Brian Roney’s webcomic reviews

Shortpacked! (first strip) (mostly gag-a-day, daily M-F) is a comedy strip about a toy store taken way too seriously. The megalomaniac manager, the toy-collecting obsessed worker, the really creepy guy who doesn’t take a hint, and a guy who’s obsessed with ninjas all man the store, and entertain the audience by playing off of their (and other character’s) quirks. Most updates are a full color page, and there’s 539 pages in the archive. There’s several chunks of filler sketches, although most of them have some humor in them as well.

Shortpacked! is a comedy strip that has slowly added drama elements, occasionally to the point of excessiveness. It has a few characters that were carried over from David Willis’s previous strip, It’s Walky. It’s Walky was a comedy strip that slowly added drama elements to the point of excessiveness. It had a few characters that were carried over from David Willis’s previous strip, Roomies. Roomies was a comedy strip that slowly added drama elements to the point of excessiveness.

I would imagine people have sensed the recurring theme there.

David Willis is a bit legendary in the webcomic world for just that sort of thing, actually. He’s been doing this for ten years, and he’s done quality strips all through that time. His comedy is spot on, his characters are real and interesting, and the interactions between characters provide interesting advancement of plot while being smart and funny.

… and then he turns on the drama.

Now, the drama doesn’t seem forced. He writes it well. The characters are fleshed out enough and interact well together, so the drama works smoothly with the world that he’s created. The thing is, when he writes drama… he writes lots and lots of drama. Soap Opera, the comic strip? Here you go.

Okay. I think I’ve hammered the point enough. I’m going to go over the good points. I laugh out loud at his strips frequently. The comedy and characters are both extremely solid. He’s perfected the niche comic/cartoon/toy parodies, making fun of the ludicrousness of both the companies making them and the people obsessing over them both with casual ease. He makes the most serious of subjects funny, and they’re even more magnificent due to the contrast.

Unfortunately for readers who are jumping into Shortpacked! straight, the characters that have been carried over from It’s Walky have not been explained at all. So, to catch the reader up on things- Robin has sugar-fueled superspeed. Mike worked with her in government work to repel aliens. I _think_ that’s all that’s necessary to understand the main points. You could read through Roomies and It’s Walky to get the full backstory, but that’s ten years of daily comics, several years of worth are pure drama and not much funny. I’d do it, but then, I’m the kind of person that writes a comic review blog. Not advised for the casual reader.

I really enjoy Shortpacked!, especially the one shot comics where he just picks a current comic or toy or cartoon and does a strip in that continuity. David knows that not everybody enjoys the drama for his cartoons, and that people enjoy the one-shot gags. He has a character specifically designed to make fun of the fact that his strip is heading towards drama, for goodness sake. But you’ve got to write what you’ve got to write, and Shortpacked! slowly gets more and more drama-based, and I slowly get sadder.

The beginning is wonderful, though.

You should try Shortpacked! If you get through to the current strip and you still love it, try out Roomies. If you get lucky, there’s ten years of archives for you to enjoy. Give it a try.

Something Happens (first strip) (weekly on wednesdays, gag-a-day, no continuity) is a self-described surreal sketch comic, “as if ‘The Far Side’ were filtered through ‘Monty Python’”. It certainly lives up to its reputation, bouncing around from weird possibility to strange plot setup and having fun while it goes. The strange is taken as a given, and the ludicrous is commonplace. There are 95 strips in the archive.

Something Happens is Thomas Dye’s second strip, the first being Newshounds. Despite Newshounds being more frequently updated and with a much larger archive, I enjoy Something Happens quite a bit more, so that’s going to be the focus of my review. While I’m on the subject, though, Newshounds started as a gag-a-day strip about a newstation of animals, and gradually turned into a dramatic strip about the same. I really enjoy the early work and have not been a big fan of it recently.

On the flipside, I really enjoy Something Happens’ recent work, but thought some of the early pieces were a bit slow. Just a few strips in, though, they’re all solid strips with wild ideas. Each new strip brings another view on reality, and it’s never clear what the rules’ll be when they start. There’s a strip where the main character has wheels for feet, one where the planets are the main characters, a time travelling commercial… each strip is its own self-contained sketch, and generally ones that you could imagine being an improv comedy skit. Each one’s quite good.

