You actually need to read most comics before you can decide whether you’ll like them. After all, the descriptions don’t tell you much about the execution; “Whacky hijinks at a gaming magazine” could be good, could be terrible. “Funny D&D characters try to kill a lich” might be Order of the Stick or it could be some talentless heap. And “two guys bitch about videogames” could be almost any webcomic pulled at random from the gaming heap.

But there are comics where, by nature of the very pitch, you know whether you’re going to enjoy it or not before you rest one gaze upon it. Last Blood (“Vampires must protect the last humans on earth from zombies”) is one of them.

Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is another.

Long after humanity has died off, two bohemian robots wander about the solar system to discuss philosophy and drink a lot.

Okay, I lied a little. Some folks will no doubt have issues with the ideas that robots would drink. Or be, as they are, unemployed. Or in fact have a need to discuss philosophy. So let me assure you that all of these strange aspects of robot life are explained, quite rationally, in the comic.

But let us talk about the robots.

Chris and Ben are robot assemblers – they make new robots at the factory. One day, they note that they’re making Robot Assembler 4000s – and they’re the 3000 model. They have succeeded in making themselves obsolete. Now without a purpose for existence, they go on a road trip to explore the nine planets.

And drink a lot. At bars. And experience a lot of squalid life.

Technically speaking, robots don’t need to drink to survive – they’re immortal. But the humans who created their AI discovered that without strong motivations, there was no coherent intelligence. So they gifted them with an urge to taste things, and a need to interact with each other. In fact, except for the fact that they’re immortal and really don’t need anything to survive, they’re a lot like us… If we had everything we ever needed.

(Humanity died out quite peacefully, as it turns out. It turns out they simply preferred to procreate with robots engineered to provide frightfully sinful pleasures; the last human went with a smile on his face.)

Chris is the would-be writer of the robots – he wants to say something, but doesn’t know what. He’s on the road trip to try to find a reason to exist, but in a world where everything is free, there doesn’t seem to be a place for him. That bothers him. It also bothers him that really, he may not have anything at all to say.

Ben, on the other hand, likes to have fun. He knows how to party, loves chatting people up, and he drinks a lot. An awful lot. In fact, he has a drinking problem. He knows this. He’s off the sauce as of tonight. Right after this last drink.

The two of them wander through the planets, starting with Mercury and working their way outwards. They hook up with some women on Venus, explore the remnants of humanity in a museum on a thriving Earth, get trapped briefly on war-torn Mars, spend some time in the emptiness of the Asteroid belt, and so forth.

All the while, though, there’s an underlying tone of bleakness. Not hopelessness, since this is a wry strip with an understanding of how absurd life is, but… Even the rare action sequences are strangely distant. Without us, the robots have created a place where they can have everything they need except for meaning. It is implied that the meaning for most robots comes from their work.

Without work, what do these robot assemblers have? They talk a lot about nothing. It’s an existential crisis; they want a reason to live, but the universe is complex and doesn’t seem to give them much. Ben drinks to mute this strange pain, even as he enjoys life a hell of a lot more than Chris does.

Which is not to say that it’s not entertaining. The robot world is fleshed out well, and one of the joys of the strip is seeing each segment of it revealed to you as these two tourists drink it all in. And Chris and Ben are solidly defined; you know exactly who they are.

Plus, Nine Planets is drawn absolutely perfectly. It’s done in muted earth tones, mostly, and the robots are inked in a way that straddles the line between clunky and organic perfectly. Their faces are dummy faces, with buttons for eyes and a tiny hole for a mouth – but the body language of their stick-thin forms tells you everything you need to know.

The strange thing about it all is that you wouldn’t think this would work. They’re robots. You shouldn’t be able to sympathize with two clearly inhuman protagonists, particularly not on something as human-specific as a Road Trip To Find Oneself. They’re robots. They don’t think they’re special at all.

But that’s the amazing trick of Nine Planets; you recognize that the robots aren’t like you at all in many ways, but the intersection makes it more compelling, not less. By not being human yet having some human desires, they cast a light on what being human is and call that all into question. No matter what you are, life is going to be confusing and pointless sometimes… And this stark, strangely lifeless and endless rotating bar trip feels like an alcoholic’s fever-dream, boiled down to the essential elements of numbness, rage, and occasional desperate bursts of joy.

There’s intelligent life out there. Somewhere. There must be a reason to go on living, because in the world of Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life, you don’t have to stop until you find it.

It’s out there.

I just know it.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(10 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

True story. When I was young and teenaged and callous, my punk friends and I were driving past a frightful wreck on the freeway. Being dedicated subscribers to Fangoria, we geeked when we realized this was a font of actual gore in front of us.

“Aw, man!” one of my friends shouted. “There’s a body on the road!”

“Cool!”

“There’s a body through the windshield!” another shouted. “Someone’s actually hanging out the windshield!”

“Holy shit!”

“And a dog got thrown out of the car, too!”

We all suddenly got very depressed. “The dog, man,” we said. The wreck was all just fun and games ‘til a dog died.

This doesn’t say much about me as a teenager except that I was pretty goddamned insensitive, but the comic I am about to mention today would be a lot less without the dog factor. For that comic is Post-Nuke Comic, the story of a man struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

…with his dog.

Let’s start off by talking about the bad points of Post-Nuke, since it’s interesting how these points would normally be show-stoppers for me in other comics. It takes some looking at where Post-Nuke (and other less-successful humorless comics) fail in order to see why it succeeds so roundly.

See, Post-Nuke is a pretty straight dramatic strip. It’s the story of a guy, wrapped in bandages and wrappings and a gasmask to keep him warm, as he struggles through a landscape choked with radioactive snow (since the blanket of dust has cooled the planet to sub-Alaskan levels). He fights radioactive mutants, goes crazy with loneliness, stumbles over survivors and deals with their betrayal.

Because it’s largely a one-man show, it consists of a guy narrating everything he does. The trope is that he’s talking to his dog Aries, of course, but the end result is that there are a lot of panels where he’s actually telling you what’s happening on-screen. “I can’t believe it! We’re stuck!” he says, or “Is that a grenade in his hand?” And it’s not like the art isn’t strong enough that you can’t see what’s going on.

(That said, the “talking everything out” does add some personal reaction to what could otherwise be a silent and all-too-short action sequence. It may well be that it’s an awesome technique to use for people writing webcomic action sequences, albeit slightly more sparingly.)

Later on, when he encounters other characters, the dialogue is stilted – characters don’t actually interact with each other so much as they do exchange information in word balloons that swell to fill the panel so tightly that the characters look like they’re getting pressed out to the side by an exploding airbag.* And they’re not really talking so much as they are blatant vehicles for the author to provide exposition; there is a lot of discussion of What Happened Before The War, all told in the same essential voice.

(And to be fair, the author admits this as a failing that he’s trying to work on.)

Plus, there are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. Enough so that it’s going to grate if you were an English major.

The story is also butt-simple. There’s nothing new here; it’s essentially the same “The nuclear apocalypse arrived, one man survives among the mutants.” It’s a bare plot and sparse characterization.

All right. Criticism time over. Now’s the big question:

If there’s all of that to weigh it down, then why does Post-Nuke Comic succeed so roundly?

The answer is because Andreas Duller, the creator, knows how to write action comics for the web. For all of that, there’s one thing the man knows how to do better than just about anyone else on the web, and that’s to keep you hanging consistently. The man is awesome at providing a little hook in almost every final panel that keeps you turning that page.

The problem with writing action webcomics is that it’s very difficult to create action setpieces that work on the web. In a normal comic, if Batman gets into a fight with some generic mooks, that’s five pages’ worth of quiet mook-thrashing, surrounded by a happy layer of plot, dialogue, and character development. You read the set up, watch the thrashing, move on to other things in the book, because it’s all presented in one lump sum.

That whole rhythm changes if the pages are presented one day at a time.

When the comic is revealed so slowly, five pages of nothing but Batman head-beating can take forever – in this case, since Post-Nuke’s a weekly comic, that’s over a month of just watching Bats thrash some thugs. You will get bored if you don’t structure it just so.

