coming soon…
Perry Bible Fellowship
Oh this is good. My latest discovery and I can only regret that it took me so long.
Nicholas Gurewitch is another of those guys I wish I could be, speaking his mind in his webcomic on whatever the heck he pleases and political correctness be damned. His Perry Bible Fellowship is a wonderful excercise in naughtiness presented in an appropriately deranged, inconsistent drawing style.
Controversial? You bet! Ever heard of black humor? If you haven’t, Perry Bible Fellowship can serve as an encyclopedic case. Morbid, kinky, iconoclastic – you name it, they have it all and they’re not about to stop any soon. Adult comedy at its finest, so wrong on so many levels, and yet so unbelievably funny. Do yourself a favor and start reading it. Now.
TASTER 1 – adventures of man with no penis
Return To Sender
Another sadly dead and dearly missed comic, about how little things in life can lead to some rather big situations, and how we never really know the possible outcome of our decisions. But don’t worry, it’s not half as heavy as it sounds.
Return To Sender is a great story, one of those that develop by small steps while unnoticeably drawing you deeper and deeper. You don’t realize you’re totally hooked until it’s too late. Then, unfortunately, it stops.
Vera Brosgol ran her highly original webcomic since 2002 to 2005, when she abandoned it for lack of time (a more than common predicament among webcomic writers). The author has moved on to other things, but fortunately she’s left the incomplete Return The Sender in its place for future generations to discover and enjoy. It really has one of the most engrossing plots around, and the artwork is among the coolest I have ever seen in a webcomic. Plus Colette is just adorable. Well worth checking.
Soul-D
And now something for all unfulfilled wannabe rock stars out there (I know there’s hundreds of you, guys). Have you tried making a deal with Satan yet? Works every time.
Angela Bowman’s Soul’D is a classic underdog story, about a girl who has a dream of being a professional singer, but she’s stuck sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and generally wasting her youth (sounds familiar?). When she finally gets a chance for her big break guess who decides to bump in. The Devil, or rather a devil, Baxter, an agent of evil sent straight from Hell by his tempestuous boss to lead this poor innocent soul to damnation. But Baxter is not really your regular malevolent monster of a devil. He’s kind of a hellish wuss. And so it begins.
The comic has gone through a general refurbishment, with all the panels re-designed and re-drawn by the author. This means that the archives have been actually reduced and the strip is being as if published anew, so currently it’s only early in the second episode. Whether the changeover was necessary is a disputable point (I for one think the girl looked prettier in the old version of the comic, but to each his own). Anyway, the story is interesting enough to be waiting patiently for the next parts to reappear in new shape, and you can always kill the time between updates reading something else, can’t you? That’s what I’m here for.
Drown The Maidens
OK, maybe I shouldn’t do this, seeing as the comic has been in hibernation for, what, some two years now? Plus, I happen to know its author personally, so this could seem like some nasty instance of favoritism. Except it’s not, because the comic is just good, simple as that.
The author who goes by the name of Eurydice presents a beautifully stylish medieval story of castles, knights and princesses, only with a twist (as befits a Neil Gaiman fan she is). The art, especially the colors, are amazing here, with the use of watercolors lending the panels an old-fashioned feel. The characters are (were?) very promising too, and the story certainly had potential for a long-lasting regular read. Unfortunately, it broke off suddenly and there doesn’t seem to be much hope of it raising from the dead. Still, I’m pointing you you towards Drown The Maidens so that you can enjoy what has been published and curse the author for not keeping it up. Maybe a massive curse-fest will help get the comic back on tracks, I dunno, but it’s worth trying.
Stay As You Are
The next comic is very special for me. And I know I’m bending the rules here a bit, because it’s not technically a webcomic but a regular comic printed and published in book form, whose selected episodes were put up on a website for all of us to read and relish. But the web and comic parts fit, so end of discussion. This is too important for me to leave out anyway.
Brad Yung’s Stay As You Are was in fact the first comic that I found and read online. The sentimental factor is, therefore, undeniable in my attitude towards it. But old sentiment wouldn’t be good for anything if the comic itself wasn’t that, well, goddamn brilliant. A traditionalist artwork (with flashes of genius, mostly to be seen in the magificent Non-Sequitur Theatre series strips) gives way to the narration in which there is all the sadness and wisdom and loneliness of a sharp-witted mind you ever needed to survive in this world of absurd (pathos alert!).
