Skottie Young and Scott Morse (AKA SkottieScott) have launched new bi-weekly webcomic…. with a yet to be decided title. From the announcement on their blog:

We’ve decided to make a departure here at SkottieScott from the re-imagined character designs you’ve come to know and love. Instead, we’re opting to CREATE. We’re opting to OWN. We’re opting to contribute to the entertainment spectrum with something original and hopefully a load of fun for everyone. It is for us, anyhow.

Periodically you’ll find accompanying anecdotes about the creation of the story and characters, but mostly you’ll find the story pages themselves. We’re creating these one page at a time with no outline to work from: we’re shooting from the hip. This could backfire and destroy comics and the internet itself… or succeed and make the internet a better place and comics the medium of choice for storytellers. Or at the very least make you smile twice weekly.

Look for Scott’s work on Mondays and Skottie on Friday.

Scott is a character designer, comic book artist and graphic novelist. His novel Soulwind was nominated for both an Eisner and Ignatz award. Skottie is a comic book artist for Marvel. He illustrated their Eisner Award winning series The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

LuVisi’s experience isn’t a rarity. Many artists talk of finding work and careers through their exposure on DeviantArt, a site that has been around for 11 years and now attracts more people looking at art daily than anywhere in the world. “We have a larger global footprint … than all of the major museums in the world combined,” says Angelo Sotira, who co-founded the site at the ripe old age of 19 with a $15,000 investment.

The mission of KaboingTV is to provide an alternative channel for quality animation that serves both the cartoon fan, and the animation community of artists and writers.

The first series to premiere on KaboingTV  “Frog in a Suit, was created by Murray himself. He animated the pilot, while the next two episodes were animated by Jantze Studios. Joe Murray hopes to have more original animated content in the future, but that will depend on whether audiences take to the site.

Check out the second episode “Tricky Business” here:

“It’s the other great love of my life,” said Kinney, author of the best-selling “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book and movie series. “It’s very difficult to walk away from an audience of 10 million kids a month. To know that you can make a positive impact on what they’re learning and what they’re experiencing online is sort of addictive.”

» Speaking of Richard Thompson, check out his new Cul de Sac website.

» While much discussion is made regarding the threats to the South Park guys, attacks on Lars Vilks, Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis has posted the Vilks cartoon on his blog with the title, “They can’t fatwa all of us but they can go fatwa themselves.“

“I’m trying to produce the first episodes without outside funding that comes with strings attached. It’s also my wish to have you the audience, plus fellow animators be my producers rather than funding sources that don’t love cartoons as much as you do.”

Murray’s Kickstarter “Frog in a Suit” project ends on June 5th with a goal of at least $16,800, and has reached 26% of that goal with 37 days to go.

“So look at your pledge also as a vote to have more episodes of Frog in a Suit, and to have a website that you can go to and depend on, to give you hilarious, quality driven, irreverent cartoons.”

Murray notes that once funding is complete it will be a matter of months to launch the site and begin pulling in enough traffic to woo advertisers and more sponsors.

McGruder has been good about keeping us posted via Twitter, and now he has launched an “official unofficial” Boondocks site at http://www.boondocksbootleg.com. Here, you can find screen shots from the new season, video clips and behind-the-scenes stuff, as well as McGruder’s political commentary and randomness. (Warning: Some content may not be safe for work.)

Last week McGruder noted that the “first Boondocks trailer (was) nixed for being ‘too much for people to handle.’ I would put it out anyway, except I think they might be right.”

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

The strategy to extract fees from online readers, which is still lacking in many details, has more than a little bit of a “damn the torpedoes” mentality to it, but Murdoch noted that if his plan is successful, “we’ll be followed by all media.” Could this be the beginning of the end for free news on the Internet? Murdoch is hugely influential and could orchestrate a sea change for his contemporaries in the news business. And he’s in good company. His explanation that charging for news was natural because “quality journalism is not cheap” was virtually identical to the phrasing used by New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in an interview last December with NPR.

While I concede that “free” can work for those with loss-leader products, for those of us whose content IS the product, I can only hope that this begins a trend that challenges the mentality of free. I can hope, but I’m still pretty skeptical.

Hat Tip: MJ Editorial Cartoonist