The color of magic: Vibe

The first thing that hits the reader when reading this webcomic is a jarring gorgeosity of color.  It hits the retina in shock-waves. The underlying design, the meta part of the webcomic is likewise a glistening intensity, a virulently cartoon sheen that is almost aggressive in its sense of purpose.

Dan Ciurczak has created a world where loa help certain humans. Loa are manifestations and aspects of elements and perspectives within Haitian vodou. The reader is propelled into a world where spirits can interact as distilled emotions. Bad vibes coalesce and have to be dispelled by witch doctors like the cocky protagonist, Baron Bones.

It's self-aware and reflexive, occasionally too much but overall this florid playfulness and frenetic pace is reminiscent of Corey Lewis' Sharknife, a westernized 'henshin' transformation comic. There are certainly times where I would have preferred a slower pace.

One issue is perhaps the characters and 'about' sections being empty. It's just a small thing but frankly the first chapter is somewhat confusing. I can't help recalling Megatokyo's infamous refusal to provide additional information.

Expeditions into Deviantart: Bomango & Serious Engineering

Having read webcomics for 15 years I'd forgotten how primitive the early ecosystem of original webcomics actually was. Strips like Penny arcade have at least 2 early years of strips that look unreadable and have no context for today's current readership. There were certainly wasn't an expectation of any viable ecosystem of payment or criticism.

 Likewise any of the surviving strips from that time have undergone a metamorphosis either resetting the script (Sam and Fuzzy, Bad Machinery) or stay in creative stasis (Sluggy Freelance and Megatokyo).

Compare the sketchy erratic start of these strips to the macabre shadows of Astral Aves and you see how things have changed. Readers are less forgiving of artists publicly learning on the job. The webcomic ecosystem is now much larger and Patreon and Gofundme has plugged the failed attempted gap of micro-payments that Campbell mentioned as a funding model.

One way to simultaneously gain a following and hone your skills as an artist is through Deviantart. I won't pretend it's a world I was familiar with but what I found was that its collaborative nature enables an artist to exist as part of an active community of creators.

There are two strips that leap out at me:



Bomango:

At times VanHeist's Bomango appears to still be a multimedia experiment: there are varying story lines, images from a animated storyboard and the protagonist has drastically changed physically. Gogo's actual properties still haven't been made fully apparent as yet so reading this is more of a mercurial and open-ended experience.

It's frustrating but Bomango has never pretended to have a concise narrative. It's more of a haze of intersecting moments now. It's aiming at a coherent story but there's a lot of retro-active re-sharpening going on. There narrative veers between happy-go-lucky vignettes and a deeper darker origin story.  

Visually it's gleaming to the point of possessing camera flare. Tracking the changes to now show an artist with a bright  and hyper-stylized aesthetic that just needs a clear story to wrap around.

Serious Engineering:

Serious Engineering is a strip by Roman Jones that has used Deviantart far more thoroughly in an attempt to even out the bugs. There weren't many bugs to start with but Roman has been able to engage with other people for translation and shading. The only issue I'd have is maybe tightening up the speech bubbles.

The comic in its current state has a stylised sheen to it and the recent use of shadowing is very welcome. Coming from a Ligne Claire background my preference for crispness is certainly requited.

The backgrounds are minimalist and simple but the actual characterization of the characters here have changed from murky realism into a far more expressive and more pleasing sleekness.

Thematically it meshes well together. The story is about self-discovery in a world that doesn't have a place for misfits. You shouldn't reduce it to a mech webcomic because as it now stands Corelle's attempt to gain access to engineering culture is more a vehicle for gaining personal agency. Unlike Bomango there is a feeling of an underlying and coherent narrative guiding this road-trip.

Space prison blues: The Lydian option

This webcomic is a heady mix of space opera sci-fi and the hard realism of inter-species bickering.The Tha'latta have captured a 'motley crew' of humans and they are stored in a massive multi-species prison, it's a contained prism of villainy and despair. I think maybe it jumps the gun in getting to the main point of the story, the prologue is a bit too brief.

