WEBCOMICS THAT AIN'T SHIT

A Webcomic review and criticism blog by James Buchanan.

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GOBLINS: LIFE THROUGH THEIR EYES

FANTASY/ACTION/DRAMA/COMEDY/TABLETOP/NSFW/ONGOING

Remember what I said a while back about introducing you all to comics that may not always be GOOD, but will at least be interesting? We’re doing that again. Though our comic for this week isn’t quite as niche as last week, it’s significantly more divisive among the intended audience. So! Keeping that in mind, let’s have a look.

Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes, by Tarol Hunt, also known somewhat unfortunately as ‘Thunt’, tells the story of… Well, tells 2-3 stories at once, most of the time. The core, and most well-advertised of which follows a goblin adventuring party on a quest through a world heavily based on the classic Dungeons and Dragons settings. The comic itself is one-part D&D jokes, one-part epic fantasy, and several parts deconstruction of some of the more problematic tabletop tropes. The goblins, archetypal mooks and XP trash for low level adventurers are here the focus, with a game mechanics inspired culture and mythology. The secondary plot follows a group of more classic adventurers, and their trials and tribulations both with and against the goblins. The third is a side-story with one of the goblins, but this is getting complex enough without going into every little storyline and sidequest. These stories split and reform multiple times over the comics continuing run, and at the moment, all three groups are together. More or less.

We’ll start with the strength of Goblins. On theme alone, it’s doing something interesting. No, it isn’t THAT unique to have a story focus on the traditional foes of a fantasy setting (See: Warcraft after the second game) but it’s still better than the alternative, in which whole species are treated as mindless goons, despite clearly having SOME kind of society. Goblins, from the outset, humanises the inhuman other, giving them a voice not granted in the original text. True, it starts as a largely comedic voice, with humorously named goblins having chatty little conversations about how much XP they’re worth, but within a few dozen pages things have darkened, and a party of adventuring player characters (more on that later) are shown to be, essentially, invading psychopaths.

Not in a very subtle way, sure, but it’s trying.

A running theme of the comic is that monsters, at least the uglier breeds of humanoids, are people. Not always nice, or even good people, but people regardless. The casual killing of goblins and their fellow monster races is treated by the ‘camera’ of the comic as a tragedy at best, genocide at worst. Much of this is presented in VERY simplistic, almost comedically exaggerated fashion. A villainous human carves insults into the skin of captured, helpless monsters, as is cheered on as a hero to his town. It’s silly, but it’s not that far off some of the stories presented in tabletop games… Or played out by roleplayers of a certain bent.

The comparison to actual games is intentional. One problem I have with the comic involves the treatment of the settings validity. See, while the characters within the world mostly seem to treat it as real, and are treated themselves as thinking, in-universe beings… Not all of them? Especially in the early comic, many references are made to the Dungeon Master of the world, a god who was, through a hint of in-universe justification, just the guy running the tabletop game this was all taking place in. The prayers of a character take the form of literally arguing with, and pleading to, the DM.

Which is cute! It makes for some fun jokes. But then you have the inevitable slide towards serious, dramatic stories and bam, we’re back in Cerebrus town, aren’t we? This keeps coming up. And no, Goblins doesn’t do a fantastic job of making the transition. Where the comic is now, it’s entirely dropped the more overt references to unreality, an earlier side comic literally killing off a trio of characters who were the most overt reference to players controlling beings within a game.

Another issue is the tone. Goblins is a dark little comic. Violent, gory, and full of tragedy, and while this isn’t necessarily a problem, it doesn’t mesh too well with the art and setting. The colourful, and loose artwork and oftentimes silly setting and characters doesn’t lend itself to the oftentimes VERY dark storylines. Abuse and even rape take place in a story where one character is rarely seen without a very fake moustache. None of this is impossible to make work, it’s just that Goblins doesn’t always manage. Be ready for some mood whiplash. Not for nothing is the memetic cry of the comics hatedom ‘I’M SAD!’. They’re not wrong.

And then there is the art. I don’t actually mind it, after the end of the first real chapter. Oh, it starts pretty weak, but it improves quickly, settling on a colourful and distinct style. Like Girl Genius, a comic I intend to write about soon, it’s a very loose and cartoony style. The humanoid characters have exaggerated expressions, faces deforming around huge mouths and wide eyes. It tends to look best on the monster characters, and many of the demons and truly inhuman beasts look interesting and distinctive… But it’s really not a style everyone will be up for.

Despite all that, I still enjoy Goblins. It’s deeply flawed, but has enough going for it to make up for that. Many characters go through an impressive amount of development, both in design and personality, and the setting itself is a fun take on common fantasy tropes. It can be jarring to have the mechanics of a game so often brought up by in-universe conversation, but like the largely more successfully handled version of this in Order of the Stick, you get used to it.

Goblins is worth a look. Be aware that the early comic is ugly as sin, and that the tone will change dramatically soon enough. Oh, and some of the plots take a long bloody time to get going. It reads well enough as an archive, but if you’re up to date, expect to wait a long time for those two-a-week updates to move the story forward.

Right. Roll for initiative.

-James

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BRAVEMULE

FANTASY/ACTION/DRAMA/VIDEO GAME/SFW/FINISHED

Sorry for the wait, had some writers block related issues, exacerbated by me weapons-grade laziness. But I’m going to make it up to all two of you with something interesting! Something bizarre! Something… Video game related! Buckled up kids, it’s time for a corner-case.

Bravemule, by Kevin Snow, George Kavallines, Eidolon Orpheus, and Andi McClure (largest creative team yet!) is a partially illustrated, partially animated playthrough of Dwarf Fortress. It focu-

Sorry, what?

Dwarf Fortress? Well, if you insist…

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress , by Zach and Tarn Adams (The Toady One and Threetoe) is a fantasy setting simulator with a couple of insanely complex little game-modes attached. It’s amazing, and I love it. It’s not for everyone, as evidenced by my continued difficulties in sharing it with friends, but hey, the works you tend to find the most valuable and important also tend to be the ones with a very specific sort of appeal. It ain’t for everyone, but boy-howdy is it for me. This is a game where you ‘control’ a colony of mad alcoholics trying to eke out a living in a dangerous world of horrible monsters, poorly planned magma smelting projects, and cannibalistic elves. And as with all things complex and niche, it has some weird and wonderful little fan projects. Oilfurnace is a good example of a short little comic based on a failed (and they tend to be failed) fortress. It sums up the experience nicely.

Anyway.

