jack

LutherLevy.com is like an 18th century Lutherian phdcomics.com, but with jewish werewolves.

I'm not sure if I recommend it or not -- I don't normally read plot-comics, which seem to move very slowly compared to novels, and I only read the first couple of chapters. I just really loved that description.

Crossposts: http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/856283.html

I've abandoned reviewing the webcomics I read in any sort of order, but this is one I started reading:

http://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/48

It's about a government sponsored superhero organisation, which despite being gender-mixed, the plot focuses primarily on the female characters.

The very good

In a way, it's a reaction against the mixed way superheroines have often been presented in comics. Despite most being stereotypically sexualised, the vast majority of characters are women, and interact primarily with other women, and the focus is on being superheroes.

The main character, Sydney, is amazing, quirky, foul-mouthed, brave, shy, ambitious, geeky, determined to do good.

The relationship between Sydney (who after running a comic book store finds superpowers) and Maxima (who runs the agency), is really lovely. It reminds me heavily of other strong duo relationships (Sherlock and Watson, etc). Maxima is the only one who can get through to Sydney. Sydney is the only one who can get under Maxima's skin. They're very good for each other.

It's very much a work in progress, so it moves a little slowly, but the author has good art skills from the beginning, and mostly manages to move the plot forward without getting bogged down.

The very bad

My god, Sydney is so wonderful, just like a real person. As are the other characters in every way but the art, which reverts to a traditional "whoever you are, if you're a superheroine, your costume looks like it was sprayed on".

It's especially inappropriate for Maxima and Anvil, who are obviously wearing sensible clothes (military jacket over a solid gold body, and combat trousers and T-shirt respectively), but look like they have balloons strapped to their chest :(

Dear author, I'm sorry if you read this that came across as so negative :( I know that's part of the strip, but if you could adjust it, it would make me so much happier. There's still plenty of sexiness to go around.

Where to start reading

Start from the first page, which is a short flash-forward to Syndey playing a roleplaying game after she gets her superpowers. But if you hate the art, skip ahead to the original beginning in strip #5 which shows normal people, not superheroines.

Crossposts: http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/832277.html

Schlock Mercenary is one of my (many) favourite webcomics. Like many of the others it turns a gag-a-day format into a rich world: in this case a Draco bar or Mos Eisley Cantina style 31st century galactic culture, with many roughly-human-level species with their own little empires, and space bars, and mercenaries, but a few lesser-advanced and more-advanced species in there too.

The early comics are more rough, and make a few assumptions which are difficult to integrate with the story as-you-wish-you'd-written-it, but on the whole it progresses smoothly from them into the more professional comics later. But I was recently rereading the archives, and made two realisations I don't know how I didn't see before (which will only make sense to other people who know the characters):

1. Kevyn joined Tagon's company in his sister's takeover bid and then chose to stay, rather than coincidentally working for the company when he invented the Teraport. That makes much more sense, but was just never spelled out.

2. At the start of the comic, the company has about 30 members (at one point, they hire taxis for all of them). The number of foot-soldiers has to be a glossed over a bit to accommodate different sized stories. But what I hadn't realised was that by the time of the first big recruiting drive on Ghanj-Rho, we've met 20+ out of 30 (possibly including Pronto and Pi, who only show up after the drive, but are as likely to be newly-promoted old members as new members.).

Absurd notions cartoon on snow: http://www.absurdnotions.org/an20010305.gif

I recently caught up on the last year of Sluggy Freelance webcomic. I used to read it regularly, and eventually got bored, but am still curious to know what happened to the characters. It's been running for 12 years and we are just discovering a little more about the mystery of Oasis, first introduced about 10 years ago.

And I wondered what other continually-updated stories manage to have a mystery or plot set up and resolved over a longer stretch of time. Off the top of my head:

* Several 20+ long regularly updating stories, don't have one plot arc taking up all of that, but do have characters growing up over the course of the story, eg. Doonebury, Arlo and Janis, Coronation Street.

* Long-running series of books, but are more normally episodic.

* Sequels with a long gap in the middle, eg. "Godot finally arrives" (or whatever the actual titles are). But if they resolve a mystery they're rarely something the original actually had in mind.

Today I think I applauded a webcomic for the first time. The last arc in Order of the Stick really has been amazing.

( Minor spoilers for the current ep )

A webcomic I just found, from two people linking to individual strips, but that is well drawn, and in a fairly small run has a number of classic strips:

The home of Adolf Hitler, 1933. Doubt creeps in.
Painstakingly created the exact opposite of Mahatma Gandhi
Newspaper stand[1]
Speed dating a pro wrestler
"The Jackbooted Thugs"
Friday evening at the Spinx's house
"Hello, I want to buy a bookcase, please."
16th century Russian Howitzer
The ATHEIST apocalypse!
The emperors' [sic] new clothes, each as metaphor for current cultural trends.
Opposite world

[1] I kept wondering why this URL wasn't loading correctly, until I realised "page404" did not refer to an http error :)

And for the set-up in the first panels more than the punchline:

Entrance to hell
An alternate reality, in which people's physical size is directly proportional to their level of intelligence

Casey and Andy exists! I just tuned in to check the archives and see how funny they were this week (I do that to comic archives I like every so often) and it had just resumed.

