One of the reasons I go to comic cons is to wander the Artists Alley in search of good comics I never heard of before. I came back from Boston Comic Con with a big stack of postcards, print comics, and jotted notes, so the three comics here are just the beginning of the deluge.

Boots and Pup has been around for a while, but creator John Y. told me that he was moving to a six-day-a-week schedule this week. That's a brave statement, because the comic has been on hiatus since 2007, but John tells me he has a two-month buffer already in place. The comic is colorful, simply drawn, and kid-friendly yet witty enough for older readers to appreciate.

At the Agreeable Comics table, Kevin Church was pushing Lydia, which is a spinoff of another webcomic, The Rack. "You can read it on its own," he said, and indeed, I read the print comic on the way home from the con and found myself laughing out loud. It's workplace humor with a wry twist, illustrated by Max Riffner in a nice, expressive yet simple style in black and white.

Finally, I stopped off at Jason Viola's table to tell him how much I liked his comic Herman the Manatee, in which Herman, a manatee, bumps his head on a boat in every single episode. (In the second series, Herman does move on to other things.) Jason gave me a carefully crafted minicomic of another story, Who Is Amy Amoeba? (language NSFW), the story of an amoeba who can't stop dividing, and suffers multiple identity crises because of it. It's a very clever idea, well executed and simply drawn, and well worth a visit, as are all of Jason's comics.