Lucid Tv (A blood red smile)

I'm not shocked by much but this strip is particularly cruel, it takes pleasure in its cruelty. There's a certain salience here in trying to 'push the envelope' in displaying the Abuse of power that a doctor can engage in. I guess the best lazy cross-over analogy I could go for would be the gory med horror film Pathology mixed in with the slacker humour of Scrubs. The fqact that one of the doctors loooks suspiciously like Mozza from the Smiths is quite apt. This is horribly amusing, like the slow motion car crash you can't help watching on Youtube, the firsr strip since Sexy losers to make me simultanously cringe and laugh out loud inappropriately. This is a piquent sort of psychosis, veering the non-sequiters through every moral quandry and out the other side, bloody and grinnning. Keogh has created a sick like paeon to surgery and its discontents, bittingly intelligent medical satire is a genre I didn't know I ever needed, just like an extra heart spliced in.

Cthulu is my homeboy (Lovecraft is missing)

H.P.Lovecraft shouldn't need an introduction but I can certainly offer a lobotomy to the fecklesss pikers who disdain our lord & master. Lovecraft was Kafka with the insanity turned up to gleeful abandon. So, a webcomic with a focus on H.P.Lovecraft should be enough to make every horror geek drool an ocean but you would certainly have seen the blatantly overused Cthulu memes online and thought twice about this strip.

Lovecraft is pretty well harrowed ground and this could either be a total munted conspiracy theory overfiend godzilla-with-tentacles goof-up or something exciting. it's more intriguing than anything else, like a slow boil, not dizzying or spectacular but a real good take on the subject. It starts at Lovecraft's career as a amateur journalist & writer in the classic New England setting of his mythos. As the title suggests he has disappeared and the story now continues...

From what I've seen so far in this strip, Lovecraft is used as a symbol, rather than an anti-social punchline. I'm not sure how the gruesome ethereal horror is going to be subtly embedded into this narrative so far but the overall mystery we've seen experienced is by our plucky heroine. At the moment Lovecroft is a character in absentia so it will be interesting to see where this goes. I'm very interested in this strip and if you have even an inkling of gleefull bloodlust in your veins you will be as well.

In space no one can hear you bark (Pug Davis)

Pug Davis is certainly a labour of love, while ostensibly it looks like sci-fi the artwork veers between primitive sketchiness and squidgy detail. This strip is breathaking in its consistent insistance on long-term infinate canvas within its somewhat slow paced strips. Guided by a stoic warped pug dog as its hero accompanied by an uh....odd sidekick, Blouse, there's a tragic back story here that gives what could be a throw-away space opera cowboy bebop riff a certain level of poignance, there's little fables popping up here amidst the minamalist scrawl and they are easily matched by the painterly subtlety on display here. The relationship between the two characters is not outlined at first so this is a discovery and finally this becomes a meditation on growing friendship.

At first glance though this looks like a mishmash of dispirate angles & the off-level sections add to the erratic flavour of this strip, the shading and linework certainly helps the stream of consciousness storylines present here stretch out into the ethereal nothing of outer space. This strip is willing to mix science fiction & surrealist tropes mix-up, there's a lot of wordless emotion here and Rebecca Sugar is quite willing to let the artwork alone convey the narrative, a concise use of silence to direct the action, but more awe and empathy than undercurrents of Pinterersque malice, this is a strip about the occasional downsides and the endless oddity of space exploration .

Cloverfield also caused epilepsy (Blip)

Looking at Blip I'm guessing this is the second generation Japanophile convergence strip that finally works. This strip has enough of the structural/artwork background to qualify as manga influenced but has none of the cultural dependency that cripples a strip like Megatokyo. It is seriously funny though, talkative snide and heartless type of funny and a talking cat that gives lil' Nyet a run for his sordid roubles in debonair ranting.

Blip is also quite rare in that in veers between an emerging narrative & some goofball slice of life strips, the artwork certainly has enough manga in its origin to skip between chibi and serious epic heaven & earth , subtle enough as it progresses from a schlep to a viable long-term narrative strip in a way that Sore Thumbs no longer is.

Don't let the initial cartoony vibe put you off, there is a long term lovelorn storyline here beneath the sarcasm but the manga influences are more than mere skin deep chibi-fetishism, the western slacker vibe is mixed up with with the standard scattergun Japanese epic engagements between good & evil fought by hidden heroes. Luckily the typical schoolyard antics anime & manga chooses has been replaced by a more adult twenty-something world. The title itself is telling, later taking on more significance than one would automatically think, there is a theological basis for this strip and Sage can change from goofy to estachalogical in a split second.

The little angels & demons present here are initial comic relief but overall the pacing allows enough klutzy goof-offs to make this entertaining on a weekly basis, the reason this strip works is because the (decidedly grumpy) heroine, K, is fully grounded in the uselessness of modern western existence and this makes her role within this divided world that gradually emerges , a focus point for all the haphazard craziness, giving the strip more emphasis. Enjoyable and worth sticking with for the long haul.

hungry like the wolf (Menage a 3)

While I concede Menage a 3 certainly does not lie within my genre-heavy fanboy remit but I also believe that it's sheer fun without being trifling. The narrative drops the reader right into the lustful insanity from Montreal, almost like a mirror image of our world except everybody is a sex-obsessed nut. Gary is the dawdling man-child looking for flat-mates whose life gets a fun injection from the snarky slacker girl, Zii, and a drool injection from the voluptuous Qubecois sex-pot Didi, the main lust object in the strip.

