Man – stop posting for a week and suddenly everything happens in the webcomic world. It would be a bit of a drag to rehash them all – and most of the news can be found in this post by Howard Tayler, wherein he says pretty much everything I would have said.

As far as other webcomic developments this last weel, I must say I appreciated some of the dorkoriffic halloween costumes;  I enjoyed the wrapping up of the latest story arc in No Need for Bushido, which managed to treat characters seriously without losing their personalities; I was impressed the surprisingly convincing flirtation going on in Nukees these days; and I liked the fact that the scariest image on Halloween was the future version of Penny that looks just like Aggie.

This is probably a low blow, especially to a man having his wisdom teeth removed today, but for the first three panels, I thought this was one of the most touching autobiographical webcomic strips out there.

All the little things aside, however, what I’d really like to discuss is Something Positive 1937.

Now, this is undeniably a cool little comic. It offers a more bite-size version of the classic S*P humor, which is nice. It is interesting to see the family connections and similarities – and differences – between the past and present generations. And the characters themselves are intriguing in their own rights, with their own stories to tell and lives to live.

But what really wows me about the entire thing… is how it seems to have come into being. Milholland had some extra advertising space on his website that was going unused for a short bit. Now, while most webcomickers would have used this opportunity to leave it blank or try and draw in more ads, he decided to create an entirely new comic that would fit in the spot.

Think about that – he added this little gem to his daily workload simply because he could. Because he had an inspiration and an opportunity to tell a story, and he decided to do so. I mean, that’s what most webcomics are in the first place, sure – but this was on top of all the other stuff he did. And now we’re over fifty strips into S*P 1937 and it appears to be a permanent fixture, and along the way he’s come up with a pretty awesome new advertising method along the way.

That’s just awesome. Not just because it means more free comics for his readers, but because it serves as a reminder of exactly how interested he is in the stories he is telling.

We see this in S*P 1937. We see this in bonus pages and world backgrounds and video miniseries. We see this in posting triple-size updates just for the sake of doing so. All of it evidence that these guys aren’t just trying to get an audience, it isn’t just about money or internet fame or any of that – it’s about telling a story, and they are just as eager as the fans to see where the story goes. It’s something easy to lose site of, and I’m always glad to be reminded of it.