Brian Roney’s webcomic reviews

Sometimes I write reviews, and sometimes the reviews grab me and make me write them.

So today I’m writing a review for Nukees, the Atomic Comic Strip.

Nukees (main site) (first strip) is a strip that follows Gav, King Luca, Suzy, Danny and others along the nuclear engineering section of UC Berkeley. The strip is consistently MWF (since 2000) and archives since 1997. That’s approximately ~1300 comic strips. There’s a week or two in the archives for sketches and colorings and filler, but it’s quite rare. Nukees is a gag-a-day (with a few exceptions) strip with a heavy plot and occasional drama. There are puns (not the main humor, but clearly enjoyed) and occasional violence, but very little gore.

Nukees is another strip that requires a good chunk of knowledge to get all the references within, but unlike the last few strips, Nukees focuses more on situational humor and leaves the physics for set-ups. On the flip side, since the author’s a postdoc in physics, the physics that is present is pretty heavy (bose-einstein condensate, thermodynamics, quantum tunneling, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle… the list goes on). I don’t think they’re generally required to enjoy the strip, but it helps. There are occasionally cultural references- there’s some Bush jokes, and some jokes about various weather patterns and some Berkeley politics, all of which seem outdated now, but they’re not too hard to guess what they referred to and they’re not all that often.

I’ve made comments before that some others do very well in separating their character’s “voices”, and I’ve complimented the various methods that cartoonists have done so. Nukees manages to separate the characters very well through very clear means- each character has their own neurosis. Gav is addicted to evil, and strives to cause chaos wherever he goes. Gav tends to be the main focus of the strip, largely because he’s so amusing and so _actively_ manipulative and greedy. “King” Luca believes that he’s a King (after all he owns and grants land, and has people following him, he fits all the criteria), and acts as chivalry demands in all respects. In a college, where people need rescuing from impossible homework and such, Luca gets quite the following. Danny is obsessive compulsive, and requires that everything fits in its proper order, to the point that he corrects people’s grammar and does not use contractions. He does not seem to mind too much when people abuse this love of fixing things for uses such as building giant robots, and he’s smart enough that he often outwits people attempting to abuse his OCD by having plans that depend on them doing so.

All the other characters in the strip have their own caricatures, and each of them seem very well thought-out. The plot of the strip involves the various capers they all get into, generally opposed to each other. Relationships start and break up, the bitter exes start drama only to get drawn into somebody on the run from a giant robot leg… The characters all stay together as if they’re friends, despite the fact that in general they’re mostly just sticking with the familiar. There’s a lot of loneliness in this strip, but they hide it well (and in some cases, drown it in alcohol). But the need for each other, just to have _somebody_, keeps these characters together even when they’re feuding, and that makes for good drama.

And on the subject of drama, there’s a good chunk of action as well. The giant robot ant is a recurring theme in this strip, and there’s giant squid, giant robot legs, artificial intelligences, nuclear meltdowns, bar brawls… lots of good clean fun. It’s primarily a science fiction strip and enjoys itself thoroughly being there. The plot’s been advancing through the whole archive, and time advances as well. Although there’s often not much indicating the passage of time, characters do advance- new characters join the college, some characters graduate (although the only graduation has happened recently, so the character’s still around). Characters experience life-changing events that actually change their life and are applied to their attitudes (although generally not their insanity) in later plots.

Nukees did not make me laugh much while reading through the archives, although I did enjoy the humor and I was entertained enough to read the whole archives through before posting this (generally I only just skim through a few select areas for people with archives past 1000), and considering I was supposed to sleep an hour ago, that’s saying something.

I wouldn’t be complete talking about Nukees without making a few references. The author, Darren Bleuel, is one of the more influential people in webcomicdom, although you often don’t hear of him as much as some of the… more dramatic personalities. He tends to go by Gav (yes, the same as the character, although he looks different (he has blue hair, for starters)), admittedly, so the nickname/name thing might throw things off. Biggest thing he did, likely, was co-CEO Keenspot, which for a long time was the huge monster webcomic label (and still is _a_ huge monster webcomic label). He’s still there, too. Gav as character and Gav as cartoonist have been cameo’d many times in various strips, to the point where he has a Gavspotting page on his site to track them. Most comic artists on Keenspot or Keenspace know and recognize Gav, as he was the recognizable face for Keenspot for quite some time (Chris tends to do a lot of the announcements, but Gav had bright blue hair, it’s hard to be more recognizable than that).

Nukees is a fun strip. I enjoy it quite a bit. You should give it a try.

It wouldn’t really be appropriate to discuss obscure nerdy gags without discussing XKCD.

XKCD (main site) (first strip) is in fact, a very geeky gag-a-day strip. There is no plot, no storyline, and no consistent characters save for the author’s avatar and occasional story threads (well, some of the other characters might be repeats throughout, but if so, I haven’t spotted them). The comic is generally done as stick figures, and there is occasional violence and bad language. There are a smattering of art strips where there is no gag (these were more frequent towards the beginning when he was using college sketches), and these still generally only have stick figures for the people although may have more complex scenery.

XKCD updates Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There’s 296 strips in the archive.

