Webcomics Commentary

Webcomic news, reviews, history, and analyses by Maplestrip. Webcomics Commentary by Maplestrip is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Images are used under fair use and are not released under the same license.

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I started a new blog on Blogspot. I decided to do this for two reasons:

1. I wanted to generalize, because I find myself often wanting to write about topics besides webcomics, and as a result, I get into a minor writer’s blog and can’t write anything for here. Now I can write about everything that catches my interest!

2. Tumblr really isn’t made for long-form posts like the ones I do on here.

Now, I don’t want this blog to die altogether, so I would like to at least link every webcomics-related post I make on there. I just uploaded my first post on there, which is about Ben-Hur of all things.

I want to thank everyone who follows this blog, and I hope we can stay in contact!

Here is a link to my new blog: https://mabletree.blogspot.nl/

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Taking a look at The Webcomics Examiner

A week ago, I wrote about dead webcomics and fan attempts to keep them available for future generations. I mentioned in that post that all web content run the danger of becoming unavailable. The entirety of webcomic culture exists on the internet, safe for a few books that don’t nearly represents all that is out there. This week, I wanted to take a look at one webcomics review website that had been around for a long time and got quite a good reputation, but has since been taken offline. The Webcomics Examiner, founded by Joe Zabel in 2004, is now only available through The Internet Archive… well, most of it.

Let’s first quickly go into why The Webcomics Examiner is important. To do this, you only really need to look at its list of contributors: it includes names like journalist Eric Burns, webcartoonists Ryan Estrada, Shaenon Garrity, Cat Garza, David Hellman, Jamar Nicholas… just a lot of big names. Joe Zabel himself was also a successful cartoonist when he founded the website. The Webcomics Examiner was a place of “frank, sophisticated discussions of webcomics as a fine art,” according to the website. “The Examiner also engages webcomics’ finest artists, with interviews and roundtable discussions exploring their work and the medium at large.” The website even got praised by Penny Arcade. In short, it was an influential website in a time where webcomics still seemed like the future of comics as a whole.

Booting up the list of all 111 articles the website has, it seems their last article was an interview with Scott McCloud in 2006. Seems like we’re off to a good start! The article is a prime example of why I like this website. Zabel, as the interviewer, immediately sets the scene. “Every topic is extremely broad once you start to unpack it,” McCloud says, something every diligent webcomic fan can probably relate to. The two really get to the essence of what McCloud’s 2006 book is about in this article, but let’s move on to something a bit more webcomic-related, shall we?

In an article titled “The Best Artists Rarely Keep to a Schedule”, Zabel talks about Derek Kirk Kim, who apparently was a prolific webcartoonist in the early 2000s, having published a best-selling graphic novel. The review of his 2006 webcomic Healing Hands sounds really good. I’d love to be able to read it, though seeing as I can’t seem to find it online, I would probably have to buy it.

To grab another random article of the list, Michael Payne’s “More Than Cute”, a review of Count Your Sheep (which is still available!), starts off in a nicely romantic fashion. Payne lists off some well-known webcomics that didn’t manage to grab him right away, like Narbonic, College Roomies From Hell, and Clan of the Cats, after which he describes the background of Count Your Sheep and his experiences with it. What I like about this article from a historian’s perspective is how it captures the time it was written in. Payne talks about Count Your Sheep moving from Keenspace to Keenspot, winning Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, and how its author also created a webcomic for Girlamatic. This website is a goldmine for if you want to know what webcomics were like during this time.

The staff of The Examiner wrote some interesting original thoughts. Ever heard about the dichotomy of introverted and extroverted webcomics? I hadn’t. This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone write an actual article about music in webcomics, a topic that is pretty important to me. The website featured a few lists of best webcomics by year, which are pretty cool to look back on, especially because many of the listed works have since been forgotten.

Over the website’s two year history, its staff have conducted a few “Roundtables”, where each person weighed in on a certain topic, like, say, the future of the medium (you know, today). The variation of opinions is interesting. A discussion like this one on conceptual webcomics is great because all of the debaters get ample space to lay out their thoughts. Because they all have different backgrounds and different expertise, there’s a lot of interesting ideas presented in the article and everything is explained in a way that it should be understandable for a large audience. A two-part roundtable about the artistic history of webcomics featuring major names in the industry is a must read for any webcomic fan, in my eyes.

