A while back we had an idea that was so cool, we decided to fully bake it ourselves. After some beta testing, it’s now ready for launch.

First, the problem: There are lots of webcomics out there. And many of the best ones have been going for a long time, so have extensive archives. So if you look for cool new comics, you might find something like Wondermark, with over 500 strips, or Arthur, King of Time and Space, with nearly 2000 strips.

The standard way to catch up on these is an archive binge – spending hours or days trawling through the archive to catch up to the latest strip. This can be gruelling, takes a lot of time in big chunks, and you run the risk of losing your place when you inevitably need to stop to use the toilet, eat, or sleep. There must be a better way!

Archive Binge is a site which constructs custom RSS news feeds for webcomics. Not normal RSS feeds (which deliver the latest new comic a few times a week), but custom feeds which deliver strips from a webcomic’s archives, at a rate of 1, a few, up to 10 strips a day. So you can use your feed reader to keep track of the comic for you, read at a rate faster than the comic updates so you can catch up, but without investing hours at a time. And you can pause it if you go on vacation.

It’s like a digital video recorder for webcomics. Check it out. Tell us what you think.

Sorry that Awkward Fumbles has been paused for a while. That one actually takes us some effort to write new strips for! We have a couple of dozen art submissions in the buffer, awaiting our dialogue addition, but we’ve been busy with a couple of other ideas we’re trying to get implemented. We will get back to Fumbles at some point though!

Oh, and we forgot to announce that the buffer for Square Root of Minus Garfield is now so immense thanks to enthusiastic reader submissions that we’ve gone to five updates a week. We may have to update even more frequently if the submissions keep coming in! Keep it up, folks! (Ah, I see now how we can succeed with bringing you fresh new content all the time… get you to do all the work!)

The buffer of submissions for Lightning Made of Owls has slowly been being whittled away by our relentless five-a-week update schedule. To give the buffer a chance to recover, we’re changing the schedule to three updates a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully this will better match the ongoing rate of new submissions.

And in case that’s too subtle a hint: We need more submissions! Unleash your comic creative urges and send us your results!

Yep, we’re unable to resist the gleaming piles of cash any longer. We’ve started selling banner ad space on mezzacotta. You’ll see some of the fine products which are supporting mezzacotta at the top of the page.

We know ads suck, but we’ve very carefully selected advertisers we think will appeal to our readers*. So please consider supporting the advertisers with your hard-earned bucks. If you don’t, we’ll have to think about running huge animated graphics to catch more attention and dynamically modifying the ad space URL directory to get around your ad blocker.

* Or who are willing to pay extra.

We are auctioning the original hand-written “artwork” for Darths & Droids strip #206 on eBay. The item includes the page scanned and used for the strip, plus the unused first hand-written draft of the same page.

We are not doing this to make money. We are listing this item at our own expense, and will post worldwide at our expense. The entire purchase price will be on-donated to the Jane Goodall Institute. If you win the item, you can ask us to sign it before posting (or not, whatever you prefer).

The auction ends at 23-Jan-2009 06:19:00 UTC. Here’s the eBay item listing: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300287292661

It seems we’ve confused a few readers with our explanation of Ryan North’s Jokes Explained Explained. Thankfully another reader, xyzzy, has kindly written an explanation for the benefit of any such confused people:

(“Ryan North’s Jokes Explained Explained” Explained) Explained

It seems some readers didn’t quite understand what we were trying to do with Ryan North’s Jokes Explained Explained. So we’ve now provided an explanation:

“Ryan North’s Jokes Explained Explained” Explained

Feeds for Lightning Made of Owls and Square Root of Minus Garfield are now available on LiveJournal. If you’re a LiveJournal user and like seeing comics in your friends list, simply friend these:

• LJ feed for Lightning Made of Owls
• LJ feed for Square Root of Minus Garfield

More of the tedious gruntwork for guess who? I toil late into the night to bring you:

• RSS feed for Lightning Made of Owls
• RSS feed for Square Root of Minus Garfield

And what thanks do I get? I’m lucky if they buy me lunch at the mezzacotta Café.

Our frenzy of releasing new features on mezzacotta continues! We are pleased to present the mezzacotta Café, serving a variety of snacks and light refreshments. Our chef is known for his remarkable approach to cooking, in which ingredients are assembled into a myriad of new combinations and styles. But he can be a bit unpredictable sometimes, and his taste is, well… unique.