The characters in Something Happens have a tendency to be angry a lot, and I think it influences the pacing of the strip- people tend to speak in exclamations and loud rhetoric, so the strip generally reads either very slow or very fast, with not very much middle ground. It doesn’t detract from the humor, it’s just a particular style for the strip that’s a bit unique.

The art for Something Happens is quite reasonable- Thomas had many years with Newshounds to improve his comic style, and it’s quite distinctive now. The characters tend to be very cartoony, with large eyes and mouth, which probably contributes to the feeling that they feel emotional a lot. Characters are also very free with motion and interaction. Characters are distinctive, although given that there’s no continuity or characters carried over, this isn’t really saying a whole lot.

Something Happens is a nice wacky gag-a-day strip that deals with the insane ideas accepted as commonplace. Go give it a try.

Ozy and Millie (first strip) (daily, anthropomorphic, gag-a-day) is a wonderful example of a comic strip version of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. They become friends and play together. Ozy and Millie is a philosophical and often political comic that takes a look at various philosophies taken to extremes through the eyes of children. Usually M-F daily, although with rare breaks that sometimes last as long as a month, there are 2,221 strips in the archive over the last nine years.

Ozymandias, the Ozy of the strip title, is a young wolf who has been taught zen philosophy from an early age, and spends much of his time in quiet contemplation of life around him. His calm acceptance of things around him quickly makes him friends with Millicent, the Millie of the title, a ten year old fox tomboy who never seems to quiet down at all. With Millie’s chaos and Ozy’s calm, the stage is set for most of the strip’s hijinks. Also frequently in the cast are various representations of school stereotypes- a nerd who spends all his time playing roleplaying games and believing that eventually he will make a lot of money with computers, a jock who bullies people because he can, and two characters that are both obsessed with being “cool” (a girl already in the in-crowd and a boy that desperately wants to be). The (single) parents of Ozy and Millie and the various adults at the school round out the cast. All of the characters are extremely distinctive both visually and philosophically.

The anthropomorphic nature of Ozy and Millie doesn’t come up all that often- occasionally it matters that the characters have tails or fur, and the dragons have a culture of attempting to control conspiracies, but otherwise the characters and just normal people. Well, where stereotypes and extremes can be considered normal. Millie’s chaotic and creative semi-insanity, while amusing, can only loosely be considered anything related to normal.

The early Ozy and Millie strips are often much more political than the current strips (and with much worse art, something that improves constantly). In Dec 2006, the author made the decision to separate his political commentary from his main strip, and so started the website I Drew This to host those rants and comics. The strip remains heavy with commentary regarding capitalism and politics in general, but specific complaints have been shifted to his other comic. Ozy and Millie has always had a lot to say about philosophy and politics, and most of the points are interesting to think about. One of the downsides of this is that it often takes a lot of text to set up the jokes, and often the jokes really aren’t all that funny, although they’re amusing. This is also why I’ve marked Ozy and Millie as a newspaper strip even though I don’t think it’s published anywhere- it has a consistent level of humor which is family safe and fairly broad. I would expect a lot of different people to enjoy Ozy and Millie, even if they don’t end up laughing loudly from it.

One of the things that Ozy and Millie does very well is point out the silly things that people treat as commonplace. Sayings that we’ve adopted into our language that don’t mean what they should, customs that have lost their roots, parenting and teaching methods, and everything related to corporate America. The strip manages to capture the spirit of both Ozy and Millie very well- the strip is often random, haphazardly covering different subjects, and then it will calmly sit and talk about something beautiful to ponder.

I’ve enjoyed Ozy and Millie for years, and it’s easily worth a read. Go give it a try.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (first strip) (gag-a-day, daily, adult language, adult situations, graphic violence) is a daily strip with no plot or repeating characters, focusing on dark humor. Strips are generally one panel drawings with a caption, although occasionally there are a few panels. It updates daily since May 20th, 2006, with about one week-long break each year. There are 437 strips in the archive.

SMBC is consistently dark. There’s jokes about murder, abortion, malpractice, some more murder, amputation, cruel psychological tricks, infidelity, overweight people, stupid people… if it’s cruel and black comedy, there’s a shot at it. Due to the nature of the jokes, there’s a lot of adult warnings necessary for this comic- there’s swearing, there’s violence and gore, inappropriate jokes, etc. No nudity.