But Andreas has a positive knack for knowing how to end a strip, even a short four-panel one, the precise moment where you need to know what happens next. It’s a simple plot, but simple plots can be compelling… Particularly when it’s the struggle for a man’s survival. And even though Post-Nuke is told at a glacial pace when viewed in real-time, reading the archives goes through in a flash because it’s a continual whir of Wanting To Know What Happens Next.

Stephen King believes that this is the best talent a writer can have. Andreas has that.

Plus, as I said…. There’s the dog. There were times when I didn’t care overmuch about the protagonist, but when I wasn’t worried about the guy I was filled with concern for the dog. And the dog is awesome – like his master, he too is wrapped in bandages and is wearing a gasmask, which is some stunning imagery. The dog looks cool, a sleek survival dog.

The action sequences don’t often hinge around the dog, but the dog is there. If the guy buys it, so does the dog, so it’s a great two-part package; don’t like the dude? We have a dog in danger, too! Which, combined with the quick-moving plot and the what-comes-next style, leaves us with something that’s a truly great pulp read.

Post-Nuke has the feel of a man who’s working hard to get a story out of his brain. It’s not the most polished effort, but it’s got something raw and vibrant about it – the aura of a man who has something to say and needs to tell you. That urgency fills every strip.

It’s good stuff, but I wonder what’ll happen as he refines his technique. This guy’s someone to watch.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - Yes, I’ve been guilty of this myself. I’m trying to get better. But the amount of dialogue here is larger than anything I’ve done.

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(17 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Full Frontal Nerdity is the webcomic that I forget that everyone isn’t reading. In my mind, it’s a juggernaut, right up there with Penny Arcade and PVP – a perfect gem of nerd culture so exquisitely done that I just assume that everyone’s already glommed onto it.

But it’s come to my attention recently that the glory of FFN is a localized phenomenon. Oh, it’s got a print comic that gets into shops occasionally, but it doesn’t get nearly the cred that it deserves. And so today, my task is to convince you that Full Frontal Nerdity is the strip that you should be reading.

That is…. If you’re a nerd.

The concept of Full Frontal Nerdity is simple: Four nerds (one of them attending via webcam) hang around a game table, discussing the latest news in the gaming world and trying out their own games. There are no extended plotlines – just a straight gag-a-day strip about the deepest recesses of the nerd psyche.

FFN is relentlessly topical. Was there an announcement about the Fourth Edition of D&D? You can be pretty sure it’ll get a reference. GenCon’s in session? FFN’s on it. World of Warcraft CCG? They're on it. FFN has its finger on the pulse of the nerd heartbeat; in a sense, it’s like a newsfeed for What Nerds Are Talking About.

But to call FFN a simple “gag-a-day” strip doesn’t cover it. The great thing is that Aaron Williams is the undisputed master of throwing four or five punchlines into his strip at a time. Other strips might end on a single gag, but Aaron somehow manages to stack his Funny so that three or four pieces of zippy dialogue build on the last line until it just comes together like a miniature sitcom compressed into four panels. Aaron’s second panel is often a better laugh than lesser comics’ final panel.

That kind of writing is remarkably hard to pull off, because finding a single good gag is hard enough. It’s tempting when you find a good and satisfying line to just end on it, and have the other three panels leading up to that boffo laugh. But Aaron works overtime to make the first panel as amusing as the last – something rare in comics in general, let alone webcomics.

How does he do it? Well, mostly by selling zany concepts. The joy of FFN is watching four guys take an idea and watching them run with it all the way to the end zone – just as you think they’ve exhausted this particular idea, they’ve got some other ideas to spin on it.

It’s like the conversations you wish you had with your friends. Except Aaron’s are better.

Here, I’ll just highlight some of the better comics from the past eight months:

• The only White Wolf World of Darkness crossover that would actually make me play the game.
• Some much-needed advice on costumes.
• “I printed up these homebrew cards for a Warcraft CCG Pre-Game Game. It simulates attempting to log into Blizzard’s servers.”
• On the demise of Dragon magazine.
• “I can almost hear his childhood crumbling.”
• There’s a new author writing the Justice League.
• “Before we start tonight’s gaming, are there any developments we need to pass judgment upon?”
• What happens when nerds argue about pizza.
• Stephen King: The Roleplaying Game.

Honestly? FFN is one of the best comics I’ve ever reviewed here. (The other still-active ones that I’d consider “best” are Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic, DM of the Rings, Minus, and the tragically-underupdated Malfunction Junction.*) It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that FFN might have even counted as one of the strips that fell within my purview to review… But if I have the slightest chance to point you in its direction, I will.

It’s quality stuff. Go nuts with it.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - With a tip of the hat to The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, natch.

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(24 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Bag of Toast is like having a bum raving at you on the subway, minus the body odor. Either you find that sort of thing entertaining or you don’t.

See, while other comics are fiddling about with “stories” and “rational punchlines,” Bag of Toast is running amuck with bulletins straight from the id that often make no sense at all, like “Extremely hairy Roger says, ‘One day, I will be considered sexy again,’” combined with a bizarre image of what is indeed a very hairy man. And when they do make sense, they tend to be nonlinear – as with today’s strip, which has an ad with happy, naked people exhorting, “Genitalia! Bundles of fun for everyone! Squishy! Warm! Interconnecting! A fun part of emotional and reproductive health!”

Not to your tastes, you say? Well, it’s not to mine, either. I kept saying, “This is stupid. It makes no sense at all.”

Then my finger clicked the “next” button. My conscious mind didn’t want it, but the very nerves in my body had to see more.

Bag of Toast is filled with really nice art – the kind of purposely-crude, colorful stuff that’s hard to pull off, since just a hair too much chaos and it looks ugly. But thankfully, Jeff Cohen creates a pastel-filled world that’s just fun to look at, and all the while he constantly switches styles like the Perry Bible Fellowship.

As I said – it’s random. Perhaps too random at times, since it does feel like someone shouting strange things with a megaphone out into an empty universe just to see if anyone laughs. Some of the gags fall short because, well, they’re not really gags – they’re just strangeness set to paper.

But it’s such an airy, strangely-agreeable entertainment that you forgive anything that doesn’t fire in search of the next one that does. And many of ‘em do, not causing outright laughs but often making you tilt your head and grin a little.

As a reviewer, there’s not much to review here, because it’s a nonlinear sequence of oddities – a freakshow captured in fine drawing. What am I supposed to analyze? There are some forms of entertainment that all but defy critique. But what really comes across in Bag of Toast? It’s the joy. I may not want to sit next to Jeff Cohen on a bus, but I envision him giggling madly as he creates these strange little gems from the id. And having them sent to me quietly across my browser is like having my own private bum to dance for me whenever I see fit.

It’s good stuff.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: webcomic review

(7 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

“We’re a unique case – most fictional individuals never question their creator, and few creators question themselves.”
- Petitus

“Length,” it must be said, is one of the criteria used when selecting comics for the Weekly Webcomic Review.* Shorter is better. Shorter makes a weasel happy, because trawling through the archives of a massive comic like, say, the Mansion of E turns into a week-long project where I spend two hours a night desperately trying to get to the end before Friday.

That’s why I like relatively new comics. I can blaze through the archives in about an hour, get a sense of the entirety of the thing, and review it accurately. Reviewing a thousand comics takes an investment that really has to hook me, since it is twenty times the work involved in looking at a fifty-comic strip.

When it’s a thousand comics and the webcomic server keeps dying intermittently? Even harder.

But trust me. 1/0 is no ordinary comic strip.

1/0 is an exercise in self-awareness. The strip starts, appropriately enough, with the creation of light, as the webcomics creator makes the world on-camera and then puts the characters in it. The characters are aware they are in a webcomic, and they’re not necessarily thrilled about it – particularly as the laws of physics are being developed on the fly by a creator who may or may not have their best interests in mind.

