Glare me to death: Scout Crossing

Speaking of Questionable Content and hipsterism; this strip is a little gem that is still suffering from birthing pains. The first 20 strips are nigh scenester incomprehensible as it moves from snide indie cat-fights into super-hero escapades with nary a blink. That might be part of the problem I had with this strip initially, it was the awkward transition between the 2 states or genres (the Nickleback gag at the start was both funny and close to ruining the entrance into high concept magical fighting).

I say almost because this strip has been hitting the right notes since then, what looked liked aimless angsty wandering about as a slice of life strip quickly became an action strip with a viable background narrative.

The superhero tag is the only genre that really fits here as webcomics are the last place to find an equivalent to the DC and Marvel juggernauts. The webcomic spin on this is a localised and personalised version of the epic battles that the major action print comics deal with an injection of snarky underdog rage into the proceedings.

If Scott Pilgrim is a post-modern love story with a video game sheen then this is a failed suicide girl model slowly picking off her scabs for a mixture of pain and pleasure.

This strip's creator has 2 other webcomics on the go so you can't fault him for sheer ambition and I certainly don't think this has diluted his focus because this strip is pretty decent. Admittedly it's only really getting started but I can sense the kinetic energy in place and the artwork can more than handle the hectic paces Scott Ferguson is putting the characters through as he traverses a strange mutated world.

This is self aware/self-conscious blue state indie snickering transitions into superhero antics and morality with the quickness. I don't know how these 2 states of being will co-exist; the humor / anger quotient can be somewhat weird and may take a while to even it all out. We're only just being introduced to the parameters of how this indie / superpowers fusion is going to work and I categorically have great hopes for this rambunctious misadventure.


Musical accompaniment: Blood brothers, crimes. Yeah kinda old but also kinda hyperactive train-wreck high frame-rate psychosis.

'Hey, have you heard of Broken Social Scene?': Questionable Content

Uh, maybe it's because I'm slightly tipsy but this is just something that got me kind of writhing & orgasmic: the idea of a rest or change in Questionable Content. Admittedly my purported remit is to look at new genre comics but this strip has been one of my staple webcomics for the last 5 years & the idea suggested here in today's strip of bursting out of the whole Dora/ Martin / Faye lust axis is kinda stimulating. I like the strip, it's comfortable,  like a stout or a rich sherry in winter's chill. But the idea of a strip that's effectively become part of the webcomic establishment moving its typically slow tectonic plates of narrative into unknown space kinda gets me off.
 
 I want some new characters to aid and abet my idiotic geekboy lust for Penelope & Marigold. Martin's whole existence in the strip has revolved around Faye and Dora and I'm hoping these recent strips that are accentuating the new directions this strip could flow into are the sign of things to come. This webcomic developed from sly inside gags about indie music into a full fledged twenty-something relationship paradigm. Holy fuck, I hope this strip here isn't just a meta-comic witticism about QC's continual pulsating patterns of lust and misplaced hope in Dora's cafe of doom. Considering the exponential increase in artistic talent Jeph has shown in his artwork since he started the strip in 2003, I hope this is a narrative reset, I hope to sweet everloving fuck that this is a new arc in the misadventures of Martin & his pervert anthroPC, Pintsize. Or even a romantic adventure between Martin & Pintsize, one can only live in hope.



Musical Accompaniment: Pavement - Slanted and enchanted, like there was any other choice? Well, uh, okay, to be facetious; maybe Mogwai's raging and bewildering Young Team.

All killer, no filler: Sinfest

I've always been out of the loop when it comes to webcomics awards, I only found out via the webcomic overlook. The fact that Sinfest has been twice nominated in the 2010 webcomic list awards got me thinking about the attrition rate of the webcomics I used to read.

It started in 2000, around about the time I started my addiction and along with Sluggy Freelance  and Everything Jake was always on my reading list. Now, if Sluggy Freelance has devolved into a weird cult with its own internal logic Sinfest is still somehow fresh. It just took me a while to realize it.