Bravemule is a little different. Chronicling the rise and fall of the eponymous fortress, it gives us a story of madness and violence, greed and avarice, mules and moustaches. Presented as a series of personal journals by the dwarves themselves, it was based on an actual playthrough of the game, with details and elaborations inserted through the writing. And what writing! The dwarves of Bravemule seem to have an… Odd mode of speaking. Or thinking. One-part antiquated, one-part total insanity, the voice of the dwarves of Bravemule helps to make the madness of their actions feel more coherent. The creatures who write down their thoughts like this probably WOULD be driven to gibbering by the presence of an octagonal room. They call everything that isn’t a dwarf or a favoured pet some kind of elf, all forms of fighting and killing are called murders. At one point, a ‘farmer’ murders a crop by drowning…

Or, y’know. She waters the plants.

The art, while not used heavily, comes in several flavours. From the detailed character portraits and occasional comic panels, to the ‘in-game’ images produced by a mod that turns the minimalist 2D art of the game itself into 3D stills. It even has a few animated, and musically enhanced updates that cover the most dramatic sections of the tale. Overall, it’s pretty great stuff! Sure, the word-to-image ratio probably doesn’t let me paint this as a webcomic on some kind of arbitrary technicality, but what we do have is good stuff. If I’m counting Erfworld as a webcomic, this isn’t THAT far from the mark. Still, if you’re not looking to do a lot of reading, maybe look elsewhere.

The biggest barrier for entry to Bravemule is, of course, context. Without some knowledge of Dwarf Fortress, it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense. Well, the basic thrust of the matter is easy enough to follow, but not the details. This is a comic for, and about, Dwarf Fortress. It’s very much a fan-work, with all the provisos that come with it. You won’t miss out on everything if you go in raw, but it will certainly be a less-than-complete experience. Many of the little jokes, lie the image above, only really tracks with an understanding of the game. And it’s really not an easy game to understand to begin with. I recently spent over an hour walking a friend through his first fortress, and while we made a lot of headway (and got insanely lucky with metal deposits, damn!) the poor guy is a dozen fortress failures away from really getting it down-pat.

Simply put, there is a LOT of work needed to really appreciate Bravemule to the fullest. If you don’t have that going in, you may not get much out of it. That’s OK! But the warning is important. It’s certainly not a bad little comic, but it isn’t one I can freely recommend like some others. And not just for that reason, either. The actual content of the comic is pretty dark. Nobody gets out of this story, and none of them have a good time on the way there. The relentless, almost whimsically grim feel of the game has been well-portrayed, and any connection you feel to individual characters will not be rewarded. They’re nasty, cruel little bastards these dwarves, and they mostly get what’s coming to them.

Still. If any of that sounds good? Could be worth a look!

Strike the earth! And, of course…

Matul Remrit endures!

-James

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DRESDEN CODAK

SCIENCE FICTION/SCIENCE FANTASY/ACTION/PHILOSOPHY/SFW/ONGOING

Today we’re looking at a comic that surprised me. I read it, in a previous form, years ago. I decided to go back, examine the reasons I stopped following it, and talk about why I liked it so much for a time before… Essentially giving up on it. But, to my surprise, in the years since, it dealt with a lot of those old problems, taking it from a more nuanced discussion about the value of something I can’t wholeheartedly recommend… To a more well-trodden path for this blog: It’s good, but it has problems. Oh well! Not a bad problem to have, right?

Dresden Codak, by Aaron Diaz, isn’t so much a comic as it is a pair of comics loosely connected by a single character, Kimiko Ross the mad scientist/transhumanist, and some themes. And some side comics and standalone pages. And cheesecake. Originally a pretty surreal, logic-avoiding collection of little stories about philosophy and transhumanism, it eventually came to a more dramatic head in the Hob storyline, which injected a sudden burst of grim meaning in a familiarly ‘Cerebrus’ like pattern of comedy-to-drama we see so often in this silly little medium. Unlike most, it kind of pulled it off! Not perfectly, of course, as we’ll get to in a moment, but better than most. The Hob storyline led into the current run of the comic, a more standalone, serious story called Dark Science that is, in most ways, a fantastic bit of fiction.

Shame it took so long to get going.

I ‘gave up’ on Dresden Codak a few pages into Dark Science. Not for any quality reasons, because the writing and visuals of the comic were, at that point, fantastic. From early enough in the run, even pre-Hob, the design of the world has been exemplary, with beautifully composed artwork of a complex and information-heavy style. Here and there the actual panel layout could have used work (and still could, it can be a little unclear what order one is meant to read the panels) but the actual content was gorgeous. Still is, even more so. The comic was beginning to deal with some real questions that I’m partial too in particular, like transhumanism, the scientific method, the rights of machines.

But it just took so fucking long. Those full-colour pages, pretty as they were, didn’t move the plot forward much, and took so long to make that we often had to wait more than a month between updates, which only got worse as Dark Science marched forward. Eventually I just stopped checking back in, crossing it off my list of currently running webcomics, tossing it into the ‘abandoned’ pile with a number of other dearly departed comics.

So, I was surprised to find that, at some point in the last few years, that became less of an issue! Dark Science is still not a terribly lengthy work, currently at 78 pages, but these are dense pages, and the story is moving along and a steady pace! It’s still a strange, almost Dadaist take on a coherent narrative, but it’s a huge improvement. In Dark Science, Diaz seems to have finally gotten into the swing of a longer form work, and things are blooming!

That was a lot of description without actually going into why you should care, huh?

I’ll make it simple: Dresden Codak remains one of the prettiest comics out there. The pages are a delight of clean-edged, well-shaded designs. The characters are all well realised and, not counting a few older bods dropped from the face of the comic, characterful and interesting. Rich and vibrant, it’s hard not to be caught up in the look of things, even when the plot is meandering. There’s some fanservice here, of course. Kimiko, our protagonist, spends plenty of time showing off some skin, which is fine. There isn’t actually anything wrong with a little fanservice, so long as it doesn’t get out of control. She’s a fun, if somewhat muddled little protagonist, skin and all, and she has WAY more to do in the plot than just look pretty. Hell, the scenery is more pornographic than any single character could ever be thanks to artistic skill alone. The cheesecake is there, but it’s not really a big problem.

Diaz’s transhumanist leanings are also a plus, at least in my mind. What can I say? I loved Bank’s Culture novels. I own a copy of the Eclipse Phase rulebook, and plan to run a game with it one day. I buy into the whole ‘humanity is more than a meat body’ thing. So having a comic that goes hard on the idea that changing your form is a good thing, that cyborgs are people and robots COULD be people? That’s cool! I dig that. The story could be a little more solidly focused on those points, but hey, lightning fights with evil scientists is also cool, I guess. Diaz can be a bit simplistic when it comes to a few anti-faith stances in the comic, which can be a little grating, but that’s something I’ll put up with for the sake of staying ‘on message’.

Go read Dark Science. Hell, you may as well read the whole comic, start to finish. My favourite things in all of Dresden Codak actually came before Dark Science; Dungeons and Discourse, a single page comic about a philosophy flavoured tabletop game. There’s a lot to love in there.