The sort of things you will need to know before enjoying all XKCD gags: A reasonable smattering of computer science knowledge, including various unix commands, perl, and a knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Video games, especially guitar hero, katamari damacy, first person shooters, and old NES games. Various memes, including All Your Base, Lolcats, and Your Mom jokes. Graph theory. Economic theory. Linear Algebra. Dadaism. Physics (electricity and magnetism, mostly). Ender’s Game. D+D. Snopes. The list goes on.

If you know everything in the above list (you geek you), I can almost guarantee that you will love XKCD. If you know most of them, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you don’t know any of them, I have no idea how you will like it because I haven’t tried recommending this strip to anybody who hasn’t known any of the above. I suspect you will be missing something. Unlike Irregular Webcomic, there are no footnotes explaining gags, and no help for missing references. This is a strip for the geek, by a geek. Although most of the topics are widespread enough that if you’re the kind of person that reads webcomics and you know of wikipedia, you can figure it out with a little work. And if you happen to fit into XKCD’s wavelength, you will be blown away by how AMAZINGLY good this strip is, and how well it captured your thoughts (which seems to be a good chunk of the internet’s population).

One of the other special bits about XKCD is his use of alt tag text in the comic strip. In most browsers, if you mouse-over the comic strip, a bit of text will pop up with an added comment about the strip, often a second punchline or an explanation about where it came from. Most geeks I know have shared a lot of the experiences in XKCD. There’s several strips about finding arbitrary patterns in life or putting arbitrary restrictions on oneself, the adult geek version of the “lava game” (where the ground is lava and you’re only allowed to move via furniture). For these people, the alt text is just another reminder of yes, somebody else has had this experience too. Some people don’t care for the alt text (some browsers don’t handle it well), and I’ll admit I’d prefer it as a footnote as well, but it’s perfectly enjoyable without it.

I mentioned earlier that often the strips won’t actually have a gag, and will be an art sketch. Early on these were just random things that came to mind, but more recently when random art sketches come around they’re often interesting things like a physical map of the internet communities, where he shows what the internet world might look like if land size roughly correlated with site popularity. These are the sorts of things that will cause you to look at them and go “Huh.” and think about it. The sorts of strips, that if you work at a geeky place, you can print out and stick on your door.

If you’re a geek, you may very well find yourself quoting XKCD frequently after reading through the archives, or referencing a strip, or repeating a joke. I’ve quoted the Bond parody strip word-for-word to people, and had people join in. It’s the sort of strip that inspires readers to sneak chess boards into roller coasters to take entertaining pictures, because it’s the perfect geeky thing to do, and let’s go do it! There’s a “random strip” feature (since there’s no continuity), and often I’ll see friends just click the button to see what amusing geek reference they can find.

XKCD is also home to some of the sites that I absolutely love- The Fairest, The Funniest (often not work safe), and The Cutest. Each of these three allow users to submit pictures of things that are pretty, funny, or cute, and then compare them to each other to get a ranking. Check the “top images” for each of them for some pretty impressive stuff.

XKCD- a wonderful geeky comic, if you’re a geek. Go geek.

Irregular Webcomic! (main site) (first strip) (punny) is the first (and likely only for a long time) review of a webcomic that uses photography instead of drawn art to make the panels. The author, David Morgan-Mar, has various lego sets, roleplaying-miniatures, and assorted other methods of finding various ways to get pictures of characters. The way this remains consistent is that he also has many different “Themes”, each of which are generally distinct from each other. His Star Wars parody generally has nothing to do with his Fantasy story arc, which tends to not interact with his Indiana Jones parody or his take on Mythbusters. At current count there are 17 different themes. More on this later. All of the strips have a punchline, and there’s very rarely any serious drama. When there is, it’s used purely for comedic value.

Irregular Webcomic!, despite its name, has been surprisingly regular. It started on Dec 31, 2002, and starting Jan 27, 2003, the strip has been updated daily, save for about 6 exceptions, the last of which was in 2004. As of 7/29/07, he’s at 1645 strips. In his FAQ, he claims that the Irregular part of the name is that he doesn’t guarantee any particular schedule, so if he misses an update or such, that’s just part of the webcomic being Irregular. The fact that it’s been much more regular than a majority of webcomics he cites as an example of life’s amusing ironies.

One of the things that people should probably be warned about Irregular Webcomic! is that the strip uses puns an awful lot. There’s even been running gag puns. So if you hate puns, you may want to skip this one. If you don’t mind them, however, it’s quite well done. There’s also a large number of geek jokes. David Morgan-Mar claims to have a PhD in Physics, and I’d believe it. There’s a long series of strips regarding the thermodynamic impossibilities of Coruscant and the Death Star, over which he received quite a bit of mail from people clinging on to their believes that Star Wars physics should work (which mostly just gave him more material to mock). Parodies are the majority of his Themes, with roleplaying games coming a close second.