The crux of 1/0 – a mathematical formula that is impossible – is that as the audience, we know the characters are written by Tailsteak the writer and thus have no free will. (Hell, both Tailsteak, who speaks ex cathedra in captions, and the characters freely acknowledge this.) But fiction is a funny thing; talk to any author. They’ll tell you that their characters, if written properly, are never quite under their total control; they grow and shift when the author’s not looking directly at them, staking out a mental space in the author-brain that’s not quite something they’re in charge of.

They become quasi-real. And though it sounds Tailsteak should fail here, he pulls off an elaborate little dance – because despite the fact that the characters are his, we sense that they do surprise him. He’s not quite sure where he’s going with this, and neither are they – and what would it be like to be created by someone who isn’t omniscient, and admits it freely, and to realize that you are on stage?

They do strange things. To punish Tailsteak after he tries to kill one of the characters, they go on strike. The cast is smart enough to realize that even though Tailsteak controls their physical environment, Tailsteak relies on them providing entertainment – and so for thirty strips, they do nothing until Tailsteak concedes and makes a bargain with them. (In another sequence, a character attempts to argue himself out of death in a hazardous situation by pointing out that by his having brought up death as a possibility, he’s rendered his death into a predictable plot twist, and thus it can’t really be sued.)

As the comic goes on, the interactions deepen. This is a mini-environment where they are forced to develop morality (if they know they are cartoons, and one of them draws a cartoon within the strip where he drops an anvil on his creation, has he just committed homicide?), philosophy, economy, theories about their God and their universe, and eventually come to terms with the shadow of the end of the world.

Yes, the end of the world. Because at some point in the strip, Tailsteak decides that it’s ending with strip #1000 – a nice round number. And what will happen to them then? How does this crew of motley characters, each created from the strange environment in which they live (on the immense dead body of a guest character from another strip who arrived in a crossover and died), come to terms with stasis and nothingness?

All of this makes 1/0 sound like a very solemn strip – and it can be. But it’s also weirdly funny, a strict four-panel that tries to end in a good punchline, and usually does. But for a strip that masquerades as a gag strip, it does a damn fine job of adding depth and emotion as it goes on.

I’ve never really rooted for a lesbian worm to fall in love with a straw man before. But 1/0 did that. Stranger things have happened.

(Thanks to draegonhawke for pointing this out to me. As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. [Though 1/0 may have been huge in its time, I’m comparing it to now. Such are my arbitrary rules.] If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - Inaptly named as of late, but hey – I had a dead laptop and then a convention. Cut me some slack.

Tags: webcomic review

(20 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Since I came up a little short on time for this Weekly Webcomic Review, instead I’ll ask something different of you. I’ve done this for LJ folks, but never for a webcomic:

Let’s hold a Webcomic Social!

Here’s how it works: In the comments to this post, you give me the link to your favorite webcomic, and a brief review of why it’s so awesome. Hopefully, others will read your review and see this webcomic you adore, fall in love with it, and have many new-audience babies.

There are two brief rules, however:

1) You may not recommend your own webcomic. Not that I’m opposed to PR, natch, but I find that the reviews given of self-recommended webcomics tend to be either ridiculously oversold (“It’s the best EVAR!”) or tragically understated (“I, um, have this comic, it exists, maybe you could look at it if you don’t mind.”). In the interests of the most fascinating reviews, you must pimp someone else’s work.

2) The Top 11 Most Popular Comics On Piperka Are Verboten. That means, in alphabetical order, you may not discuss these comics, which need no further help:

• Ctrl+Alt+Del
• Dinosaur Comics
• Girl Genius
• Order of the Stick
• Penny Arcade
• Perry Bible Fellowship
• PVP
• Questionable Content
• Sinfest
• xkcd
• VG Cats

If you’re looking for new adds, I’d personally way recommend Girl Genius, Order, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible, PVP, QC, and xkcd. But they’re big, and hopefully you know about ‘em by now.

That said, let’s see if this works! I’m curious to see what you like and why. And I’m also hoping to find some cool ones of my own.

Tags: webcomic review, webcomic social

(103 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

It’s surprisingly hard to blaspheme properly. That’s because comedy is largely about the unexpected, and blasphemy is tediously predictable.

Let’s take this idea larger: vulgarity is tediously predictable. There are only so many body fluids – shit, piss, blood, vomit, semen, and saliva – one can use to shock, and most of the good jokes involving those have been taken already. The same with swear words; there are only so many “motherfuckers” you can rattle off before the word loses its sting.

Bad comedians focus on the naughty, never realizing it’s not the naughtiness itself that’s funny. Masters like Sam Kinison and Parker and Stone make it look like a simple string of horrendous ideas, but the good vulgar comedy always has something deeper at the center. There’s not just a guy dancing and yelling “Cut boobies!” – there’s an idea that ties it all together, some central philosophy that makes it hysterical because this ugliness has a context.

You need to have rationality to hold that vulgarity against. It doesn’t work unless you have the sanity right next to it, the sweet to show how sour it all is. And the better the sweet… The more shocking the sour.

But really, that’s irrelevant, because the fascinating thing about Jesus and Mo is how shocking it isn’t. The core concept is so controversial that it’s the only comic to be banned in Pakistan.

You ready?

Jesus and Mohammed – yes, the Jesus and Mohammed – are living in an apartment together. They occasionally frequent a bar, where there is an atheist bartender. They talk a lot.

You could go a lot of places with that.

Wait! I got it! Jesus and Mohammed are gay lovers! That’d be -

Nope. They share a bed and read together, but there’s not a hint of sexuality to be found.

Do they fight crime? You know, in superhero suits? Because –

Nope. They dress like they always did. And talk a lot.

Maybe they don’t really believe! They’re slick hucksters and con artists, joining up to –

Nope. They actually believe everything they wrote. In fact, they often argue about who’s better, and talk about how stupid the other guy’s religion is.

Then where’s the blasphemy?

Well, first of all, there’s the little issue of “drawing the prophet Mohammed.” You may remember that some Danish cartoonists got death threats for that a while back, and caused riots. The author is actually putting his life in danger by doing this.

But even so, Jesus and Mo is simple because it cuts to the heart of religion – finding all those strange little areas where faith doesn’t quite work out. He delights in going through the more obscure passages in the Bible and the Koran, and having Jesus or Mohammed “explain” how these crazy things were actually true.

Jesus and Mo are frequently at odds, of course. They both can’t be the leaders of the one true religion, and they know that, so they spend a lot of time picking on each other’s theology. But at the same time, they’re both fundamentalists who have to defend the same crazy accusations that “there is no God,” and of course there is one – they just disagree on who He is – and so they have to team up to reinforce each other’s ideas. They're friends who work for different companies - same job, different boss. As such, it's the usual conflicting tensions.

At its worst, Jesus and Mo merely picks out the most bizarre things about religion that week – which is, admittedly, a pretty easy target when you have Islam creating specially-fitted cabinets to fit the bottom of a bicycle so that women can ride without inciting men’s lusts. In that sense, at times it’s a very specialized FARK.

But when it’s on, it’s like an angry hunting hound, forcing the craziest religious ideas into a corner and making them fight for their lives. Simply watching the way Jesus or Mohammed get backed into a logical paradox and then escape it with some even more insane idea – something that yes, people actually believe – and piling on rationale after rationale is like watching a contortionist on a high wire.

It would have been easy to have a crazy show where Jesus always weeps blood from his hands and can never clean the dishes properly. That’d provide a lot of, you know, guffaws. But Jesus and Mo is the reverse; it sets up the quiet life of two men as the norm precisely so it can show off the real vulgarity.

The horror show here is the fact that the author is taking their thoughts to their logical conclusions, and in fact there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – that resembles actual logic. There’s logic at work, yes, but it’s logic in the service of feeling, trying to find the loopiest connections to justify precisely what they want to be true.

Yet this thinking is being replicated, in smaller and much less probing conversations, every day in houses all across the world.

That’s the real vulgarity. And Jesus and Mo hauls it up, fresh and stark, for all to see.

If that’s not a miracle, what is?

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: webcomic review

(12 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

”Ferrett,” people have said, “You’ve been clogging my RSS feeds and bookmarks with all of these cool comics! I don’t have time to explore the worlds you’re pointing out to me!”