Get to it.

-James

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BICYCLE BOY

POST-APOCALYPSE/DRAMA/ACTION-ADVENTURE/SFW/ONGOING

Y’know what’s a weirdly underused setting for webcomics? The wasteland! Given how many video games and tabletops are set in such post-apocalyptic settings, Its surprising to me that so few webcomics are set there. Some are, of course, and I’ll almost certainly review another one eventually, but the class ‘Bombs went off a generation ago’ style of irradiated hellhole just isn’t as popular as one would think given the rest of our fiction.

Bicycle Boy, by Jackarais, is one of the few I’ve read that IS set in a freshly post-nuclear setting, and it’s a refreshingly basic and understated one, which I tend to prefer. The story follows an amnesiac (I know, I know) Cyborg who later is dubbed ‘Poet’, and his eternal companion… A kind of shitty bicycle he found on waking from what appeared to be a skirmish. Later joined by Machk, a scout of sorts from one of the nicer settlements out there, he must figure out who he was, and why he was rebuilt… And although that sounds INCREDIBLY generic, it’s actually a lot of fun!

Bicycle Boy has a few big strengths that keep the pretty simplistic premise from being an issue, and they’re ones we’ve seen before in other comics I like, but feel the need to explain before suggesting. The art is good, the character designs are distinct, and the setting has a solid and believable of feel to it.

We’ll focus on that first. This isn’t Fallout, overflowing with nonsense and (admittedly fun) comedic depravity. The world of Bicycle Boy is still freshly ruined, mere decades since a massive atomic war. Societies are reforming, people are living lives not fully ruined by the war… More or less. It follows. It feels correct, in a way most ‘and then they were tribal savages again’ post-apocalypse settings really don’t. It’s a setting you could see returning to something like modernity in a generation or two… Were it not for one major issue that the plot looks to be focusing around: Radiation. Not magic radiation that turns people into mutants and monsters, just the regular kind. That gives you leukaemia. And most people in the setting are apparently starting to die off from it, one way or another. That’s a realistic, and intimidating issue to handle in this sort of story, and I’ll take it over any army of mutant rad-roaches.

The art is another plus. Like many of the comics I like, the style of Bicycle Boy is loose and impressionistic. The backgrounds in particular tend to make use of strange colours and exaggerated light and shadow, which is almost as striking as Jackarais’s complaints about their own use of colour are hilarious! As time has gone on, the art has become a little more wild and dynamic, though the early, softer looking style was still damn pretty. It’s been a subtle shift over the years of the comic, but when you START with high quality, full-colour artwork, you don’t need the same art evolution as say… Drowtales.

…I’m going to have to talk about that comic someday. Whuf.

Now, Bicycle Boy has some issues. The early chapters in particular are pretty rough from a plot and writing standpoint. Dialogue in particular takes a while to get into full-swing, with early conversations reading like blunt info-dumps for the reader rather than any kind of human interaction. This gets better, of course, and the current chapter has far more solid writing. The characters feel more rounded and real, which is good, given that we’ve been introduced to a bunch of new ones in the current chapter. Just struggle through the bit where a pair of high guards explain the political situation to each other with an audible thump of dropped narration.

And then there’s Poet… Poet isn’t my favourite. As a character, he’s believable enough… Just not terribly likeable. He lies, he steals, and he doesn’t know why he does it. He also stutters in a faintly anime-esque show of moe-hood. He complains a lot, and it’s not a character trait I love in a protagonist. Machk, the other half of the pair, is a lot better, being a strong and interesting sort of guy who does a lot less sulking. I can’t say that Poet is really a BAD protagonist, but he’s not a particularly strong one. Keep that in mind.

The story of Bicycle Boy is still developing, now entering into what feels like an important chapter. Updated at a reasonable ‘one a week’ pace, it’s an easy comic to follow, and an easy one to like, which is a plus. Come for the cool artwork, stay for the developing characters and interestingly grim setting!

It’s not that long yet, so you might as well get to it.

-James

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UNSOUNDED

FANTASY/DRAMA/NSFW/ONGOING

A while ago I mentioned having an informal list of best-looking webcomics. We’re going to be talking about one of those today, a fine little story that lays much of its appeal on being gorgeous. Oh, there are other reasons to dive in, of course! But I know I only started reading in the first place after being shown a choice page of beautiful art. And it wasn’t even one of the NSFW pages!

Unsounded, by Ashley Cope is a weird little beasty. It’s a fantasy comic that dials the fantasy up to 11, and does so with plenty of blood, gore, and naked chests… Without being too gaudy or unpleasant. It is however, a little hard to follow. The ‘main’ storyline, such as it is, follows Sette Frummagen and Duane Adelier, the classical pairing of a girl and her zombie. Sort of. On both counts. She has a tail and no navel, and he’s a bit brighter and flashier than your average undead, or as the setting calls him, ‘Plod’. What are they doing? Hard to say! It started out as a pretty basic ‘Going from point A to point B while keeping secrets from each other and the audience’ sort of thing, but a few disasters, reveals, and colourful acid trips later that has become a little muddled. Still, it’s an enjoyable romp their on, dark as it is.

Other storylines follow the war between two kingdoms, the revenge(?) of a widower ‘Plat’, and the travels of a sorcerous, and quite charming ‘Blacktongue’. Expect to read a lot of that sort of thing. Call a Rabbit a Shmeerp is in full effect here. They have their own words for just about any kind of magic or monster, and while most follow easily enough, it can make returning to the story after an absence a little confusing.

But you’re not here for that, are you? Because as I mentioned above, Unsounded is one of the best-looking comics out there. Even when it isn’t terribly clear why we should care about a certain scene, I IS clear that we should look at it, and appreciate how pretty it is. Cope can fucking draw. Like… Really though. All the humans and… Former humans in the comic are instantly recognisable, with appearances that tell us a little about their personality, which is always nice. In some ways it resembles another artistically favoured comic, The Meek, in that the style itself is very clean and crisp, with expressive faces and solid lines, but where The Meek mixes realistic colours and faintly Disney expressions together, Unsounded has a far less measured style, with both the designs and their execution often canting far into the fantastical, with colours to match. The afterlife of Unsounded, visited more often than one may think, is a gorgeous riot of colour and shapes, full of strange creatures and stranger small gods. It looks a little like Zebra Girl’s other world, though rendered in glorious colour rather than stark black and white. More interestingly, Cope likes to mess around with her pages when magic is happening, with images going beyond the bleed, or in recent updates, even including animated sections that shift and move!

I’m saying I like it.

