3. The Crosbys Take Keenspot. Chris Crosby has always been Keenspot's public face, but the company has always been run by a group of four. Teri Crosby, Chris's mother, is staying on, but Darren "Gav" Bleuel and Nate Stone, who constructed the company's technological base, are training their replacements and moving on. The press release about the matter has little to say about Keenspot's future plans, which is a little eyebrow-raising, since the company has rarely been reticent about those.

IMPORTANT?: Never underestimate the unpredictability of Chris Crosby. Keenspot isn't what it used to be, but it still runs the immensely popular webcomics community Comic Genesis, hosts a handful of formidable talents and is one of the few webcomics brands taken seriously in the mainstream media. And hey, You Damn Kid was still in development, last anybody checked...

OR NOT?: It has been some time since Keenspot has made any real waves in the webcomics world. The Crosbys have seemed to be more focused on the scriptwriting and Wowio sales for their own creations than their company's fortunes. And while you can count on the Crosbys for quirkiness, their practicality has been only a sometime thing (anybody remember the Keenspot bricks-and-mortar retail outlet?). If the company fails to change, or changes to fail, its impact on the webcomics scene is likely to be confined to nostalgic veterans like me, who remember when we could call it "the Universal Press Syndicate of webcomics." And really mean it.

2. Jess Fink v. Hot Topic. Two months ago, I described Todd Goldman's art plagiarism as a "non-story," in part because it didn't seem to have any lasting effects beyond itself, in part because eight months after the incident, no one seemed to be reporting any other cases of art plagiarism. Looks like I might have to revise that assessment. Cartoonist Jess Fink is pursuing what seems like a legitimate plagiarism charge-- no doubt emboldened by the resolution of the Goldman case. Once again, Gary Tyrrell is on the story.

IMPORTANT?: Fink shows no signs of going away quietly, having recently found legal counsel. Hot Topic is a much bigger target than even the millionaire Goldman. Online anti-plagiarism activism really depends on cases like these to focus attention on its cause.

OR NOT?: I'm not sure whether more attention should be paid to Hot Topic, the big retailer with the deep pockets, or "Newbreed girl," the design company that actually produced the shirt. The former is certainly more lucrative to sue or pressure successfully, but the latter is much more likely to fold.

If the case gets wrapped up in legal proceedings that outlast the average Internet activist's attention span, the narrative may change to "big guy screws the little guy, and whaddayagonnado?" Which wouldn't exactly be a new story in the world of cartooning. So, all in all, I think the importance is going to depend on the follow-through.

1. Nicolas Gurewitch Semi-Retires At 25. At the peak of his popularity, the Perry Bible Fellowship cartoonist announced that he would no longer produce comics weekly. Other projects beckon!

It would be a slippery-slope argument to say that this probably means he'll soon stop altogether. But enough other cartoonists have followed that basic pattern that that is the way I'm betting.

IMPORTANT?: The best argument for this story's importance is the example it sets for other cartoonists. Many model themselves after Charles Schulz or Will Eisner, aspiring to fifty-year careers that end in death. It's interesting that the mortality-obsessed Gurewitch has chosen another path, and he's successful enough, critically and commercially, that a small band of talents may follow his lead in the years to come.

This story struck me as jaw-dropping when it first came out, and the analysis from Journalista, Fleen, Comixtalk and The Comics Reporter was largely confined to "isn't it great that this guy gets to do what he wants to do?" Gurewitch's book was an Amazon best-seller, he consistently places in both top 20s in the Unreliable Surveys, he's got a number of syndicate outlets and he's taken a clutch of awards. Why walk away from all that?

OR NOT?: Probably for the same reason that Gary Larson, Bill Watterson and (for a while) Berkeley Breathed did-- to head off burnout. One's interests shift as one gets older, and if your strip is bound together by a certain sensibility more than a set of characters or a setting or a theme, the strip gets harder to maintain as your sensibility changes. No matter how much effort you put into it, at some point you've said what you want to say, and the exercise begins to feel repetitive.

Let's be honest: Gurewitch's Web output hasn't been anywhere near weekly in a long time. So this announcement just makes official what Web readers can see with their own eyes.

And there's a big difference between Gurewitch's exodus and Larson, Watterson and Breathed's-- when those cartoonists went, no one else stepped in to fill the void. Gurewitch's own particular brand of brutal whimsy will be missed, but the field has no shortage of interesting voices. Let someone else take their place in the sun now, as fresh as PBF was when it started. As Gurewitch was fond of reminding us, today's innocent ball of childlike wonder is tomorrow's moldering corpse.