Well, today you’re in luck. What you get is Sylvan Migdal’s Mnemesis, a tight little gem of a short story; it’s eighty-four comics from start to finish, and when it ends, it ends. And as an extra-special bonus… It’s a story about the afterlife.

What’s not to love?

The setup of Mnemesis is the same as most other “Man meets the afterlife” stories: a person dies, and wakes up in a Heaven that’s almost exactly the same as our world, but not quite. He explores this new world, figures out the new rules, and tries to find a place for himself in a world that’s still just a little short on guidance.

The difference in Mnemesis is that things change.

The two main characters can’t remember their names at first, since the trauma of death erases their memory, but settle upon “Ryan” and “Lily” as pretty enough names. Naturally, they’re attracted to each other, for this is That Kind of Story.

They fly on a tricycle (don’t ask) to Post York City, the echoed recreation of New York, and discover that the dead can create anything they want with their minds… But since only a handful of people know how to create the complicated stuff (and only chefs remember cooking in detail enough to create a good meal), there’s a rough economy.

There are great concerts in Post York, where Keith Moon and John Lennon get together to jam (even as it’s hinted that the post-death lives of Keith Moon and John Lennon haven’t gotten much less complicated). There’s fun, as people get to know each other… But Ryan is slowly coming to realize that he is – or was - a murderer.

There is also a group of Christians who do not believe this is Heaven; this is a final test laid by God Himself to see whether his true followers will reject this false world. And while most other afterlife stories are static, with a never-changing backdrop, the new Christians will rise to power and change the very nature of the afterlife itself.

Mnemesis is strange; it starts out goofy and light, but eventually it deepens into a real story of what it means to ask for forgiveness… And what it means to get it. I can’t say too much, because it’s a brief little tale that can be digested in an afternoon, and spoiling a little might well spoil all.

There are worlds within worlds, they say. The afterlife in Mnemesis is no less complex than the world here, and maybe a little more, because you eventually have to make peace with everyone. And I do mean everyone.

More than that, I cannot say.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!

(Also, thanks to Bolindbergh for pointing this out to me! And if you enjoyed Mnemesis, you might check out Sylvan’s other comics, Spork and Ascent.)

Tags: webcomic review

(7 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

I’ve said before that Zombies are a +2 on the scale of 1 to 10 for me. You know what else is a +2?

Stories about the afterlife.

That’s right; you show me a tale that starts with someone cacking off, and you’ve had me since “hello.” I’m a big fan of exploring the strange world of the dead, which usually isn’t too far from our own; I loved Dead Like Me, I loved Defending Your Life, and that’s why I also love Afterstrife.

Afterstrife is a very simple story: A gloomy goth dude notices an attractive blonde chick sitting on the edge of a bridge by the railroad tracks, about to jump. “Look,” he says. “Whatever has gone wrong, it’s not worth killing yourself.”

“It’s a bit late for that, Wonder Woman,” the girl replies, urging his eyes downwards. And there, in a neat little body bag, is her being carried away by solemn paramedics. “And since you’re the only person up here to notice me in the last ten minutes, that probably means that you’re dead, too!”

Complications arise when it turns out that neither of them can leave the bridge. They walk off one end, they turn up on the other. It’s a pure-D paintcan scenario, of course, but it’s not like either of them are people you’d want to be trapped in the afterlife with: Stitch, the goth kid, is whiny and mopey and already half in-love with the blonde girl. He remembers nothing of his previous life. Megan, the blonde chick, is bitchy, closed-mouthed about the past that led her to suicide, and often flat-out insulting, but she’s also often extremely correct about Stitch’s limitations.

Beyond that, I can say little more without giving it away.

Afterstrife is one of those comics that I’m loathe to review in many ways, because it’s not done and because it’s rather slow-moving. We’re sixty comics in, and we still haven’t seen more than flashes of what caused Megan to off herself, nor have we seen more than the first glimpses of the nature of the afterlife that Megan and Stitch find themselves in. That’s not a problem – it doesn’t feel slow, except when you’re reading it at its twice-a-week interval. But that slow trickle of character development means that as a review, I’m in a bit of a bind: I could review it now and risk it going off the rails at some point, or I hang around until #150 hits the Web and hope that everything that needs to be revealed is at that point.

But there’s a lesson to be learned here from Afterstrife, and that is in how it presents itself. There’s a reason I’m saying, “Hey, check this out now” when there are other webcomics that also are trying their best to promise great things later on…. And that’s because Afterstrife is utterly confident in how it presents itself, and that confidence extends itself all the way to me. I trust it.

Each strip is almost scientifically-designed, and I have to admire the compact way Afterstrife engineers its writing to keep the plot moving. Sure, there are only four panels, but each one contains both a tiny snippet of character revelation and some new facet of how this afterlife actually works. Afterstrife balances this all with ease, being humorous without having to end every strip on an out-of-place gag, yet being serious without descending into maudlin self-reflection.

Other comics? They get bent out of whack, focusing in on the plot while forgetting to develop the characters, or zooming in to discuss the world and losing the funny. There’s a reason most webcomics are set in the real world; it’s hard enough to develop and display characters, let alone developing and displaying a whole world along with ‘em.

Afterstrife, however, isn’t a funny comic. It’s got laughs, yeah, but they’re mild ones; the point is watching what happens to these two characters. And you have to admire the swagger of its pacing: it’s laying the plot elements on the table, one by one, and taking its time laying solid ground for a big setup. You feel yes, this is leading somewhere good – so even though I have yet to see the payoff yet, I don’t have any qualms about saying, “Hey, check this out. The payoff’s coming. Just wait for it.”

(And given that the creator of Afterstrife just ended a four-year run on HOUSD, there’s a lot of reason to believe that this is going somewhere really good.)

Of course, all this discussion of what the comic will be makes it sound as though the comic is boring today. It isn’t. There is a way you can drop hints about what will be revealed later that can make it fascinating to watch now, and that’s what Afterstrife is: a good, solid paintcan story where two people who really shouldn’t be together are struggling to find a place after death.

They didn’t fit in in life. Death isn’t making it any easier for them. Go check ‘em out.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: webcomic review

(20 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Last Blood is the story of a hard-working man who is trying, single-handedly, to take over the webcomics industry….

….no, wait. That’s Bobby Crosby, the author. But let me explain.

See, Bobby Crosby is – or was – the author and artist of Pupkin (“Half Puppy, Half Pumpkin, All Love”), a throwaway strip that he posted because he just wanted to have something on his bobbycrosby.com website. The Internet being what it is, though, it rapidly acquired a bizarre following, and despite the fact that Bobby would have rather forgotten all about it, he kept getting roped back in.

In 2005, he finally gave up the ghost. And for most people, that would have been the end of their dabblings in the webcomic field.

But Bobby reemerged with a vengeance in 2006, taking webcomics - *gasp* - like they were a serious business. He started up several mercenary-styled, micro-targeted comics: +EV, which I’ve already reviewed, a comic about the niche market of online poker. He began Marry Me, an excellent little story about a pop star who gets married for unlikely reasons, which he plans to have run for eighty pages and then sell the screenplay to Hollywood. And he’s done Last Blood, which he also plans to direct a feature film about in 2007.

Here’s the amazing thing, though: each of the comics he writes are really, really good.

They’re creative ideas, filled with solid dialogue and the kind of compact, spot-on characterization where he can show you someone and let you know everything you need to know about them in six panels. That’s a rare talent. I don’t know how he keeps finding artists to fit all of his ideas, but we might be witnessing the birth of one of the first webcomics moguls here. Because Crosby’s got talent to spare, and no end of ideas.

In fact, Last Blood was such a great idea that it had me at “hello.” Ready? Here’s the pitch, fresh from a Hollywood studio floor:

“Zombies have taken over the world in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, and vampires have to protect the last humans on earth in order to survive.”

I mean, fucking come on. Even if you take into account my unholy love of zombies, that’s a goddamned A-list idea right there. Of course the vampires need to protect the humans! You can’t drink zombie blood, amiright?

