generates the navigation, but I’m surprised it’s still there.

Hey, guys, looking to hire a PHP coder? I could fix both these problems for you!

Comments

[avram]

Random? I’m pretty sure I’ve been getting it consistently throughout the site.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Girlamatic is on my list of things to buy when I've got a job, largely on the strength of Encounter Her. I was going to ask if you were familiar with that, but then I noticed who posted first comment to your post, so I assume you are.

Have you seen Freefall? It's been one of my favorites from quite a while now. It's a daily continuing story strip; this comic would be a good place to start the current story arc.