Courting Disaster, my weekly comic about sex, love, and relationships updates every Friday. You'll laugh your pants off.

This week's question...

A reader writes... Q: Recently, by chance, I discovered a cloth handbag lying on the laundry room floor behind a chest of drawers. The bag contained the following items: a skimpy top that had plastic (I guess) push-ups in the bra, a skimpy pair of silk trunks, a small towel, a biobag (dog poop cleanup bag and we don’t have a dog) and a pair of socks belonging to my wife of 35 years. Also, she has been rude to me a lot lately and almost never has anything to say about what she does with her time, other than work, when she is not around. I haven’t let her know I discovered these items yet. My imagination has run wild. Am I overreacting? I have never seen her dress in anything like this.

Don't answer here... go on over to the CD site and offer some advice.

After completing my fist year of daily updates, things began to happen for me at a pretty rapid pace. As I mentioned previously, Keenspot has already invited me to join its ranks. And, now that I had a full year under my belt, I was ready to consider a book. Print-on-demand publishing was several years off, and in those days, webcartoonists looking towards print publication looked to the same publisher. Plan 9 Publishing was formed by David Allen to print collections of Bill Holbrook's Kevin & Kell. It soon grew to publish the early webcomics powerhouse Sluggy Freelance and others. In 2001, "others" expanded to include me. I ended up releasing three Greystone collections through Plan 9, and I did illustrations and book designs for a couple others including BOfH #4. My first book, "Greystone Inn: Dilutions of Grandeur," premiered in early 2001. As an employee of the Philadelphia Daily News, I was honor-bound to alert my supervisors of my foray into publishing -- just to make sure there were no perceived conflicts of interest. Now only were there no conflicts of interest, but upper management liked the strip enough to run it in the paper under my first independent self-syndication contract. Later that year, other papers picked up the strip as well, but none were as big as the Daily News. My daily comic has had a spot on the DN's comics section ever since. With over a year of daily cartooning experience, a book out and a self-syndicated strip under my belt, I felt as if I had a wide enough span of experience to start volunteering at AllExperts.com, where I answered questions about cartooning. I had been addressing basic questions and concerns for about a year-and-a-half when I was contacted by a literary agent who told me that a publisher wanted badly to release a book on cartooning and she had found me through AllExperts. "Would you like to write a book about cartooning?" Faster than you could say, "How To Draw Comics the Guigar Way," I signed a contract to write the Everything Cartooning Book. The deadline was incredibly tight, and my wife had just given birth to our first son. I took a monthlong sabbatical from work, my mother-in-law moved in to help out, and I locked myself in my studio with two goals: Keep the daily comic going and write a 320-page book about every conceivable aspect of cartooning (and do the illustrations for the book to boot). The Everything book had an extensive chapter on self-publishing your work on the Web. It may have been the first nationally published tutorial on the subject to even mention webcomics in a how-to format. Take a look at the Cartoons for Dummies book for example. Look at the amount of space they devote to newspaper syndication and compare it to the space they devote to webcomics. And that book was published last year! So... proud? Yup. Meanwhile, Greystone Inn, was doing very well on the Web. I was doing all sorts of things to try to encourage my readers to feel welcome on my site -- like the weekly Mondays With Mel caption contest. And, since Greystone had such wide-open parameters, I could write story arcs that appealed directly to certain members of that audience. Like the week I devoted to a character I called Gary the Graphic Artist. Through Gary, I was able to vent about all of the irks that I incurred in my day job. On May 30, 2004 I posted this one. To this day, I've never received such a strong and long-lasting response to a single strip. "Just Photoshop It," from what I'm told, is hanging in countless graphics departments, silkscreening studios and design shops. I receive e-mails requesting reprint rights to this day. It also caught the attention of Computer Arts Magazine and for several issues, they bought a Gary the Graphic Artist strip to run in the opening pages of their publication. To be continued. Ten Years of Webcomics: Part One | Part Two

