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Aug. 28th, 2007 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackA list of comics I sometimes read, ordered by realism.
Arlo and Janis
Absurd Notions
Unshelved (at Overduemedia)
Death and the Maiden
Home on the Strange
Schlock Mercenary
Freefall
Dilbert
Angst Technology
Penny arcade
Order of the Stick
Sluggy Freelance
xkcd
Ozy and Millie
Casey and Andy
Bob and George
1/0
Indexed
It's surprisingly tricky. Realism seems to include both being realistic, and having a vivid realistic world even if that differs a lot from ours.
Arlo and Janis, Absurd Notions, Unshelved, and Home on the Strange are all technically realistic, and ranked in order of plausibility -- you meet people like Arlo and Janis every day; Home on the Strange isn't fantasy but is occasionally fantastic.
Angst Technology is like User Friendly, by default realistic but departing into fantasy for some storylines.
Dilbert creeps in high up, because the comic itself is very abstract (crude line art, fantastic situations), but as anyone can tell you, as a metaphor, it's more real than life. Xkcd similarly, it could have rated quite highly, but was squeezed out by several narrative comics.
Death and the Maiden, Schlock Mercenary, Freefall, Order of the Stick, Sluggy Freelance and Bob and George are all set in fanstasy or science fiction or fantasy worlds of varying coherency. Death and the Maiden is so vivid in drawings and characters it gets a top spot despite the supernatural subject -- the supernatural is restrained and not subject to multiplication. Order of the Stick makes up for in character and plot what it loses for its wonderful but non-realistic representative art.
1/0 is in a category all of its own. It's the canonical self-referential comic, starting with the cartoonist declaring "let there be light", and working upward from there, but you really come to engage with the world and the characters, and the plot and the art evolve as the world does. However, the complete disconnect from our universe makes me put it in the "non-realistic" category.
Indexed is one of Xkcd guy's recommendations, a venn-diagram based comic. Technically it's quite realistic -- the diagrams are genuinely unarguably true. But somehow the lack of any art made me award it the wooden challice of realism :)
Arlo and Janis
Absurd Notions
Unshelved (at Overduemedia)
Death and the Maiden
Home on the Strange
Schlock Mercenary
Freefall
Dilbert
Angst Technology
Penny arcade
Order of the Stick
Sluggy Freelance
xkcd
Ozy and Millie
Casey and Andy
Bob and George
1/0
Indexed
It's surprisingly tricky. Realism seems to include both being realistic, and having a vivid realistic world even if that differs a lot from ours.
Arlo and Janis, Absurd Notions, Unshelved, and Home on the Strange are all technically realistic, and ranked in order of plausibility -- you meet people like Arlo and Janis every day; Home on the Strange isn't fantasy but is occasionally fantastic.
Angst Technology is like User Friendly, by default realistic but departing into fantasy for some storylines.
Dilbert creeps in high up, because the comic itself is very abstract (crude line art, fantastic situations), but as anyone can tell you, as a metaphor, it's more real than life. Xkcd similarly, it could have rated quite highly, but was squeezed out by several narrative comics.
Death and the Maiden, Schlock Mercenary, Freefall, Order of the Stick, Sluggy Freelance and Bob and George are all set in fanstasy or science fiction or fantasy worlds of varying coherency. Death and the Maiden is so vivid in drawings and characters it gets a top spot despite the supernatural subject -- the supernatural is restrained and not subject to multiplication. Order of the Stick makes up for in character and plot what it loses for its wonderful but non-realistic representative art.
1/0 is in a category all of its own. It's the canonical self-referential comic, starting with the cartoonist declaring "let there be light", and working upward from there, but you really come to engage with the world and the characters, and the plot and the art evolve as the world does. However, the complete disconnect from our universe makes me put it in the "non-realistic" category.
Indexed is one of Xkcd guy's recommendations, a venn-diagram based comic. Technically it's quite realistic -- the diagrams are genuinely unarguably true. But somehow the lack of any art made me award it the wooden challice of realism :)