Neo-Mento is a new flash-based web and print comic series created by Dylan Culhane. Sharp stuff in a readable, innovative format.

As long as I’m a bit distracted this week by humongous, wonderful graphic novels , here’s a German photo comic you may not have seen that’s kind of cool.

And while we’re at it, a Canadian photo comic many of you may already know about, but that’s always worth a visit.

We’ll see. But points to the venture already for choosing Phonogram for their cool-looking screenshot.

At the very least, Longbox CEO Rantz Hoseley is a smart guy. This will be one to watch.

(Link via Heidi)

So, no sooner do I post about my search for some Shawn Cheng comics you could read online, when Shawn contacts me and graciously offers to put all of his great mini The Would-Be Bridegrooms online in a great click-through format. Read it, thank him, buy things. All is right with the world.

And as long as I’m following up on earlier posts, y’gotta love this miniature masterpiece by Mr. Turner. Though y’gotta read it TWICE to know why.

Oh, and Bryan Lee O’Malley is offering his full third Kupek album for free. (I thought it was great, but don’t tell him; we don’t want him to stop making comics.)

So, yeah. Good stuff this week! Way to go, The Internet.

Since the last couple of posts were about searching for fragments of a cartoonist’s work online, here’s a cartoonist who’s been putting up whole stories for a while: Kris Dresen.

Dresen recently uploaded a brand new story She’s in the Trees, her first in color. It’s a beautiful short, wordless tone poem you could probably squeeze in before the boss comes back from the bathroom.

And if you have a bit more time to spend, I can highly recommend Dresen’s earlier story Grace, also available online (some nudity and adult themes). It’s a full-fledged story (with words even) I enjoyed when it was being serialized, but I’m glad to link to now that it’s finally complete.

Good stories, good storytelling, and smart, easy-to-read formats. And you can even order the print versions here if you like.

Thank you, Ms. Dresen.

Beaver and Steve creator James Turner offers his take on the creative process and yeah, sometimes that’s just how it is. 

[Thanks to Dirk Deppey at Journalista for the link (crediting Xaviar Xerexes).]

Salgood Sam pointed me (via Twitter) to Manmachine by Martin Hekker, which uses a simple Flash-based side-scrolling thingey that doubles the cursor speed for fairly seamless navigation once its all loaded  (“programming by Mike Angstadt” so I assume this was Mike’s doing).

[Correction!: The audio is Flash-based, but the scroll-thingey is Javascript-based. Thanks to Andrew in the comments section for the heads-up. (Way to ruin a good pun, Universe).]

…this collaboration with writer Alexander Danner from 2005 is five kinds of wonderful if you’ve never read it. Reading it again yesterday, I was reminded of Neil Gaiman at his most dry (and most succinct—it’s a quick read). 

Neal Von Flue used the original “infinite canvas” application developed at Vienna’s University of Technology by Markus Müller under the supervision of Peter Purgathofer in 2003-2004 (not to be confused with Microsoft Live Lab’s recent experiment). The app isn’t being actively developed anymore, but a few artists gave it a try with some cool results. The implementation on Alexander and Neal’s story is simple, but I think it adds a lot to the reading experience.

Tymothi Godek offers a gargantuan sidescroller simply called “!” that I enjoyed— it’s just a “rough draft” but an entertaining and brain-bending read nonetheless.

Thanks to the Neal Von Flue (no slouch in this department himself) for pointing us to “!” in the comments section of the XKCD post from Friday. Tymothi’s experiment, like the much shorter XKCD strip is playing with parallel narratives, but ramping it up with more characters and some great intersections. Despite the crazed fantasy storyline, Tym is mapping the sort of intersecting, branching, and colliding paths that people in real life take all the time, but that only comics can make visible. Very cool.

XKCD goes parallel.

One of the byproducts of all those ancient infinite canvas debates (nestled in webcomics history right after the Clone Wars and shortly before the Norman Conquest) was the idea of the spatial nature of story structure.

So many of the terms we use for stories (rising action, turning points, parallel/intersecting plots, circular narratives, multiple layers…) have equivalents in space, it seems only natural to make them literal through comics.

It may sound academic to some, but I think the very fact that comics MAPS TIME is pretty frickin’ cool, and I’ll never get tired of seeing smart cartoonists screwing around with it.