The setting of Unsounded is a bit of a mess, but it’s clearly meant to be. The main players are pretty universally terrible people, ruling fucked up kingdoms full of awful people. Plenty of people in-universe would disagree, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Cresce is a socialist kingdom with… Well, with a queen which is a little odd, but not necessarily a bad thing. Working with wicked demons and warmongering sort of is though. Alderode practices a caste system that seems to be based on human sub-species, and happens to be where most of the (pretty clearly not a good thing) magic gets done. They are ALSO warmongering. Basically, it’s a shitty place to live, so shitty that a number of characters have taken to a hatred of the gods for putting mankind in such a garbage world.

I mean, it’s a pretty world, but it’s also overflowing with dangerous, bizarre monsters. Like the art style, the setting is… Colourful. Possibly a bit too colourful, as like the language, not all of the cute little changes to the basic fantasy setting are strictly necessary. They don’t all actually add to things. But then, I don’t much care of China Melville’s style of ‘fucking everything, so many things’ fantasy, so this kind of ‘full’ world may not be for me. It wouldn’t work as well as it does if it wasn’t so well rendered, and the way they treat the undead is brilliant. Zombies being used to replace slavery/jumpstart what looks a bit like an early industrial revolution! Glorious.

Unsounded is pretty good! Yeah, it has some problems, not the least of it being that Sette is a pain and centre character for the early story. I dislike children in fiction, they always tend to deform the plot around them, even if Cope does a good job of actually treating Sette like a character in a story first, and a child second. Bad things happen to Sette, and she deserves quite a few of them. I’ll have a discussion update (eventually?) about children in fiction to explain that point. Anyway, issues aside, Unsounded is great. It looks fantastic, and even an over-filled world has a lot of cool stuff to show you.

It even has a bird with tits! Wow!

Unsounded is worth your time. Go give it a little.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

Stormclouds over Canberra

Sorry to those who follow this dumb thing I do, but we're gonna miss this week's update. I'm at Phenomenon this weekend, and while I COULD set up a late update tomorrow,I'll probably just be sleeping. So! Instead I'm just gonna go finish off all this rad roleplaying. It's HELLA TIGHT.

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XKCD

COMEDY/SCIENCE/MATH/CURRENT EVENTS/SFW/ONGOING

Yeah, this is probably the least required review I’m going to do here. Like, more so than the inevitable Homestuck discussion we have in our future, if only because  have so much less to say about our current comic. It sort of... Sells itself pretty well, huh? Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pounding...

XKCD by Randall Munroe isn’t so much a comic these days as an institution. A fountain of memes and t-shirts, reaction images and over-used quotes, it has firmly carved out a place in internet culture. Is it pretty? Not particularly. Is it funny? Often, but not always. 

You know what XKCD is? XKCD is clever.

It revels in that cleverness, never afraid to put out a comic for a niche audience even within the already constricted niche of ‘people who read a webcomic largely about statistics and coding jokes’ and often gets a chuckle anyway, even from those who only half got it. Importantly, it’s self aware with that cleverness. Inclusive. Often enough, it serves to introduce interesting concepts to the reader, or elaborate more deeply on something we’re all sort of aware of, but haven’t ever really sunk our teeth into yet.

The real meat of the comic is just nerd shit though. Going in, you can expect all the academia jokes you’ll ever need to be dancing before your eyes, coming from the invisible mouths of featureless stick figure people. Some of them with hats! A saving grace is that Munroe seems to be a pretty widely interested scholar, happily mixing references to hard science and literature with pop-culture ephemera and the odd bit of dada-ist rambling. The comic has a bit of everything, which I’ve always liked from joke-a-day comedy comics. Keeps things fresh and interesting, when you know the next update could be anything from a joke about celestial mathematics to nerd etiquette. 

XKCD is... Minimalist. While early pages sometimes included attempts at more detailed, realistic art, the comic rapidly settled on a simple stick figure style of drawing, though as time went on more colour and artistic flair did steadily sneak into the updates. It’s still rough and simplistic, but you can’t ignore the charm in that. It feels like something scribbled in the margins of a work-book during a long, boring lecture. 

Well, so long as your sketches sometimes include lengthy graphs and lists, and the occasional high-quality map of a fantasy world. 

A more recent addition is What If?, a bit of side-content in which Munroe answers viewer emails about science, maths, statistics, and random nonsense. I actually tend to prefer these to the mainline comic, as the longer form answers interspersed with comic panels and little jokes allows for a more informative, weirdly educational experience. I’ve learned things from What If? which is more than I can say of most comic. 

A high-point of What If involved figuring out how many fireflies it would take to be as bright as the sun. And what would happen to the poor creatures were they all in the same place like that. Messy. 

Both comics taken together, as I think they must be, XKCD is certainly worth a look. I mean... You know this. You read XKCD! I know you do, because everyone does! Maybe not all the time, maybe not every day, but still. 

But just in case, I’m gonna link to it here one more time. 

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

MANLY GUYS DOING MANLY THINGS

COMEDY/VIDEO GAMES/FILM/ONGOING

Well, that didn’t last long! Back to the pure comedy comics, and one of the better ones at that! Honestly, I used to think I was mostly a drama comic guy, until I had to go through what I ACTUALLY read and noticed how much of it was like our topic today! See? This is a learning experience for all of us!

Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, by Kelly Turnbull (AKA Coelasquid) is the point at which all steroids converge. Think up an over-muscled, stupidly grim and serious hardarse character in film, TV, or videogames and chances are they’ve turned up in MGDMT. That’s sort of the point. Commander Badass, steak-and-American-soil grown supersoldier from the nonspecific space future has retired to the nonspecific pop-culture present to run a temp agency for terminally macho dudes. It’s pretty fucking dumb. But it’s so, SO good. Joined by Jared, the worst pokemon trainer, Jonesy, the chillest mess of a young woman around, Canadian Guy, the Commander’s bootleg clone (Possibly) and everyone from Ganondorf to Kurt Russel, MGDMT pokes loving fun at every trope and series even loosely connected to the tongue-in-cheek title of the comic.

It also sort of has a running storyline, but it’s out of focus, and mostly just an excuse to have the Commander and Jonesy cutely flirt and for feathered raptors to say ‘WERK’ a lot. It’s mostly a joke-a-day sort of format, with few ‘storylines’ lasting more than two or three updates, many only lasting for one, with the occasional longer segment focusing on some larger parody or joke.

Art-wise, it’s a strong little comic. Detailed and distinctive, it’s always clear who the parodied and lampooned characters are meant to be. Well. So long as you’re at least passingly aware of games, film, and TV from the last few decades. Pop-culture nerds like myself have a lot to enjoy, though I’m sure many of the gags would fall flat without that base-level knowledge. Pokemon and Zelda show up a lot, and like our last comedy webcomic, expect to be reading a lot of jokes about the game currently being played by the writer. Turnbull’s own characters are just as clear and interesting as anything being subjected to a good razzing, to the point where enough people assume The Commander is from something that she’s had to put a disclaimer in the About page of the comic. 