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned how historically valuable the comment section of each of these articles is. Alas, it is also a wave of information and I don’t have the time to wade through it all. I probably should if I’d ever want to write a book about this period of webcomics. I suppose this only proves further how broad a topic can be when you start to unpack it…

If you’re interested in the historic or artistic aspects of webcomics like I am, I hope I have given you something to read. If you just want me to talk about actual webcomics, I’ll be sure to write another review or something next week. Now, if you excuse me, I have a huge interview with Ryan North to read.

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Webcomic preservation

Let’s talk about webcomic preservation. I don’t have any specific points planned for this week, so I may as well just rant about something I have been dealing with a lot during my research on webcomics. The past week, I’ve been reading through a webcomic titled Life of Riley. Created by Aaron Sacharow and Dan Jaaren from 2000 to 2005, it is a very clear product of its time. Life of Riley is one of those edgy teen stories inspired by late 90s popular culture, early 2000s anime, early 2000s IT culture, all that kind of stuff. You don’t need much more than an image to know what kind of webcomic I’m talking about:

I’m only 150 pages in, but I can tell you now that the webcomic is, as you can probably expect, not the pinnacle of storytelling. I like how Jaaren uses infinite canvas techniques just to get the story beats at the end of each page, and I honestly appreciate these kinds of stories. After all, this is how we remember this period of webcomics the best, with works like Megatokyo and early El Goonish Shive. Then what hurts me is that, for a while, I would not have been able to read this webcomic. The only reason I am able to link to it today is because one good fan decided to download all of its pages and reuploaded them after the creators shut their own website down. If it wasn’t for them, Life of Riley would have been lost forever…

Another webcomics that started in 2000 that you may have heard of before is RPG World. Written and drawn by Ian Jones-Quartey, who went on to work for Cartoon Network and became co-developer of Steven Universe, RPG World has always felt like a legend to me. A webcomic created by someone who would later turn work on my favorite cartoon is pretty cool, after all. RPG World, like Life of Riley, stopped updating in 2005. Three years later, Jones-Quartey abandoned the website and the webcomic became unavailable to the public. When I started researching webcomics in 2014 and 2015, I was unable to find any public archive of the webcomic. I thought Jones-Quartey’s famous works would be lost forever.

I am in luck, however, as fan Bryan Howard decided a few months ago to rescue the webcomic by making his archive available to the public. I will finally be able to read a webcomic that had its protagonist show up as a toy in a famous Cartoon Network series! There are quite a few stories I can tell about webcomics that were downloaded by fans and reuploaded to the internet after its creators stopped keeping the original website up. Ryan Armand’s famous work Minus, which I definitely want to talk about in the future, is only available through archived versions. I was able to read the webcomic my blog’s avatar is from, 319 Dark Street, only because its creator reuploaded it to freaking Facebook for crying out loud!

I can’t stress enough how important this is for me. Works on the internet can be very fragile, and these examples show that pure fan love may be a stronger weapon to keep the history of webcomics alive than simply a creator’s will to keep their work around. I’ve been doing a little backing up lately myself as well, downloading all of Fluffernutters with the fear that it is a likely victim of this problem due to its small fanbase. I’m even more worried about the works currently displayed exclusively on websites like Tapastic or Line Webtoon, which have protections set in place against people downloading their images in order to diminish copyright infringements. If Tapastic goes down, who will have Your Local Non-Binary or Procrastination at its Finest on their hard drives? You could argue that these very niche, gag-a-day webcomics are not worth preserving, but they are still a symbol of our time. They are just as much part of history as Life of Riley was fifteen years ago. More famous webcomics, like Stutterhug, which I spoke about last week, are also at risk.

This has already happened. While reading T Campbell’s A History of Webcomics, I learned of the existence of Flight, a webcomic anthology series that was huge in the mid 2000s. Looking it up, I found out that its website is under construction and “will be back up shortly.” Looking through its official forum, I found a ghost town. It was sad, melancholic, to look through some of the last messages posted on there. I recommend having a quick look at the last two threads here if you want to understand what I mean.