Seriously, reading Stay As You Are makes me feel melancholic, in a positive way. Its bittersweet ironic flavour is something I long to find again some day in some other comic. I only wish there were more of the strips available online, but we should be grateful for the few that are none the less.
San Antonio Rock City
So you have to move to new place. You don’t know anybody there. You don’t like it there. You hate everybody, because you are punk rock like that. You make a comic about it.
San Antonio Rock City (occasionally known as Chicago Rock City or Minneapolis Rock City, whenever necessary) is a black-and-white strip by Mitch Clem, who made a name for himself with his earlier creation, a punk-oriented comic Nothing Nice To Say, which was inspired but slightly too hermetic for my taste (no crossover appeal award here). Rock City, however, is much more accessible and easier to identify with. A raging loser struggling to get his act together in a strange and hostile city, who can’t identify with that?
After a satisfying year-and-a-half run the strip seems to be irrevocably over, and it’s a damn shame, as its sardonic humour and the general screw-the-world attitude (to be taken with a pinch of salt) made it a title to look out for. For a while Mitch Clem was also doing a weirdish non-dialogue Kittens! strip, but this has also been abandoned. Well, let’s just hope this is not the last we heard from him.
VG Cats
There’s never enough comics whose primary concern is to make fun of games and gamers. Here’s another classic example.
VG Cats by Scott Ramsoomair is a goldmine for lovers of intelligent parody. Almost all of its vast archives (it’s running since 2001) is occupied by strips that are direct parodies of well-known video games, in which a pair of cute kitties (allegedly styled after the author’s real life pussy friends… er, I mean… you know what I mean) play the roles of the games’ heroes (characteristic costumes and all) and enact ridiculous situations in the in-game context. Counter Strike, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Mario, Max Payne – the cats do it all, and they never fail to find a hint of absurd in whatever game they take on.
The artstyle is so charming it deserves its own gold medal to go with the one for profound Penny Arcade-like command of the video game canon. For hardcore gamers and nerds in general it’s a must, for others, it’s a nice and colorful way to catch up a bit, and have a few laughs on the way. I heartily invite you to try some, and sooner than you know, you’ll find yourself hooked on the cats.
TASTER 2 – GTA (tell me this is not true… I thought so.)
my absolute favourite, TASTER 4 – SW: Episode 3 (yes, they do movies too)
Looking For Group
We’re back to the fantasy area, this time with a comic that actually looks like a real-life comic, only it is not. But it well could be.
Authors Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza present an epic-sized tale of a companionship of adventurers on the quest for justice and aiding the light in the eternal war between good and evil (that’s Cale, a bold elven hero on his way to greatness) and killing boredom with some random violent amusement (that’s Richard, a blasé undead warlock, the series trademark character, and very rightly so). The classic motif of ill-matched duo of protagonists seems as fresh as ever mostly owing to very well-thought round characters. It is rewarding enough to watch these two interact; an actual grand-scale plot is an added bonus.
Drawing massively from all sorts of classic fantasy literature, and WoW (which has become a LOTR-like classic already, hasn’t it?), Looking For Group is loads upon loads of enjoyable reading served in a very stylish, slightly old-school packaging. Recommended for anyone who has had a fantasy craze one time in their life. Which is almost everyone. For Pony!
Hockey Zombie
If you ever thought there’s not nearly enough comics about people raising from dead just to be able to drink beer, watch TV and beat the crap out of others in the ice rink again… I got good news.
Hockey Zombie! No, seriously, mull it over for a second, hockey and zombie in the same phrase. In the same comic. Is there an even better combination in the universe? Well, sex, drugs & rock’n'roll, ok, but apart from that? No!
Hockey Zombie is the ultimate macho delight created by Chris van Gompel for men who know what matters in life and are not afraid to admit it. Beer-drenched houseparties, heavy metal, hockey brawls, guns, strip clubs, a sex-box from the future, the Devil taking on God in a game of poker, and a good portion of old-fashioned zombie-style brain-eating in between. What’s not to love? (The artstyle change, maybe? Nah, I’m just being bitchy.)
Yes, well, before I go I should probably tell you, unless you haven’t figured out for yourself yet, it’s not exactly family entertainment.
