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Kevin and Kell has been going since '95.

My first check of the day is on Kevin and Kell, even before slashdot.

I could be mistaken, but the only financial input Kevin & Kell seems to get is from book sales and donations. So I have no doubt Calvin & Hobbes could have still come about even today.

Seriously, people give MS a bad rap these days, but any exploit you're going to see in their software these days usually takes advantage of complex system interactions or odd exception throwing.

That's because Microsoft's "Active Content" security model, introduced in 1997, pretty much created the 'complex system interactions' vulnerability ecosystem. Before then the whole idea that an application that displayed untrusted content would provide a path for that content to execute code with full local user privileges was inconceivable. It was a joke, literally, the basis for the joke "Good Times" virus hoax was the idea that there would EVER be a way for an embedded virus to be launched automatically by email software.

Microsoft has its own problems with buffer overflows, for example this recent one, but if they only had buffer overflow issues there wouldn't be the kind of virus problem there is now. Because when you fix a buffer overflow you're fixing a bug. When you fix a 'complex system interaction' problem, you can't usually fix the underlying cause because there's other legitimate software that depends on that cause... so all you can do is add new checks. Which means that variants of the original exploit, possibly using a different avenue of approach to the underlying vulnerability, still remain.

So Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. Every check they add has the possibility of breaking legitimate content. So instead of preventing the dangerous interaction, they pop up a dialog and ask the user if they really meant to do whatever caused the dangerous interaction to happen. Which pisses users off, and trains them to answer "yes" to "I'm about to do something stupid and dangerous" dialogs.

When web comics about fuzzy animals are making fun of this problem, you know things are getting bad.

CATS wants to execute 'setupbomb42.dll'. As a result you may have no chance to survive make your time. Allow (yes) (no)?

And the really annoying thing is that Firefox (with XPI install through the browser) and Safari (with 'open "safe" files after downloading') have started to follow Microsoft's path of setting users up the bomb and then popping up a dialog asking if they want to detonate. Luckily Apple finally turned 'open "safe" files' off by default, but they've kept the 'set us up the bomb?' dialogs anyway.

If you take away all copyright then [url=http://www.reallifecomics.com/]these[/url] [url=http://www.penny-arcade.com/]people[/url] might stop producing work. Is this what you truly want? A society where all writers must take another job with NO possibility of making money?

Since the works of the people you linked to are publicly available, free of charge, from the very sites you linked to, it seems to me that you proved your own argument false, or at least gave strong evidence against it.

More evidence: Girl Genius (my favorite comic, web or otherwise), Megatokyo, Kevin and Kell.

I don't know when Kevin and Kell made the jump from CompuServe to the web, but he's been putting out strips since the early 90s.

(Strips were originally posted on CompuServe.)

Just hunt for prey near a steroid factory. :)

Amusingly enough, I am 99% sure the story submitter found this article via Penny Arcade.

Story Submitter here, and you're absolutely correct. I did indeed find this linked off of PA, and decided to share it here. Got to find them somehow, right? Though I read PA, I'm actually more of a Sluggy Freelance fan, and was much more interested in the comments about that comic than the others.

Still, I'm sort of disappointed that they didn't comment on Bill Holbrook's Kevin and Kell. We've all seen anthropomorphic comics before, and that's about as close to a mainstream anthro webcomic as you'll find. It is well written, and it would be interesting to see it compared with the mainstream anthro comics, like Over The Hedge, Pearls Before Swine, and others.

The silly side of me would like to have seen them try and analyze the artistic history of something like Partially Clips, just for the hell of it.

In some places it may a matter of democracy, but in all the bad stories I've read there appears to be no democracy to the organizations. Somehow, someway, they ended up becoming little fiefdoms for those in charge.

Kevin and Kell and Bill Holbrook would win. One a day, every day since 1995, plus he's doing 2 other strips in print, "On the Fasttrack" and "Safe Havens" (IIRC). I'm sure he's doing something few other web cartoonists do: work ahead.

Most web cartoonist seem to think that Tuesday's comic should be started and finished on Monday. The key is to get a month or two of strips completely finished, *then* start publishing. You'll also get a good idea of exactly how many strips you can do per week if you get some done first. If you can't do more than 3 a week during that two month build up period, don't even attempt to do a daily strip.

Like in this Kevin and Kell strip: "The Freedom of Ones and Zeros Act"

If I'm not mistaken, that's a reference to Kevin and Kell.

If I'm not mistaken, that's a reference to Kevin and Kell.

