Brian Roney’s webcomic reviews

Magellan (first comic) (violence, gore, cursing, occasional nudity, drug use) is a superhero webcomic about a training academy for superheroes where the main character has no superpowers. There’s no jokes, but plenty of story and action. Updated three times a week with a full color page, there’s roughly 342 story pages in the archives, plus some extra character information pages and cover art.

Magellan may remind people of the film Sky High, where a high school taught superheroes how to use their powers, and included a main character without powers. Magellan, however, came before Sky High, and handles the situation much more seriously. While Kaycee Jones doesn’t have superpowers (and it is made a big deal that it is remarkably impressive to have made it to Magellan Academy without powers to begin with) and has a large portion of the story, there are long plots that don’t mention her, but other characters that have been developed take the main stage instead. This never bothers me, as all the characters are developed fairly well, something that is rather surprising and impressive given the wide cast list.

Magellan starts off a little weak- the first few pages include the discussion of a Genetic Blender that screams “campy” and makes taking the series seriously a little difficult, but pretty soon afterwards the series starts making some serious developments with active plot, twists, character conflict and development. Kaycee has a full backstory as to why she’s pushed herself so hard to become a hero, and that backstory comes into play more than once. Character’s moods affect their conversation which change the first impressions and lead towards long running plot, and the emotional feelings for each other are clear, whether they be love, lust, anger, hatred, or fear.

Because there’s quite a bit of all of those at Magellan. The heroes at Magellan come from all different starts- some were born with powers, others acquired them later,  others are a different race entirely where their powers are normal, but on Earth they’re something special. Aliens, demons, psychics, mutants, they’re all here. Often the characters attitudes are shaped by their powers- the powerhouses of characters are generally more aggressive and bullying, although there is the rare character who feels that superstrength just means he needs to be more careful in this fragile world. Arrogance is around aplenty for the heroes as they start their training, and it’s still too soon to tell where that arrogance is going to change into, but with all the character changes and revelations, it’s clear something’s going to give.

From the extras regarding powers and invulnerabilities and whatnot of the characters, I get the sense that every character that shows up in Magellan, even in the background, has a story and defined powers. This makes the rather large supporting cast fairly bearable- even characters that just have a single line or two give the impression of coloring their perceptions with their attitudes and powers. I find myself wanting to know the histories of these secondary characters, and what brings them to these areas.

Downsides: I can list off twenty or so characters just off the top of my head, and clearly not all of these characters get the development of the others, which makes that whole “wanting to know the histories” all that more futile. There’s always somebody in the spotlight, though, and even the annoying characters are still interesting, so this doesn’t bother me as much as it might’ve. There’s also excessive violence, as I suppose is appropriate for superhero work. Some of the violence and gore came as a bit of a surprise and felt rather abrupt, but I suppose it’d feel that way to the characters in the world, as well. And occasionally the comic has to walk a fine line to avoid becoming silly and campy. I think the first few pages started out unfortunately, but past that the comic’s handled that aspect fairly well.

If you’re interested in reading a rather well written superhero story, Magellan is a fine example. 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.

Minus (first strip) (weekly) is a comic strip about what happens if a little girl with an overactive imagination has omnipotence. There’s no overarching plot, and few storylines go past a few pages in length. There’s not much humor here, but there’s quite a lot of art. And I don’t mean art in the sense of drawing well (although they often are)- I mean art in the sense of reading a page, pausing for a moment thinking about it, and commenting to yourself, “I think I am a better person for having seen that.” Each update is at least a large full color page. Minus currently has 84 strips in the archive.

Minus is a difficult strip to classify because of the surreality that comes up- the strip is only limited by the powers of the main character, and the main character has no limits. Anything Minus wishes comes true. The difficulty is, however, that the main character is a young girl. Often her power is not controlled, or it is handled by her subconscious. She has no concept of what should be normal reality, because she has never been bound by it. And often uses of her power have unintended consequences that she does not think through, because they would not apply to her.

Life in this world is difficult for people that aren’t Minus. Often she will have left in the middle of fighting a monster to go deal with something else, but the monster will still be there for normal people to have to deal with. Or people will be perhaps a bit too mean and have Minus not like them, or not word a request correctly and have a wish turn out oddly. Often the strips tell stories that are rich and dramatic despite being short- when a child can use her powers to make her fantasies real, and people take places in those fantasies, when those fantasies stop and life goes back to normal… what happens to the lessons learned? For all those days when recess meant raiding a castle and fighting dragons, in Minus, you just might. But when it’s over, was it just fun, or did something happen to change you forever? There’s a lot of thought in this comic.