Irregular Webcomic also happens to be possibly the best designed webcomic site I’ve ever seen. There’s an RSS feed (including an LJ feed), the archives are remarkably easy to navigate through regardless of whether you’re intending to read through the entire archive or by theme, and the archives allow you to load comics 5 at a time, including annotations. There are cookies you can store to turn annotations off, or visually-impaired mode on, and a link to a strip’s permanent url even when it’s on the main page. Also, the strip is small enough and high enough on the page that scrolling down is not necessary unless you’re at a truly abysmal resolution (or there’s a long footnote). Roughly the only gripe I could possibly come up with (and I’m a professional software tester) is that if you’re going through the main archives 5-strips at a time and a theme comes up in one of the first two strips you have to select that strip individually before being able to just navigate through that theme’s strips. Considering I don’t think I’ve seen anybody have the site navigate even this easily, I’m certainly not going to be complaining about an extra click in rare situations. Also amusing on the site is a web poll that gets updated every few days, and an archive of past poll results. Generally the web polls are silly, and occasionally thoughtful (”which line separates yellows from greens” with a graphical list of colors was actually quite interesting). Every once in a while there’s also polls that you can either try to use some game theory to figure out what the right answer will be, or just have some fun and pick something. This poll likes to make you think.

As mentioned, there’s 17 different Themes, and you can navigate through the archives of the themes individually. This means that if you just want to read one particular plotline, or if you don’t particularly like various themes, there’s methods to work around that. I’m not as fond of some of the themes as others, so every once in a while I’ll just read through an individual theme that I like, and I enjoy having that option. All the themes are pretty decent, though.

The other fun thing about the fact that there’s 17 themes in Irregular Webcomic is that he often takes the opportunity to mix and match them. He has a “crossover grid” somewhere, marking which strips have been a crossover between which themes. These are generally just throwaway gags, like Colonel Haken from the Cliffhangers theme (Indiana Jones parody) falling through a portal into the Star Wars universe where he and Darth Vader compare notes about how incompetent their minions are. Most interestingly is that the Death theme ties all the themes together- the idea is that there are Deaths for each possibly way to die. Death by Insanely Overpowered Fireballs tends to get the most work (there’s a Fantasy theme. This should be obvious), although Death by Choking On A Giant Frog and even Death of Being Ground By A Mars Rover Rock Abrasion Tool get screen time. Whenever one of the other Themes has a death, one of the Deaths goes to deal with it. Although generally the Deaths experiene some bureaucratic snafu or are on strike, so most of the deaths don’t generally stick.

Due to the fact that the strip’s photographs, it’s hard to make any claims about art quality improving, but the sets have gotten more elaborate and clearer over time. This sort of strip generally isn’t looked to for art, however, and the writing is quite good for being geek-based pun-loving humor. Annotations explain all of the more obscure jokes (so if you’re not familiar with the fact that a certain flower is also a word in German for something else, it’ll get explained), but if you don’t like humor that requires knowing various facts, you’ll often be left behind. On the flipside, if you don’t mind learning something new, or if you already have a bunch of obscure trivia, there’ll be jokes here that you’ve never seen anybody make before. Kudos to him for that.

Irregular Webcomic is a great comic for people who enjoy puns and obscure geek trivia. Go give it a try.

Schlock Mercenary (main site) (first strip) (cartoonish violence) is a daily, storyline/plot based gag-a-day strip with a heavy science fiction bent. A group of mercenaries led by Tagon (a remarkably mercenary human who is perhaps not the quickest on the uptake but is quite competent at getting what he wants) and including Schlock (a carbosilicate amorphic alien who enjoys violence and Genuine Artificial Imitation Ovalkwik perhaps a bit more than is healthy).

Schlock Mercenary’s been around since June 12th, 2000, and has never missed a day (he frequently comments that his buffer is about a month and a half). Every day is in color, Sundays are triple sized. Every once in a while, the strip has a footnote, generally making some discussion regarding science fiction that the strip didn’t have the space to explain. He used to provide little “exercises for the reader” with various physics problems, until he discovered that the group of people that read the comic include some people that know quite a bit of physics. He was deluged by responses, and was quite entertained by it, but hasn’t given any more physics problems. Generally the footnotes are entertaining and educational. Almost every strip has a punchline. Occasionally they will have several. Rarely they won’t have any, but those will always have a dramatic moment important to plot. Most of the strips don’t make me laugh out loud when I reread them through the archives, but they all make me at least smile.

Schlock Mercenary does not have very good art starting out. As Howard Taylor (author/artist) comments on the first strip, if you start at the beginning you get to watch his art go from bad to not quite as bad. His recent art is actually fairly good, although not something I’d go link people to for art’s sake. His writing is what drives the strip, and that’s quite good. He does many witty lines (not as biting as Something Positive), and entertaining situations, and he keeps the drama going behind it quite well.

Schlock Mercenary has an interesting feature, given that it’s based off the adventures of a mercenary company- characters will die, or leave for various reasons, and new characters will get hired, or kidnapped, or however they get involved. There’s really only a few standard characters that have made it through the entire strip, and I’m not going to spoil who they are (especially since some people who you think are likely to make it don’t). So there’s always something new in the character interactions. Although given it’s a group of mercenaries, it’s often variations of hurting people and blowing things up (one of the running gags in the strip is that there’s a lot of variety you can fit into those two skills).

