Modern Tales also has multiple daughter-sites, including Serializer.net. A full year's access to any Modern Tales website costs 2.95$ a month (you can sign up monthly or yearly: yearly, you get two months free), and subscriptions to any other MT-affiliated websites after that cost $1.95/m.

As of March 31st, Modern Tales is launching a new daughter-site called Girlamatic.com. It's a website aimed at, for lack of a better term, really cool chicks. And, of course, the non-chicks who nevertheless read comics not involving heaving spandex boobs. The artists set up to participate run the gamut from Donna Barr to Vera Brosgol to Rachel Hartman to Lisa Jonte. There are lots of them. And they will all be updating, every week or more.

Bite Me was asked to join the website several months ago, and after considering for about five minutes...I said yes. Shaenon Garrity put up a strip that pretty much explains all of my economic and artistic reasons when she moved Narbonic to Modern Tales, which I urge you to read.

You will still be able to follow Bite Me without subscribing, as long as you view the week's new page before the next update replaces it. However, you'll be missing out on unlimited access to a lot of kick-ass comics by some of my favorite artists (and best friends), as well as access to the past pages of Bite Me (and, if you go on vacation, you won't have to bribe your friends to print out the updates for you. Trust me, I've been there. They'll bleed you dry, the bastards.)

If you have doubts, you can subscribe for a month and see if it suits you, and then drop it if not. This is not one of those freakish CD clubs that owns your soul for life after you order your 95 cent Madonna CD, although the price is comparable. These are real people trying to do something good for comics.

As Lisa Jonte would put it, subscribing costs less than a tube of cheap lipstick*. Everytime a subscriber clicks on a page of Bite Me, and everytime a new subscriber mentions the comic as one of their reasons for signing up...I can afford to buy a sandwich on REAL bread. People don't seem to understand that maintaining the comic free online is very costly---hosting plus domain name plus bandwidth fees for getting too many hits plus software plus art supplies plus scanner plus no steady income = yikes.

People have asked me why I don't just put up a Paypal tipjar, to which I say: girlamatic is a COMMUNAL tip-jar (which operates by Paypal, no less!), with more benefits for you and more security for the artists.

Since I want to make more out of comics than just my pricey hobby, being part of a proven small business, run by artists for artists and populated by some of the people I admire the most, is exactly the Step #2 I've been looking for. To that end, I will be happy to help bring my readers along with me: if there's anybody out there without a checking account who would like a subscription, I will give you my own mailing address: send me cash, and I'll personally buy you a subscription. NO JOKE.

Eventually I would love to publish the comic in book-form, thus finally rendering our relationship a physical one: earning a little money and getting well-known professional exposure can only help me get there.

I want to thank all of you for being a loyal audience over the months (...cripes, years!) despite tendonitis, server problems, and the like. I hope you stick around, and as a result get to read a lot of cool material...AND nudge me that much closer to legitimacy. Y'all rock the house.

*also, it doesn't stain napkins.