In the end, I wasn’t able to find any good archives for Flight. I know the anthology was released in the form of multiple comic books, so I am glad to know that these works are still out there somewhere, but other webcomics, other communities, may not experience the same fate. Works die on the Internet if no one is there to keep them up!

This year, the official website of the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards was redirected to Keenspot’s website, making it only available through the Internet Archive. Next week, I’d like to talk about The Webcomics Examiner, an old webcomic review website by Joe Zabel that is now similarly exclusively available through The Wayback Machine. It’s only a manner of time before a website like Sequential Tart goes down, it seems. Websites are a fragile thing, and both webcomics and webcomic discussion only really seem to exist on websites. It only makes sense to have all webcomic news sources online, I suppose, as one of the webcomic’s biggest strength is its  world-wide reach. This is exactly why I made my blog freely available through a Creative Commons license: to preserve webcomic history for future generations.

I hope this post got you to think. Maybe you’re a fan and want to make sure that your favorite webcomic will always stay in existence. Maybe you’re a webcartoonist and want to encourage your fans to download your works. Maybe you don’t care about any of these things. Either way, I think the preservation of online culture is something worth thinking about and discussing :)

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Stutterhug

Samantha Davies’ Stutterhug has been going on for just over a year now, its first strip being posted in April 2015, and its impact is already surprising. With a subscriber count of over 20,000, it is one of the 30 most popular webcomics in Tapastic, and has been so for as long as I remember. Outside of TapasThis is interesting, because Stutterhug lacks any traditional comic qualities, be it plot, punchlines, or even dialogue. Stutterhug is almost purely aesthetic.

I find it difficult to explain what Stutterhug is exactly, as there is very little that I can compare it to. In many ways, I would compare it to older animation. The webcomic looks and feels a bit like Betty Boop. Each strip features an unbound number of “panels” in which one or more anthropomorphic characters are living or interacting. Each image shows a what could be seen as a key frame of the characters’ movements, so that they could theoretically be sewn together to create a basic animation, which people have tried to do actually. It’s perhaps somewhat akin to Randall Munroe’s “Time” strip, though much smaller in scale and with a very different aesthetic.

 What stands out to me is the abundance of whitespace and the rich use of the canvas’ size. Every strip is very tall, and though the image is wide as well, most of the width is used as a white margin. This gives Davies an enormous freedom of how to fill up the page. If you know me at all, you probably know that I highly respect this use of the digital medium.

So, what exactly is this aesthetic Stutterhug is going for? Well, every page does feature a very cute character story. These stories vary from two characters that are cutely dancing with one another to a simple fun gorgeous rivalry to a juxtaposition of how cheerful or mellow people can be. I can share a lot of these, as they all have this beautiful linework and coloring: it’s all just very pretty. The stories are always upbeat. If a character is down, they will either quickly find inspiration to carry on or they can count on their friends to help them through their troubles. Davies makes use of a lot of holiday imagery, especially around Halloween and Christmas, often giving the webcomic an a bit more fantastic vibe.

It is most definitely through this aesthetic that Davies is telling the stories that matter to her, whether that is by using literal imagery to romanticize the world just to make it a bit prettier or, well, one could probably not describe everything that is going on in this image in a thousand words. The webcomic is all about compassion, though. The differences in the anthropomorphized creatures’ appearances can often symbolize love breaking boundaries, while other strips are a bit more straightforward in their message. The whole webcomic is just a celebration of the power of compassion, friendship, love, even at its darkest strips. But it’s also a celebration of variety, of cherishing everything the world has to offer, everything life has to offer. It goes without saying that the webcomic is very optimistic, very cutesy, but that’s the whole point.

If you clicked on every link I’ve posted, you’ve already read an eighth of the webcomic, though if you want to read more, you can find Stutterhug on Tapastic or Tumblr. I hope my posts gave you an idea of what this webcomic is about and what it tries to do, and I hope you find reading or rereading some of the strips as uplifting as I did! I will try to update on a weekly basis again now I’m back from vacation, but we’ll see how successful that plan will be. Did You Knows may be off for a while, though…Still though, I’m back!

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I’m creatively dead... that being said, I’m going on vacation this month! I hope that will solve that issue!