That might just be enough to sell it for me. He could have stopped there. But the truth is, Crosby’s a smart enough writer to know that he has to give us more than just a good idea, so he gives us a great setup; the last humans in America are holed up a school in the middle of nowhere. The only reason they’re alive is not because they’re so awesome at staving off the zombie onslaught, but because one teacher has made a strident effort to maintain normality. Most of the other humans succumbed to despair and suicide, but April has kept them together by holding classes and making sure that everyone keeps goddamned moving.

Now she has to deal with vampires. Who may or may not have their best interests in mind, who are certainly not trustworthy but are necessary.

What the hell do you do?

Crosby’s got the tension ratcheted up, and he also knows that the best fun of bringing in the classic monsters is showing you their current take. As I’ve said before, half the fun of zombie stories is seeing what zombies are like in this world; are they fast or slow? Intelligent or mindless? Can a shot to the head put them down? Will sprayed zombie blood infect you, or do you have to be bitten?

The ante’s upped when you bring in vampires, too. We don’t know what they can do, except it’s established early that they can smell the blood of zombies and humans for hundreds of miles around, are superhumanly strong, heal like motherfuckers, and some of them have different abilities. They’re clearly outclassing the humans. Which is not a good place to be if you are one, because the characters don’t know any more than we do if a stake through the heart will kill them. Or what, if anything, can kill them.

Oh yeah. And did I mention there’s a whole backstory that explains the story behind zombies? And how it might just related to vampires? What? Are you not fucking hooked yet?

Crosby knows how to write a serial comic ( comments on cut scenes that “slowed the action down” can only be appreciated if you, too, try to squeeze a five-year plot through the toothpaste-tube thinness of twelve to twenty panels a week), and Owen Gieni has some fantastic skills at coming up with very professional, good-looking zombart. This is comic-book quality stuff, and the action sequences are both original and entertaining.

The only downside to Last Blood is that Crosby considers it a graphic novel. That’s fine, except when we get the Week Of Covers, where we see splash pages and comic fronts. Me? I want to see what happens next.

But more importantly, I want to see what Crosby does next. He’s moved up my list from “Guy who does work” to “Guy to watch.” He’s got the talent. He’s got something to prove. And he’s got the stick-toitiveness to maybe, just maybe, make it happen.

I’ll be watching both him and the vampires, if that’s all right by you.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

(And a special callout to Mr. Myth’s Damn Good Comic Reviews for bringing this one to my attention.)

Tags: webcomic review

(22 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

One of the iron-clad rules of the Weekly Webcomic Review is that I only review strips with traffic less than or equal to my own comic, Home on the Strange. Today’s strip is kinda special because Multiplex is already popular, and it may well surpass HotS before the week is out. Hell, it may be more popular already. But I like it so much that I want to review it now, before the chance escapes me forever.

That speaks well of it, I hope.

Then again, I’m its target audience because I am an utter movie whore. I read Entertainment Weekly, and never miss an issue. I pick up Star Magazine, and I check out IDontLikeYouInThatWay because I love celebrity gossip. I stop by BoxOfficeGuru.com to see how much dough Ocean’s Thirteen made internationally this weekend, because it affects my MovieStocks on the Hollywood Stock Exchange.

The great thing about Multiplex is that the more you dig movies, the better it gets. And I have to admire the way that Multiplex ropes in its readers, because it’s the exact same formula I use for my strip. Except, it could be argued, they do it better.

What is that formula, you may ask? It’s simple:

• Put a bunch of nerds in an environment where they can riff on the latest media trends.
• Make these nerds a lot like the audience intended to read it so that the folks who drop by will go, “Hey! I do that!”
• Have a handful of one-joke strips based on outrageously popular media tie-ins (Spider-Man, Casino Royale, zombie movies) so that people who stumble across your strip by mistake will and laugh their butts off, then link to it in their blog…
• …But also throw in a soap opera-style storyling featuring a pair of ill-fated romances, with dysfunctional protagonists you’re rooting for even though they’re doing butt-stupid things, all within the context of their own little nerdy society.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It sounds formulaic, but the cool thing is the way that Mediaplex makes it work so effortlessly.

When it takes on movies, it can be savagely funny, tearing apart the shortcomings of Spider-Man 3 with glee, or parodying Shrek, or mocking the excessive usage of slo-mo in 300. It’s a smart strip in that it frequently doesn’t bother to explain the movies it’s referencing; either you get the 28 Months Later reference or you don’t, or you realize instinctively that The Prestige is rated PG-13 and The Departed was rated R. (Or, as I discovered, I had the exact same reaction as one of the characters to a suggested remake.)

The character relationships, however, are a little more complex. This is a theater filled with nerd machismo, and the characters are continually putting each other down; even the hookups are testosteronish, as the men and the women are sneaking off into closets to fuck in a ritual of manhood where everyone applauds when they come out. Everyone seems to have that pall of “We’re in our early twenties and have nothing better to do, so let’s churn up some good ol’ psychodrama” – to the point where one of the employees begins putting out a ‘zine tracking the worst excesses of the local multiplex.

It’s a low-rent operation. They sneak upstairs and smoke weed, and duck work, and bitch about the customers. But at the same time, they all love movies. And they love to hate them. They get into elaborate discussions of why this upcoming film will blow, or why this movie didn’t work right, or why this movie was way better than anyone gives it credit for. They have these discussions on-camera, dissecting the fine details of movies that rings absolutely true to any cinemaphile. And they realize, instinctively, that this is trivial in some way even as they feel it with their whole hearts – yeah, this is just dumb entertainment, but it’s a dumb entertainment that matters to them.

Remember when I said that people can drop by and go, “Hey! I do that!” Well…. I do that. All the damn time. So I’m predisposed to like ‘em.

And when Multiplex decides that it’s going to have character discussions, well…. It knows painful. Not the sort of overblown psychodrama painful, just that sort of dull ache that comes when you don’t even get a good breakup. The kind where, well, they liked someone else better than you, or they just didn’t give a shit enough to really commit.

The only serious ding I do give is the character design; Multiplex has a flat, colored-paper-cutout feel to it artwise, and as such the differentiations between some of the characters are hard to make out – and it has a reasonably large cast. There are a couple of times I’ve been caught flat-out going, “Wait, who’s that again?” And confusion is the enemy of a satisfying melodrama. (Also, there are moments where the ending punchline just isn’t strong enough and the character revelation isn’t big enough to justify a strip’s existence to me… but that happens rarely.)

But those are minor issues. Overall, it’s a good – no, a fine - balance. I’m sure they’ll be bigger than HotS in a couple of months, and if it’ll published more than once a week I’m sure it could skyrocket right to the top of the heap. I really like Multiplex, because it’s really a lot like me.

Maybe it’s like you, too. Or someone you know.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: webcomic review

(12 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

I’ve often thought that the truest test of whether someone was a person that I could consider a true friend was if they could appreciate “Archie” on a non-ironic level.

Okay. On one level, you have Archie and Jughead and the gang, and their adventures are so hidebound at this point that they’ve approached the level of kabuki theater. We know that Archie will always chase after the girls, Jughead will always run away*, and Betty and Veronica will alternately chase Archie and, paradoxically, try to bond as girls. There is nothing new under the sun in Archieland – except for those rare times when they try to do a “hip” Archie comic about some rad new fad like breakdancing or the hula hoop, and then it’s Katie bar the door.

But on another level, Archie has a lot of funny to it. Sure, it’s well-worn humor, but there’s something wrong with a guy who can’t appreciate a terrible pun or a zany plot once in awhile. It doesn’t all have to be Seinfeld and Monty Python, folks; it’s okay to position the characters in place Just So in order to deliver an absolutely ludicrous punchline.

Discovering The Princess Planet is like pulling off the wrapper to discover a new Archie, shorn of all the hoary clichés that permeate it, but studded with extremely silly running gags that seem fresh.

Yep - The Princess Planet is a new Archie, rarin’ to go with verve and gumption, blazing its own trail into whacky adventures as it finds its own rhythm. It’s perfect for kids, and even more perfect for kidlike adults.