 The art style is sharp and angular, a mixture of bright colours meshing together in what can be perhaps too much  haze in the background adding a fluorescent ambiance to the grit of the prison shown here.

The Lydian option refers to the possibility of the guard species voiding the airlocks. Characterisation is minimal before the escape starts but you get the gist of various basic character molds: brash, stealthy, arrogant. We'll call this survival science fiction or a blast of violence in a genre known for specious star trek hippy lovey-dovey morality.

The various species on display here are fascinating in their differences, there's no star trek milksop 'we are the world' pissant analogies here, it's pretty much brutal warfare and intrigue. It is admittedly a 1 trick pony with a tense but simple endgame of escape. Basic but worth your time. 

Take the wheel and Drive

Looks can be deceiving, it's an obvious cliche but in the case of Drive,  I initially thought this was a goofy cartoony space comedy from the creator of Sheldon.  I gradually realized this was a rich and fertile world. What could look like a motley collection of goofy aliens becomes a decent storyline with a clear internal logic. Human history has been transformed by the application of an alien technology and the chaos surrounding the main character is an incursion into this narrative.

The pilot finds himself beset by various foolish games and various fuckeries and it's a rollicking ADHD sort of strip with a low key non-edgy humor mixed in with some realpolitik. There are  intersections between the past and the present story-lines scattered throughout the strip, not enough to take your from the main storyline but enough to gradually immerse the reader in a tragic story behind the comedy set in place.

The idea of an English / Spanish language mixture for the future is certainly different, the continual implementation of fact sheets from the 'enciclopedia Xenobiologia'  within the comic gives the reader a good background briefing of a 'space opera' styled world.

At first I thought the title of the strip was reductive but as I continued to read the strip I saw that the 'drive', or the ship's engine becomes an underlying emphasis of human civilization and its subsequent war with the 'makers'. The way this underlying tragedy is portrayed can be a middle ground, the artwork is cartoony but bold, the creator of Sheldon clearly has the experience to pull this off and the imaginative prowess to get stuck into creating a large universe with a plethora of diverse lifeforms. It doesn't look serious but there's a pitch here for an underlying mythos that is worth the time of any science fiction fan. Robert Heinlein it ain't but it's clearly a webcomic with some teeth.

I guess if you're looking for analogies then the 'zaniness' of 'the Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy' might be a good reference point. Sometimes the humour doesn't quite hit it, a little too 'zany' for my tastes and the visuals are a little too fluidl and cartoony to absorb sometimes, for all that's it's a strip making an attempt to create an intelligent space opera.

 The appeal of this strip is its resolute attempt to tell a story and while the safe 'dad' jokes wear thin occasionally  I kept with this strip primarily because of the underlying vision behind it.  

Do over?: Sore thumbs

Just wondering if this is going to lead to the zinger that shows us what the Sore Thumbs reset is really about, that is, was it just a way to get out of an increasingly garish storyline or just a new spin on Sore Thumbs characters in a bizarro universe? There's certainly not much emphasis on video games anymore, it's transformed into a magical realist morality tale on the foibles of western society with Fairbanks as the screaming cheerleader in a clown suit.

You couldn't really call this a gamer comic, if it ever really was one before straying into bug-out mind jack territory. Now it's a cheerful  antic sci-fi strip and this discovery of 'evil Jimmy' looks like it might explain how the reset of the Sore Thumbs universe works, I'm still not sure as to whether it's a glib & knowing deus ex machina deal or just boredom on the part of Crosby. Just want to see if I can get some resolution here.

Caught in a web of your own design: String theory

At first glance this is not a genre strip and the main point I'd assumed it was set in our universe or timeline but slowly but surely the other references come creeping in and the emotional range widens out into a slow burning rage. I've never been so fortuitously side-swiped by a strip this much, what I thought was a cringe-worthy workplace goof ball drama was merely a prologue to a much richer story.


This is certainly a bleak strip, I didn't know seething hatred could be a metier but Beckey Grundy is an adept at creating a protagonist as a vector for bad luck mojo, our anti-hero scientist Herville Schtein mostly choosing the path of least resistance. I just got drawn into this strip as I discovered what looked like our time was not, as the tragic protagonist is only gradually inserted into an alternate future.


