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Have you read Scurry by Mac Smith?
Yes, completely!
Yes, partially
No
I've never heard of it
"Scurry is a comic about a colony of mice struggling to survive all manner of beast during a long and strange winter."
Read it here!
WE INTERRUPT YOUR DASHBOARD WITH BREAKING NEWS
SCURRY IS BACK FROM HIATUS, AND THE ART IS AS AMAZING AS EVER
Are there any other webcomics reviewers you know and recommend?
There aren’t really a lot that stay active, sadly. Websnark was the blog that got me really into the idea of reviewing Webcomics (and introduced me to Narbonic), but it hasn’t updated all year and a lot of the archives are missing. There’s also the Webcomics Overlook, but that hasn’t updated in forever either and seems to think webcomics are dead.
A lot of other webcomic review guys are influenced directly or indirectly by Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad, which stopped updating in 2008, but popularized the idea of “Webcomic Reviews” as “Shitting on people’s webcomics” that filtered into sites like Shitty Webcomics and The Bad Webcomics Wiki. And reviews shitting on bad comics are, as Anton Ego put it, fun to write and to read.
But while there are a handful of webcomic creators that I can shit on without feeling bad because their comics have made them wealthy and successful (or they’re just bad people in some way), that’s kind of not the norm, and you’re either beating the same dead horses over and over (as I tend to do) or you’re just ethering random people who happened to catch your eye like a bully.
I’ve come to agree with Ego that the purpose of a critic is less to dunk on Bad Things and instead point their audience in the direction of the Good Things. Which doesn’t mean being Mr. Rogers, but it’s a lot less fun then dunking on Sinfest for the millionth time, so the only people who care about webcomics enough to do that also make webcomics and enter the community which can make being a critic awkward at times, so people tend to drop out.
Also, here are some Good Things
Drop Out
Kiwi Blitz
Latchkey Kingdom
Mokepon
Monster Pulse
Narbonic
Octopus Pie
Out-Of-Placers
Prequel
Scurry (On Hiatus)
Do you have any recommendations of a good fantasy webcomic with good art from 2015 to this year?
Well, there’s my own comic, Saffron and Sage. It’s a comedy-fantasy about four nerds on a rescue mission. It’s in the middle of an artist change, and it’s probably going to become a little more Legend Of The Hare-esque as a result over time.
There’s also Sleepless Domain, a comic about Magical Girl Idols solving mysteries. I really like the subtle worldbuilding and visual characterization here.
If you’ve a tolerance for furrier stuff, Latchkey Kingdom is a fun collection of lighthearted short stories in a fantasy world. The “short stories and slow continuity build” approach is a good one for new webcomic creators to study.
If you’ve got a strong tolerance for furrier stuff, Out-Of-Placers is about a dude who gets turned into a furry monster, and a girl one at that. Which sure fucking sounds like it’s a fetish comic, but amazingly it hasn’t gone there (yet) and is more about worldbuilding all these weird-ass fantasy races. I will say that it’s a bit, um, edgier than the other comics here (cw: there’s an attempted sexual assault), so it might not be for everyone.
[un]Divine is about a dude who kind of accidentally sells his soul to a demon and has to fight angels. This premise doesn’t scream “author fetish” like Out-Of-Placers’ does, but this is a notably hornier comic that seems to be meandering towards femdom porn, which is either a plus or a minus depending on if you want a big tiddy demon gf.
Cornucopia is another fun fantasy adventure, and it’s one of the more creative comics I’ve seen when it comes to word balloons, and it’s got some really fun and likable characters.
If you place a high premium on the art, then this one page of Scurry is probably enough to sell you on it, but it’s a pretty good story too.
Finally, ReTale is a comic with a really nice web site and you should hire the dude who made it to make yours. It’s about a girl working at a Walmart-type store in real-world Tallahassee. It’s the newest comic on this list, launching this year, and has a lot of crazy visual ideas.
I know I say this a lot
But the art in Scurry is so fucking good.
Pict, filled with righteous fury, is off on guest of revenge against the traitor who just killed her father and threatens to destroy her home. This is a big....a big....
Look at this adorable rage face! She looks like American box art Kirby!
Sorry, tangent. Anyway, Pict is marching off on and emotionally driven-
Now it’s even more adorable! Lookit her little fists! (ง'̀ᴥ'́)ง
I couched my criticism/questioning of Scurry expositioning the nuclear war, and man, this payoff was fucking aces. I fully expected Scurry to have a good reason to be doing it and I still feel owned for questioning it.
The three wolves of the apocalypse being a nuclear bomb, a nuclear winter, and one (1) literal wolf is a great gag, but it also imbues Erebus with a huge amount of dramatic weight. He’s not just a bad guy. He’s not the villain of this arc. He’s the bad guy, of the entire world
The one wolf who’s yet to do much on screen is being presented as literally the source of all the world’s problems, such that killing him will end the nuclear winter.
And obviously there’s no logical reason killing a wolf will cure a nuclear apocalypse, but Scurry is the kind of story where it probably will, or at least Erebus will die and then the weather will turn warm and was it a coincidence you decide. And this is such a cool and creative way to set that up. Even though this story is about a mouse trying to protect other mice, this has turned it into a huge epic clash of destiny for the fate of the very world itself without actually having to introduce any macguffins or change the story itself. That’s a fucking framing device, man.
I used to think Scurry was a comic you read for the art and the story was fine but not the draw. I’ve changed my mind. Scurry is fucking great.
I really like how, as Resher’s backstabbing comes to the fore and people are getting murdered left and right, Scurry is starting to get funny about it. I love Resher casually tossing away the push-pin “knife” in panel 4 like that could be anyone’s knife maybe it’s your knife did you ever consider that. I love this pathetic attempt to stall in the last three panels, from Resher’s plan being “we stall”, to his doofy expression trying to win over Pict, to how his plan to keep everyone everyone from finding out he killed Pict’s dad lasting about a third of a second.
We already found out who the Main Villain of the story is, and it ain’t you Resher. Your new name is Mid-Boss
