mezzacotta

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


mezzacotta (yes, all-lowercase) is a website launched by David Morgan-Mar and The Comic Irregulars (authors of Darths and Droids and Irregular Webcomic) to showcase "all the weird, crazy, half-baked ideas we come up with."

It contains the following webcomics:

  • Lightning Made of Owls: a webcomic consisting entirely of user-submitted Guest Strips (much like the Guest Strip Project), launched on 15 November 2008. Its name is a deliberate Word Salad Title. It features the following stock characters:
    • Holly, an optimistic, lively young woman. Always depicted with clear round Nerd Glasses.
    • Ambrose, a learned, eccentric older man. Always depicted with a yardbrush moustache.
    • Samantha, a smart, vain, self-motivated young lady. Always depicted with large earrings.
    • Oliver, a bald man who is Always Lawful Good. Always depicted with an L-shaped scar.
    • Meridien, a long-haired spiritual woman. Always depicted with a cloth fashion accessory, typically a ribbon.
    • Delkin, a young technician, and the joker of the bunch. Always depicted with Hidden Eyes.
  • Comments on a Postcard: Having finally completed their magnum opus, the phenomenally acclaimed genre-defying webcomic known as Postcard, the Comic Irregulars have started to re-run it from beginning to end. But there's a problem - all of the comic image files have mysteriously been deleted! Furthermore, nobody else seems to have ever heard of Postcard, or have any memory of ever reading it. But, unperturbed by this apparent glitch in the time stream, the Comic Irregulars are simply running the News Posts without the comic images, and hoping that the reader's imagination will suffice until they can find someone, somewhere, who has a backup copy of the files in their browser cache. [2] Launched on 8 December 2008.
    • The above description is one of many random descriptions of the webcomic that load when the "About" page is viewed.
  • Awkward Fumbles: Launched on April 14, 2009. A collaborative webcomic where mezzacotta readers send in comic strips with blank speech balloons, and the Comic Irregulars other readers insert dialogue and captions of their own making, to create a finished comic that isn't quite what either of the parties intended! (If this sounds like something that the Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North already did a while back, that's because it is.)



Awkward Fumbles contains examples of:
  • Pixel Art Comic (Pixels)
  • Schedule Slip - Although it doesn't have a schedule, it didn't update at all between May and August 2009, due to it being more work for the Irregulars than the other comics, where the readers do all the work. It changed with an overhaul, allowing readers to not only draw but also write the strip.
    • And then it slipped again. Currently, the latest strip was published on March 30, 2010.
Comments on a Postcard contains examples of:
Lightning Made of Owls contains examples of:
mezzacotta contains examples of:

The webcomic that uses the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
The webcomic with two people talking to each other. Mostly.
The webcomic that uses SVG.
The most innovative webcomic for quite some time. By some measures.
The website that went online before it was ready.
The webcomic that reduces hair loss and increases virility.
The website with The Hyperstig.
The webcomic that could use more publicity.
Post about us in your blog!
From the people who brought you Darths & Droids.
The webcomic that everyone is talking about.
The longest running webcomic on the net.
The webcomic with the rotating taglines.
From the people who brought you Irregular Webcomic
The webcomic that will revolutionise your web experience.
The website with the International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation.
The Emil Zátopek of webcomics.
The webcomic that broke TV Tropes.
... All we know is, he's called The Hyperstig.
The webcomic that started on the other side of the shark.
The proleptic webcomic.
Dare to be stupid.
Now totally sold out for the advertising bucks.
The website with the non-rotating taglines on static pages. (a special one for on static pages)

Square Root of Minus Garfield

Square Root of Minus Garfield is so trope heavy that it gets its own page.

  1. If you want to know where the comics really come from, they are generated by a fractal algorithm seeded from the "publication date".
  2. Actually, there never was a webcomic - they're just making up the "commentary" and leaving it to the reader to imagine the described nonexistant image. Whether or not this even counts as a "webcomic" is a question that'd have Scott McCloud lying awake at night.