Something I've been noticing about the visual aspect of blogging is that those that intersperse writing and illustration heavily and effectively might be a kind of perceptual bridge from comics. The way most blogging formats work is a wide column surrounded by shorter ones of links, which we don't pay attention to. When you break up text with a well placed photo, you're getting the same kind of interplay as you do in with comics, but you're getting them at a slower pace, with the straightforwardness of text, which keeps you moving forward, rather than the distractions of the comics page--when you look at comics, your eye is going all over, on the newspaper page to other strips, in a book to other panels. Think of the way a blog page would look transferred to a comics page: lots of wide areas of text followed by paneled illustrations of varying size and shape. It wouldn't work well at all: hand lettering looks like it belongs in captions and word balloons, not as a substitute for typesetting, which is what I, at least, think of as "real" when I think of reading large volumes of words. (I've never read Cometbus.) Pretty much by accident, or at least trial and error, blogging is becoming its own visual medium. Maybe I should pitch Taschen a book.