This blog is going on hiatus for three weeks. I’ll be back with more webcomic goodness. I’m sorry I didn’t ready anything for the queue, but I simply can’t think straight anymore ^_^;

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...that Chinese webcartoonists have been using the internet in recent years to take aim at the Communist Party, creating a new account on Sina Weibo each time their old one is deleted? One person had his account deleted over 300 times. [1]

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Did you know...

...that in high school, before Ngozi Ukazu wrote Check, Please!, she wrote the screenplay for Hardy, which she described in an interview as followed:

"It dealt with addiction, externalized and internalized homophobia, the anxiety of graduating and feelings of failure--and I believe Eric "Bitty" Bittle was born to balance that out. Both are gay hockey players who go to the fictional Samwell University, but Hardy is brooding, quiet, and butch, while Bitty is nurturing, engaging and more flamboyant. I think Check, Please! was really born as a question--’could someone like Bitty survive in a world like Hardy's?’" [1]

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Writing webcomics, part 1

Last week, a friend asked me how to write a good webcomic. Some of the first things that came to mind were tips of tricks for writing comics in general (something I’m not an expert in, I might add). Of course, writing any kind of comic is quite different from writing literature (in the broadest sense), which was what my friend was familiar with. However, from this jumping-off point, I started wondering about what is unique to webcomics that no other medium has (which I suppose I always do, so go figure).

Story-based webcomics are the ultimate mix between comic strips and graphic novels. Webcomics are posted online on an update-by-update basis. Like a comic strip, a reader following your webcomic live will only read one page every few days. Traditional comic books, graphic novels, and manga don’t work this way: those are generally read one book at a time, possibly with longer waits in between books. If you want to keep an active and vibrant community, you have to think about how you are going to handle this difference.

On the other hand, you may gain new readers after having published hundreds of pages. These people will have to archive-binge their way through to catch up. Can you please both groups? Should you try to?

I have actually written about this topic before, as I helplessly tried to review Check, Please! Two-and-a-half years after it started. Check, Please! Is an interesting example, however, as it keeps its community invested in a somewhat unique manner. Besides the main webcomic, author Ngozi Ukazu regularly writes official tweets from the characters’ and answers questions on her blog. All this additional content keep readers devoted to the story.

This is also one of the worst things you can do for future readers, though. Unless archive-bingers are completely sold on the characters or plot by the time they catch up, they are unlikely to do all the research necessary to get to the same level of knowledge as long-time readers, who have been following all the supplementary content since day 1.

Let’s assume you want to keep readers invested, but either are afraid of alienating future readers or simply don’t want to create additional content like Check, Please! does. Well, you will probably have to make sure that almost every single update is interesting. Your reader always has to look forward to your next page. Newspaper comic strips may actually form a better foundation for this than comic books do, even if you want to write a story of epic proportions. Let me give some examples:

In Cucumber Quest and Paranatural (the former shown below), almost every page has at least one (1) joke and one (1) critical plot point. If you’re reading these two webcomics, you will know that every update will be interesting and fun. Have some extra examples of these two webcomics!

But it doesn’t always have to be comedy! Below, I basically picked a random page from Strong Female Protagonist. I just randomly clicked through the archive and picked the first one I came across that wasn’t a massive spoiler or an important plot point in its own right (which was surprisingly difficult). Notice how much conflict there is in just one page. Allison goes from annoyed to insecure to angry all in the span of a few pages. The page works very well on its own (it basically tells its own micro-story), yet has a simple cliffhanger that lets you know that the next update will prove at least just as interesting. Brennan Lee Mulligan writes like this a lot. Just let me grab a few more completely random pages. There’s something interesting happening in every update.

Cucumber Quest and Paranatural trade in comedy for drama a lot as well. Oh, something that may also keep readers invested and draw in new readers is making your webcomic meme-tastic. It may be a bit difficult to pull off, though.

Oh God, I’ve gone on about this for over 600 words without even reaching the point I wanted to make. Oh well, I’ve been in a creative slump recently, so next week’s post is going to be about archive-readers. I hope you’re looking forward to it like I am looking forward to the next Cuco Quest update!