Apparently any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality. 

Dude was made from steak, guys. C’mon. 

Alternatively cute, badarse, and hilarious, I really can’t say much against Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. Update schedule could use a little kick in the pants, perhaps? But Coelasquid has been good about explaining slowdowns and absences, all with pretty good, and/or unfortunate explanations. Can’t really hold it against her when some of the updates a black and white, single image jokes given some of the shit she’s gone through over the seven-or-so years of the comic.

And remember kids: The punchline is ‘machismo’

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

WILDE LIFE

URBAN FANTASY/SLICE OF LIFE/DRAMA/SFW/ONGOING

So, after a week spent away with the girlfriend (sorry, should have given warning about missing that update. I’m sure both of you reading will forgive me, in time) I thought I might write a little something about a webcomic she introduced me to. And hey, it’s not another joke-a-day comedy!

Wilde Life, by Pascalle Lepas starts by focusing on the newly upturned life of the eponymous Oscar Wilde (Not that one) as he picks up sticks and moved to a town in the middle of nowhere literally called ‘Podunk’. The names aren’t subtle. I mean, Oscar is a writer, the obvious witch who rented him his new house is called ‘Barbara’ Yaga, and his new friend, the redheaded werewolf, is called Clifford...

Yeah, I know it says drama up there, and not comedy. The names are just kind of silly. 

Wilde Life soon turns into the sort of modern fantasy story I tend to like, when the supernatural is transported from dark fairytales to a world like ours without fully overcoming the more normal trials and dramas of life. Sure, it’s a big deal that Oscar’s new roommate is a ghost from the 40′s who needs his help to listen to audiobooks, but for Oscar, the familial drama that comes from having run away from his old friends and family is far more pressing and diverting. 

Until some real monsters start showing up, but those can wait. 

The main strength of Wilde Life is in the tone of the world being created, and the emotional quality of the characters. They’re a bunch of flawed, but believable and mostly likable people, human or otherwise. Clifford may be THE WORST (as even the alt-text will happily inform you) but you can see where the angry child is coming from. It’s a little lacking in villains, as even the recent arc focusing on an evil, or at least self-serving witch was still mostly about Oscar and Co, but that tracks for a character-driven sort of story like this. 

Artistically, I have little to say that isn’t positive. Wilde Life starts solid and only gets better, with a realistic style that helps to make the splashes of the supernatural all the more vibrant and strange. Lepas can draw some gorgeous sunsets, and equally flashy displays of magic.Some of the action can feel a little disjointed, but that’s a minor fault for such a combat-light story. 

Wilde Life is currently on a very short hiatus, looking to return to our screens about a week from now. 

Which is enough time, I think, to get up to date. 

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

AWKWARD ZOMBIE

COMEDY/VIDEO GAMES/SFW/ONGOING

I seem to be doing a lot of joke-a-day comics lately. I may have gone a little hard on the dramatic, story-driven comics when I first started out, and we’re paying for it now by... Doing a bunch of pure comedy webcomics? This isn’t much of a problem. Oh well. This is, however, our first look at the real stereotype theme for webcomics: Video Games!

Awkward Zombie, by Katie Tiedrich is the BEST video game webcomic. Probably. I mean, I tend to like it most, though that may be due to similarities in the games Katie and I play. Easy to appreciate a joke when you know where it came from and why it’s funny. Still, biases aside it’s still a great comedy webcomic, with a wry and sarcastic sense of humour that’s easy to appreciate. Named for an early World of Warcraft comic, Awkward Zombie tends to change focus based on what the author is playing at the time, with a few extra comics thrown in with fan scripts and input from her friends and family. As such, it tends to present one game for a number of strips, or alternate between whatever she’s been playing on her couch and on her handheld. We’re currently neck deep in MGSV and the new Fire Emblem, which is an... Interesting combination.  The comic also includes standalone comics based on Tiedrich’s real life, often involving her cats and/or boyfriend (now husband). Of note are a set of ‘one panel every hour’ updates done in a sketchy, pencil-on-paper style. 

Cementing her style early on, Awkward Zombie enjoy a cartoony sort of style, very clean and easy to recognise. You’ll know which character is which, even when not directly copying the aesthetic of the game in question, like with the Animal Crossing or Pokemon games. One game that will forever show up in the comic is Smash Brothers, as the early comic focused so heavily on Tiedrich’s exaggerated takes on the extended cast. Her Marth in particular has drawn a lot of attention for being drastically different to his Fire Emblem self, something a latter comic referenced to great effect. 

Awkward Zombie, like all joke-a-day comedy webcomics, tends to require a lot less explanation than a longer form dramatic comic. The jokes are good, the games focused on are well suited to a little good-natured ridicule, and the art is pleasant, if not breathtaking. Hell, even the quick jaunts into the creator’s personal life tend to be well executed. Don’t expect the sort of ‘in the news’ freshness of content you can expect from Penny Arcade. Tiedrich seems more than happy to take her time with her games and comic.  We’re still getting updates about MGSV for fucks sake. Good thing Kojima games are so well suited to comedy.

Go get a little awkward. 

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

THE PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP

COMEDY/SURREAL/NSFW/ONGOING*

*Technically. The Perry Bible Fellowship is rivalled only by Dresden Codak when it comes to good webcomics with terrible update schedules. This isn’t helped by the removal of several comics from the collection. We’ll get more PBF someday. Can’t possibly say when.  

We’ve only looked at two other joke-a-day comic so far. In general, I don’t read many of them. I enjoy them, and have one or two more to bring up here eventually, but I tend to spend more of my time enjoying things with plots and characters as a focus. Still, it’s good enough, and distinct enough to have caught my eye.

The Perry Bible Fellowship, by Nicholas Gurewitch is fucking grim. It’s good! Really good, actually, if your taste in comedy includes surreal nonsense, saccharine parody, and pitch-black gallows humour. That said, it’s not going to be for everyone, be they pro or anti Skub. The usual formula begins with something chaste and good, often childlike in tone or content, that is soon revealed to be significantly less family friendly in a final, often pitch-perfect twist in the tail. Some strips are direct parodies of brands, shows, and other stories but others are more general. You’ll find everything from deals with the devil and riffs on human sacrifice to parodies of breakfast cereal mascots and subverted classic jokes. There’s a lot of variety to be found in the somewhat abridged list available on the PBF site, even if most, if not all share a certain grim darkness in their humour.

Good thing I like my humour with a touch of the gallows about it.