Schlocktoberfest, in particular, is a deadly bit for the strip. Every October, the strip goes through a particularly vicious month. Generally a character will die permanently (with medical advances in science fiction stories it’s possible to die temporarily, so it’s important to make these distinctions). Occasionally several people. This adds quite a bit of tension to the strip, but every once in a while it’s a bit of a drag, because you know the story’s going to get dragged out for all of October (and in the most recent case, for several months afterwards, which I’ll get to in a bit) until it gets resolved.

The story moves along fairly well- there’s very few one-shots that don’t advance the plot (if any), and the plot of the universe moves along with the characters. If they help overthrow a government, sooner or later they’ll have to deal with that again, whether it helps or hurts them. Antagonists that aren’t dead will resurface, and plot points from all through the history of the series will be brought up again. There’s one particular point from late 2000 that continues to get fleshed out piece by piece but has never actually had a full reveal, and I’m anxious to see how it goes.

Most of the plotlines last a few months (2-4), enough to get everything dealt with and handled and moving on. Every once in a while, though, plotlines go longer. In particular, a plot started in August of ‘06 lasted through May of ‘07, involving several flashbacks and scene cuts. Previous versions of this technique didn’t really bother me (there’s one storyline that involves the restrictions of speed-of-light communications that I actually enjoyed the use of limited information reveals), but this storyline seemed to drag it out a bit. However, since that story ended he’s gone back to being snappy with things, and I’m happy to leave that one nitpick behind.

Schlock Mercenary is one of my favorite strips. It’s had an interesting history- I started reading it back when it was on Keenspot, and then Howard decided to strike out on his own. Fairly soon after that he decided to join Blank Label Comics, and he’s been there and happy ever since. I got the opportunity to meet Howard at Comic-con 2002, and he’s a great guy (and a rather amusing public speaker). If you enjoy science fiction and combat and don’t mind the occasional character death, Shlock Mercenary is a great strip. You should go read it.

Narbonic (main site) (first strips) (finished) was a daily (M-Sa), storyline/plot based gag-a-day strip with a bent towards the surreal. The story stars Helen Narbon, a mostly evil mad scientest who runs a lab of her intern, Mell Kelly, who has a strong desire for weapons of any type (preferably big), and Dave Davenport, who has the near-supernatural ability to take most everything in stride.

Narbonic’s been around since July 31st, 2000, and as far as I can tell has been daily M-Sa pretty consistently in that time. It finished Dec 30th, 2006, and has since started rerunning with “director’s commentary”.

Narbonic is one of the best-thought of webcomics out there by people who read it. www.websnark.com (back when it was reviewing webcomics) had the most to say about it out of all webcomics it reviewed, but I’m not going to repeat the things he said here.

There’s a group of webcomics out there that work with “Mad Science” as a philosophy. Girl Genius and Narbonic both started around 2000, with things like A Miracle Of Science, Mad About U. and even Casey And Andy coming along much later. Mad Science has definately had a fun time of it. Each of the strips have a different take on things- Narbonic’s set is that reality is inherently too complex for the standard mind to understand. Most people ignore the out of place and the abnormal, except for a few people that have a trait about them that causes them to go “insane” and thus notice what is really going on, and in many cases, use that information to create things that would normally be impossible, thus the “Mad Science”. What this trait actually is and how it’s handled is one of the major plots of the comic, so I’m going to try avoiding ruining too much.

The characters of Narbonic are very well defined. Often two or three appearances are enough to get an idea of where a character’s main attitude is heading, and they are all easily recognizable due to differing body types, hair colors, gender, and such. This is not to imply the characters are one-dimensional, in fact, details of people’s attitudes will often be clarified and evolved over time. We learn early on that Dave has a fairly low self-esteem with women, but over the course of the strip, not only due we clarify exactly why and what moments led to that attitude, but Dave gets to think about and change his philosophy (there’s some gender-switching and time-travel involved, admittedly (no, not at the same time)). Much of the humor deals with stereotypes, and both the fitting in, and breaking out of.

The main gripe I have about the archives is that sunday is used for non-story things like guest art, etc. These side-strips are often quite good, especially the “Olde Tyme Narbonic”-style strips, but they’re also often many pages in the archive. I do like that the M-F strips are all on one page, so I can read them all at once, but it makes the multi-page breaks in the archive even more pronounced. It’s a minor nit, and one that shouldn’t prevent your enjoyment of the strip.

The art’s improved over time, and wasn’t horrible starting out. The strip itself has also improved in how it handles mad science and interweaving older plots into new ones. It’s also consistently, and intelligently, funny. Occasionally a joke involves a little thinking, including a few jokes that play with the concept of being a comic strip- at one point a character attempts to demonstrate his intelligence by predicting what everybody else will say in the following panel and responding to them early.

Narbonic was designed to have an ending spot from the very beginning. It’s drawn in plots from the very beginning of the strip and adding details all throughout- every invention, every explosion, every accidental time-travel or blatant death ray has been building towards the ending in a way that’s beautiful to have watched over the years.

Narbonic’s very good. You should give it a try.