The first new strip is: http://galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=645

Andy is just going to finish the final story arc he was working on when he burnt out, it's not resuming permanently. I think that's probably a wise choice. I think the strip was brought to a good conclusion, though he burnt out in the final story. I'd obviously like to see more strips, so I'm very glad he's rounding it out properly, but if he doesn't feel there's more to do, it's good to end.

(Although it's annoying that whenever any webcomic author moves on to a new and shiny project, I don't like it as much as the original. In this case his next project was a slightly more serious comic about Wendy Darlington, Alice Liddell, and Dorothy, unfortunately overshadowed by the well-known "Lost Girls" with a similar premise, but a lot more about lesbianism rather than general adventure. I personally miss the wackiness, though applaud the greater ambition, will be reading CC through when I get the chance and report if I get hooked.)

I've stalled on recommending the list cartoons I read, but I still mention any new ones I come across.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic (here) is good because:

* It's a humorous study of living in a Dungeons and Dragons world
* But about what it is to be a dnd-evil character, rather than about the mechanics
* It's drawn in line art, but well -- I generally love cartoons that use the format to convey essentially verbal jokes, but a few actually convey things with pictures
* The characters are evil but sympathetic, and mostly non-altruistic, but not evil for the sake of evil, which is a concept that's funny once (hahaha, look how it confounds expectations because the parents are pleased when the kid is nasty) but I've seen and now has got old
* The characters are nice -- I defy you not to love Turg and Lewie :)
* The characters are kinky, if you're looking for wholesome bdsm...

The spiritual sequel to DM of the Rings has started here. ie. "What if Starwars Ep II was the result of a roleplaying campaign, not the plot as planned, but that resulted when the players argued with the DM and got unexpected dice rolls." I didn't like the first few cartoons so much, but this one and the next one are well worth it.

You need to know that the players were griped off because the DM wouldn't give them blasters, and the equipment list was the Dungeons and Dragons equipment list with "laser" before every item, so they ended up with "laser swords". This starts just as they're captured by a large number of droids and suicidally attack them.

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/darthsanddroids/episodes/0009.html

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0489.html

This order of the stick is great (if you've been following it, if not start from the beginning, not here). Maybe not the best, but I always have an unaccountable weakness for stories that reach a climax and then go off and examine the theology of it.

A 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.

( Read more... )

Like a hundred others, it's a webcomic set in a small software company. But quite good. It manages the right blend of surreal characters but without saving the world every week. And they're all *nice*; there's no Steph Murky here. The wimp falls somewhere between Carrot and Fraser, as it were, genuinely nice, and helpful, and friends with the slob, but agh.

Many of the cartoons are slgihtly off, and I've given up now, but reading the archives is well worth it. I recommend starting here and reading forward:

http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=3
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=4
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=7
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=9
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=10
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=15
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=19
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=21
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?nav=28

http://dilbert.com/
http://www.partiallyclips.com/index.php?b=1&c=1

Cartoon review 2 is Angst Technology, but is postponed because the site seems to be being redesigned and the archives are not easily accessible.

Arlo and Janis is an honest to god newspaper cartoon about a middle aged couple called... Arlo and Janis, and their cat Ludwig and teenage son Gene. It's mostly realistic, with the humour coming from them doing day to day things and getting an amazing insight into "Oh yes, we do that too..." Occasionally he'll go off on a self-referential or absurdism riff, but for once there isn't any roleplaying.

It's been going for fifteen years, and is still fresh, and in which time, unusually, the son has grown up. Though otoh arlo and janis and ludvig have evolved artistically, but not really go older.

There's a daily strip from comics.com.

Better, there's a daily update by the author at arloandjanis.com when he makes some comments and posts a few strips per day from the old archives. (This week he's taking a break and talking about the Hurricane, but see for instance http://arloandjanis.com/juneaugust2005.htm)

They mostly stand on their own. A fairly representative sample chosen randomly from there:

( Read more... )

See: http://www.absurdnotions.org/page1.html

I decided to collate a list of webcomics I like, or used to like, with a few comments about each. Impossible to sort, I decided to find some favorites and sort them alphabetically.

First is Absurd Notions. Realistic description of the lives of four or five friends living in an aprtment. Warren is the complete sysadmin, occasionally spokesperson for the strip, who I tend to identify with. Isaac is a geek. Jay is an artist and a practical joker. Biff is the nice but abused one. Jag is Jay's girlfriend, and probably the nearest thing to a sane character.

As always with favorite strips I come to like the characters; they eventually start roleplaying and have much player/character humour; much humour comes from naturally funny/sarcastic things said rather than blatant punchlines.

It's basically stopped now, though every so often a new comic appears. But it's well worth reading through the archive. The first few cartoons (linked to) are fairly representative and a good introduction.

Tune in next time to read about angst technology.

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