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...that Jay Resop’s 1998 webcomic Neglected Mario Characters was the first sprite comic to appear on th internet? [1]

[webcomics-commentary]

A few fragile pages

Ugh, I don’t have time this week to review an entire webcomic. I have to finish up my essay for school! What to do, what to do. Oh well, let’s just review five pages instead.

Have you ever read the webcomic Fragile? It’s a highschool drama story written and drawn by M. Victoria Robado (or Shouri), who also does stuff for Pixie Trix Comics like Eerie Cuties and Magic Chicks. Regardless of whether you have or haven’t read the webcomic, you should be able to enjoy the first few pages of its seventh chapter, which were uploaded quite recently. I’m just going to go through them and say why I like them so much. Feel free to read along!

So, chapter 7 page 1: our heroine Emily’s alarm goes off. She presses snooze and goes back to sleep. Nothing particularly unusual here, for comics standards. I can’t think of any specific examples right now, but surely this is pretty common both in fiction and real-life. You can really see her tugging herself back into her sheets in the fourth panel. But, as page 2 shows, such things simply don’t last very long. Well, because this is a webcomic, it lasted for a few days from our perspective, but that’s beside the point.

Page 2 is probably my favorite page of the bunch, because it’s by far the most recognizable to me. How often has it happened to you that you were in the middle of doing something when someone tells you to do that very thing? It is the most demoralizing thing. These two pages alone get you to really understand Emily’s mindset this morning. But it gets even better.

Page 3 may be less relatable for most of us. I mean, standing in the mirror and trying to cope with your reflection, yeah I know what that is like, but having scar tissue like that is different. The past two pages worked to get you to sympathize with Emily, and this page then reaps a bit of profit from that. It’s easy to understand her annoyance here, and from a storytelling perspective, that is really great.

Page 4, then… well, I don’t know about you, but having a set of text messages you really don’t want to read is one of the most common feelings in my life. I’d run out of that room as well ^_^; The final page of this set (page 5) is similarly a relatable scene: not really listening as your parents are talking to one another about useless stuff, and getting dragged out of your own little world when you are called. I really like how that is visualized as well, with punctuation still visible as she can hear her parents perfectly well but simply isn’t processing what they are saying.

These pages not only give great insight into how Emily is feeling (which may have already been obvious from her depressed/snarky demeanor throughout the webcomic), but also work really well on your sympathy receptors. The pace may be excruciatingly slow, these five pages work because they are relatable. Reading one of these pages is like reading a “don’t you hate it when” kind of post, except with an actual narrative background. I just wanted to point out how well-done these pages were (and I couldn’t think of anything else to post about).

Whether Fragile is something I recommend… I honestly still don’t know. It’s been running for seven chapters and it still feels like the webcomic lacks any kind of depth. Emily is still very introverted, making it difficult to ascertain what exactly the webcomic is about, and the theme of teenagers trying to figure out what to do with their life is somewhat simplistic. I like the way it is executed, though! The story doesn’t shy away from throwing some emotional punches every once in a while. Furthermore, it is definitely something more grounded compared to the wacky fantasy you usually see. If you’re into that sort of thing, be sure to check it out :)

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...that Tayor C. (Monsterkind) was a fan of Zack Morrison’s Paranatural years before meeting and eventually dating him? [1]

[webcomics-commentary]

Squiddles!

Since I started this blog, I’ve mostly spent my writing time writing traditional reviews of webcomics (like my Strong Female Protagonist post last week) or describing webcomic-unique aspects (like my post about GIFs). However, I initially intended to use this blog to overanalyze specific moments or concepts in webcomics. It turns out it’s difficult to do that. Let’s try to go in a bit deeper this week. There will be some minor Homestuck spoilers in this one.

Squiddles Is a children’s cartoon intended for kids between 1 and 6 years old. The cartoon has since branched off into multi-media territory, including a popular toy line. The creator of the series was inspired to start a children’s cartoon by the eldritch horrors that appear in the eternally pitch-black sky of the dark gothic planet that they find themselves on in their dreams. At least, that’s what must have happened in the universe of Homestuck. Squiddles is, perhaps luckily, only fictional.

These creatures are, to use a cliché, fucking metal. They literally created the universe inhabited by the Troll species (which, in turn, created the universe we live in). Also, when one of these creatures died, its final cry killed off (to round it up) 100% of the Troll population, spread over their entire universe. They are literally referred to as “Horrorterrors”. Some “Derse Dreamer”, then, must have looked up at these monsters and thought “wow, I suddenly feel really inspired to write a kids cartoon!” It’s ridiculous!