Artistically it’s all over the place. The ‘basic’ style of the comic makes use of bright colours and simplified human figures. Those blobby humanoids do much of the heavy lifting for the non-parody strips, along with ornamenting the main-page of the website. They’re kinda cute, really. Other strips show off more developed artistic ability, from the highly realistic greyscale sketch shown above to beautiful full-colour pages done in an almost painted style. Such quality is often there as contrast to the subject matter, like when a beautifully realized depiction of a battle at sea is used in a joke about a Captain Crunch knockoff. Nothing helps the surreal quite like uncomfortable realism overlaying the absurd, and such strips tend to be the best Perry Bible Fellowship has to offer.

And here’s something: You’ve already seen PBF content. Plenty of memes have been spawned here, from the Skub/anti-Skub divide referenced above to the word ‘Weeaboo’ which didn’t originally mean a Japanese culture nerd. It’s a damn quotable little comic, often mined for reaction images.

For the record, I’m pro-Skub, and I’m not afraid to say it.

The elephant missing from the room, however, is the self-editing on display in the comic. If you’re returning from an absence to have another look at PBF you will likely be surprised to not see comics you remember. Gurewitch has made a habit of removing strips for a variety of reasons, many of them understandable enough. This is a real danger for the more biting of parodies and darker jokes. It’s easy to want to take back such jokes with some hindsight, but as a practice it never really sat right with me. I’ve always preferred to see those strips preserved for better or worse. Still, I can’t fault Gurewitch for cutting content from his own comic.

So long as you’re willing to endure a few hits to the childhood, I heartily recommend The Perry Bible Fellowship. Word-salad name aside, it’s a rioting good time that is bound to produce a few good laughs, if somewhat grim ones.

Go on then. Have a laugh you can feel guilty about.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

DAISY OWL

SLICE OF LIFE/COMEDY/SFW/ABANDONED 

I don’t believe I’ve covered a comic like this yet. Our first abandoned comic, not counting my digression about poor, mostly-lost Carpe Chaos, it’s not one of the best examples of a comedy webcomic out there, but it’s one I happen to enjoy. Not going to pretend it’s GOOD, all things considered, but there are some fun gags, and a few almost poignant moments.

Daisy Owl, by Ben Driscoll is the story of an...Unconventional family. Daisy and Cooper, a pair of young -8 and 6 respectively, I think, it’s not made very clear- children adopted by an owl called Benjamin Owl. Like, an actual owl. Mr. Owl’s friend Steve Brown, a bear, serves as the fourth member of the group, serving as something of a second parent for the two kids. Sometimes. When he’s not making super honey at the honey research lab. 

It’s a weird comic, OK?

Over the comics limited run the foursome embarked on a number of bizarre little adventures, often with little to link them beyond some random happenstance and a few good jokes. You’re not here for the plot, which is for the best, because there really isn’t one worth mentioning. The SECRET HISTORY of Daisy and Cooper is revealed in the final completed arc, but for most of the comic it’s just two kids being weird and fun, and Steve’s dating life. 

The artwork is pretty basic. Near the end of the comic, a number of coloured, high-quality single images were included, but for the most part the style is simplistic and not terribly detailed. You can tell who’s who, but it’s hardly the best looking comic out there. That said, it has a certain charm, and while most of the art doesn’t do much work, the actual pacing of strips is pretty fantastic. A LOT of good work is done with ‘beat panels’ and breaks in the dialogue, and much of the comedy comes from awkward, uncomfortable silences peppered through the nonsense. 

Said nonsense borders on the surreal at times. The odd dreams of characters are involved, as are the imagined adventures of the two children. On top of that, the reality of their world is just as strange, one where a honey lab, run partly by an enormous queen bee, kidnapped a half-brown, half-polar bear cub and raised it to be the worlds greatest honey scientist. Also ‘space babies’ are a thing. The characters take this all in stride, casually accepting that yes, the futon is evil, putting out ‘frustration particles’ at dangerous levels. 

I like Daisy Owl. Shame it had to end just as a new story-line was starting. Apparently Ben Driscoll stopped enjoying the creation of a comic, which I can respect. Better to bow out before it became a real trial, and the comic itself began to really suffer. Though he’s said he wants to return to it one day, that was about 17 years ago now... So chances are, we’ve seen all the Daisy Owl we’re gonna get.

Which is a shame, really. 

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

SCARY GO ROUND

SLICE OF LIFE/COMEDY/URBAN FANTASY/SFW/FINISHED*

*But then it started again. And then stopped again. Also a different comic started, that was related to it, but then that turned back into... Look, the MAIN story is done.

Unfortunately, despite what the image I’ve chosen suggests, our Easter-ish update actually has very little to do with the holiday. That was a happy accident. No, we’re not reviewing a comic about a homicidal French Easter Bunny and the parodic president that loves him. No, we’re dealing with something a little less cogent. We’re dealing with Bobbins 2. 

Scary Go Round, by John Allison, is a very British sort of webcomic, both in setting and in humour. It’s a bizarre but utterly charming sort of nonsense that has always appealed to by BBC influenced comedic leanings. What can I say? I like my comedy dry. And surreal. And occasionally raunchy? 

So the story, such as it is, follows a group of young-ish people living in a small English town where some seriously weird shit utterly fails to distract them from their own nonsense. Expect a lot of dull surprise and snarky comments to be pointed at danger, with significantly less gravitas than even a fan of the Culture novels would expect.

That’s a deep cut. Whatever.

After attempting to tell the story of a pair of bitchy college girls, Rachel and Tessa, the comic soon refocused on Allison’s existing Bobbins character Shelly Winters, who is a total loon. Fun though. Alongside Tim Jones (Mad scientist), Amy Chilton (Punky sass-machine), and Ryan Beckwith (Slacker with a heart of slack) she bumbles her way through some utter stupidity and supernatural shenaniganery. Eventually, much of the comic was given over to Esther de Groot, (Goth extraordinaire) and Eustace Boyce (’The Boy’) alternating and interacting with the main cast. It’s lovely. Seriously, the shit they have to deal with is just the right kind of ridiculous, be it deals with the devil and Alistair Crowley, or an attempt to return a fishman to the sunken city of Atlantis. There isn’t really a main plot to speak of, just various weird adventures in the lives of them and their friends, but that’s not really a problem. With characters this charming you can coast on just... Throwing odd shit at them and getting a reaction.

Scary Go Round is a distinctive looking comic, perhaps more so in the early days. Allison started off with an outline-less, highly digital looking style which looks far better in practice than my description would suggest. Near the midpoint of the comic he transitioned into a more naturalistic, traditional sort of style which I find equally pleasant. I tend to like sketchy styles, and it matches the whimsical nature of the story being told nicely.

...Actually, ‘Whimsical’ may just be the best word to describe Scary Go Round, and the rest of Allison’s comic output. The feel and humour of Scary Go Round eventually transitioned into a new comic, Bad Machinery, which served as something of a timeskip for the main cast, and refocused on younger characters for a sort of schoolyard supernatural mystery adventure. It feels much the same, and probably deserves to be included in this review. After all, it did eventually just turn into ‘part 2′ of Scary Go Round. Can’t really complain, both are a lot of fun. 