The humor’s quote good, too. The vast majority of jokes tackle subjects and areas that I wouldn’t expect to see such consistently funny jokes, but SMBC nails them. Reading this comic will quickly give people the assumption that the author is a sick and twisted person, but a damn funny one. There are a few strips that fell flat for me, but most of them make me stare at the comic for an extra few seconds to make sure that yes, he really did just make that joke, and then I chuckle. Reading through the archives in rapid succession weirded me out a little and made the humor less intense, so I suspect this is a comic that’s best in small doses, which is understandable.

It’s always a little difficult to review comics that don’t have plot or recurring characters. The only real storytelling in SMBC are the comics that have multiple panels, and there’s not very many of those. Most frequent are panels that have a situation and some text, followed by a caption that gives context to the situation, generally making it funny. There are a few comics that are done backwards- panels two and three will be labelled “10 seconds ago” and “20 seconds ago”, for example. SMBC’s beat timing is often a little weird because of this- it’s not timed the way other comic strips are, since the caption or the later panels make the reader think back to the original panel to complete the joke. I rather like this switchup, and SMBC is quite good at it.

As for downsides- as with any comic that ranges to so many topics, especially dark ones, there will occasionally be a comic that skirts the line to offend the reader. If you aren’t offended, there will still likely be a few comics that just fall flat, because the context for that comic just wasn’t something you found interesting. The art’s not all that great, but it’s as good as it needs to be to get the writing across.

If you like dark humor, you will likely enjoy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Give it a try.

Sheldon (first strip) (daily, gag-a-day, newspaper strip) is a fine example of a newspaper strip that I find entertaining. More interestingly, it was a webcomic that became a newspaper strip and still had the full archives online (and has since gone back to being an independent webcomic). Sheldon updates daily with extra-sized and color Sundays. Updating since November 30th, 2001 with sundays starting in 2004… that’s roughly 1950 strips in the archive.

Sheldon is the story of Sheldon, a ten year old boy, a computer geek who has managed to write a piece of software that speeds up the internet. He starts a company, goes public, and is now worth billions of dollars. He then downloads an encyclopedia into the brain of a duck, which gives it the power of speech. He lives with his grandpa, who is 65, retired, and quite a bit overweight. He has a friend, Dante. I’ve now covered the source of the vast majority of the strip’s humor. Like most newspaper strips, there are very few major changes. Storylines are fairly short and have no major plot to them, they just provide a setting for the punchlines. Other than other minor characters in the cast, pretty much everything is a riff on- Sheldon being rich, Sheldon being a geek, Sheldon being ten years old, Grandpa being fat, Grandpa being old, and the duck being not very good at being a duck.

But the setup and punchlines are great. Sheldon has great pacing on his setups. I often want to talk to Dave Kellett and see whether he’s this snappy of a speaker in real life (and what I vaguely remember of him from Comic-con 2003, he is). His characters all have the same pacing to their speech, but it’s the witty, rapid-fire joking speech that provides solid amusement. I’ve laughed several times while skimming through Sheldon’s archives to refresh my memory, and I have a few strips from the archives that I remember and keep in my head in the hope that I will eventually be able to pull out the punchlines on somebody.

I comment that much of the humor fits into particular categories, and while that’s true, those categories still leave a lot of leeway. Just the “Sheldon’s a ten-year-old geek” jokes alone cover much of what many geek comic strips will touch on. Most of these jokes are fairly general, but that means that you don’t need to have any obscure knowledge to enjoy the jokes. They’re still amusing.

The art’s well done for the strip. The characters have fairly cartoony expressions, as befitting the exaggerated expressions they need to pull off some of these punchlines. There are a few strips that are visual gags that depend on the art to sell the laugh, and they’re done quite well.

I suppose really the only gripe I have about Sheldon is that the background of the strip is generally irrelevant to what’s going on. The fact that Sheldon has a lot of money generally isn’t mentioned for weeks or months at a time, something that I’ve always wondered if it confuses new readers. Reading a Sheldon storyline is like listening to a stand-up comic. You know they’re telling a story, because clearly they are. You just can’t remember the story afterwards, even if you can remember the jokes that tied it together. It just wasn’t important.

Sheldon’s got some good laughs, and is worth a try. Go give it a read.

Home on the Strange (first strip) (mostly gag-a-day, MWF, realistic) is a strip about Tom and Karla, a married geek couple, and their friends. It is primarily a geek media reference strip- Buffy jokes, Star Trek jokes, Star Wars references, Babylon Five comments, Serenity moments… they’re all there. There’s little long-term plot aside from character development, which mostly happens in storylines 6-10 strips in length, although the majority of strips remain funny. The character’s relationships and such change over time, as well. There are 251 comics in the archive.

