The game is afoot.

— Sherlock Holmes

There's just one more question I'd like to ask you.

— Columbo

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids and their mangy dog!

— innumerable Scooby-Doo villains

Forget about making a hundred, forget about the victim, forget about the suspect and focus on the only thing that can't lie: the evidence.

— Gil Grissom, CSI

O photoprocessing machine, I command you to reveal to me that which is hidden!

— Bee

Like most good ideas, mysteries and detective stories have many ancestors, but they didn't really get to take a place in entertainment until the Industrial Revolution. It's not hard to see why. The underlying message behind the traditional mystery—and the traditional detective story, its most famous subgenre—is always the same. That message: our world may seem confusing, but patience, pluck, and especially reason can lay its secrets bare, punish the guilty, and reveal the monsters as aged men in latex or clockwork springs.

Let’s start with my own work. I’m no judge of whether it’s the best out there, but it seems well-received enough, and I know it better than anyone else’s because I know what I was thinking.

My muscles tensed. A cold sweat broke over my brow. The next few minutes would be do or die.

"So long story short," said Joey Manley, "You want to edit this thing?"

Since I started editing Graphic Smash, and even before, I’ve seen a lot of action, from "widescreen" superhero epics to old-fashioned 1930s-ish serials to Matrixesque cyberpunk to melees between talking rats and wombats. I’ve seen a lot of great action.

And honestly—I’ve seen a lot of bad action. Cartoonists sometimes rush into things, when that should be the action star’s job. So let’s puzzle this out a bit. What makes good action pulse and throb?

Traditional copyright faces webcomics with an uncomfortable choice. Its restrictions, properly enforced, would mean a virtual end to crossovers and homages, fan art, fan fiction, and many other staples that make the webcomic a more entertaining creation and foster artistic growth.

A total lack of copyright, however, leaves unscrupulous readers free to “bootleg” subscription sites, program tools to deprive comics of advertising revenue, and even profit from others’ labor without permission.

The Creative Commons license presents a possible solution. It lets copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms.

Money Matters and the Modern Webcomic

Much as some webcartoonists would like to pretend otherwise, webcomics are not really an industry apart. They are part of the larger online content industry, and any analysis of their business has to take the business of all online content into account.

Have I mentioned that I love roundtables? See, all you need to do is think of four or five good questions and ask them to some of the foremost talents in webcomics today, many of whom are surprisingly willing to share their wisdom. Then just sit back and let the intellectual capital flood in. It’s a great racket.

This roundtable, incidentally, is about humor.

The Collective Convective

Keenspot and Modern Tales were Big Panda’s most influential descendants, at least as of late 2004. But they were far from the only ones. As the number of webcomics continued to grow, the formation of collectives became as easy as the joining of bubbles in a bathtub. And like bubbles, they defied attempts to keep track of them all.

But categories began to emerge: (1) dropdowns, (2) kaffeeklatches, (3) showcase hosts (closed and open), (4) subscription sites, and (5) one pay-per-view store.

These collectives are worth studying, both in success and in failure, for every success shows where webcomics may be heading and where they may not be heading.