Dominic Deegan : (first strip) (some gore and violence, some sexual content (no displayed nudity)) plays heavily on one of my favorite themes- prophecy. Generally when I see people play with this sort of theme, it’s in a time travel motif such as Sam or many various ST:Voyager episodes, or with a one-time shot prophecy like Star Wars or various fantasy novels. Dominic Deegan is one of the few comic strips that has a seer as a main character.

Which brings us to the description of said main character, Dominic Deegan (big surprise). Dominic has the ability to see into the future related to anything he concentrates on, and occasionally sees involuntary visions of important things to come. The future he sees is not necessarily what is destined to happen, but is what is likely to happen if things do not change. He also has some minor magic ability (mostly with illusion or distraction). Throughout the series he does learn new abilities, such as more interesting methods of communication and such.

Dominic’s ability to see the future is the main drive of the comic, and it’s used to propel the plot forward at a fast pace. You might think that it’s hard to keep tension in a comic where the main character can see the future, but this is mostly handled by limiting Dominic’s second sight to only seeing things relative to what he’s currently looking at or examining or things that he’s specifically looking for. So while it is obvious that Dominic has a huge advantage in piecing together all the pieces of a puzzle, he still has to _find_ all the pieces, including some that have vanished under the couch. The drama of the strip tends to focus on whether Dominic will piece together all of the information fast enough, as the evil of the current storyline is racing to destroy some important piece of Dominic’s world.

Dominic Deegan updates 7 days a week, and currently has 1400+ pages in its archives. All the pages before page 410 are four panels, and all the pages past 410 are eight panels (or the size equivalent. Basically after 410 he doubled the size of the strip). The art starts fairly choppy, but eventually improves to be quite good. The writer, Mookie, also has a fine sense of the dramatic in his art choices, choosing shading and spacing that leads to the biggest “dramatic reveal”. This is explained in-story as a family trait of all the Deegans- as Dominic’s father was a Bard, he learned early on how to make dramatic entrances, and uses his second sight to see how to be the most dramatic himself.

The comic is a story-based comic, with each minor chapter taking generally 50 strips or so to tell, but occasional major chapters that take up to 200 strips. The focus of the strip is almost entirely dramatic, and there’s rarely a punchline through most of the dramatic storylines. When there are punchlines (which is more often during the minor chapters), the punchlines tend to rely heavily on alliteration, puns, and awkward situations. These tend to be stretched out fairly often and even most of the characters seem annoyed at most of the puns, so if you despise that sense of humor you shouldn’t worry too much, although there’s not much other humor to be found.

One thing that Dominic Deegan does tend to suffer from is the sense that the main hero is going to be safe. After all, the comic’s named after him and he can see the future, so having the comic focus on this dramatic tension of whether Dominic is going to survive or not occasionally falls flat. However, some characters close to Dominic _have_ died, and Dominic himself has suffered permanent damage. The world has healing magic, but there seems to be limits to its usage- it cannot regenerate lost limbs, for instance, and damage from infernal or necromatic sources cannot be healed. I rather enjoy the way that Dominic Deegan classifies the various types of magic (white magic, necromantic, infernal, shamanistic, and normal magic, so far). He does not explain many of the details, but there are enough strips in the archive that a vigilant reader can piece together certain rules and differences between the magic types.

Dominic is portrayed as a bitter, grumpy man who has grown disillusioned with the world due to everybody asking him to use his second sight to see really stupid, minor things. Throughout the story so far, he grows from a lonely, bitter man to a man surrounded by friends and family he has accumulated and shows the emotional weakness that he is attempting to overcome to enjoy what he has achieved, and the mourning over what he has lost. The different personalities to all of the characters come through quite well, and they all have a distinct “voice” and feel. Topics of debate among the characters include racism, corruption, government, violence and sacrifice, with all of the characters having different attitudes about the issues. This leads to added tension, especially since regardless of how well you can see the future, convincing somebody that something is right when their emotions say it is wrong is still beyond Dominic.

Dominic Deegan is one of my favorite strips. I would suggest you read it.

Incidentally, www.websnark.com reviewed the reaction of Dominic Deegan’s fans to a storyline at http://www.websnark.com/archives/2006/07/you_know_i_have_3.html (although it does contain some spoilers). Basically, various fans have reacted negatively to a character death. Websnark responded with “Um. It’s his webcomic. He can kill the characters in it.” So, fair warning. People die.

Least I Could Do : (first strip) (mature themes) is going to be the first strip I’m reviewing that I quite expect a majority of my readers to not particularly appreciate. However, the mindset in LICD is remarkably like some of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past several months, so reviewing it is hopefully going to be a little cathartic for me.

Least I Could Do is the story of Rayne, a sex-obsessed, emotionally infantile man who indulges his every whim and fantasy. Since he’s the main character of a comic strip, he gets away with it eventually, although not necessarily avoiding consequences.

LICD is a near-daily strip (I think they might not update sundays), starting February 10th, 2003, written by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by Trevor Adams. Every once in a while the artist changes, although the writer remains the same. On 7-28-03, the strip started being drawn by Chad Wm. Porter. On 8-15-05, the strip started being drawn by Lar Desouza. Trevor’s art wasn’t really all that great, in my opinion. Chad’s started out a bit blocky but he really got into it and his later art is some of my favorite. Lar also started out a little odd, and while he did improve and his art of people in motion is better than Chad’s, I preferred Chad’s style on anatomy (which, to be blunt, is roughly what the strip’s about anyway).