HotS is a little difficult to review, because not only are the artist, Roni, and the author, Ferrett, two separate people who both have input on the strip, Ferrett reviews webcomics himself. As a major blogger, he also writes about his experiences with the comic in his blog, so often his webcomic review skills are turned on himself. So really, the comic comes prereviewed for me. There’s also the fact that if he happens to see this review (Hi, Ferrett!) and links to it, I’m likely to very quickly have 95% of my readership be HotS fans willing to argue points. But I just claimed that I was going to try to be more critical and unbiased, so I’ll give it my best shot. In my effort to present a review of HotS that you couldn’t get just by reading Ferrett’s LJ, though, I may have gone into a bit more detail than I usually do.

After a month of comicdom (comic 17), the side news panel (that often has author commentary) explains that Ferrett believes HotS has reached as good as it gets. He claims that one month of practice is where HotS hits its pinnacle and that claiming otherwise would be calling Ferrett a liar. Well, I’m going to come straight out and call Ferrett a liar. I claim that HotS has improved past then. Not in writing jokes, since the punchlines are about as good (most of the punchlines get a chuckle from me, although not straight-out laughter). The art’s gotten smoother, too, although he’s claimed he didn’t mean that part. I think it’s improved in being a comic, and fitting in to what it’s trying to be.

HotS early strips suffer from a lot of the problems that writers translating into comics often have- the comics are wordy, panels are crowded, and a lot is trying to get packed into the strip all at once. He admits the fact, even. He claims he should’ve taken out a few speech bubbles here and there, should’ve never tried to get the artist to draw armies… and even after comic 17, these problems still happen. Out of the five comics after it, only one is sparsely worded. The rest each try to stick 40 words into a panel, or 8 panels into a comic. They’re quite good, the Ferrett knows how to write, but they’re wordy. In recent strips, however, the HotS manages to nail the same sort of solid delivery with less setup. There are strips with only 2 or 3 panels, because that’s all they needed, or fewer words, because the situation tells itself. There’s still the occasional 6-panel wordy comic, but they feel less crowded with more relaxed strips surrounding them. There’s a lot of comics to get through to get there, so if you don’t like the first twenty strips because of the wordiness, go ahead and take Ferrett’s advice and believe that it’s not going to grab you for the rest of the run. If you can tolerate it, though, it does get better.

The humor is quite good, and remarkably consistent. The only strips out of the archive that I didn’t get a smile out of were the strips that were purposefully being dramatic without a gag, in order to carry on storylines (most of the strips have a gag, but not all of them). Most of the humor isn’t laugh-out-loud-worthy for me, but they are very enjoyable, and reading several of them in a row doesn’t interrupt the pacing at all- often the conversations continue from strip to strip to allow the humor to build and accumulate more punchlines about the same topic. Most of the topics are geek subjects, too, although the social geek, not the science/computer topics that XKCD hits. Subjects like “How would you convince somebody you were repeating the day over and over” and “What would you use a wish for?” come up. This is the kind of strip that if you were one of the people that watched Firefly, you should give the strip a shot.

The Ferrett claims that he writes strips every once in a while to be “on-ramp” strips- strips that stand by themselves and allow people to link into the comic. He does these quite well. There’s a stand-alone comic about a proposed ending to Harry Potter 7 that I’m still amused by what the response could’ve been if that had actually happened. Individual Buffy jokes often stand by themselves, and other one-shots exist that don’t have any need of prior information to laugh at. This comic cherishes geek culture, both in the interactions between the characters and as a strip itself, and I think that’s a major part of its success.

More and more character interaction is presented as the audience gets used to the characters, and the timing on the dramatic arcs are done quite well- the readers have gotten used to and care about the characters by the time they come up, but the characters haven’t been relegated to gag status. The character relationships are impressively done, although apparently Ferrett gets a lot of email about getting on with developing various relationships. Personally I don’t feel the pace is wrong, and lends a realistic feel that helps get a sense of the characters, but then I’ve always been annoyed at fast relationships in media. One of the things that does annoy me, though, are that some of the characters are portrayed as unlikable to the point that they really are. In the commentary for one such character, Branch, Ferrett comments that he and Roni debated over what font to use for her to indicate that her text was almost entirely useless to read, since that was part of the character design. So now not only is the text useless to read, but the font’s annoying as well. This’d be fine for a few throwaway jokes for the character, but when the character got her own plotlines it was (and remains) annoying. She’s not a main cast character quite yet, though, so I shall nobly suffer through her development.

