Hey look, it’s E-merl 8.0! Everything’s gone a bit wider and more colourful, hasn’t it? And what’s that? Why, it appears to be brand new, twice-weekly webcomic serial, Dice With The Universe. Picking up the baton from the recently completed MASIVO, Dice will be updating every Tuesday and Friday. But unlike… well, just about every serial I’ve done before, Dice will need you (yes, you!) to take a hand in determining what transpires each week.

Meanwhile in other news… there is no other news I can tell you. Yet. While it looks like I’ve got a very exciting and rather busy 2014 ahead of me, I’ve been thoroughly sworn to secrecy about the lot of it. So! Vague hints it is! In the year to come look out for a second webcomic serial to debut at E-merl, a new comics installation to be exhibited somewhere in London, a discussion panel 12 years in the making and the announcement of a major new digital comics research project. Comics! Excitement! Vagueness! Yay!

Time for an autumnal news update, don’t you think? Starting off with an upcoming event – Thought Bubble 2013 will soon be upon us and I’m going to be there, sharing table 149 with Mr Noble. Debuting at the show will be not one, but two new issues of Necessary Monsters: Murderbox by myself and my esteemed colleague, Mr Azzopardi. Also at the show will be Mr Miers and his fascinating Score & Script anthology, which just so happens to contains new strips by both myself and Mr. Noble. Why not bring your freshly-purchased copy along to our table and enjoy the bout of fisticuffs that will no doubt ensue as we attempt to settle which of the strips is the finer.

Remember my gallery comic, Black Hats In Hell? I mentioned it in a news post a little way down the page? No? Well then allow me to direct you towards two aide-mémoires. Firstly, the comic has had the good fortune to be featured in Paul Gravett‘s new book, Comics Art. Part of Tate Publishing’s Contemporary Art series, the book presents a fascinating tour of the medium that I’d recommend to everyone as thoroughly worth checking out. Secondly, I’ve now completed my own write up on Black Hats, in the shape of an academic paper entitled Images In Space. Based on the talk I gave at Oxford in September, the paper examines the comic alongside other architecturally mediated works and tries to get at what makes this subset of comics tick. Take a peek and let me know what you think via the twitters or, even better, in person at Thought Bubble next weekend.

Despite the unprecedented outbreak of summer, production has not slowed in the E-merl comic factories. Freshly unleashed on the public is my new game/comic hybrid, Icarus Needs. Folks may remember the game’s protagonist, Icarus Creeps from his appearance in a couple of previous tales here at E-merl. For those interested in getting some further insight into the ideas behind the game, I’ve popped up a pdf copy of the Game Comics talk I gave last month at the Joint International Graphic Novel and Bande Dessinées Conference in Glasgow.

Staying in the world of comics theory I’ve also recently had the good fortune to see the publication of my first two academic papers on digital comics. Digital Comics: New Tools and Tropes can be found in Studies In Comics (Volume 4, Issue 1) while my hypercomic history From Comic To Hypercomic is in Cultural Excavation and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel. Should any of my fellow comics scholars happen to be reading, I’ll also give a quick plug for the new journal on digital comics that I’m going to be editing. Writing Visual Culture: Digital Comics will be out in early 2014 and I’ll be taking submissions for papers up until 18th August. For full details, check out the full call on the TVAD blog.

Hello Internet! Four quick bursts of news for you on this fine Thursday evening.

One: At the end of May I released a free-to-play browser version of A Duck Has An Adventure over on Kongregate. Anyone who hasn’t had a chance to play Duck on Android can now hop over there to try it out. The game has proved quite popular so far, scooping Kongregate’s Game Of The Week and racking up over 300,000 plays so far. Also, oddities like this page of YouTube play-throughs and some lovely reviews. Thanks Internet!

Two: The Necessary Monsters website has now relocated to NecessaryMonsters.net and morphed into an Etsy shop. Not only can you purchase the original graphic novel there, you can also pick up the first two issues of Necessary Monsters 2: Murderbox. It’s the same great mix of spy-horror thrills, only this time with a soupçon more James Bond and Hellraiser thrown into the mix.

Three: The Iron Man 2020 serial I wrote for Marvel Comics has now been collected alongside other tales of Arno Stark into a lovely little trade paperback. Available in all good comic stories or via your local Amazon dot whatever.

Four: I’m off to Scotland! Yay! All next week I’ll be attending the Joint International Graphic Novel and Bande Dessinées Conference in Glasgow and Dundee. And on Tuesday morning I’ll be delivering a new, completely retooled version of my Game Comics paper to the assembled comics luminaries. Wish me luck!

So I have a pretty insanely busy April ahead of me. So busy that I have now decided to name the next few weeks as The Official 2013 E-merl Spring Tour. Wooo! The centrepiece of the tour will be my new hypercomic installation called Black Hats In Hell that will be opening at two – count ’em, two! – different locations this month. On the 15th April I will be taking over the Postgraduate Gallery at the University Of Hertfordshire with the initial installation of the comic, which has been designed specifically to make use of unique shape of the gallery space.

Then on the 19th of April I will be installing a new, site-specific remix of the comic outside the Platform Theatre at Central St Martins in London. This second version will incorporate collaborative digressions made by some of the students at CSM and features as part of the Comica festival taking place that weekend. I’ll be there in person on Saturday the 20th April as part of the Comica Comiket and would love to hear attendees feedback about the work.

But my travels in April do not stop there! I’m also hitting the conference circuit and will be delivering two papers across three conferences without the aid of a safety net or, probably, any reasonable amount of sleep. The hijinks begin on April 3rd when I’ll be delivering a paper entitled “Comics Are Control” as part of the Adventures In Textuality conference at the University Of Sunderland. Then a week later on April 10th I’ll be at the opposite end of the country at the University of Sussex delivering a paper on Game Comics as part of their Tablet Syposium.

For the Spring Tour’s grand finale I’ll be popping across to Germany from April 23rd to 26th in order to deliver an expanded version of my Game Comics paper at the Change & Continuity Symposium as part of the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. If any of you are in any of those places at the same time I am in those places you should probably say “hi.” And then you should probably buy me a drink because, if I have actually managed to succeed in meeting all those deadlines, then I am certainly going to be in need of one.