For much of my life, many people have noticed that I have a tendency to to have horrible comments come into my head, which cause me to laugh. Most people ask me what I’m laughing at and then I explain, with the preface that I wouldn’t normally say such things, but they did ask specifically. Rayne is basically that voice of mine, constantly on. His jokes are crude, rude, insulting, chauvinistic, and fairly predictable once you get into the voice of the character. And yet… for those of us who can think that way, Rayne says all the things we’ve been afraid to ever say, because _we_ know that it’s wrong. And this way we get to watch the consequences happen to somebody else.

On a side note, Rayne also apparently has the same trait (mentioned in the review of El Goonish Shive) of when he makes crude sexual advances, it is considered endearing instead of creepy. Well, most of the time. It’s really quite entertaining to watch in comic form. The whole trait is exaggerated because of the fictional universe, of course, but considering it’s something I’ve seen in real life, LICD mirrors something that I could believe does exist.

So, clearly, people who do not like situations that are often chauvinistic and infantile should not enjoy LICD. And considering my recent internal debates about the same issue, I’m not entirely certain why I do. I’m sure I’d be horrified if I saw any of the strips in real life, but considering I feel the same way about Preacher or Sin City and I enjoy both of those, I suppose this shows that I’m just good at separating fiction and real life (Huh. Me? Good at separating fiction and real life? Weird).

LICD is generally one-shot, with occasional brief plots that last a few weeks. Every once in a while a longer plot will emerge, but LICD never goes dramatic. LICD stays comedy every time, and should not be read for character development, story or relationship interaction. Admittedly there are occasional bits of all three, but they’re all merely backdrop. LICD is all about the one-liner that you can’t believe they just said and you’re ashamed of laughing at. And that’s what it does quite well.

LICD takes life, adds sexual adventures, views everything through a child-like innocence, and comes out as something that amuses me. So, if you enjoy that sort of thing, go read Least I Could Do.

For Purply.

Digger: (first strip), by Ursula Vernon, is a bit of a complex strip to review. Unfortunately it’s a subscription strip, so it’s not going to be easy for casual readers to catch up on things unless it goes free for a period (which is how I got into it back in April of 2006). Subscribing to Graphic Smash isn’t for everybody, I know, but it could be worth it just for Digger.

First off, the creator herself. ursulav is a very interesting person (her LJ title is “Bark Like a Fish, Damnit!”, which says something about her). Her writings in her livejournal are often tinged with the functional insanity of somebody who obsesses about tiny things and ignores important things and comes up with comments such as “This game needs more mammoths!” She is the kind of woman who my brain pictures as wearing oversized silly hats, not because she believes it’s fashionable, but because it’s comfortable, functional, and gosh darn it, it gives people a giggle (disclaimer: I do not actually know if Ursula wears large floppy hats). If you read her blog, you will discover random animal facts about tapirs, or vampire bats or various other animals that you barely even knew existed. She will comment extensively on why these odd features led to the particular features in the anthromorph she just drew (tapirs obviously cannot be skinny anthromorphs. It’s just common sense). The art’s very well done, as well.

She ended up getting into comics through art- she draws anthromorphs and occasional nudity, and is a professional artist along those lines. Her art is often whimsical and random. She started getting into comics due to a series called “Irrational Fears” which involved her drawing a series of comics with the expressed purpose of “Hey! Maybe if I draw some of the things I’m scared of, and then draw myself kicking their ass, it’ll be cathartic and reduce it to a sort’ve manageable silliness.” This involved drawing her representive self as a chupacabra for reasons that not even Ursula is certain of. Very nice series, and quite entertaining. After finishing a chapter of Irrational Fears, Ursula decides to do a little ditty on the side as an experiment in drawing style, and comes up with Digger. She proclaims quickly that it is just a style experiment and people should not get attached to it (this is back in March 18th, 2003). Of course, _she_ goes ahead and gets attached to it and we now have 400+ full-pages of Digger.

This should give you some idea of Ursula’s style, I hope. Go ahead and read the first five pages of Digger, and you’ll understand roughly the feel of the entire comic series. There’s a wombat for the main character for no particular reason other than Ursula likes wombats. There’s a giant statue of Ganesh because Ursula always wanted to draw a giant statue of Ganesh. And then it just goes from there.

And it goes quite well. Digger’s a full-on dramatic arc, story-based and continous. There are never one-shots, and the strip does not “revert to normal” during pauses, because there are no pauses. There are no punchlines. The format is meant to be read as a comic book, and it fills the space quite well. In exchange for lack of punchlines, however, there are a large number of very entertaining moments that are part of Ursula’s style. For instance, just in the first page there’s the comment “Other than the fact that I thought I was a small stone named Edward for some time, I got off lightly.” A few pages in there’s a “Well… I suppose no one was ever killed by a cave painting. Except greataunt Ruby that time, and everyone said that was a fluke.” This continues throughout the entire series. There’s often entertaining footnotes by the author underneath the comic, on the idea that Ursula likes footnotes, so decided early on that if I was gonna do a comic, there would be entertaining footnotes. Because “c’mon, everybody loves a good footnote!” As a note, Ursula does still work professionally as an artist, and Digger is a full-page comic, so she only updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays (she treats this as a side-job, and I’ve never seen her miss an update yet). And you can commission stuff or order prints from her other work if you’d like.