Sinfest was a strip I'd forgotten about. I'd previously thought it had hit a purple patch of recycled jokes       then there was a kinetic moment somewhere where Ishida seemed to hit his stride. I'm easily distracted & had put sinfest off my daily read list but it had since hit a metamorphoses moment where it's dealing with issues of faith and morality


Up to about 2005 the strips were gag strips with the occasional bit of continuity thrown in. The one-off jokes were never going to sustain a strip, it's not quite Cerebus syndrome but while I was away Tatsuya Ishida tweaked this strip into something steadily approaching awesome. The ongoing Romeo and Juliet dalliance going on between Criminy and Fuchsia is leading into the Devil as an actual villain, the inclusion of the pet comics into the main storyline, it's all meshing together & the continuity is a great attractor for me.

The author has a roving eye for source material and if webcomics suffer from an over-emphasis on the beta male geek ghetto, this strip has developed into far more of a comic meta-filter for the current memes buzzing around, even if it does show a soft liberal/ left bias Ishida is willing to poke fun at his own perceived inadequacies.

 So if some of it can still be gimmicky;  it's always been a tongue in cheek strip. The artwork, of course, is immaculately 'slick' and the inclusion of occasionally larger full colour pages is where Ishida shines  as an artist, working a vein of modern decadence in a post-manga fluorescence.

The gods must be crazy: Gastrophobia

Gastrophobia is a hyperactive incursion of ancient Greece shunted directly into your corneas. Visually, it's quite arresting. The gags are mainly visual with lots of accentuation and strong, fluid line work, Onomatopoeic sounds (thunk!!!) and way more motion lines than I've seen in years of reading webcomics. This is not a subtle strip. It's an overpowering splatter of pie to the face and is quite digestible.
       
If the street smart Amazon wonder woman Phobia is the muscular fulcrum of the strip then her son Gastro is the clown prince. The relationship between mother & son is a tad dysfunctional, more like slapstick partners getting caught up in 'wacky' adventures and 'hijinks'.  If you want a long term storyline with a consistent canon then this isn't for you.

But don't be too quick to dismiss this strip as its strength lies in its ability to jump quickly from idea to idea, breaking the fourth wall and evading any sort of seriousness. There's no pretense about anything too long-term, more like short connected bites of evanescent humor in an alternate version of ancient Greece.

The cutesy/surreal vibe might not be to everybody's taste but the characters are pretty endearing and the pop-cultural references hit with smart bomb efficiency.

A Gothique beatdown

I have bought myself a new laptop, my Dell was utterly munted and unusable so hopefully my haphazard update schedule will improve. I couldn't bloody type anything so now I've got no excuse at all. There's so many webcomic blogs that have fallen by the way side & I didn't want to become just another un-updated webcomic blog, a desiccated corpse online.

Just a little titbit, found another parody of the infamous cartoonist/ evangelist/ gibbering space cadet Jack Chick's cartoon strips, if the original Cthulu parody doesn't cheer you up then this certainly will or you clearly need some humour reconstructive surgery. Keep it real.

Transitions: Webcomic resets

A couple of resets in the webcomics I consistently read:

Scarygoround has wrapped up & Bad machinery is the reset option. It's the goofball antics of the younger set, not much has changed but frankly the dry,droll British wit is like a quadruple hit of espresso in a morass of nonentities creating furry obscenity.

Sore Thumbs has come back from the death of one of its main characters by restarting the Sore thumbs universe, though you have to use your knowledge of the central characters to get the jokes here, so not really a reset, more like a re-imagining, Battlestar Galactica would be the best analogy.

It's moved far beyond its original 'gaming webcomic' parameters some time ago, into pure sizzling joyous crazy, so this was probably the only way out, I'm not sure if this is an epilogue or a new beginning though this strip seems to carry its past a lot more than most, so many meandering useless story lines. I'm conflicted, the injection of colour is a welcome gaudiness but overall it looks more like an extended in-joke than a viable long term adventure.

A blood red smile: Lucid tv

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 humor 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 first strip since Sexy losers to make me simultaneously cringe and laugh out loud inappropriately. This is a piquant sort of psychosis, veering the non-sequitur through every moral quandary and out the other side, bloody and grinning. Keogh has created a sick like peon to surgery and its discontents, bitingly 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 and 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 and 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 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 .

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.

Losing my religion; Enter the Jabberwocky

This website is something I've come across in my travails 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 conspiracy theories that veer into a stratosphere of amphetamine mind-fucked faith).

Bile and contempt drips with every word but there's also a strangely fascinated undercurrent here at a world view that is so disingenuous and warped. It's the best rebuttal of Jack 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 & Fuzzy

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. it 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.