Webslinging by Randy Lander There are comics websites out there that throngs of fans check regulary, from the massive undertaking of Sequential Tart to the relatively new kid on the block Ninth Art to the various forums belonging to Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, Larry Young and other pros. Don MacPherson and I hope that The Fourth Rail is among your daily visits as well. It can be tough to stand out in a crowd of thousands of various comic-book websites out there. This feature is aimed at directing you to some great websites of which you may not be aware. Plenty of folks are aware of the site belonging to writer Warren Ellis, who counts among his many credentials the Wildstorm book Planetary, taking a small team of super-heroes through various archetypes, adventures and conspiracies on a semi-regular basis. Fewer folks probably know that his partner-in-crime on that book, John Cassaday, has his own website as well at www.johncassaday.com. Designed by Chad Michael Ward, known for his work on warrenellis.com,opi8.com and several other high-profile and comics-related sites, Cassaday's site has a visual flair fit for an artist's website. It also has a ton of goodies for the fan of his art, as well as insight into a self-effacing and funny personality. The art gallery features unseen sketches, cover galleries and other tidbits from Planetary, Desperadoes, Union Jack and other work that he has done, and the biography is worth a look if only to see what everybody is saying about Cassaday. Or at least, what everybody is saying that he found entertaining enough to put in the bio. On top of Planetary, Cassaday will soon be contributing to the relaunch of Captain America with writer John Ney Rieber. This can only help to raise his profile, and given his talents, that can only be a good thing for fans of the medium. For those who are seeking out not merely sketches, scripts and other aspects of what make a comic on the web, there are any number of good online comics sites. Nextcomics and Opi8 both run some of my favorites, and I can also recommend the regular work of the guys doing Brother Matthew and Steve Conley's Astounding Space Thrills, just off the top of my head. However, there's something a little different, and potentially quite exciting, going on at Unbound Comics. Unbound Comics is the home of ebook editions of comic-books. The idea is that you can view sample pages or download a sample PDF, but if you like what you see, you can pay a very reasonable fee and get an electronic copy of the comic to read. Despite being the work of a lot of fairly new faces, the comics offered up are professional and intriguing, and mixed in amongst the unfamiliar there are some gems that definitely deserve a second look. Marie Javins's strange anthology Scorched Birth has a host of familiar faces from editors to artists telling autobiographical stories of their "abnormal hidden histories." Meanwhile, David Yurkovich, a pillar of the small press community who has never quite gotten all the attention he deserves, has offered up an early tale of his unusual super-hero team Threshold, a tale that would appeal to super-hero and non-super-hero fans alike. Unbound Comics isn't the only site offering this kind of thing... Jambooks is also giving it a go, with online versions of printed books like Elvis Must Die and Desperate Times amongst their offerings. The possibilities offered by these ebook comics are certainly interesting, and well worth checking out to see if you can get a glimpse of where the medium might be expanding. On a slightly less visionary note, but still certainly an interesting undertaking, if you go to http://www.chronologyproject.com/ you'll find the Marvel Chronology project, a site run by Russ Chappell as "an effort to catalog every actual appearance by every character in the Marvel Universe, and place them in their proper chronological order." It's a massive undertaking of history and continuity, helped out by a great deal of volunteer labor. While the site would be of most use to writers doing research for working in the Marvel Universe, it is also useful for fans of a character seeking out other appearances or simply those who wish to spend some time swimming in the vast array of characters that Marvel has to offer. Those who want to look around a bit will find links on many of the characters' names taking them to linked sites dedicated to those characters, so that the Chronology Project also serves as a home base of sorts for all sorts of information about various characters, by making it easy to find a name and then find someone who knows just about everything about them. That will bring a close to this edition of "Webslinging." Keep in mind... this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of links, nor is it meant to give sites some kind of "Best of" status. They're just some friendly tips. Happy clicking. Email Randy Lander comments about this column, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board.