The strong point of Digger, I feel, is the _culture_ that Ursula communicates through the work. Readers will get a strong sense of wombat morals and life (which, as would be expected, are not human morals and life). There are also various other characters who all have their own unique culture that interact with each other. How does the hyena react to a wombat? How does the wombat react to a human? To a lizard? To a prophetic slug? All of the various characters come from cultures related to their species and profession in life, and these cultures mix and match beautifully. The dramatic storyline pulls readers into a story that is Going Somewhere while feeling sympathetic towards the poor wombat heroine who Just Wants To Go Home, Darn It. But, as the wombat say, anything they do should be done Responsibly, so our furry heroine gets dragged into all sorts of mischief that is embarrassing to any well-brought up wombat.

If you enjoy dramatic stories in a graphic novel format with a good dose of silliness and a dash of entertaining insanity, don’t mind anthromorphism and enjoy speculative culture of different species, I wager that you will enjoy Digger. Go give it a shot.

El Goonish Shive: Main comic page (First comic).

El Goonish Shive has been on the web since January of 2002. It was done in the single-line, four-ish panel style until May of that year, and was daily in that time. Shive expanded the format to a double-line, freeform panel-position style in May (with vastly improved art), and started skipping Sunday. In August, he started going to a MWF format. Pretty quickly Shive lost track of MWFs and started having weeks of MWS or TWF or TThF, but pretty much stuck to 3/week until March of 2003, when he went back to 5/week, but missed several, and went back to 3… Mostly he’s kept to at least 3 a week except for late 2004, and in 2005 he’s missed the occasional week or strip, but he’s pretty decent about getting at least a filler or background on days he won’t have a comic. The most recent part of 2007 he’s only really averaged one update a week. He’s certainly not the most consistent of updaters regardless of when you look, so don’t expect a comic every MWF, and occasionally check back to see if there’s something new. This review is also coming at an awkward time- Shive’s taken a break until Aug 2, as he reevaluates his art style. He keeps attempting to have a strip buffer and failing, but he also keeps trying to improve the quality of his strip, and there he succeeds.

And quality there is. El Goonish Shive is one of the strips that even if I’m not going through all my strips, I will often check anyway.

Now, El Goonish Shive does have funny moments, but it is not primarily a humor strip. It is very much storyline based and full of drama and action. In 2002 (the strip’s beginning), the art was fairly subpar and there was a decent amount of metahumor, but merely a week after the first strip starts the first storyline (Goo), and the strip remains remarkably storybased from then on, with only occasional interruptions like April Fools weeks, Dr. Germahn stories (which have mostly been split off into another section of the site anyway), and sketch fillers (also generally split off). There are moments of extreme silliness, most of which are played into the humor factor, but it merely leads to the strip’s enjoyment, not to “laugh out loud” funniness for the most part. The silliness is paced very well, however, leading to perfect one-liner moments (I still use “I stand by my ridiculous claim.” whenever I have the chance) that seem completely in character.

Where the strip really shines, however, is in how it handles gender roles, sexuality, relationships between the characters, and drama. You see, one of the main plots in El Goonish Shive is Tedd’s transformation gun, which fires rays capable of changing the person struck by it into the opposite gender (although usually into girls), into animal anthropomorphic forms, alternate sexualities, and many other bits and pieces. Also taking center stage is Grace’s shapeshifting abilities, often combined with the raygun. So expect a lot of characters learning things about each other via science fiction and fantasy. This is something that’s a huge selling point to me.

Any story that has these as their main points would be hard-pressed to avoid being sexual and occasionally perverted. It’s still something that I don’t understand, but it is possible to be perverted and still be considered “safe”, which generally turns the perverted comments into entertaining teasing. This is a quality that I’ve been accused of many times. El Goonish Shive has it in spades (often I wonder if the reason I enjoy the comic so much is because I identify with Tedd so much, but over the course of this review I believe I’ve found other things that I would enjoy about it anyway). Also, the characters within the comic react to various switches and shifts as real people, and consider the ramifications of any changes with the relationship goals they are pursuing. Certain characters have secrets from other characters (recently it’s become an interesting exercise to not only keep track of who knows about a certain character’s sexuality, but which characters know which other characters know), some characters don’t know each other as well as others (or in some cases, have never met), and the author keeps track of this all very well.

There are very few comics where some (not all, obviously) of the main characters barely even know each other, and fewer that are done well, especially in ways that the reader has no need whatsoever to keep track of who knows who- whenever a situation is needed to be known for a storyline to work, it will be mentioned in a remarkably natural mention (or occasionally a humorously obvious recap). El Goonish Shive is one of them. El Goonish Shive also takes the relationships that do exist, and develop them into strong bonds that can survive action-based storylines and turn them into strong drama. I didn’t particularly care for the Painted Black storyline myself, as the drama took a sidestep to action (well, and Grace’s character development) and angst (angst is not drama!), but in situations like Sister Sister, relationships between the characters developed because of, in spite of, and alongside transformations and drama, and it was done very well.

