Sandra and Woo has experienced a huge increase of visitor number in February, beating several important milestones:

• > 5,000 visitors per day with 5,191 visitors
• > 1,000 RSS feed subscribers with 1,061 subscribers
• > 10,000 readers as reported by Comic Rank with 10,138 readers

Of course we’re very happy that our comic is that successful. However, more is always better and so we’re trying to get some new readers this month as well. You can help us accomplishing this by voting for Sandra and Woo at TopWebComics.com since a comic in the top 10 of that toplist can get several thousand new visitors a month. As a voting incentive you’ll be redirected to a page containing a draft drawn by Powree for one of our early strips after voting. There’s a new sketch for every day in March, so gotta catch ’em all!

I’d like to recommend our German readers to have a look at the German version of the Oscar nominated documentary Burma VJ about the failed uprising in September 2007. It includes exclusive footage shot by reporters of Democratic Voice of Burma. The documentary is available at arte+7 for a few more days:

• Watch Burma VJ on arte+7

However, when you install FlashGet on your computer, you can also download the WMV movie file which is available at:

• mms://artestras.wmod.llnwd.net/a3903/o35/geo/arte7/EUR_DE_FR/arteprod/A7_SGT_ENC_04_040773-000-A_PG_HQ_DE.wmv?e=1267214549&h=038606a588f815311266129d544d33f9

We’re now offering exclusive custom advertising on Sandra and Woo. Well, I have to say that I’m not overly optimistic that we’ll find someone who’s interested since most of our fellow hobby webcartoonists won’t be able to afford exclusive advertising on a website with nearly half a million page views per month.

However, for commercial advertisers it would be a good deal, maybe even a very good one. In fact custom advertising would be a win-win-win situation for everybody involved:

• The advertiser would get some unique advertising opportunities that ad agencies are usually not able to offer. And that for a rather low CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) since there is no middleman involved who takes a 50 % cut.
• We would make a bit more money than with the ad agencies we’re currently using.
• Our readers would have to tolerate at least one more prominent ad, but they would also not have to see idiotic “weight loss” ads (that slip through the filter frequently) anymore and the whole website would load considerably faster since the ads would be hosted on our own webspace.

Do you remember the photo of the young girl standing in front of a house fire with a suspicious smile I posted in a news entry last October? Well, I found out that the girl’s name is Zoe and that she had nothing to do with the fire which was started by the fire department itself for training. You can read the whole story behind the picture on the blog Traveling Roths of Zoe’s father Dave who took the photo. The original title of the picture is The Firestarter but it’s more commonly known as Disaster Girl. I think it’s a fantastic photo and I managed to get a 20” x 16” (50 cm x 40 cm) large print version of it. The signature in the lower left corner says: “For Oliver from Zoe & Dave”.

Thank you very much, Dave and Zoe!

Do I even have to mention that trying to put it in a frame nearly led to disaster? I made a bent in the print and the glass of the frame broke in two. Thankfully I had another glass of the same size. There’s now also some dust on the inside but I don’t dare to open that frame ever again…I guess all of this makes the print only more authentic.

Design Update

Completely unrelated to that I made some minor updates to the design of the website. Most notably there’s now an explanation which HTML tags you can use when writing a comment.

Gunnerkrigg Court

“Gunnerkrigg Court does not look much like a school at all.”

“It closer resembles a large industrial complex than a place of learning.”

“Within the first week of my attendance, I began noticing a number of strange occurrences.”

“The most prevalent of these oddities being the fact that I seemed to have obtained a second shadow.”

That’s the awesome beginning of an awesome comic, Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell. It is the big winner of The Webcomic List Awards 2009 whose winners have been announced today. It did not only win the main category “Best Comic”, but also the awards for “Best Writing” and “Best Longform”. I was a judge for several of its categories and Gunnerkrigg Court has been my favorite comic in the contest by far. My copy of its first print edition has already arrived. Gunnerkrigg Court is a fantasy comic with sci-fi elements subdivided into more or less self-contained chapters. They tell the mysterious story of the young girl Antimony “Annie” Carver and her best friend Katerina “Kat” Donlan who attend the eponymous school as they get involved in the political intrigues between Gunnerkrigg Court and the mythical creatures of Gillitie Wood, a forest near the school.

Go check it out!

After the discontinuation of the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards I and several other members of the webcomic community site The Webcomic List felt the need for a replacement and came up with the idea for a new award called The Webcomic List Awards in July 2009. Webcomic creators and other people involved in comics were asked for their favorites; the winner of each category was then established by a panel of judges, including for example Brad Guigar of Evil Inc. for “Best Gag-a-Day”, among the five webcomics with the most nominations.

On the website of The Webcomic List Awards 2009 you can have a look at the comic pages drawn by our community members to present the categories, announce the nominees and celebrate the winners.

However, if you are just interested in the winners of each category, here they are:

Digger

Best Comic:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best New Comic:

• Moon Town by Steve Ogden

Best Gag-a-Day:

• Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto

Best Longform:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Colour Art:

• FreakAngels by Warren Ellis

Best Black and White Art:

• The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl

Best Non-Traditional Art:

• The Dreamland Chronicles by Scott Christian Sava

Best Writing:

• Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell

Best Character:

• Digger of Digger by Ursula Vernon

If you have a webcomic site of your own, it would be great if you could write a news entry about our award and the winners of it. It is currently the only general webcomic award with additional categories other than “Best Webcomic” (which exists for example as part of the Ignatz Awards or the Harvey Awards). However, it was also our goal to keep the number of different categories low so that each one is worth more. Since it is also not a popularity contest the most popular webcomics (Penny Arcade, XKCD, etc.) don’t win by default.

We believe that all winning comics are of very high quality and therefore worth checking out. So have a look at them and spread the word!