The Princess Planet is full-blown for silly, and there’s no mistaking its crazy nature: There are whole weeks devoted to gut-socking puns on various karate styles – wherein a character stands in a weird pose with his arms out, crying, “I know Snake style!” and another cries, “So do I!” and a snake in an ash-blonde wig, fashionable sunglasses, and a fur-lined jacket says, “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t be caught dead in either of thosssssse outfits!”

Don’t like that one? There’s more! A human fighting squid-style by squirting ink on someone! An octopus fighting human-style! A man claiming to know crane style, then being beaten when someone drops the hook from a gigantic mechanical crane on him!

The Princess Planet is eager to please, and filled with rapid gags. Don’t like the last one? But wait, there’s more! There’s always more.

The Princess Planet ostensibly has some lead characters – but like Archie, they simply exist to fill a slot to deliver a punchline. There are repeated gags, like the endless twists on Medusa hair styles or the King’s fruitless quest to get a new flag for his country (with people suggesting the “doomicorn,” the “maroonicorn,” the gold doubloonicorn, the balloonicorn, and the unicornicopia) because the current banner for his country is – and no, I’m not making this up – a mound of grass eating a sandwich.

It’s all delivered with a wonderfully light art and an even more light-hearted style, topped with a whirligig of silliness. If you’re too blasé to be able to appreciate the giddy joy of an entire page’s worth of riffs on Rapunzel jokes, then fine. You’re probably too jaded to color in the placemats at restaurants and to squeal with delight when you get the toy in the Happy Meal.

Pfeh on you. You can go stand in the corner with your gloomcookie friend. Me? I’ll be reading The Princess Planet. And smilin’.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - Unless he’s wearing the different hat, of course. But that is advanced Archie-fu.

Tags: webcomic review

(11 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

One of the things I hate about movie reviewers is the way most of them try to hide their prejudices. They won’t come right out and say, “I would sooner drink a glass of devil’s urine than laugh at an Adam Sandler movie, and I’ll fall to my knees in supplication at the first whiff of Truffault”; no, instead, they talk about the ways in which this latest Adam Sandler movie is substandard.

Who the fuck cares? I mean, I don’t like Adam Sandler, but that means that I’m patently unqualified to review his movie for anyone except for other people who don’t like Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler clearly has millions of fans who are willing to pay bucks to see him.

The question is, is this latest Adam Sandler movie more Adam Sandlier than his last? If you found Adam stammering in a high-pitched voice to be a gut-bustin’ calamityfest, is this next movie featuring his quavery voice even better?

That’s why I hate it when most mainstream critics review horror movies. They try to couch it in terms of whether this was predictable or this was witty, but I don’t go to horror movies to be scared witless. I go to scream and be scared.

Most of ‘em hate schlocky horror films… And that’s okay. Just be honest about it. Don’t fuck around and try to tell me why this slasher pic isn’t superior to Texas Chainsaw Massacre; you never got why I liked the original Chainsaw, and you won’t get why this is good, either.

It’s okay. Just be honest. That way, I can at least know to disregard your opinion.

So as a critic, let me tell you the honest-to-God truth: I fucking love zombie films. On a scale of 1 to 10, “zombies” are a +2. That’s right; for me, the worst zombie film in the history of mankind is a 3. A good zombie film like Dawn of the Dead – either Dawn of the Dead? It’s a fucking 12.

Yes, this critic goes to 12. Where can you go from there?

This might sound like my entire DVD collection is filled with the living dead, but the fortunate thing for my budget is that most zombie films are an objective 2 or a 4. Very few people know how to do zombies right. Romero knew in the beginning, but he lost it come Day. The number of objective 5-or-greater zombie flicks can probably be counted on two hands.

Fortunately, I’m here to tell you that thus far, The Zombie Hunters does zombies right.

Let me qualify that, though. The Zombie Hunters is a no-gag strip, which is to say that it’s sheer drama. There are moments of humor in it, but mostly it’s characters struggling to survive.

This is a tough act for a webcomic to pull off. The reason gag strips are so prevalent (and popular) online is because gag strips are largely self-contained. If you show up at Home on the Strange, we may be in the middle of a dense, character-heavy storyline, but there’s a dick joke at the end of the final panel. That’s something even the uninitiated can laugh at.

Tune into today’s Zombie Hunter strip, however, and you just see someone you don’t know about to be torn apart by zombies. That’s a tough sell, because Zombie Hunters is also very action-oriented.

I’ll be honest. I don’t know that much about the characters yet, because the story opens in the middle of an escape from a crowd of zombies, and seventy strips later they’re still not out yet. Action’s hard to do in a webcomic, and even harder to do consistently.

Yet the skill and quality of Zombie Hunters is such that even though I barely know these guys, and the story is moving slowly because they keep getting assaulted by the mobile corpses, I’m still riveted.

Zombie Hunters knows how to do action – which is to say, they can make a set of five panels so that it’s exciting and easy to follow and you know that the characters are half-a-second away from becoming Zombie Chow. The art is filled with stitchy little lines, very detailed and clean yet somehow messy, as befits a comic about a messy world; the splashes and splotches of color are disorganized but somehow tie everything together. It’s just damn pretty to look at, even when things are getting axes put in their heads.

And for all of the slow plotlines, it feels like it’s moving from strip to strip. There’s a momentum about the Zombie Hunters that feels urgent; I haven’t gotten time to know the characters, not really, or their backstory, but the hints and flashes we’ve gotten thus far make me want to know them. I’m sticking with this story not just because the action sequences are darned good, but because I’m pretty damn sure I like the people I’ve been presented with and I want to know more about them. The only way I can find that out is to stay tuned in so that I can get to the point where they’re not struggling for survival.

That’s pretty awesome stuff.

So yeah. I’m biased. But it’s a very nicely put-together strip, and I await with interest the inevitable explanation of the physiology and behaviors of zombies (What kills a zombie dead? Can you fool them? What are the other kinds of zombies that are hinted at but not explained?).

The Zombie Hunters comes highly recommended. If you like zombies. And even, probably, if you don’t.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: webcomic review, zombies

(29 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

For every webcomic that I eventually review, I read five other comics. Of those unchosen masses, generally one turns out to be too popular for me to review (I’m a big fan of Marry Me, Shortpacked, Sheldon, and the Perry Bible Fellowship, but all of them have enough of an audience that they don’t need my publicity).

One invariably turns out to be very well done for what it is, but “what it is” turns out not to match up with my tastes at all (for example, Rice Boy is a comic that many people love, and it’s great for what it’s trying to do, but I’m not a fan of that brand of surrealness).

The remaining three webcomics I see suck.

The most common cause of suckage is what I call Penny Arcade syndrome – the idea that being foul-mouthed and shocking is funny simply because it’s foul-mouthed and shocking. Thus, I keep running into webcomics that go, “Look! Here’s Gandhi being skullfucked by a dead pig, isn’t that funny?”

Well, no. It’s not funny, unless you’re the sort of person who Beavis-and-Buttheads yourself into a side stitch at the sight of a frat boy lighting a fart.

The truth is that Penny Arcade often goes obscene, but they do it creatively. There’s an art to presenting vulgarity, a way of wrapping the foulness in a layer of normality so that it pops out at you like a Jack-In-The-Box. You can’t just lay all of your cards down on the table by incanting the magic words “Donkey Punch Cleveland Steamer Salad Toss” and expect your audience to burst into laughter.

No, good vulgarity sneaks up on you. It’s got the double-punch, where you think you see it coming, and then it loops around to smack you from behind. And if I had to have someone give a seminar in “Writing Vulgar Humor 101,” I could think of no one better suited to present it than Neil Swaab, the author of Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles.

Mr. Wiggles has two characters, and you really don’t even need to know their names: there’s the balding, fat loser with bad pants, and the psychotic teddy bear who torments him. The bear is the eponymous Mr. Wiggles, and he is a never-ending stream of awful.