There’s also a lot of detail that’s occasionally difficult to miss. There’s a few moments where things happen in the art that aren’t covered in the text and are easy to overlook if you’re not paying attention. Occasionally some of the characters look alike, although since they don’t generally stay constant from strip to strip anyway this doesn’t tend to matter very often. Minus changes her hair color frequently, so is usually identifiable by the curl on her head. Most of these aren’t necessary to get the idea of the story going on, however, and the art is very pretty in a wild sort of way. There’s generally very few words in the comic, and those that exist are usually necessary. Most of the story is driven by the art itself.

Downsides… well, it’s mostly not funny and it doesn’t have a plot, but it really doesn’t need, or try to be, either. Roughly my only gripe about Minus is that the space alien plot went on longer than I felt was best. Minus often breaks rules in reality that I’ve stopped even realizing are there, and they shake up my perceptions of what’s going on. Sometimes sequences are a little disjoint, as it’s often a little confusing whether Minus just changed herself into a bird or if something else is going on, but either a little more investigation will make the result clear or it won’t really matter.

Minus is also remarkably easy to tell whether you’ll enjoy the strip in the first few pages. Go give it a try.

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.

No review for tonight, it’s late and reading various new comics the whole way through has burned up much of my time for tonight. So instead I thought I’d make a little FAQ and hopefully answer a few questions people might’ve had.

Admittedly, so far only two questions have actually been asked of me, but I’m going to make a few more up because they’re questions I ask myself.

1. Why do you review so many big name comics instead of smaller comics that people might not have heard of?

When I started this site, I only had my friends for readers. Now, my friends, as much as they enjoy webcomics, are not serious webcomic readers. They know of the comics that they read, and a few that they just don’t really care for, and others fall by the wayside completely. So when I reviewed Order of the Stick, many of my friends hadn’t heard of it before. Thanks to the review, they started reading and loved it. I understand that most of the people I catch from the web are the kinds of people who’ve already read most of these, but I’m still getting used to the idea of having other people for feedback.

Besides, I’ve reviewed a few comics that aren’t in the top 100 of www.piperka.net, such as AKoTaS, Nukees, and Partially Clips. So I don’t feel too bad. And the longer this goes the more likely the comics I review will be lesser known. Also, the top rated comics are top rated for a reason, because they’re generally quite good. I’d like to expose people to them if they haven’t given them a try yet.

If you prefer reading reviews of smaller webcomics, I suggest Ferrett’s webcomic reviews. He specializes in such things.

2. Why are your reviews so positive? Why don’t you tear the bad comics apart like Your Webcomic is Bad (warning, coarse language)?

Well, for starters, I read all these comics daily. By reviewing only comics that I read daily, you’re guaranteed that at the very least, I’ve been willing to continue subjecting myself to the comic. I don’t see the point in writing a review to try to tell people that a webcomic is bad. Webcomics aren’t like movies, where you’d've wasted three hours and $10 to see something that you could’ve read a review for and skipped. Webcomics are almost always free for the reading, and you’ll generally figure out whether you’re enjoying yourself in the first ten minutes, which is about how much time you’d've wasted reading the nasty reviews.

Instead, I want to show people what comics they might actually like, because if people can spend five minutes reading a review and then saying, “Yes, I’ll clearly enjoy this comic! I’m going to give it a try.” (and having it be correct), then I’ll have helped entertain somebody.

Also, I’m a wuss and like saying nice things when I can. I do try to be objective and point out flaws where they exist, so people can skip the comics that hit the points that they won’t like (and I’m trying to be better about that). But I honestly enjoy these webcomics, so my reviews are going to reflect that. Even when I write a review where people might consider most of my points to be negative, it’s still a strip that I read regularly, so clearly I’ve seen something in it to make me not mind any of those negatives.

3. When are you going to review X?

Well, at my current rate of one review roughly every other day, I’ll get through my current comic set in… about a year. That’s not counting the comics I’ll add through that time, too. I actually have tiered bookmarks on my browser, since if you try to open up 150 tabs in Firefox at once it will crash at you. Some of the sortings make sense, but they’re still pretty haphazard. I may try to sort them at some point in the future so I’ll be able to give a better comment about what order I’ll review things in, but right now it’s really whatever I feel like. Occasionally I even roll dice to see if they suggest a comic to review.