This would explain disparagement, but not vitriol. I actually got into an argument with an Apple-basher at college once, and it was during the System 7/Win95 era, where you concern mattered less.

That, and that it has so few games..

The worst flamage is in the developer and business spheres, not the hobbist/gamer space. This comic says it best for me...

But the most important reason is that their friends also hate it, but they have no idea why, only that their friends' friends also hate it.

This is about the only thing I can figure, except that too few people out there even know that Macs still exist; they think they stopped making them or something. This limits the "friends of friends" effect.

hen when I ask them what they know about Macs they say "well, I haven't used one since school, but..."

What's funny is that the "one" is more likely to have been an Apple ][, not a Mac. And the Apple ]['s were well loved in their day.

If I was more conspiratorially minded, I'd guess most Mac haters were decended from Commodore 64 and Amiga users, bitter that that company tanked, as well as getting too used to having many friends pirate games and software for them. (The social network makes it easier to pirate software on PCs than Macs.)

Reminds me of a Kevin and Kell strip.

But K and K is a comic strip by Bill Holbrook. =b
(-1 Offtopic, here I come).

It has been ages since I bought an indy-comic. Partly because there nearest decent comic-store is an hour or so from here - and that seems to cater mainly to the young, inmature section of the market (more tits than in a porno-rag), partly because much of the mainstream norwegian comics are very good (karine haaland, Nemi, Pondus and EON & Wildlife to mention a few), and partly because the web provides me with more under- and overground comics than a sane man can read (Comander Kitty, Fur Will Fly, House of LSD and Kevin & Kell to take the first four on my list of bookmarks).

I don't think that indy-comics printed on dead trees has the importance they had for say, oh, ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that are good will find their way into mainstream magasines (at least this holds true for Norway), the ones that ain't good will die out. That, and the World Wide Wait is the underground printingpress of today; both for comics as well as for writing, art and music.

But as the subject says, that just my 2 cents (by the exchange rate anyway).

• PVP Considered the best by many (and me)
  
• Kevin and Kell Very inoffensive, but quaintly interesting.
  
• The Adventures of Mayberry Melonpool A take on Trek. Goes way back.
  
• Nodwick A D&D henchman's life.
  
• Dork Tower Dorks like you and me. Good, but strips get rare these days.

Mr. Dewclaw, you too can ENLARGE....

People are working to make this a success, though it seems to vary.

Kevin and Kell seems to do pretty well. The author, Bill Holbrook, does two other paper strips. I know that he's making a profit - my friend is his colorist, who tells me that Bill is all business, and wouldn't pay my friend if he couldn't afford it. But the strip has a huge variety of revenue sources, like book sales at Plan 9, merchandise, and special "memberships". Most people know Sluggy Freelance, which also does the same thing. It also seems to make a profit.

But other strips like Bruno the Bandit are just as high quality in art and humor (in my opinion at least), but it seems like Ian McDonald has had just no luck in turning it into a profitable business, even though he's a prominent member of Keenspot and has two collected books published. My friend (who colors Kevin and Kell) has also had trouble keeping his strip Unlike Minerva afloat - he just doesn't have the time to juggle the strip and day-to-day living.

Anyway, it seems like the very best can survive, but even the very good like Bruno have difficulty making it. I know of one strip right now trying to make it with "tips", 8-bit theater, which seems to be having some success. Hopefully the author, Brian Clevinger, will pull it off. But even then, he's just struggling to meet the costs of bandwidth.

I don't know what the future of this medium is. But if anybody at all can make it, then I think there's hope for others.

Anyone know why so many Web comics have alien abduction themes? I've seen it in Kevin and Kell, College Roomies From Hell, Cool Cat Studio, and maybe Alice. Roomies, now known as It's Walky!, is now entirely about aliens. What gives?

There are some great cartoonists publishing primarily or exclusively for the Web. (Aside from User Friendly, I'm a big fan of Kevin and Kell and a lot of the Keenspot comics.)

Could we please have some Slashdot interviews with some of the folks behind these comics?

One of the sites I regularly visit, the Kevin and Kell online comic strip, asks people not to link or inline directly to the comic strip--they've had some trouble with people doing that in the past. I had some concern that this linking decision threw open the door to people to do just that--but from the NYTimes article, I see that it's still open to debate (and legal action).

Others that I enjoy include:

Userfriendly (http://www.userfriendly.org)

and

Kevin and Kell (http://www.kevinandkell.com)

Enjoy them!