I been reading a lot of really good web comics lately and I thought I would write about it for a little while.

For starters, Tim Buckley, over at CTRL-ALT-DEL is running a choose your own adventure style web comic called "Ethan Macmanus: Space Archaeologist". Every week he posts a new comic with options for the main character at the bottom. The viewers get to vote on what happens next. It's a great concept. It ensures that the viewers get what the want, and it allows them to feel like they are a part of the site's community and not just a reader. Readers as writers if you will.

Good Ship Chronicles - enlarge image

Good Ship Chronicles by Tauhid Bondia just went through a complete redesign. The whole website looks a lot better. Its cleaner, easier to use, and it now has a ton of goodies for the viewers. Including a detailed map of all of "known space" in the good ship chronicles universe. Personally, I want to visit planet Fillabray in the Balthos Alliance. The website wasn't the only thing to change though, The art work has also gone under a huge overhaul. Each episode is now in a very detailed grey tone instead of just black and white like it was previously. I haven't decided if I like the grey tone better yet. I really liked the black and white artwork, it had that perfect balance of light and dark that is hard to come by. It reminded me of Calvin and Hobbes. The grey tone reminds me of Sean Wang's Runners, except with less emphasis on texture. Although it seems like Runners is going to be in full color from now on...Anyway, I can't recommend Good Ship Chronicles enough. It shows that even in an idealistic universe like Star Trek there will inevitably be a ship filled with losers and misfits.

If you are like me and love illustration, and have an undying interest in becoming a professional illustrator... you may want to head over to Bearskinrug.com. Kevin Cornell just posted an amazing entry about advice for people trying to break into the lucrative(?) world of freelance illustration. I'm not strictly a freelancer, but I've done enough of it to know that he is giving out some good advice. Especially the part about always make sure that you put aside some time to work for yourself. Which I haven't been doing enough myself. I really need to start sketching more just for the fun of it. Good advice Kevin. Eh. There is Mojo the sock monkey too.

If you like DnD, or are a big fan of fantasy novels you should start reading Looking For Group. This comic is just great. It centers on a do-gooding elf, but really the best character is Richard, the outrageous, kill happy warlock. Even if it weren't funny, I'd still read this one just for the artwork. The use of line weight and color makes everything pop. Plus, the compositions are amazing. I'm constant being impressed in just how much is fit in to each frame.

Well, I'm tired of writing for now, so this will have to do. Enjoy the comics!

Most of you will find this post to be boring, but I'm hoping that a select few of you will think its the coolest thing since sliced bread. Now, I'm not sure if I'm the first to figure this out, but I did figure it out on my own. So if you have heard of this before don't jump down my throat. After all, what do I know? I'm not a scientist...

Yesterday I was working with a SPRY Accordion, which if you don't know is an AJAX script that comes with Adobe Dreamweaver. Here was my problem: I was using a DOCTYPE to tell IE to stop being quite so dumb and act a little bit more like a grown-up browser that is actually compliant with web standards. This allowed my Accordion to work in IE. However, it still didn't force IE7 to use the overflow style properly. Whenever I would use the accordion it would bring up a horizontal scroll bar half way down the page. It looked like I was using frames or something. Anyway, because of company policy I couldn't just turn the horizontal scroll bar off with overflow-y. I also couldn't just set it to visible because Mozilla Firefox and other browsers perform different actions than IE when you set the overflow style to visible.

I needed a way to tell IE7 and just IE7 what to do. The common IE hacks like !important and *HTML don't work in IE7 anymore because MS is just smart enough to remove all of the hacks that web designers use to fix the bugs in IE, but not smart enough to fix the bugs that we needed the hacks for in the first place. After hours of banging my head against the wall, I finally snapped a little bit and just started inserting random characters into my CSS until I found a way to fool IE7.

So here it is; If you put a forward slash just before a style it will prevent compliant browsers from reading the style but IE7 still reads it. Below is an example. If you look at this box in any browser other than IE it will appear red, but look at it in IE7....Bam! that box is green!

I hope you all enjoy that little hack, I know I will.

Well, It took me almost six months to get around to it, but I finally finished these sketches.

How the Comic Strip "Sheldon" is Created from Sheldon Comics on Vimeo.