Phallic metallic: Build your own boyfriend

The original premise of build your own boyfriend looks at first glance of the title a childish extension of the Japanese robot fantasy, a lecturer at a university dissatisfied with her love-life builds a robotic companion, it's a collection of the worst stereotypes imaginable with only an inversion of the typical male pervert role.

From the beginning however, this is a strip that is willing to playfully skewer the robotic genre, there's no real manga background here , just the basis of a low-key yet interesting strip willing to ask questions about romance and human consciousness.

Most of cyberpunk's existence has been posited around questioning what posits essential humanity, a robot with something approaching consciousness fits within that bill, the only fantastic element within a sleepy campus.

Gwen Anderson decides to take her love-life into a whole new zone by going DIY. One interesting element is the pretense that Owen is a human and all the lies and half-truths that needs to keep the cover story going.

This is also an in-depth examination of modern gender roles in the west, Gwen has been let down by men, she tells us, ' The engineer in me had to wonder, why not make a better version'. This 'perfect male' is also attractive to other females.

Admittedly, the scene where Gwen glowers at her competitor is standard practice in rom-coms, the inclusion of the robot here is a clear twist in the tale. 01 or Owen is not just a pliable sex-slave but someone possessing free-will and this is where the story gets interesting because it veers inadvertently into questions about human consciousness.

 There were earlier prototypes but Gwen fails to see the point of creating a lover be-smitten with her, romance, she tells us, begins with a challenge. This is a short sweet story and there haven't been updates for some time, even so, this is an worthwhile examination of romantic need.

Broken bones and broken hearts

The threads are starting to stitch together: to the few perverts who don't consider Megatokyo a requirement for life (Don't worry, come the revolution you will all be crucified in public) We've finally got some narrative on the relationship between Yuki and her goofball lover. I've been waiting a long time for this space to be filled, (mainly out of hope the schoolgirl-Piro relationship thing doesn't get all skanky on me!)

Yuki is being drawn into a web of intrigue and magic and Miho is the glitch in the system of Megatokyo that typically crosses over between Piro's increasingly shrinking 'normal' world and the chaos of the ningas and the magic girls and the zombie hordes. This dichotomy has existed since Megatokyo began and I believe I can see a tipping point between what Piro sees and what he needs to see to examine the world beyond his romantic meanderings. Finally we will the crossover when the truth seeps out into reality and chaos in the flesh starts smoking a cuban cigar.

Darkness creeping into your mind: The Trip, Undead nigh Alpha

One small addition to realism in webcomics I've been looking at is The Trip, less than twenty pages in its interest is in the use of photography to create a detailed grainy look, no characters as of yet but there's already the hint of horrors to come. I'm hoping there's more of this strip primarily because of the use of landscape and darkness intertwined into something that should be quite interesting.

Undead Nigh Alpha is another sci-fi strip I've become absorbed with; the sketchiness and pallor of the artwork, criminality where future Martian society blurs into cyberpunk surveillance which merges into horror, even if the narration is somewhat overbearing there's still an underlying morality that focuses the story. Not many strips here either but a good edition what could be an equivalent to Saturnalia.

Get yourself Connected: Eye Trauma comics

One strip that has impressed me is the equivalent of a webcomic short-story, the one-shot, Circuit breaker, takes the spaces were divide our day into and uses them and extends them in this short morality play. The connections the protagonist uses aren't that different from how we normally have processed time since the industrial revolution. The strip uses the premise of a man plugged into various activities, the mind seemingly takes control of physical needs. I'm impressed by the swirling colours and delineated lines. Small, short and bitter, no explanatory notation and no extended Channel Zero style cyberpunk hacker bullocks. Just a brief message about how we're all slaves to something in the end, no matter what the choice.

The other work Damian Duffy and John Jennings have created are also noteworthy, little bitter hacked up coughs of spite in an all too septic world, the various Hole series in particular is a delightful to behold. As with Circuit breaker, there's a moral to the stories and an anger present here making Eye Trauma a disciplined little group dedicated to bringing something more mature online.