The art starts a little choppy as character designs are worked out, but eventually (about fifty strips in) settles down into a good quality for the strip. There’s a few runs of filler in the archive, generally as the artist has to go deal with life (getting married or sick, etc). These have let them claim an uninterrupted MWF schedule for the last two years, which is nice, but filler in the archives always annoys me a little. Just a personal pet peeve, though, and there’s certainly not enough here to warrant complaining too much.

Home on the Strange. Good geeky comic. Give it a read.

8-Bit Theater (first strip) (gag-a-day, sprite comic, pixellated violence, TThSa) is a comic based off of Final Fantasy 1. It imagines the heroes not as brave, noble warriors who strive to save the world, but instead, greedy, stupid, bumbling fools who are tricked into doing good and solving the world’s problems by pure chance. It has a solid plot, and if you’ve played FF1 you know the main outline for the plot. The characters are pixellated like the original Final Fantasy characters, but there’s a full page of art every update. There’s 883 pages in the archive.

8-bit Theater starts off a little slow, but about 20 pages in, the comic really picks up speed and the comic continues to be quality for the rest of the run. The art remains pixellated, as appropriate for the characters, but the expressions, varied positions, interplay between characters and backgrounds, and layout of the comic continue to improve throughout the comic.

The characters are all well defined by their character stereotypes, assisted by the original source material’s vagueness on character goals. Fighter likes swords and is good at fighting things, Thief steals everything he can, White Mage is a good, compassionate healer, Black Mage attempts to destroy everything with magic… anybody familiar with FF1 or any of the rest of the Final Fantasy series will be comfortable being amused by the stereotypes. The comic’s not much for character development or relationships, as most of the characters are too well defined into their stereotypes to change much, but there are occasional moments.

The vast majority of the comic’s humor comes from the fact that the heroes are so very bumbling and incompetent. Luckily for them, the bad guys are generally just as stupid. The author, however, is certainly not, and comes up with so many varied ways of the characters getting into, through, and out of trouble that you will be astounded that anybody could possibly think of anything that insane. Whether it’s casual violations of the laws of physics or cheating fate by poorly conceived plans, the characters believe whole-heartedly that they’re… well, I don’t want to say solving things. But pursuing goals. And that whole-hearted belief leads quite easily to humor. If you’re not entertained by humorous misunderstandings or frustrated poorly conceived plans (if you hate Wile E. Coyote cartoons, for example (not usually quite that convoluted, but that sense of failure)), you may not enjoy 8-bit Theater. Otherwise, you should enjoy yourself here.

This is a pretty wordy comic, so be prepared for lots of reading. On the upside, though, 8-bit Theater keeps a consistent quality through the entire run (once it warms up in the first 20 or so), and the pacing of the jokes are amazing. Each page will often have many jokes within it, as the comic does not restrain itself to just a punchline, and instead goes for cramming as much witty dialogue into the comic as possible.

One of the things that annoys me about the archive is that occasionally the story will be set aside for random other projects, like an “EZ Company” story that took 5 or so updates. There’s random content thrown up during E3 weeks, and various filler occasionally as well. I don’t begrudge the comic’s break time, but having it in the archive is a little jarring when reading through at speed. Most of them were amusing in their own right when I read through the archives the first time, admittedly, I just didn’t like the interruption.

8-Bit Theater ends up being referenced in most of the other roleplaying comics around eventually. Some of the more popular sayings come in the first few strips- Fighter’s “I like swords.” has become iconic of the “I don’t know what’s going on, but I want to respond with something.” gamers. It’s also got quite a few references to many things- Larping, D20 systems (3rd edition D+D in particular), other game systems or series… nothing that is required to know, since the jokes mostly go off the stereotypes of the above, but this is definitely a gamer comic.

8-Bit’s a great comic. Welcome to Corneria.

Evil, Inc. (first strip) (daily M-Sa, mostly gag-a-day, occasional adult situations, punny) is a strip that I’ve been wanting to review for a while now, but it never really seemed like a good time to review it. The strip has been mostly gag-a-day, but every once in a while drops into dramatic storylines like the one going on right now, and I didn’t want to get people started into a strip at a cliffhanger. Evil, Inc. started on May 30th, 2005 and has had no breaks in the M-Sa streak (This is the other strip that I’m rooting for in the Daily Grind), meaning that there’s about 700 strips in the archive.