The main reason I’m rather obsessed with Squiddles is because its existence is such a beautiful combination of baby fodder and Lovecraftian horror. The creatures really are cute, and you may be hardpressed to find anything particularly objectionable in the show. From what we’ve seen in the webcomic, it seems like Squiddles is much less creepy than something like Ren and Stimpy or Courage the Cowardly Dog. But even without having ever seen a single frame of the show, I know that it isn’t as pure as it may seem.

It is easy to fantasize about what the Squiddles TV show may have been like, in particular because its soundtrack can actually be found on Bandcamp. It’s actually one of the many pieces of Homestuck music that was made by its Music Contribution Team. Hussie sadly never used much of it, as Squiddles never took on a larger part of the plot, but there’s a lot of content to dig into. Most of the Squiddles! album is actually pretty cute: it’s better music than you would expect for a cartoon with such a young demographic, but it’s not unthinkable. “Mister Bowman Tells You About the Squiddles” is a catchy call-and-response song that could get anyone to sing along, and basically everything in the first half of the album is simply nice atmospheric cuteness. However, as you’re listening to it, the cracks begin to show. The backstory of villain Skipper Plumbthroat feels surprisingly real and sad, one of the Squiddles’ mothers was killed by a unicorn, and even songs like “Mister Bowman …” don’t feel entirely right. These are not the kind of things you expect from a cartoon with the same target audience as Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. The album completely breaks down at the end, with the “End Theme” including lyrics such as

“So let them get to bed right now, so they can rest and make cute sounds … Plumbthroat in his fishing boat – is gonna kill the Squiddles if they don’t get any sleep. So let them sleep.

“Because they will die if they don’t get any sleep.

“Plumbthroat has thing for killing insomniac jellyfish.

“It’s not a pretty sight.”

This is messed up.

But Squiddles! isn’t my personal favorite Homestuck album just because of its creepy background. It’s also genuinely beautiful, and I can’t stress that enough. “Friendship is Paramount” has this beautiful high-pitch melody with awesomely atmospheric bridges, while songs like “Tentacles” and “Lazybones” bring in some real character. “Ocean Stars” suggests an absolutely gorgeous water landscape like you expect it in a Shinkai Makato film, and songs like “Sun-Speckled Squiddly Afternoon” is the kind of background music I want to hear while just sitting in my yard in the sun chilling. Squiddles! has a lot of variety and is really memorable.

If Squiddles were an actual cartoon, I’d probably want to watch it. Just thinking about its eldritch repercussions makes me feel excited. It may be difficult to understand if you haven’t read Homestuck (it may even be difficult to understand if you have!), but this primitive-looking cartoon is one of my favorite things of the whole webcomic.

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...that  Michelle Czajkowski, creator of Ava’s Demon, has worked for both Pixar and Dreamworks? [1]

[webcomics-commentary]

Strong Female Protagonist

Spoiler-free.

Seeing as I’ve been talking about how unique the medium of webcomics is for weeks now, let’s take a step back again and talk about a specific fixed-canvas, traditional-looking webcomic. Though Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag’s Strong Female Protagonist doesn’t revolutionize any techniques or utilize the web in a different way, it really is worth talking about. Let’s see, where to start when writing a review? Well, let’s begin with what Strong Female Protagonist is about.

The webcomic takes place six years after thousands of fourteen-year-olds worldwide found out they had superpowers; it takes place in a version of the United States where teenage superheroes and supervillains have fought battles, the former eventually abolishing large-scale crime for good. Strong Female Protagonist stars Allison Green, an ex-superhero who realized that beating down supervillains and mobster bosses didn’t actually improve the world all that much. Twenty years old, not having been able to follow a formal education, Allison tries to figure out how to actually make a difference in the world, or better yet, how to make all the world’s problems go away for good. After all, if anyone is able to do it, it should be the strongest and toughest human being in the world, right?