You name it, Mr. Wiggles has done it. Molesting children? Sure. Sex with animals? Absolutely! (Well, he kind of is one.) Mass murder? Mocking the handicapped? Huffing gasoline from the body of a dead bum? Sure! Mr. Wiggles gets a -10% on the purity test. Which could make this a very tedious comic.

But that’s where the spark happens. Yes, viewed from one angle Mr. Wiggles is a never-ending stream of sick jokes. But the way Neil keeps finding ways to present his bizarre topics in a way that still leaps out at you even when you know it’s coming is nothing short of genius.

For example, this one gets you when you think you’ve already found the joke:

WIGGLES: “Yesterday, I lost the remote control for the TV. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember where it was. Turns out it was in the Indonesian kid’s ass next door all along!”

LOSER: “Well, it’s always in the last place you look…”

WIGGLES: “Actually, in this case, it was the first!”

That send-off line sings. You think you’ve sunk as low as you can go, and wham. Hits you like a truck. There’s worse, man, worse.

Then there’s the way he comes up with such bizarre concepts you can’t help but laugh, as in this exchange when Mr. Wiggles is asked what he’s going to do this New Years’ Eve:

WIGGLES: “[I’m going to do] the same thing I did last year.”

LOSER: “Spend the night going up to transsexual hookers and asking if you can pay them $50 to watch their balls drop?”

Mr. Wiggles is an encyclopedia of the ways you can keep finding new ways to offend people. Every time I thought he’d wrung the last clever way of putting a spin on what could otherwise be the same-ol’, same-ol’ gag about “Mr. Wiggles kills people and buries the bodies,” whoops! There’s something new.

Keep in mind, this assumes that you find the idea of a talking teddy bear as a sex-crazed rapist to be a funny idea. I’m betting that some of you won’t. That’s fair, in which case you should stay the fuck away. But for something that could quickly turn into an exercise in monotony – as many lesser comics do – this one turns out to be, like Red Meat, an endless series of twists upon the same basic premise.

It’s good stuff. You know. If you can stomach it.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke. And thanks to Carl Ray, of Fish Tank – which, I may add, you should all be reading - for pointing me in Mr. Wiggles’ direction!)

Tags: webcomic review

(5 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

I’m never really sure whether liberal humor is funnier than conservative humor because:

a) Liberal philosophy encourages people to question authority. Humor is about stretching boundaries, and good humor really needs to be able to wander just about anywhere. Since liberal folks can naturally explore almost any idea wherever it takes them,* that leads them to be able to explore weird and bizarre logics to their inevitable conclusion.

b) I’m a liberal.

Most days, I’m pretty sure it’s a). I look around at the greats of comedy, and the majority of them have been pretty liberal-minded folks, and when I look at the rare attempts at flat-out conservative humor (like the drunk-drivin’ Mallard Fillmore or the recent-Hillary-kerfluffle Day By Day), I see some pretty hoary humor. It’s not that the jokes aren’t funny at times – it’s just that they’re usually variants on what’s been done before, without anything particularly clever.

Then I think about it, and I realize that Hollywood is generally liberal, and thus it might just be that there are some great conservative comedies out there waiting to be made that can’t get funding.

It may well be that Larry the Cable Guy doesn’t speak to me because I don’t agree with what he says. I’ve read his book, and it wasn’t particularly clever, but do I laugh at Chris Rock because I think what he says is true?

Is it about the presentation, or the message, or the identification, or the newness? How does one break down comedy?

I don’t have a firm answer. All I can tell you is that this week’s strip, Thinking Ape Blues, is going to make the liberals in the audience cheer and the conservatives cringe.

Let’s talk about the art first, though. I love the art on this because it’s clean and elegant.

Thinking Ape Blues has a clean-lined cartoon style that’s dense without being too busy. There’s a lot of stuff happening in each strip, from aliens landing to a cyber-Cheney stalking the heroes through the ruins of civilization (though no worries – there’s no continuity here, only a series of one-strip gags), but despite the surfeit of background details it never loses sight of the characters. In fact, if I had to pick a comic out as an example of cartoon art, I’d almost put this as the prototypical example of cartooning, because it strikes an almost Zenlike balance between “abstract” and “real,” sticking the landing straight in the middle.

(EDIT: And, of course, the day I review him is the day he has an "Ape Shit" series up, which is an alternate art take. To see what I'd consider to be something more emblematic of his traditional style, try this. Mainly 'cause, you know, Holy Diver, man.)

That said, Thinking Ape Blues isn’t a strip that relies on art. It is, essentially, a series of essays in cartoon form.

The essays are delivered through the mouths of three central “characters” – The Progress Brothers, a trio of friends living in the post-apocalyptic ruins of society. That society is, as is none-too-subtly shown, America itself. There are broken buildings everywhere, and swarming scavengers.

The three characters are Abe, the caveman, who is surly, likes eating and 1970s pop, and threatens people a lot; Ben, the human, who is the middle man; and Carl the Robot, who questions the logic of humans on a startlingly regular basis. All three characterizations, though they differ, are pretty clearly three mouthpieces to deliver speeches on the same point of view.

That’s fine, though. I like it.

At its finest, Thinking Ape Blues is a series of self-contained, erudite commentaries on society and how inconsistent and strange it is, punctuated with pop culture references to make it go down easy. It’s like reading a really good blogger, but with art and a kicker punchline at the end, and that’s a pleasant sensation. It’s angry and it’s thoughtful, and it’s not fair or balanced at all, and that’s why it works.

The bleak landscape allows for some pretty crazy things to happen, so it’s not just essays. Zombie Don Knotts shows up (which should make Eric Millikin happy), and they keep running into political figures. It’s visually appealing, too.

Thinking Ape Blues can sometimes fall prey to its own pop culture malaise; maybe some people find the references-for-the-sake-of-references thing funny (and there are a lot of ‘em, if the re-success of Family Guy is any indication), but I’m not the sort of guy who breaks into hysterics because someone mentions both Yoo-Hoo and the Banana Splitz in the same sentence. When Thinking Ape Blues is on autopilot, that’s what it defaults to.

But when it’s on fire, it’s as savage as the Abe the caveman, ripping new assholes that you didn’t even know existed.

I don’t know whether humor’s funny because it’s liberal, or I am. But Thinking Ape Blues has its own take on that. And like I said, it’s not fair or balanced.

It is what it is.

(And as always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to my own strip, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke. And thanks to Betapwned – who, I may add, has their own comic - for pointing me in Thinking Ape’s direction!)

* - Except for a lot of touchy questions like, “Why are certain races, sexes, and cultures either superior to inferior in some particular area to other races, sexes, or cultures?” Then, the stock answer is always “Oppression and miseducation.” (Or, alternatively, “You’re generalizing too much.”) Don’t say otherwise; the answer isn’t funny if you’re liberal.

Tags: webcomic review

(32 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

A while back, I wrote about Girl/Robot, which had one essential joke repeated over and over again: a “helpful” robot destroys a girl’s hopes and wishes. Well, this week’s comic also has the same damn joke over and over again, too.

Lucid-TV’s joke? Doctors are evil, talentless motherfuckers.

Really. That’s it. And if you don’t find that idea funny, then you won’t find a thing to laugh about in Lucid-TV. But it’s the way they endlessly recycle that gag is what makes it work; it’s an exercise in shock humor, which is surprisingly difficult to do when you have, you know, dead bodies and a legitimate reason to show internal organs.

Yet for all of that, Lucid-TV is restrained. It doesn’t go for the whacky Invader Zim-style art; no, if you glanced at it, you’d think it was one of those bad soap opera comics from the newspaper, like Mark Trail or (God help us) Mary Worth. There’s comparatively little blood; usually, it’s just people talking to each other.

That understatement is what most shock strips don’t get. It’s really easy to go over the top in selling a gag, but if you don’t have any normality to compare to then you’re going from Hoo-Hey! To Woo-hoo! There’s nowhere to go; you started out shouting and you ended shouting, and you can get that from any hobo on a subway train.

