This month I’m excited, though, because Araknid Kid, by Josh Alves (a buddy of mine and part of the Christian comics scene) is in the running! Where most of the other offerings are moody or offensive, Araknid Kid is full of a fun kind of energy that works great without alienating young readers.

Go check out Zuda… set up an account and see all the comics in the running this month. Right now Araknid Kid is in 8th place (out of 10). Josh needs your vote! …and 30-50 of your friends’ votes, too, if he’s going to break into the top 3 at this point. So get your free Zuda account and vote for Araknid Kid!

For those of you who don’t know what this is about, you were apparently doing your homework or something equally unimportant when the rest of us were watching “Perchance to Dream.” That, of course, is the now-infamous episode of Batman: The Animated Series where the Caped Crusader gets stuck in a Mad Hatter-induced dream world. Ol’ Brucey didn’t realize he was dreaming, however, until a crucial point where he attempted to read a newspaper (9:35 in this clip)—and the text was jumbled beyond all recognition. In the climax of the episode, Bruce gives us this encapsulated science lesson:

“That’s because reading is the function of the right-side of the brain, while dreams come from the left-side. It’s impossible to read something in a dream.”

One of the things that sets Batman apart from a bunch of other superheroes is that he’s supposed to be a detective (one of his “official” nicknames is “World’s Greatest Detective”), so when Mr. Wayne dishes out a nugget like this, his fans assume they’re being taught something that’s… well… true. The show left us young viewers under the impression that you really couldn’t read text when you were dreaming. Which meant that when I later had dreams where I could read, I took it to mean that I was special or had some sort of above-average right/left brain connection.

And now, finally, after years of bewilderment and self-doubt, my gullibility has been immortalized in a webcomic.

…but is it the kind of difference you should make? Dean Rankine’s latest mini-comic, Sticky Bunny 2, is now up at Webcomics Nation.