There's a slight anime tinge here but if you're used to Gisele Lagace's sleek artwork then this is more of the hyper-stylised energetic linework, very fluid and well suited to the crazy hi-jinks it describes. While the strip is pretty open about its lust obsession, but this isn't fluff, it is sincerely humour driven craziness and the overreaching obsession with the body frequently delves into blatant perversion but it's more innocent awe than sordid leering.

Vodka & blood on ice!!! (Little Nyet)

Communism isn't really funny while Noam Chomsky still denies any form of genocide in Cambodia. Soviet Russia is funny, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita's humour stemmed from an absurd society and this inane brain dead blandness curdles into a hairball of fun right here in the form of lil' Nyet, he is a demon or a cat or extremely tanned to the point of diabolical redness psychotic or whatever.

I don't really know why I'm attracted to this strip, sometimes it feels like an extended Uncyclopedia skit on Soviet Russia. The badly translated flavour extends to the vision of Soviet Russia populated by cute animals, separated into victor and victim. I won't lie to you, this is Communism lite but it frequently hits the nail on the head concerning the underlying structural fuckery of Communism that existed ever since Lenin decided to create a class of 'Uber workers' with the Bolshevik split. it's the facial expressions that do it for me though, the idea of the goofball imperialist 'Ghost cat' and the mime penguin is closer to Bulgakov & Gogol than you'd think. This gets better the more you read it.

Losing my religion (Enter the Jabberwocky)

This website is something I've come across in my trevails and I've just recently become obsessed with it so I'll have to rant at you about this until you each each review thrice and roll on the floor with laughter and disgust.

I would have to say that as a former Evangelical these cruel dissections of Jack Chick's tracts are the funniest things I've read online for about 2 years. As in laughing out loud uncontrollably for a period of half an hour as each hit went in, it's a snarky and angry grinding down of the blatant idiocies of Jack's theologies (Islamophobia, Homophobia & surreal anti-Catholic & Masonic comsipracy theories that veer into a stratosphere of ketamine mindfucked faith).

Bile and contempt drips with every word but there's also a strangely fascinated undercurrent here at a worldview that is so disingenuous and warped. It's the best rebuttal of Jac Chick's poisonous addled theology because it's fucking hilarious. Even better than Niego or Hellbound.

Love in a hurricane of blood (Raising Hell)

I came across Raising Hell while looking over Transmission X, a worthwhile and experimental collective I'd found out about via Butternutsquash and if Koala Wallop no longer grabs my attention then this is a far more interesting substitute, no fey cartoony cute meanderings or surrealism masquerading as a plot. This strip in particular leapt out at me, or rather it assaulted my eyes with the virtuosity of the whole bloody confused mess, still, this is no starter strip and there's been some planning behind it and this unified vision makes a nice change (Road Waffles anybody? geeze).

The first thing that hits you is the colour scheme , it's very understated but when it gets violent red is used like a knife in the eyes, you can almost see the hemoglobin sizzle as it encrusts on the walls into a deeper vermilion red. If nothing else, this strip makes mindless violence look exceedingly good.

I think by now you can tell that zombies are my one true vice and this strip delivers a zombie apocalypse in the middle of a Halloween booze-fest and a lover's tiff. There's something very noir about all this while it's grounded in indie disaffected slacker styling (Stuff Sucks, Butternutsquash, Questionable Content) and it feels more adult than these strips, like the Dropkick Murphys dropped in for an impromptu gig at your house and your keg internally combusts out of pure joy while your little brother smashes a beer bottle over his head. By that I mean it feels like there's no computer geek DNA at all in the genesis of this strip, the counter-culture pulp twist is like a slice of lemon in your drink or the last twist of the knife in your back.

I like the motley collection of riffraff & human debris that make up the characters here, an injection of grit, noir and hoodrat sleaze into what is typically a subset of action or horror.There's also some surreal touches where Andy B's line work flexes with the story In the middle of the tempestuous relationship drama the zombie attack makes the drama ricochet. The 'love story' that's the backbone of the story is both ridiculous and touching.

We're not far enough into the narrative to see if the Zombie invasion has affected the planet and whether this will turn into a 'survivor/brain eating Apocalypse' storyline and the origin story for the zombies isn't apparent, but frankly I'm glad that Josh Fialkov has decided to keep everything tight under wraps. Most of the zombie strips I've read so far are purely over-influenced by the genre, this is a webcomic is willing in inject some hipster fun into the mix.

Things to check out

Is it just me or is Metanoia one of the darkest odes to murder I've seen online? It could have been so specious but it ends up being an apt little murder poem.

Project Rol is is a very stylised work, it's manga with a western substructure, inserted into a future in which 'angels' taunt humanity. Sound familiar? The artwork is pretty dodgy for a Evangelion remake, though. The tricks with colours and speed are not typically seen in webcomic but the bare linework can get a bit grating. One for the Shinji fetishists only.



Sorry about the hiatus guys, I'll be back with a batch of articles soon.

'I'm the freakin' emperor'

Sam and Fuzzy's journey into long term narrative has been a rare success story within webcomics, if one compares a Questionable Content strip from 3 years ago, it's pretty much the same structure. Even if I have all these links on the side of my blog, Sam and Fuzzy was a strip would consistently check for daily updates, I suppose, because it was willing to take a risk. iIt was willing to go beyond the staple Sam and Fuzzy we were comfortable with, victim and tormentor, template it relied on for some time. it went all Cerebus and it has actually pulled it off. This strip is the vindication of the narrative that Sam and Fuzzy have been following.

Sam and Fuzzy changed its gag strip structure and upped its speed and went for the real music and all the convoluted plot lines of the last year have led to this, the moment I'd been dreading, because of course Sam is the natural sap, I felt so relieved after reading this strip and ashamed I'd doubted Sam.