Brian Roney’s webcomic reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the delay in new posts for a few days there- we had a bit of a DNS issue and I couldn’t get to the site to update, and then I had to deal with some medical problems. We should be moving to real hosting in a week or two, and in the meantime if we’re down we should be back up in at most a few hours (although if DNS gives us trouble again, you’d have to get to a different computer for that, otherwise it’ll take up to a day to clear the cache).

I still don’t have a set schedule for posting. I try to post at the very slowest once every other day. Yes, if I was a webcomic I’d have to mark myself down for being irregular (No, I won’t do reviews in webcomic form). But I’d get major down points for being way too wordy, too.

More posts coming soon.

Flipside (first page) (really first page) (MWF, nudity, violence, some gore, some cursing, adult situations) is a fantasy comic covering the story of two women- Maytag, a sexually adventurous jester with split personalities, and Bernadette, an expert swordswoman who distrusts magic. The world has quite a bit of sorcery, and a good mix of politics and plot. Each update is a full page, and there’s (very roughly) 900 pages in the archive.

First off, explaining that “really first page” link above- Flipside is broken up into books and chapters. Book 0, what was originally on the site, told a complete story, and the author decided to start again (although carrying the characters and the world forward). This time, in Book 1, the focus would be on having the book eventually be publishable- the art’s more polished, the writing’s clearer, and the story has better pacing. The author set Book 0 into a separate section of the archives, intending for none of it to be necessary to enjoy Book 1. You can start on Book 1 and be just fine, although being obsessive about completeness I can’t imagine not reading Book 0 as well.

Maytag, the main character, is open with discussing (and practicing) sexuality and sex, and is extremely competent, confident, and controlled. That is, while she’s got her Jester cap on. With it off, she’s shy, meek, and quiet. The flip between personalities provide some interesting moments, because they’re both distinctly Maytag, and she remembers and accepts both of them. She just doesn’t have the inhibitions she normally would. Bernadette, on the other hand, is a very defensive, honor-bound person who feels very deliberate in her actions and decisions. She has a code of honor and follows it. This code of honor occasionally conflicts with Maytag’s aggressiveness, and both often conflict with the other people they interact with. These two women provide the main characters of a very rich and varied world.

Flipside was one of the first webcomics I got interested in. I was fascinated by different ethical codes at the time, and Flipside fits right into that. More than just being different styles of characters and having different goals, the characters in Flipside have extremely different ethics, beliefs, and worldviews. With powerful sorcery involved, any police force is going to have to be able to handle such threats, and with the low number of sorcerers available for such duty, often powerful threats will escape justice to wreak havoc, keeping police forces busy enough that conflicting honor codes often need to deal with their own justice.

Originally when reading the comic I was concerned that sorcery was too frequently the reason or solution (or both) of the current problem, often without discussion of the powers beforehand. Since that concern, however, there have been a variety of Intermission scripts and notation at the bottom of Book 0 pages to explain the system used for magic and magic items. Once a solid inventory was provided for Maytag’s bag of tricks, my concern over their use disappeared. And not all plots involve sorcery, although most of them have elements of it.

Flipside’s not a comic for humor. The occasional nudity is clearly sexual, although never excessively so or glorified in, and are generally specific plot points. Sexual description and topics are open categories, however. Some of the first pages in Book 0 have a stilted feel, as if the characters and dialogue weren’t very natural yet, something that improved quite rapidly. Sometimes the story feels slow, but that’s largely because I want to see the next page and I have to wait a few days for it. Reading through the archives the pacing feels just right (and you can click on pages to advance! Yay!). Occasionally (mostly in Book 0 or early in Book 1) the anatomy of the characters is a bit off, particularly arm segments. It’s since gotten a lot rarer of a problem, and the art for current Flipside pages is beautiful.

If you don’t mind adult situations, Flipside’s a great comic. You should give it a try.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic (first strip) (daily, nudity, violence) is, indeed, a fantasy gamer comic. The characters draw from the various fantasy ideas- various races of elves (generally drow), minotaurs, goblins, beholders, illithids, orcs, elves, ghosts, dwarves, harpies, humans… and they’re all magnificently drawn and portrayed. The story tends to follow the “evil” characters for the most part, and shows how they have a complex philosophy despite being “bad”. YAFGC updates daily and apparently has a huge comic buffer. There’s currently 464 strips in the archive.