This narrative complexity is accompanied by a comparable artistic flowering. As with every webcomic worth following the line-work improves substantially as experience is gained. Now it's evolved into a psychedelic swirling of colour, but it's also the little things that work. The doctor's red eyes,  the shadows in their characters faces and the move from black and white to colour increases the overall texture exponentially.

This world isn't spoonfed to you and this strip gets better as there is an emergence from what looks like a dull mad scientist parody into something more morally weighted. I know the Websnark isn't really a webcomics critic anymore but the term 'Cerebus syndrome' is quite effective here, the first chapter looks like meandering around and after that there's a lot of ret-connning, the characters seem to grow into more substantial roles.

I haven't been so pleasantly surprised for a long time, maybe reading slice of life strips has brutalised my senses because this is a long term commitment that I believe is worth reading just to see how fortitude comes from feckless, needless rage. It's not an emotion that webcomics typically emphasise as they mostly attempt glib sweet nothings. This is a richer thematic approach and deserves to be read.

In space no one can hear you bark: Pug Davis

Pug Davis is certainly a labor of love, while ostensibly it looks like sci-fi the artwork veers between primitive sketchiness and squidgy detail. This strip is breathtaking in its consistent insistence on long-term infinite 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 poignant, there's little fables popping up here amidst the minimalist 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 disparate angles and the off-level sections add to the erratic flavor of this strip, the shading and linework certainly helps the stream of consciousness story-lines present here stretch out into the ethereal nothing of outer space.

 This strip is willing to mix science fiction and 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 .

In space no one can hear you scream: Banished!

I suppose one can blame the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy in my upbringing but i think Banished is part of a tradition of space opera spoofs that work quite well online. The clearcut linework is refreshing. The first strips are primitive but then there's a progression into something light and succint with depth and colour you don't typically see online with the artist changeover. So, Ryan Smith has created something goofball style playful but it has also segued into a decent narrative that hasn't neglected the strips's strengths.

If the strips orginally mines the absurdities of science fiction then the progression to the strip's most recent updates shows some nous, a lot of webcartoonists merely restart their strip - though this isn't a Cerebus syndrome overly serious venture, the fun is still omnipresent within the upgrade - resembling classic Sluggy Freelance, if a little constricted in its narrative. I like the interplay on genre-specific trends, if gamer comics can burn up cable in their pursuit of Leet jokes then Banished needs far more recognition.

Rak is the long-suffering malcontent anti-hero stranded on Strix 13 and Timbo is the robot optimist and using this dynamic the strip takes on a lacksadaisical adventure. Space Opera can provide a broad canvas for a creative team to look at anything they desire, for better or for worse, Smith and Anderson have not fallen into the trap of mere parody, they use science fiction as a origin, not a destination, and they have come up with a rather silly character driven webcomic that is consistently enjoyable.

(Musical Accompaniment: Be your own Pet - self titled - Raucous energetic indie spazz-out rock - perfect music for the monotony of a spaceship ride)

Dead Tree blues: Estancia

I never thought I'd see the day I'd reject a dead tree version of a webcomic but after yesterday I have come to that bridge and crossed it, gnashing my teeth all the way. Some strips are meant to be adapted to print, the Megatokyo website is merely an online holding point for the books, but Estancia, I am very much afraid, is not one of these strips.

Estancia looks like smooth anime on a computer screen, it looks good, smooth and fully shmik on screen, on paper it looks dull and childish, I like scrolling down as I watch the puzzles play out. It's a consistently good mystery/fantasy strip that works well online. I can see what Hammock are doing - they're trying to expand their empire, but from a reader's point of view it isn't much chop. if they had used callandered paper it might have worked better, it's just hard adapting of course, maybe it's just angst that one of my favourite strips has become more popular than I wanted. If you like drawn out - over the top - cyberpunk strips drawn in pure anime then I recommend looking at this webcomic.