Back in February, I began talking about starting on the road that brought me to the point at which I'd been doing a daily comic strip for ten years. And I promised more stories about ten years of daily cartooning. And promptly got distracted by about a hundred other things. Well, I've done all the prep for San Diego I can possibly do. I'm waiting to accept shipment of the fifth volume of Evil Inc books*. And, quite frankly, I need something to focus on so I don't pace a groove into my studio floor. What better time for a little navel-gazing? When I launched Greystone Inn, it was hosted on a GeoCities site (now owned by Yahoo), and I updated it manually every night before going to bed. I can still remember finding out about Keenspace. It was this amazing deal being offered by Keenspot through which a webcartoonist could sign up for free hosting that came complete with updating / archiving software. That last part meant you could upload strips in advance and the software would automatically update the site overnight and place the old strip into the proper place in your archive. This was, at the time, Sliced Bread. Everything that has come along since could only be the greatest thing since that. Of course, Keenspace was operated by Keenspot. And at the time, Keenspot was webcomics. It's hard to explain, but webcomics was so new that the idea of a group of cartoonists forming their own digital publishing collective was mend-bending. I jumped onto Keenspace immediately. And on Tuesday, September 12, 2000, I received the following e-mail from Chris Crosby. Hi there, this is Chris Crosby from Keenspot Entertainment. We here at Keenspot have become big fans of GREYSTONE INN, and we would like to invite you to join Keenspot. We think your strip is interesting, original, and has a whole lot of potential, and we all agree that it should be a Keenspot strip. Please read the member FAQ I've copied below my signature for more information, and we hope to hear from you soon. I still remember standing up and cheering in front of my computer when I read that e-mail. The Internet in 2000 felt an awful lot the way I had imagined TV must have felt in the 1940s, and I had just gotten an invitation to join NBC. Joining Keenspot left indelible marks on me as a struggling cartoonist. I learned an awful lot -- not only about webcomics, but about group dynamics and creative personalities. But, for as much good that Keenspot brought, it also brought the realization that large organizations came with their fair share of unweildy problems. This was only underscored by the opposite experience I was having with one of webcomics' first fledgling collectives, AltBrand. AltBrand was a collective in the truest sense of the word in that none of us were tied together in a business sense, rather we were using this construct for mutual support, cross-promotion and convention attendance. It consisted of Lee Adam Herold, Adam Burke, Case Yorke, Xavier Xerexes, Boxjam and me. And, at AltBrand, I was starting to realize something. A smaller collective was capable of swifter action and more cohesive decisions. This was made very clear when I organized the AltBrand Webcomics Telethon for MDA. Our small group hosted a telethon to generate donations to the MDA that ran concurrently to the Jerry Lewis telethon. It updated throughout the weekend with different comics donated by other webcartoonists, and it was a huge success in so many ways. First of all, we encouraged significant donations to the MDA. And as a bonus, it was an excellent cross-promotional opportunity for all of the participants. This was an idea worth saving for a rainy day. To be continued. Ten Years of Webcomics: Part One | Part Two * This was written on Friday, July 16, 2010. The books arrived, and they're available for preorder.

Courting Disaster, my weekly comic about sex, love, and relationships updates every Friday. You'll laugh your pants off.

This week's question...

A reader writes... Q: I am a happily married woman except for one thing: My husband is addicted to the Internet. He’s a good man and provider, and a wonderful father, but he’d rather be online than anything. On a typical Saturday, the first thing he does is go online. Sometimes he’s on the computer all day. I’ve gotten up in the wee hours to find him online reading or watching videos. He’s more interested in that than in making love. I’m pretty sure he’s not talking with another woman — I’ve done some checking. Sometimes I get so jealous of his relationship with the computer I feel like putting my foot through his monitor. Any advice?

Don't answer here... go on over to the CD site and offer some advice.

Although it makes its official debut at Comic Con International next week, there's no reason you can't jump in on the fun and Pre-order Evil Inc Vol 5 NOW. Books will begin shipping after July 27. Pre-order your copy today.

Here's a sneak preview of the book.

This book will begin shipping after I return from San Diego, so the only way to get your hands on it first is to be at Comic-Con next week.

But you can be the first on your block to pre-order it!

The graphic novel is $20.

An ARTIST EDITION is $30. If you'd like to specify the illustration I draw inside the book for your Artist Edition, you can use the Note function during check-out.

If you buy all five of the Annual Reports, I'll give you Volume One for free (total: $70).

If you want an Artist Edition Vol. 5 and all four of the other Annual Reports, I'll discount the total to $80.

And if you want to get all five Annual Reports as Artist Editions, I'll take ten bucks off the total for a discounted price of $120.

Of course, regular shipping and handling charges will be added.

As a bonus -- and because my henchmen demanded it -- I'm lowering my shipping costs from $4.75 to $3 for a single book.

Pre-order Evil Inc Vol 5 NOW.

Evil Inc Annual Report Vol. 5 is, as I write, making its way to Philly for a scheduled delivery that should have it in my hot, little hands by 5 p.m. at the latest. This means it will arrive in plenty of time to make its debut at Comic Con International in San Diego July 22-25.

If you'd like to follow the action live, please follow me on Twitter, where I will be posting live tweets and photos throughout the process.

The veritable comics blog, Storming the Tower is presenting a round-up of the webcomic super-villains poised to conquer the world. Evil Inc received the following praise:

Nefarious goal: To facilitate the advancement of crime and chaos through the world's most evil entity: the corporation.
What stands in their way: Stands in their way? I'm pretty sure Evil Inc. is running the show.

Running the show, indeed. At the end of the post, there's a poll to determine the best of the bad guys and Evil Inc is currently training in the tally.

Of course, that's what henchmen are for, right?