If you need some silly British comedy in your life, I would heartily recommend giving Scary Go Round a look. It’s a fun romp with just enough depth to back up all the comedy.

Happy Easter. Ish.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

MARE INTERNUM

ACTION ADVENTURE/HORROR /SCIENCE FICTION /SFW/ONGOING

I was going to wait before doing this comic, given the last one, but fuck it. While such thoughts are still fresh in my mind after being pulled into a full re-read after my review of The Meek, we’re going to have our first sequel review! Well… Not sequel. From the same creator, though! Won’t see that again till I gather the strength to tackle M.S.Paint Adventures…

Mare Internum, be Der-shing Helmer is the OTHER comic being made by the creator of The Meek, the two being updated more-or-less at once, which is impressive given the quality of both comics. The story follows Dr. Mike Fisher, a horribly depressed member of a Mars colonisation effort still in the early stages. Mike, recently fired and staring down the barrel of a return trip to earth, attempts to commit suicide, only to be interrupted by the arrival of his replacement, Bex, the first full colonist on the station. This all turns academic when both Mike and Bex are caught in a cave-in, and find themselves injured and separated within the still-living artificial ecosystem hidden beneath the surface of the red planet, the ‘Internal Sea’ of the title.

From there, things get… Weird. Body horror and existential dread, encounters with strange creatures and biological machines. The last Martian, a charming fellow named Kallakore, serves as the source of much of what Mike and the audience knows of Mars and its history, and he’s great. First Mike, then Bex, also show us their backstory through flashback, which isn’t the subtlest of methods, but it’s pulled off well.

There are a few reasons you should care about Mare Internum. It’s always nice to see a harder sort of science fiction setting, and in most ways, the comic is pretty damn hard. The colony itself feels very believable, as does the other human tech on display. The Martian stuff is, of course, a little less so, but it’s portrayed well enough that it slides. The art, too, is similar to The Meek in style and quality, though the science fiction setting allows for some very nice images, the cavern that houses the Martian ecosystem being especially colourful and pretty. The Disney-style expressions don’t fit quite as well here as they did in The Meek, and Mike’s features tend to look a little odd from some angles, but that’s a minor gripe when he also has an ‘alien toaster’ growing out of his face.

Oh, yeah. Trigger warnings.

Look, this comic is pretty grim. It deals with some heavy shit. Depression and suicide, abandonment and sexual abuse. Physically, we get to see injuries and body horror, as Mike is steadily invaded by Martian biotech, often with some damn squicky results. It’s not for the faint of heart by any means, and there’s more existential horror on the horizon. This won’t be ending well, not for everyone.

Still, I’m a fan. The darker tones and themes are handled well, with dignity and restraint. That probably won’t help you if it’s stuff you can’t handle, but when you’re emotionally dead like me, it just means good writing and interesting characters.

I don’t have as much to say about Mare Internum. It’s newer, and I said much in my review of The Meek. But you really should be reading this one.

Just don’t go swimming.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

THE MEEK

ACTION ADVENTURE/FANTASY/NSFW*/ONGOING

*Some toplessness, but mostly covered up by the environment, and not played for sex appeal. No nipples, either. It should be fine, but do keep it in mind that the first chapter has some mild nudity.

Today we’re looking at one of the reasons I started doing these. Having thought that it had been abandoned years ago after a difficult hiatus, I eventually decided to read over it again. I was, to say the least, pleasantly surprised to find it had since continued, and that surprise led to a lot of webcomic talk between me and my friends, about comics we were reading or should read. It helped put me in the headspace to start talking about this stuff. And thankfully, it did so by being good enough to warrant a little check in years after I thought it lost.

The Meek, by Der-shing Helmer doesn’t so much tell a story as it does three, all linked together, one hopes, when they eventually cross. For now, they give us different perspectives on the world and the strife ahead of it, along with being diverting little adventures on their own. Split into chapters, each focusing on one story before repeating, The Meek begins with Angora, a mysterious young woman living in the wilds and gifted with natural magic, and Pinter, a drunken mapmaker drawn in to her adventure. The second chapter focuses on Luca deSadar, emperor of the north, and his family as assassination draws him once again into war, with the help of a demonic presence that has had some part in putting Luca on the throne in the first place. The third chapter follows two thieves, Joli and Jai-avary, southerners looking to cross the border and likely get in yet more trouble along the way.

They’re not terribly connected yet, aside from Angora’s ‘grandpa’, some kind of dragon spirit by way of salamander being connected somehow to the demon pushing Luca to war, and how the oncoming conflict will affect the lives of Soli and her youthful ward. But they all give us more information about a world that I find deeply interesting. A little like our own between the great 20th century wars, still recovering from their first and rushing headlong to the second, all mixed up in ethnic and religious borders that can only make that inevitable crash more bloody and complex. A low-fantasy setting, the only magic displayed has been Angora’s plant-based power, and Luca’s ability to, uh… Hurt people. It’s pretty gnarly. Highly unpleasant.

What really draws me to The Meek is the art. Der-shing has captured a style not unlike Disney, before they began using CGI animation for their movies… Or life action remakes, which I’ll not comment on here. Designs are, if anything, more expressive and unique than anything the House of Mouse put out, at once more realistic while still making use of large eyes and exaggerated expressions. It looks good, and every character is unique and identifiable. Given some of the names thrown about, that’s probably for the best. When needed, the art can become truly breathtaking, especially when the hidden magic of the setting breaks through, giving Der-shing a chance to really show off. Plus, it’s colourful! I’ll always give extra points for pitting colour in a realistic setting. Real isn’t just brown. Even in Soli’s chapter, set in a desert, splashes of colour help keep things interesting.

It has problems, of course. Though I really dig the way Luca’s dialogue is handled (he speaks the main language of the world as a second language, and makes mistakes when flustered) it isn’t immediately apparent that THAT is why he misses words. Likewise, a dream sequence in which he speaks with his younger self is a little opaque, both me and a friend I convinced to read the comic had to go back a few pages to double-check that was going on. Otherwise though, it’s easy enough to follow, and given the large break that happened mid-comic, some early weirdness is to be expected.

A bigger problem or at least complication is the update schedule. It’s not a fast moving comic, largely due to the second comic Der-shing has been making, the equally good though vastly different in setting and theme Mare Internum. I can hardly fault her for running two high-quality works of fiction at once. Still, be ready for a wait between updates.

I suggest giving The Meek a look. It’s an interesting world full of interesting people, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the plot is going, or rather, where they’re all going. Only time will tell.