There feels like there should be more for me to explain about El Goonish Shive, but that’s really all I can think of at the moment. Dramatic strip with humor although not guaranteed gags, relationship and storyline based with a good chunk of perverted undertones (although nothing worse than PG-13 visuals). Generally a well-liked strip by most people that are my friends, and the kind of strip that I always get a little nervous suggesting to people that don’t know me. Give it a try.

Strip #4, 5, 6: Kevin and Kell (first strip, On the FastTrack, Safe Havens)

This one’s a special case because I’m reviewing Bill Holbrook more than I’m reviewing the strips individually. For those of you who are not aware of Bill Holbrook, Bill Holbrook writes and draws all three strips above. All three strips are daily, with double sized sundays. TWO of his strips are professionally in syndication and available in newspapers. As far as I can tell the only reason Kevin and Kell _isn’t_ is because he didn’t feel like it.

Yes. Bill Holbrook has so many syndicated comic strips, he has extras. He has never missed a day. Occasionally he does extras. He has a buffer of two months. He has been doing these three strips for over ten years (Kevin and Kell starts in 1995. A daily strip, fully available on the internet. Over 4000 strips. Think about that for a bit). Bill Holbrook is a machine.

Okay. Enough tooting Bill Holbrook’s horn. Let’s review the strips.

First, I want to point out that in webcomic land, “newspaper strip” is an insult. It refers to Garfield, or Cathy, or any number of comics that are on the “funny papers” through inertia. I do not share this opinion. I adore 9 Chickweed Lane, Foxtrot, Frazz, For Better Or For Worse (yes, I know. I think certain plots are creepy too. But that’s a whole other review) and many others. Admittedly I do dislike Cathy and Garfield, but I do not disparage newspaper strips as a whole because of them.

However, the category does have merit, since it does indicate to what quality a comic becomes… I suppose “bland” is the word. You can be edgy on the newspaper… but bland works too.

None of the three strips I’m reviewing in this review are as bland as Garfield or Cathy. They deliver new, interesting comics every day. But… they kind of blend together. There’s no great “laugh out loud” moments. They’re fun reads. I enjoy them. But I can’t remember a single great moment. They tend to borrow each other’s themes (all of them deal with cyberspace and computers a large amount), and all have the same pacing (as you might expect from the same writer, to be fair).

Safe Havens and On the FastTrack only have a month’s worth of archives online, due to them being in syndication. Both of them work in apparently real-time, with characters that age and graduate and whatnot. They also cross-over between each other occasionally (something you can do with relative ease when you’re writing and drawing both of them). Sadly, they’ve both got good long term plots going on, which makes the month of archives really just… not really get it. You really have to read it for a month or so to have the archives really gel together, which isn’t really going to happen unless somebody really likes Kevin and Kell or goes insane on a comic reading spree (I’m sure we don’t know anybody like that around here).

Kevin and Kell is where the real meat of this review belongs, though, as it’s entirely available on the net.

So. To refresh my memory I’ve done a quick scan through… oh, who am I kidding. I can’t scan through ten years of archives. I did look through the storylines of the first five years, though.

Kevin and Kell is a plot-based strip with occasional one-shots (the other two strips are too). Various plots come up again and again (Vin Vulpen, Rudy’s domestication, cross-species relationships, interactions between the wild and civilization…), and they’re generally tackling new problems each time. Some plots come up again and again and finally get resolved, and new plots come and take their place. Kevin and Kell starts out being a solid comedy strip with plotlines, and around 1998 (year three) starts going more and more for story instead of comedy. Websnark defines this style of evolution as the “Cerberus” effect, where a funny story goes for drama instead… but for Kevin and Kell it never really feels like that’s the case, since very few of the stories are really _dramatic_. They’re just… stories. Good, well told stories of a bunch of people. Occasionally funny, occasionally dramatic.

Mostly, good strong stories of interesting characters. Remember how I mentioned reading Sluggy because I wanted to see how the characters ended up? Imagine a Sluggy that doesn’t do ZCom tribute strips or Harry Potter parodies or random timeless space plotlines. A Sluggy that is not necessarily the Sluggy of the past, where it was spiffy, but a Sluggy of now, with the characters and backstory, and just lived. That’s what Kevin and Kell has. And has had for years. And nails, every single day.

It’s… comfortable. Which is again one of the insults people throw at newspaper strips, but most “newspaper strips” that get insulted don’t _change_. Cathy is always Cathy, Garfield is always Garfield. But Kevin and Kell is occasionally Lindesfarne or Rudy or Fiona or Candace… all while still being Kevin and Kell. The characters grow, they age, they graduate, they have children (well, two that I can remember). Bill Holbrook creates worlds. And then he lets us watch them change and grow.

If you need a comic to be funny, or dramatic, or exciting or new, these are not the strips for you. But if you like characters and plot that can grow and change over years and years of backstory… then give Kevin and Kell a shot.