In the olden days, before it was swallowed whole by its sister blog Gawker, Valleywag had a website of its very own. Valleywag launched under the snark-filled fingers of one Nick Douglas, a college dropout whose true love was Silicon Valley gossip. He mucked through the sex lives of CEOs, pounced on rumors and innuendos, and stabbed nascent startups with his poisoned pen. Then one day, Gawker emperor Nick Denton decided to "go another way" and handed Douglas his pink slip.

Now, Douglas has had many jobs since then (he now runs a found Internet object blog for AOL). But -- perhaps I, too, have been a Gawker Media serf -- I will always think of Douglas as the Valleywag Guy. And now we get to our point: the Valleywag Guy has a webcomic. It's called Big Damn Deal and it's about -- wait for it -- a Bay Area Internet startup.

I should probably wait until Big Damn Deal builds up an archive before commenting on it, but I was struck by how little the opening pages grabbed me. Douglas knows all the dark, dirty secrets behind startup culture, and he developed a reputation as something of a dry wit. But the first few pages sound like they could have been written by any old code monkey, and Douglas' name won't be hook enough without the juicy stuff.

Maybe I'm just crabby because the navigation is backwards. This is America, dude. We read our webcomics from left to right.

[Big Damn Deal]