The Jetsons redux: Destroy Dystopia

Cyberpunk has always been at the edges of sci-fi, usually more politicised than the average space opera, typically they are attempts at distortion of societal roles, a vision of a fractured future where public space is infiltrated by corporations and all that's left are the outcasts and rebels.


Destroy Dystopia is one such attempt to translate this into webcomic form, the artwork is a hazy sketchy excursion into the other side of the future. The future is not a series of delineated smooth bliss, here, technology and grime merge, bodies melt into mutation and crime, sin has a metallic aftertaste in one's mouth and this strip for all its simplicity and violence edges into darker territory. The punk in cyberpunk denotes a mis-en-scene where corporate interests have extended from Thatcherite languor to a space where corporation and government are typically one.


If the moody anti-hero/adventurer line is something we've seen before, I was drawn in by the use of shading and tone, it veers from somewhat primitive portraits to dense backgrounds. If Momento Mori is far more sophisticated then the exuberant fun of this strip almost makes up for its lack of intellectual vigour. I like the dirtiness here, even if this isn't at the cutting edge of the genre, appropriating its surface to cover a stock-standard adventure story.

Violence gets sexy: The Whogirl

This bastard spawn of Tankgirl and Transmetropolitan is probably best served by taking it with a grain of salt. Steven Henry's, The Whogirl, looks at first to be a bland Spicegirls rip-off on too much sugar. Typically I prefer my dystopias to be a slice and dice of evil and vice. Schism perfects this stylised world, it's a morass of secrets and a search for redemption. However, I also think there's a place for this strip and its mixture of goofball humour and study of corruption.

You'll notice the silly sloganeering at first, 'I am the girl that all girls wish they could be', ignore that, ignore the hyped up mid-1990's rave wear the heroine wears and ignore the Mozza style hair on the Emo looking kid. If you don't like manga this won't convert you but if you let yourself look at what Henry is doing here with this jokey brand of speculative fiction then all that silliness is an apt accompaniment to a world gone sour. Carpe Diem with bad haircuts.

The energy concurrent in the strip can be a bit off-putting, the first fifty strips haven't yet mediated between post-feminist braggadocio and the background of a dystopic state. Once this is resolved Steven Henry has matured the strip into something approaching an alternate darkness. Looking at the artwork, yes, perhaps there is a certain cartoony roundness evident but once you understand the narrative and its inherent darkness the spirit of the silliness and antic violence starts to make sense.


Musical Accompaniment: Fun Lovin' Criminals, Loco. This album is my dirty secret, I guess you could call it Afghan Whigs lite but really I have got the jonses for this album because of the dark skanky froth within that makes sense emotionally, an album for a cynical drunks in a decaying city.

What lies beneath: Victim 12 & Schism

If you read slice of life strips you probably won't like this dystopic excursion, I find that most of the better webcomics I've been reading have either been mangae styled or come from a genre fiction background. Here are two examples of cyberpunk's contingent online:

Victim 12 is an examination of memory loss and underlying conspiracies, there's not much there yet but it looks like a narrative that's ready for the long haul, there's not much action as of yet but the narrative is a stand-off between two varying forces. This is a classic conspiracy theory/dystopic narrative that bodes well to my perverse sensibilities.

The artwork is mangaesque but not noticeably so and the lightness of the line work is a welcome change to a lot of the heavy-handed inky sludge online. The background to the story is also relatively profuse, a good sign in a comic-verse of piss-poor background management. We haven't really delved beneath the intro but it's showy enough to keep you coming back for more.

Schism is a different kettle of fish altogether, the story is far more attuned to the regularities of everyday life, but underneath it all of this a mystery. This is quite a dense strip in terms of the background information delivered and its primary aim is to distil a sense of paranoia in the reader. It has gathered together much more of an archive and there is far more use of personal background present here in this dystopic harsh realism.

If you're so inclined you'll find hints of the Matrix series here but it's clearly more of an old school cyberpunk anti-authoritarian narrative. The use of colour is clever, it isn't overbearing, more of a bruised smear than a bright intensity, more chiaroscuro than pastel blandness. I like the intent shown here and the sensibility that mixes family and corporate mismanagement together, an enthralling read.