Evil Inc. is set in a world where superheroes, supervillians, mutants, freaks, and aliens all exist and have existed long enough that the cliche matchups and organizations have settled into patterns. Hero fights villian, villian is thwarted, goes to jail, gets out, fights hero again. Until one day a villian (Evil Atom) decided to start a corporation to organize these villians, which would follow standard business and accounting practices. Which, in this sort of world, means that they manage to do a lot more evil because they’re doing it legally. There’s laws against robbing banks, but there’s little stopping them from organizing a hostile takeover. There’s laws against mugging, but not against credit card fees. And if at the same time Evil Atom can organize the supervillians, henchmen, lackeys, and all the other evil requirements for a nice tidy profit… all the better, right?

Evil, Inc. is a nice, witty strip that covers a lot of ground in an area that doesn’t get mocked thoroughly enough. The Incredibles and various other stories have done a fine job parodying superheroes having to live in a world, but Evil Inc. takes things past that and lampoons everything - superhero/villian genetics, child care, flirting, fame, costuming… nothing in the superhero genre is safe. There’s several regular characters, Lightning Lady, Miss Match, Captain Heroic… just enough characters to hit most of the main parody subjects but few enough to keep everybody straight. Sometimes the speech patterns of the characters run together a little bit, but they’re all distinctively drawn (and the art’s pretty good for B+W line art, too).

Evil, Inc. feels remarkably like a newspaper strip in pacing- and yes, it’s syndicated in several newspapers. I’m frequently surprised with the kind of innuendo and suggestive situations that go into the comic that can make it through the syndicates, but more power to him. Like most of the good newspaper strips, Evil, Inc. doesn’t often make me laugh hard, but I get a good set of chuckles out of the archives, and the humor’s pretty broad. There’s occasionally a pun punchline, but generally it’s part of a snappy comeback as well.

The part that I feel Evil, Inc disappoints in is during the dramatic storylines. There’s a good solid plot going through the strip, and while there’s gags for most of the bits, every once in a while the story requires a climax and the strip goes dramatic for a bit, and I generally find these bits to be a little slow. It looks like it’s just coming out of a dramatic arc now, so hopefully the funny will be coming back shortly.

Evil, Inc. is vaguely a sequel to Brad Guigar (the author)’s previous strip, Greystone Inn, a comic about the behind-the-scenes work to produce a comic, if such work required having a set and script and such. Mostly it’s a sequel in that the characters from Greystone still exist in Evil, Inc and occasionally have parts. Lightning Lady originated from Greystone, for instance, and some of the minor characters in Evil, Inc. were main characters in Greystone as well. You don’t need to know the strip to get any of Evil, Inc’s humor or story, however. There’s only a few scenes where they end up calling some of the bit characters in Greystone, and some backstory about Lightning Lady’s boyfriend.

Evil, Inc. is an engaging read, and a comic I suggest people try. It starts out strong and gives a good indication of what the comic is like for the rest of the run, so it’s very easy to figure out whether you’ll like this strip just by reading the first ten strips or so. Go give it a try.

Partially Clips (first strip) (lower bandwidth version of archive) (gag a day, punny, adult (vulgar)) is a pure non-continuity strip that’s deeply vulgar and quite funny. It’s currently weekly, although updated more frequently in the past. Online since October 2001, there’s … I don’t know how many strips in the archive, since the numbering system is all screwed up. No characters carry over from strip to strip, so the gags are always completely new and you don’t need any previous explanations from strips that came before. There’s also very few references to things you’d need to know to get a laugh (although there are a few).

The concept: take a piece of clip art. Copy and paste it for two more panels, making no changes to it (if it is required for the gag, occasionally it is allowed to change the shading or add a line or two). Add dialogue. Post the comic. You might think that this sounds boring, but you underestimate the situations that clip art can be interpreted into. This sort of strip lives or dies by the writing, and the writing is often excellent. There are quite a few Partially Clips comics that have multiple punchlines per strip, all of them solid. Some of these strips you could’ve finished halfway through the strip and I would’ve accepted that as humorous and a standard webcomic, but no, Partially Clips kicks it up a notch, and it makes me laugh doing it. Not all of them are winners, admittedly, and there’ll likely be several strips that fall flat, there’s several in there that made me laugh.

