Two recent webcomic discoveries.

First, The Chess Comic.

Have you ever wanted to play chess but don’t know how? Have you ever played chess — and been abysmmally bad?

Fortunately, there’s a webcomic to help you!

The Chess Comic just started back in January, and it’s a series of chess lessons.

Start here, and let the chesspieces talk you through playing the game.

Second, Directorama.

What happens to film directors in the afterlife?

Directorama begins here. Start at the beginning, and give it a couple of strips. Some of the jokes are obscure, but somewhere around the fifth or sixth strip, it goes geeky and the laugh quotient increases.

Any webcomic recommendations from the audience?

Bobby Fischer, the American chess prodigy and grandmaster, has died in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was sixty-four.

Fischer is perhaps better known today for his… eccentricities. That’s probably the most polite word I can think of. That old Buffalo Springfield lyric comes quickly to mind — “Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep.”

The human mind can handle some things but not others. For Fischer, it could handle the ordered precision of the chessboard. The intricacies of the wider world, though, clearly escaped his ability to handle.

I knew who Bobby Fischer was — the American grandmaster that dethroned the Soviet domination of the sport in the 1960s — and I read his columns on chess in back issues of …