So I suppose the answer is… I dunno.

4. I misphrased. Why haven’t you reviewed X yet?

Quite possibly I don’t read it. You’ll likely never see a review from me of Dinosaur Comics or Sinfest, for example. I understand they’re both very popular. They’re just not for me. It happens.

5. Will you review my webcomic?

If you have sent me a link to your comic in the hopes that I might review it, it has gone into one of three categories: Didn’t make it through the archives (in which case I’ll tell you so), made it through the archives and added it to my daily reads, in which case I’ll get to it eventually but with no particular idea when (so far this is where most of them have gotten to), or I made it through the archives and loved it so very much that I’ll likely review it next (in which case you’ll likely notice).

6. Why didn’t you mention X? It’s the best part about the comic! The plot twist was so amazing! And when Y died! You need to mention that.

I try to avoid giving away spoilers of any sort. I figure if something isn’t mentioned in the first twenty five strips, I don’t want to give it away. This is why I try not talk about characters in the present tense in strips where characters die, so you don’t get to know who’ll make it. I try not to talk about characters that join the good guys later despite being an evil guy to begin with, because it spoils that whole plot.

So the things I feel I can mention: Anything vague that does not give away anything specific. Anything that is constant throughout the comic (telling people that Garfield hates Mondays is not a spoiler). Anything in the first twenty-five-ish strips. I’ll also try to edit comments that have these sorts of things in them, so I’d appreciate if people didn’t try to throw them in.

7. Why don’t you include a panel or a strip of a comic so people can see a representation of the comic?

A couple reasons- a) I don’t like giving away spoilers (see previous question), b) I’m horrible at finding a representative panel from the strip that doesn’t give anything away, and c) I’d rather spend the time that’d be required to satisfy a+b to review comics or fix up the site, instead.

8. Why are various things on the site so plain? Is that still the default theme for Wordpress?

Yes. Improvements are being worked on slowly, but those generally weren’t the highest priority when I was starting out, content was.

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.

Inverloch (first comic) (some violence and gore, finished) is a comic that I just came upon today, but I loved the archives. It’s a dramatic story, no laughs to be found, but the story is well done and the art is stunning. My timing of finding the strip is a little amusing, since I believe the comic is scheduled to end in a few weeks (it’s roughly finished, it’s just doing epilogue at this point). Updates are a page-style sized update (although less panels per page than most of the other page-based updating comics I’ve reviewed), and there are 757 pages in the archive.

Inverloch is primarily the story of Acheron, a Da’kor, a race of shorter, fuzzy, clawed, horned people who are known to be aggressive and hostile towards the other races, humans and elves. Acheron, however, is not aggressive, and when he meets an elf in the forest, he talks to her. They become friends, and discover that she has lost a childhood friend, Kayn’dar. Acheron decides to go find this person, and in so doing discover why this feels so important to him, and the secrets that have been hidden from him.

Acheron picks up various traveling companions on his way, and every once in a while I was almost willing to accuse the characters of fitting into a cheesy roleplaying party composition, but it never quite crossed the line. The characters develop quite well, and the tension in between them at different points leads to fun interactions. The only gripes I have about the character interactions is that the racism point gets played on a little too often and people get angry/calm about the subject a little too fast, and the initial “strong female” character doesn’t get quite enough development for the “strong” part, but those are certainly minor points out of all the rest of the good. The drama between the characters drives a lot of the strip, and the subtle interplay between them as they ferret out each other’s secrets is fun to watch.
Inverloch is the first webcomic I’ve read where after reading through the whole story, not only did I feel completely satisfied that it was a story well done, but I wanted to read it again immediately. Part of this is because of the secrets that are revealed throughout the story that explain so much of the background, but none of them are required to enjoy the comic the first time through. A second read through the archives had just enough new information to still be interesting the whole way through.

Also, the art is beautiful by itself. The fact that a good story comes along with it feels like a bonus. Some of the strips are silent, as the characters move into positions or walk through town without a conversation, but I didn’t feel cheated, since the art itself tells a lot of the story and is wonderful to look at by itself. The art is a cel-shading style, with extras like foreground and background that fit seamlessly, including focus that gives a sense of perspective and depth. The elves and da’kor both have consistent and logical anatomy, and their distinctiveness is shown well.

Again, there’s no funny here, so if you’re looking for a humorous strip, you can skip this one. But if you want a good dramatic story, Inverloch is a great strip. You should read it.