Partially Clips also beats out Something Positive for vulgarity. Not all the strips are vulgar, just like not all the strips are hit jokes, but there’s a fairly high density of both. Regardless of the misses, I’ve got to say, Partially Clips has the quite possibly best Norse god sex pun ever. The strips in Partially Clips tend to focus on the theme of taking something about the picture and giving it a background that isn’t generally considered appropriate, and then joking about it. There’s also mockery of people being stupid, and often a shock joke (a joke that is funny by being shocking or inappropriate). Occasionally there’s a reference to something cultural, such as wikipedia, but they’re all mainstream references, so there shouldn’t be too many problems on that part.

Also done by the same guy as Partially Clips is Erfworld (first strip), which is on the Order of the Stick host page. As OotS is to roleplaying games, Erfworld is to war simulation games. The writing’s snappy, the world is interesting, and the main character is thoroughly screwed and trying to fix things. If you liked OotS and you like Partially Clips, odds are very good you’ll like Erfworld.

If you don’t mind vulgarity and are interested in a funny, non-continuity comic, you should go give Partially Clips a try.

Freefall (first strip) (MWF, gag-a-day) is the story of a science fiction crew in a rather silly world. Freefall balances silliness with competence remarkably well, and often manages to make fun of science fiction, the current world, and educate at the same time. Alien viewpoints will be examined and mocked, human viewpoints will be examined and mocked, robot viewpoints will be examined and mocked. There are currently 1457 strips in the archive.

Florence, a Bowman’s Wolf (anthropomorphic wolf genetically engineered to higher intelligence) is one of the main draws to the strip, as part of the plotline is that there’s very few Bowman’s Wolves, and so all of her interactions are with humans and robots. Having only a single character be anthropomorphic was fairly unique when I started reading the strip, and still is (other comic strips have low numbers of anthropomorphic creatures, but Freefall still has the highest example of low population and differing viewpoint). Florence is highly intelligent, logical, and kind, but also has a good chunk of wolf instincts that are played up for humor value. She generally ends up being the least silly of the group, and as the engineer, leads to the most educational dialog.

Sam Starfall, on the other hand, the alien captain, is lazy, deceitful, larcenous, a scavenger and a thief. Everything he does he does for his own personal gain, although often his idea of personal gain is twisted enough from the human norm that things don’t quite turn out as you might expect. He does not tend to follow logic… as strictly as Florence does, and thrives in a silly environment. Florence has decided that one of her major goals is to rehabilitate Sam to not break laws any more, while Sam has decided that one of his major goals is to corrupt Florence. There does not seem to be any rivalry in this- Florence is too nice and Sam doesn’t seem to be concerned with grudges. There’s an awful lot of being disappointed in each other, though.

Helix, Sam’s robot, also thrives in a silly environment and doesn’t tend to follow logic very strictly. He claims his area of expertise is to pick up heavy things, moving them, and putting them down. For readers, however, his area of expertise is asking questions about what is going on, being amazed at a rule of life that he hadn’t grasped before, following silly rules to their even sillier conclusion, and having a collection of stuffed animals.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Freefall teaches things, and that’s one of the things that I like about it. There’s no need to go into the strip knowing any information about engineering and physics, but there’ll often be little bits that are thrown in. Like recently, there’s been cameos of real or fictional robots in the backgrounds of the strips, and a footnote as to what that robot is. There’s a few quotes from people, including philosophy and politics. There’s discussion of engineering, nuclear physics, and other topics. None of these things detract from the humor, and much of the time adds to it. I greatly respect a strip that I don’t realize it’s teaching me things until I sit down to review it. There’s also occasionally references to current culture, such as the Gore/Bush election in 2000, but these are fairly rare, as it is a sci-fi strip and hard to fit in.

Freefall has a long plot and advances all the time, although the story seems to progress slowly (largely due to conversations being dragged out for additional gags). Due to this slow progress, the consistency of the humor level (above entertainment but usually below laughing-stage), I consider Freefall to be a “newspaper strip” style comic- the humor has wide appeal but no particular punch behind it, the comic’s family safe, and plot develops slowly. It’s certainly in the top list of those kinds of strips I know of, however.

There’s a lot of explanation over why all the characters are where they are, and a lot of development of all the characters as the interact with each other. The story combined with the dependable entertainment, the solid characters and the occasional interesting point to think or learn about makes Freefall a great comic. The art’s quite good, too, especially perfect for the silly-ish world they’re in.

You should go give Freefall a try.