Here’s hoping for Soli putting Luca in a headlock.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

DISCUSSION: The Petting Zoo

DISCUSSION/GENERAL

I seem to have a bad habit of adding something to a review, either a link or tag, and later regretting it, or at least pondering it enough to turn one of these discussions into a defence of it. I did it with Kill Six Billion Demons, and today I’m doing it with Ruby Quest. Still, at least it keeps an example fresh in the mind and close-by on the dashboard for ease of access. So! What have I hidden behind a clever little title?

Today we’re talking about furry webcomics.

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I’m not really bothered. Far be it from me to kinkshame anyone. I hardly have a high ground. No, this isn’t about the validity of what people are into, I couldn’t care less about what gets you off. This is a chat about what counts as furry content in webcomics, and, I suppose, media in general.

OK, so if I’m not worried about it, why do I care about throwing it in as a tag beneath the name of the webcomic I’m reviewing that week? Same reason I put Queer up there, or Un/finished. It’s not meant to be a warning label to help people avoid content, it’s more for the sake of organisation. Somebody feels like checking out my recommendations by genre or content? Cool! Easy to throw up there, easy to slap a label or two on a comic. And I think ‘furry’ is enough of a thing to warrant it. There’s a whole sub-genre of furry webcomics out there, and I’ve read… Some of them? I mean, I like to try anything once, so long as it isn’t utterly hateful at first glance. Can’t say I followed many of them for long. I’m not turned off by the presence of animal people, but I do tend to find most HEAVILY kink based comics a little trying. They’re not all Oglaf, sadly. And yes, a LOT of furry webcomics are closely affiliated with the sex side of things.

So! What counts? Well, for one thing, Ruby Quest probably doesn’t. Not really. Yes, it does include some two legged house pets walking about, but it’s not Dan and Mab’s Furry Adventure. If anything, it’s more an artistic choice made by the artist to make characters identifiable in Weaver’s simplistic looking quest comic. This lines up with a trope, funnily enough. Furries Are Easier to Draw talks about a lot of this stuff. People are hard to get right! Have you tried drawing a human face recently? Damn. Cats are easier. Cartoony, stylized cats anyway. That’s not just webcomics, either. The majority of the long-term ‘cast members’ of the Warner Bros. stable are animal people of some stripe, as are the non-film Disney characters. They’re not just easier, they’re more memorable. Mickey Mouse probably wouldn’t have lasted so long if he was a Betty Boop style deformed human.

So, do I tag such comics with the furry label? The TV Tropes page itself claims that most comics aren’t a product of the Furry community, simply artistic choices. The creator of one of my personal favourite works, Lackadaisy, has said that she chose Disney style cats as her ‘people’ for artistic reasons, without aligning herself with the furry fandom, and a quick look through her additional artwork makes it clear that this isn’t the result of any inability to draw humans. I tossed an asterisk on the Zebra Girl furry tag, as only one storyline, and one recurring character involved or was a sort of borderline animal person… Well, until Sam gets a human girlfriend who gets magically turned into a fellow rabbit person. So… OK, fair enough. That probably counts. 

Do I just change the tag? Would ‘Anthropomorphised Animals’ be too much of a handful? It does cover a wider range of characters. I can’t imagine most people consider Wily Coyote a furry, but he’s certainly an anthropomorphic animal. Same for Goofy, if not Pluto. Same for Ruby. But I’m not going to do that, am I? See, I made my bed here, and I’m going to sit down on it, playing on my phone till 3 in the morning. I’m going to go on using the furry tag, and complain about it every step of the way.

Still. Worth thinking about, right?

Now, keep an eye out for my upcoming discussion about fetish comics. Probably. Eventually.

-James

[webcomixtape-blog]

RUBY QUEST

ACTION ADVENTURE/HORROR/QUEST/FURRY/SFW/FINISHED

It’s possible I’ve been limiting my reviews to the easy marks. The more classic ‘Webcomic’ webcomics delivered in the basic style. So, today we’re going to look at something a little different, something that only fits into the loose definition of a webcomic because this is my stupid review thing and I do what I like. That said, it’s a good one… If you can stomach it.

Ruby Quest by Weaver may need some explanation. Considered one of the first and best of /tg/’s Quest Threads, Weaver took reader input on the forum as one of the main sources of plot and character progression for the ‘comic’, with readers acting much like the players of video games, putting input into the machine and watching what happens. Well, you know. Within reason. Poor Weaver was subjected to a lot of grief at the hands of certain members of the board, either due to their choices in input, or complaints about the ‘rails’ the story seemed to be running on at certain points.

Because obviously, control of a story can only ever be a yes/no sort of thing, right?

That story, regardless of where each component was sourced, follows Ruby, a young rabbit borrowed in part from the game Animal Crossing. This is about as far from fanfiction as you can get, as for the most part, all Weaver took was the artistic style, as translated into a simplified line-art style. Poor Ruby wakes up locked in a box within the bowels of an eldritch facility called the Metal Glen, some kind of asylum, or hospital, or test lab. With the help of the readers, and fellow inmate Tom the cat, Ruby must make her escape as things get… Dark.

I’ll be avoiding spoilers more than usual. Some of the reveals are fantastic, and while I usually don’t have much time for obsessive spoiler defence it’s probably worth it here.

It’s not always a pretty comic. Weaver’s style is simplistic, as it must be for quickly drawn responses to the input of readers. But it’s expressive and charming in its simplicity, and the animal features of the petting zoo people are a great way to figure out which character is which based on ears or facial shapes alone. Later though, as things get… Intense the art develops, growing more complex and striking. Colour is used masterfully, as are digitally edited images included in some pages of the Quest. The writing, such as it is, varies in quality. Much of it isn’t too polished, as it was written in the spur of the moment, often in a variety of styles, but it gets the point across. The RPG-like nature of the plot does mean whole pages are spent doing little of note, but as the story progresses and Weaver gets better at wrangling his readers, thing smooth out and tighten. Some of the language and audience commands can get kind of salty, but as the actual art remains pretty safe, I’m keeping that SFW tag up there. Some random 4chan poster shouting about ‘Schlicking’ is manageable, one hopes.

Ruby Quest is weird. Cute animal people are put through the wringer physically and mentally. There’s body horror here, and gore, and eldritch horror. That it happens to cute rabbits and cats hardly lessens that blow, but if you have the stomach for some low-fidelity blood and bits, I would give it a look. If nothing else, that gore and horror is there for a reason beyond simple shock value. It feels like it means something.

Maybe Ruby Quest won’t be your cup of tea. It’s not a regular comic, not even close, and the theme and look of it will turn a lot of people off. But if you’re going to try out a Quest, I would suggest starting here. Weaver’s later work, Dive Quest, may be a little easier on the guts, but it ended with a whimper, where Ruby Quest ended with one hell of a bang.

“And what became of cat and hare?

Did they break free to purer air?”

Well. You’ll just have to take a look, won’t you?

-James