What follows is a series of conversations, really. Strong Female Protagonist doesn’t feel dialogue-heavy, but it is all about people communicating ideas. To be specific, Allison knows and meets people with vastly different worldviews. With a superpowered generation hitting their 20s, a lot of young people have vastly different ideas of what is the right thing to do: how to improve the world. Meanwhile, Allison is frustrated, feeling unsure of what steps to take and disagreeing with everyone else’s actions. What Allison just really wants is for the world to stop turning until she finishes her studies and figures out how to make everything better.

Needless to say, Strong Female Protagonist deals with vastly complex themes. Feminist theory is primarily under discussion, but more personal to the characters are themes of self-sacrifice and the morality of murder, or simply how to make a difference when you’re young and unexperienced. Though the webcomic’s philosophical discussion is important, so are the characters. The cast features, as said, a large variation of differing perspectives. This results in a lot of conflict, but this conflict can vary from brawls to yelling to crying. The characters generally want to keep their calm, so watching a conversation go south can pack quite a punch.

Though the themes of Strong Female Protagonist are complex, this really isn’t the case for the conversations. Everything is really easy to follow and understand. I commend Mulligan’s writing for this, though it does feel a bit odd when university-level morality just boils down to something like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Sometimes, the characters add Greek mythology to the discussions for no real reason, and the conversations don’t become more interesting (or complicated) because of them. The topics sometimes feel a bit simplified, but another way to look at it is that the webcomic is accessible. Being able to see a character like Allison learn one step at a time keeps the themes grounded in a good way.

As for the visuals, there is a clear leap in quality over time, but the webcomic simply looks genuinely pretty. The web design is nothing fancy, just the way I like it. One thing that stands out in Strong Female Protagonist is its use of alt text, which is consistently brilliant. The few words are usually very comedic, but can sometimes surprise you by being thematically important.

I might go into more depth about some scene of the webcomic at some point. I think I really should, but I’d rather see my readers read the webcomic first so they know what I’m talking about. I can highly recommend it either way.

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...That webcomics in India are currently undergoing a “renaissance” and the medium is used to spread awareness on social and political issues? [1]

[webcomics-commentary]

Deathbulge Vol. 1: Prettier on the Outside

Every once in a while, I’d like to focus on what I suppose is the opposite of webcomics: comic books. After all, as long as the author wishes it, many webcomics make the leap to print at some point. This week, I’m going to have a look at my most recent buy: the first volume of Deathbulge.

In case you’ve never heard of Deathbulge, it might be worth checking out. The absurdist humor of the series is somewhat comparable to that of Cyanide and Happiness, so be sure to click that random button a few times :)

I’m such a great photographer. The thing about turning webcomics into comic books is that you have to deal with things that just aren’t possible in print. Luckily, web design is usually not too vital for a webcomic, though gifs are a bit difficult to communicate through still images. However, the most usual difference between webcomics and print comics is that the latter doesn’t have the benefits of the infinite canvas. Deathbulge, like many other webcomics, makes use of panels and pages that vary greatly in size. Some are just two panels, others are a hundred. This makes adapting such webcomics to print a challenge, and it may result in...

Whitespace. Well, I’ll be frank, I like the lay-out of the above page. The jokes get a lot of breathing room and none of the pages look too crowded. Other pages (usually consisting of three by three panels) fit on the page perfectly, though they still keep a nice, clean margin. What I like even more is the comic below:

The print version actually has an even better comedic timing than the original. Though it still constitutes as “one whole”, the split between the two halves make it so that the comic actually feels like it has two punchlines.

An abundance of whitespace in a comic book can be criticized, as you pay for every page. It’s somewhat awesome that webcomics result in comic books with a much cleaner feel. And to be fair, the book is already really cheap: just  £10 on the Deathbulge store for as long as the sale lasts. It’s quite a bit cheaper than the $25 I’m used to for webcomic books. Even its packaging was great, with the book wrapped firmly in bubble wrap.

In case you’re wondering whether you should buy this book, I’ll leave that choice to you. The webcomic is at least worth checking out, as the variation in its comedy should offer something to a pretty big audience of people. Another reason to buy this book is that Mr. Deathbulge added this amazing bookmark!

How can you say no to that?

[webcomics-commentary]

Did you know...

...that Randall Munroe (xkcd) currently owns over $800 USD worth of bitcoins? [1][2]