That’s why Partially Clips works so damn well. It’s just clip art, but that clip art is saying some fucked up stuff, which is funnier because the art isn’t going out of its way to be zany, crazy, whacky. It plays because you’re dropping the F-bomb into the placid world of Middle America, where you can see the contrast.

Or maybe I’m just finding it amusing because I had nine teeth ripped out the other day and I’m still whacked out on Percocet. Whatever. I like it.

The jokes in Lucid-TV center around the same basic ideas:

1) Doctors make really, really bad diagnoses. (Upon being shown a sonogram of a living child: “Oh, doctor! Does this mean…” “Yep. Tumors are getting smarter.”)
2) Doctors don’t give a shit about their patients. (“Why is it funny that the retarded kid told you that his dad died?” “You see, I’m the reason he’s fatherless and retarded.”)
3) Doctors are very, very good at abusing the system. (A doctor gets around malpractice suits by taking pictures of his anesthetized patients in a party hat, stabbing a hooker in the morgue.)
4) Doctors have very strange habits. (You’re allowed to have a free patient death on your birthday, unless it was the patient’s birthday, in which case you must resolve it via a potato sack race.)
5) Bad puns. I personally love this one.

But for all of that, Lucid-TV is consistently bizarre. It’s not for everyone, but goddamn it’s good if you’ve just been to surgery and oh fuck your teeth hurt and they probably touched my nads while I was under.

I’ll run it. You’ll either think this is the funniest thing ever or hopelessly repetitive. But any comic that manages to invent the term “Owlectomy” wins my heart.

Tags: webcomic review

(4 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

When I was a kid, I played videogames by the score – but they were all basically the same. The arcade games back then didn’t have a whole lot of space to work with, so there was a pretty constantly-defined progression; the first level had these kinds of monsters, and they acted in this way. The second level had different kinds of monsters, and they acted in their own way. And if you got far enough, the game eventually repeated.

Then there was Xevious.

Xevious was a scrolling shooter, where you controlled a little silver jet – called, inexplicably, a “Solvalou” – that flew over woods and oceans. It had a set of weird machine guns that shot out tiny white balls at flickery-fast speed, and a slower bomb that could target things on the ground with a boinging “BEE-ouuu!” sound.

But above all, Xevious did not play by the rules.

Xevious was unique in that it kept shifting the very foundations of the game you were playing. Everything changed as you went on. You were introduced to little pyramids on the ground that you could bomb, and they were awesome… And then, with no warning at all at a time much later, it would turn out that the pyramids could shoot you.

That didn’t happen back then. A sprite was a sprite, its function fixed forever. The idea that it could just do that stuff at will was crazy.

Likewise, you had tanks that sat on the ground, and they did fire at you. You had to blow them up or avoid them, but they never moved so this wasn’t an issue. Then they started moving, dodging just a juke out of the way to avoid your bomb. Then they started charging down the screen in mad dashes before scrolling off the bottom of the screen, obviously not interested in you; they were trying to get somewhere.

Then came the time when a tank spotted you and began rolling backwards, crawling back along the bottom of the screen where you couldn’t get at it, firing at you and forcing you to dodge until it finally gave up….

I never did beat the damn game, but it was filled with magic in a way that no other game back then was. I got better at it, and as I ventured further into it there kept coming more magical things; clouds of metal panels that floated through the air, teleporting black balls, screen-clogging motherships that appeared with an ominous hum. No matter how good I got, I would venture another fifty feet into the depths of Xevious and find something new, something crazy….

And then there were the secrets. Bomb the lower corner of the mysterious phoenix that had been plowed, like a crop circle, into one of the fields you flew over, you got a free life. Drop to the lower left corner and fire a lot when you start the game, and you’ll see a hidden message.

I emptied the wonder on Ms. Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, and later on I found everything there was to find in Mortal Kombats I, II, and III. But I never did touch the bottom of what Xevious had to offer.

I could, of course, crack the ROM on it now. I could open up the code and dissect every last sprite inside, but…

…I like the wonder. I like the feeling that somehow, if I had infinite time, I could keep playing Xevious and never stop being surprised. If you’ve gotten far enough to know where its strange land ends, don’t tell me – no, I enjoy the feeling that there’s somewhere boundless out there, a game that never ends, a shooter that always has some new trick around the corner no matter how many times you’ve put the quarter in.

But I hadn’t had that feeling of bottomless depth in a long, long time. Not until I read The Mansion of E.

The Mansion of E is, in many ways, the perfect example of a webcomic, because it couldn’t happen in any other media. It’s too crazy for the standard newspapers, is published too often for the alternatives, and – barring the one-time success of Larry Marder’s Beanworld – it’s too bizarre and reader-unfriendly for comic books (and the art is, let’s be kind, probably not good enough to pass editorial muster – this is a writer-brain webcomic, not an art-brain webcomic).

No, The Mansion of E is what the web was made for – a strange and alien little alcove where a dedicated creator doesn’t have to worry about an audience. Everyone’s got a publishing platform on the Internet. And God bless him that he does.

The story of the Mansion of E starts out simply: a man stands before a wall in his house, performing a strange ritual. He does not know the reason for the ritual; he is blindly following a book instructions given to him by his ancestors, who know little more than he does, but they have determined via trial and error that doing these things in this order on these days keeps the house running smoothly.

The man, who is named Sylvester, is the current head of his family, and the 20th in a long line of people who have owned the Mansion of E. He does not control the mansion, mind you, for no one does that; he merely stewards it. (In fact, depending on who you’re asking, Sylvester may not even own the mansion at all.)

But someone must manage the Mansion, for it is filled with strange and inexplicable things.

There are basements with long corridors filled with mysterious rooms, each labeled with a helpful signs that say “Dandelion Wine” and “Erso Phagnum” and “Pot,” each containing something odd and henceforth unforeseen. There is a mysterious machine that is counting down from 315,342,642 one click at a time, and nobody knows what it will do when it hits zero. Strange monsters occasionally stumble up, ravenous and crazed, from the deep caverns underneath, and they must be dispatched; the forests outside are filled with tree squids and forest sharks and giant spiders. Long-lost relatives of Sylvester, who should be dead but somehow live, lurk in alcoves.

In the middle of all of this, a girl named Rosemary arrives. She is on the run, and good with a sword, and wants to know what the Mansion is about. They decide to go get a pot from the caverns, and stumble into something much deeper.

You see, if you go deep enough into the mansion’s depths, there are creatures that have never heard of humans. To these peculiar races – and there are many of them, Eyebolts and Willygigs and Trogs and Nomes and Ghasts – humans are a myth, a story to tell your children before bedtime, the secret harbingers of the apocalypse.

But unwittingly, it may be that Sylvester and Rosemary are the harbingers of the apocalypse. Because they have set off a chain of events that people from other dimensions and times are coming to investigate, this strange nexus of possibility….

Mansion of E is a maddening story, because like Xevious there’s always more to it. It’s been going on for three or more years now, with updates every day of the week, and we’re still discovering new plot threads. There are mysteries upon mysteries upon mysteries – not inexplicable mysteries, the way that X-Files kept piling stupidities upon each other until it collapsed, but new facts that reveal more doors to walk through.

As such, its pace is glacial. I felt a little bad about taking two-and-a-half months to tell a one-day story in Home on the Strange’s “In The Belly of the Beast” storyline – but The Mansion of E, which is two years older than HotS and publishes twice as often, has yet to get beyond noon on the first day. A lot of things have happened, but forward progression? Not so much. A huge fire started in chronological-2004 is still blazing in chrono-2007, as the characters keep encountering obstacles in their way of putting it out.

There are whole weeks that focus on nothing more than an insect, walking the walls of the caverns, slipping and falling into the vast machinery that fills the underground as we explore the odd nooks of the sprawling Mansion…

But that’s why this is insanely great for a webcomic. Some other publishing medium would encourage the creator to speed it up, to make money, to somehow tie it all up in one big miniseries event that would get great ratings. Mansion of E? It’s done by one guy, and he has his own agenda, and he’ll get there when he damn well feels like it. He’s beholden to no one but himself and his bandwidth costs.