I may be typing this on a MacBook but mostly I’m old.  Ever so much older than I used to be. A real 20th century kinda gal.  So I’m way behind the curve on what those crazy kids are up to when they’re not trampling my theoretical lawn or treating the comics shop like a reading room. 

For one, they’re reading lots of comics online — by one estimate there may be as many as 36,000 different web-only comics out there, and that’s not even including syndicated print comic strips reproduced online.  There’s just no time to read them all, so we rely on others to announce special events, like today’s online ceremony for the 2007 Webcartoonists’ Choice Awards (congratulations to all the winners!), or the announcement that Ed Dunphy’s and Max Velati’s science humor webcomic Lab Bratz has just hit its 100th weekly episode.  At least the latter milestone makes us feel a bit better, as Dunphy used to write for such print titles as Munden’s Bar, Mongrel, Slash and Splatter.

I got those credits from ComicSpace, a sort of MySpace spinoff for comics folks.  Feel free to befriend me there; I don’t know how it works anyway.  It’s apparently "a community of over 12,500 comic fans and creators… hosting over 3,000 comic galleries… containing over 28,300 comic pages!" so, you know, who has time for that, a full-time job and sleep?  Well, MySpace now has its own comic book section, with over 20,000 "friends" so far.

The Internet is rapidly becoming the most expansive force in comics. It’s exciting to watch it grow.