I don’t usually discuss the art this early in the review, but for YAFGC it’s one of the main selling points. The art is amazing. The characters are beautiful to look at, have real expressions and body language, and character movements, even combat, seem real, clear, and uncluttered. This is despite the art only being a pencil sketch. I often wonder just how amazing this strip would be if inked and colored, and every hundred strips just that happens. Due to the strip being a pencil sketch, occasionally things like the circles drawn to shape character heads are visible, but they don’t detract from the strip.

There is frequent nudity, although generally all that is shown in the strip are boobs, and it is generally a fairly friendly nudity- even when characters are ogling others, there’s a sense of “Hee. Isn’t this fun?” that makes it feel innocent even when it isn’t. The violence is generally also pretty clean, with a minimum of gore.

The plot and story are also quite good, as all the characters are interesting in their way. The strip tends to vary as to who it’s following as a main character - Gren and Bob, despite being the iconic characters of the strip, often take a side seat to Arachne or any of the other denizens of the cave system they call home. None of the characters are annoying to read about, even the ones that are annoying to the other characters. Every character has their strong points, even if they’re not the ones you (or they) would expect from them, and between them all they keep the story moving at a good pace. And the stories are interesting, too. With this many evil characters running around, there’s plenty of entertaining scheming and backstabbing and plots, all while being entertaining.

I debated for a long time over whether to mark YAFGC as a gag-a-day comic or not. It has the pacing like a gag-a-day, but most of the final panels aren’t jokes. I did laugh a few times in the archive, but it was a rare thing. The comic is quite entertaining, though, and is very easily worth a read. I eventually decided not to mark it as such, because even if it has the pacing of one, it doesn’t really feel like a gag-a-day strip, and it doesn’t really need to be one to be good.

The site design annoys me a little- the comics are “below the fold”- meaning the user has to scroll down to see them. And the “Next strip” link is below the news post, which stays in the archive, so when the news post includes a graphic (there’s a Christmas card at one point), you have to scroll down even further to get to the next comic.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic often becomes a fast favorite of people reading it, and I’d suggest you give it a try.

Shades (first comic) (weekly, violence) is another superhero comic, although this one has the heroes being quite a bit more subtle. Once past the prologue, it follows the main character of Stanley Miller, tailor to the superheroes, and his attempts to do the right thing when put in situations out of his control. Updates are weekly on Wednesday. Every update is a full color page, and there’s roughly 85 pages in the archive.

The feel of the story can really be summed up by one of the quotes in chapter one. “Do you know any super heroes who live in England, granddad?” “No, son, not in England. But if there were any, they’d be a lot more discreet than the Americans, anyway. You’d hardly know they were there.” The superheroes are quite British- there’s very little anger in what they do, although casual vengeance is around. They sit and drink tea and chat, and when they’re not needed they’re quite happy to sit down, retire their costumes and go do their own thing. They each have their own style of philosophy and humor.

I like the idea of a superhero story based on one of the side characters that isn’t a hero himself, and Shades delivers. Stanley clearly doesn’t have any powers and feels vulnerable in the world, but he still has a sense of justice and honor that makes him strive to do what is right, even as his fear is yelling at him to stop. Just gathering the main characters takes him through a lot of trouble and injury, but his reasons are clear and good.

Each of the main characters are fairly distinct, although it takes a little while to get used to identifying new characters, especially since the characters often wear masks or change costumes. The art is good, and I really wish I had better memories for styles, since it’s similar to styles that I feel I’ve seen before, but can’t place off the top of my head. Perspective is slightly warped and it’s a little cluttered, but the style mostly portrays a sense of grunginess, which fits the storyline quite well. The only concerns I have about the art is that when there are situations like tattoos on a character with a lot of fine detail, it never really quite feels like the same detail from panel to panel. There’s also a few situations where there were felt like some of the words weren’t really necessary, as the art was telling the story just fine. Much of the comic is in the character viewpoints, however, and that tends to come out more in the throwaway commentary.

I was sent this link by a reader just when I was looking for exactly a story like this, and I liked it enough to add it to my list. I do have a few gripes- I don’t think the prologue was very interesting, especially since none of the characters in it have shown up again yet. With multiple characters wearing full ski masks, it’s hard to tell who was doing what in the story. Some of the text seems a bit extraneous, and it’s a bit wordy even besides that. The archives are occasionally a little annoying to get through (although it has the upside of being able to click on the images to move to the next page). But I enjoy the story and the characters it’s focused on so far.

There are several other comics on the site, but Shades is the only one that I really enjoyed. You should give it a try.

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.