It’s the end of the week and boy has there been a lot of webcomic news sticking to these here Interwebs! If you’ve made any comments, puns, or otherwise erstwhile thoughts known to the general Interpublic, there’s a good chance your week was interrupted with a rude cease-and-desist letter. We here at Digital Strips have thus far escaped punishment for our editorialized content, most likely because our EIC is MIA and fails to check his E-mail ASAP.

I’m sure we’ll catch up with this whole situation when he pops back into plain sight. Until then, I’ve got news bits to keep you happy. A new book from an old favorite, a manifesto from someone long overdue on such a topic, the Eisner award nominees for Best Digital Comic, and a strip I recently stumbled across and fell in love with before my head cracked against the pavement. Seriously, head over heels and it hurt like the dickens. On we go!

- Shortpacked!, the (nearly) weekdaily tales of a band of toy-store employees by David Willis, has announced that the first collection is on the horizon. Shortpacked! Brings Back The Eighties is the first printed volume of the series and will clock in at 135 pages. Included in those bountiful pages are the first hundred strips (or so, according to Willis) along with bonus commentary, a first-ever look at the strips that predate those currently found online, and periodic peerings into the super-secret Shortpacked! Employee Handbook. The book is also available in an Extra version which throws in a signed drawing on the front cover by Willis’ hand itself. So get to checkin’ the strip if you don’t already and then put in your pre-order to be part of the start of a really good thing.

- A funny thing happened to Brinkerhoff creator Gabe Strine when he attended the Emerald City Comic-Con. While happily profitting off the first Brink comic book, Gabe discovered a throng of fans he had never known about, and not just those who might have seen a strip or two online and wanted to say hey to the guy responsible. No, these were bigger names, names he had always found synonymous with the REAL world of cartoonists (never seen it myself, but I hear it’s glorious).

And so, after much soul-searching, he decided to make his new goal a tall order indeed: a listing in the Diamond Distributors catalog of comic books. If any strip deserves it, it’s this one. But if THAT one won’t make it, Brink deserves that spot. Go read the entire manifesto including Gabe’s thoughts on one-time Brink courter, Viper Comics, and stay tuned for more on his upward struggle towards greatness!

- The Eisner Committee of Experts On Comics You Should Read And Therefore Feel Bad And/Or Unworthy For Not Reading released their nominees for the awards, including those for the Best Digital Comic (it’s called a WEBcomic, get it right, committee!). The nominees are, in no particular order:

1. Bee, in “Motel Art Improvement Service”, by Jason Little
2. Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio
3. Minus, by Ryan Armand
4. Phables, by Brad Guigar
5. Sam and Max, by Steve Purcell
6. Shooting War, by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman

Anyone else not read all of those? Thought so. So get to readin’!

- And finally, I came across a strip today that is simply too good for words. The Nineteenth-Century Industrialist by Renee Katz is most of the most energetic works I’ve come across in webcomics.? My first impression was of another strip with a decent sense of humor and promise behind very rough artwork; in other words, it matched up with about 90% of the webcomics out there.? After perusing the entirety of the archives, however, I found a kinetic, albeit scratchy, art style that joins perfectly with a weirdly cute story about an out-of-place-in-time industrialist named Hiram Thorpe and his under-the-thumb workers.? Highlights include visits from Karl Marx and Pope Benedict XVI, but go and read the shallow archives and add this gem to your Favorites!

That’s it for this week!? Until next time, don’t buy anything from this guy and if you can’t make it yourself, don’t make it at all!