I read...
Something Positive, but I don't know why.
Phil likes Tacos for vague reasons.
PvP because it has its moments.
Dinosaur comics because DINOSAUR COMICS, MAN
Schlock because the setting is great, even if the jokes aren't always.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal because it is repetitive, but funny.
Able and Baker is sometimes funny.
Starslip Crisis has great characters, good setting, and can occasionally be funny, which Checkerboard Nightmare rarely was.
Ugly Hill's setting works less well than one would expect, but the art is still pretty cool. Worth reading for the facial expressions alone.
Questionable Content for...fuck...I need to stop reading emo-crap-drama comics like QC or SP.
God Mode because I'm hoping it'll get funny at some point.
Errant Story because it's a pretty nifty long-form tale.
Chopping Block because Chopping Block.
Alien loves Predator because it's fairly innovative and damned funny.
Banished is still evolving, but looks pretty cool.
Bruno the Bandit because it remains fairly cool, after all these years.
Last Days of Foxhound because it is very, very funny, even if you're not all that into Metal Gear Solid. Art sucks, humour rocks.
Penny Arcade because it, also, is sometimes funny. Not always.
Concerned because Halflife humour is funny even if you don't play much halflife. And the expressions on Frohman's face are so well-done. Great sense of timing and humour combined with a nifty style.
Inverloch because, like with Errant Story, I'm a sucker for long-form fantasy.
Girl Genius because the setting deserves to have a kickass cRPG made out of it. It's good even if the author seems to have a tendency to create situations to show the main character in her underwear.
Shortpacked is like It's Walky but with less gruesome deaths, overly heavy dramatics and convoluted storylines. Fantastic short jokes, funny and interesting characters for the occasional longer tale.
Ctrl Alt Del because it's like Penny Arcade but with fairly interesting characters. Getting predictable of late. I'm thinking they're out of ideas.
Dr. McNinja is one of the greatest ideas ever but somewhat poorly executed. Still gets a good joke in there, but the storylines get a bit too chaotic for my taste. Needs to work on the update schedule, too.
Goats has been reborn with the recent potato/Mayan calender storyline. It's been getting some great jokes and funny plottwists in there, and the switch to a kind of SF-setting doesn't seem to be hurting it much.
Sore Thumbs can be surprisingly funny both in its political "everyone is stupid" humour and its shorter jokes (which are often funnier). Not much to do with gaming.
Sam and Fuzzy is probably the best of the bunch. A great long-form comic with consistent characters and fantastic black-and-white art. I'm not a big fan of its recent storyline, but up until Empire Sam and Fuzzy combined a brilliant but unconvoluted and carefully planned plot with fantastic humour. Top-notch.
Gunnerkrigg Court again with the long-form fantasy. The art's actually pretty good and the setting fairly original and nifty.
Perry Bible Fellowship for the occasional hit of brilliance.
Nodwick because, while it's less funny than it should be, it's still pretty funny.
VG Cats never got bored with it, but I'm damned close.
Zap! isn't really that funny or, come to think of it, extremely interesting, but just enough to keep me reading. Good storyline full of tension, at least. The romance is starting to tire me.
Yamara because old DnD comics are fun.
Simulated Comic Product is like a downgraded version of the Perry Bible Fellowship, but still damned good.
Goblins works for me. Nice long-form fantasy with slightly flawed art is inching towards the predictable. I'm waiting to see how it develops.
Stuff Sucks either gets interesting soon or goes in the trash can. Fairly boring.
Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is intelligent, interesting, not too arrogant, it's actually really well-done and not very difficult.
Copper is cute.
Girly used to be amongst my readings. As were Marilith, Krakow, General Protection Fault, Landis...others. They dropped out because THEY SUCK.
(...)
Hurray back to this thread!
I'm still stacking up webcomics. For me, they are the new age funnies, I only read sports in my actual newspaper, so the normal morning ritually would actually include a jaunt over by the International Herald Tribune and...WEBCOMIX.
Let me be clear on one thing,
Sam And Fuzzy is still - bar none - the greatest webcomic in known history. Hands down. Warning, linking to spoiler-rich comics here: Believe character you care about,
drama that works
because of its light-heartedness, sharp drawing style, an imaginative and rich setting, occasionally hilarious jokes and moments of absolute hilarity (
squip) and what still impresses me the most - clearly planned, convincing and not-convoluted storytelling. The few webcomics that try storytelling end up with an ugly, convoluted mess. SaF clearly plans ahead and paces itself. With the round up of the last big arc (Love and War), a user pointed to episodes over a year old that clearly hinted to the conclusion of the arc. You just don't see that. We're currently rounding up Empire, a 2.5 year arc.
Anyway, on to newnewss:
Quite a few comics joined my "Dead to me" folder, the place where I keep comics that I read for a while before realising they were crap, or that used to be good but turned into stupid, dramatic messes.
Wapsi Square has been in there forever, and one glance at the front page reminds me why. I mean,
this is just stupid, plain and simple, and the dude still can't draw human anatomy for shit.
Questionable Content joined a while ago and no surprise, the characters are unrealistic idiotic whinos, I hope such types do not exist in real life, but regardless if I want a contentless soap series I'll just watch Days of Our Lives thank you very much.
Anders Loves Maria joined quickly after I started reading it. The drama is tiring very quickly. Moreso because none of the characters are even remotely likable, and it was to my great shock that I suddenly realised I'm supposed to care about them. Since I don't, it's gone.
And, considering the pattern of drama above you should see this one coming...
Ctrl+Alt+Del. Naturally. Fuck you and your fucking spontaneous abortion storylines, Buckley. That bit was already pushing it, but when he decided to
include the robot in the drama in a laughably hamfisted way I knew I had enough. G'bye, CAD, you won't be missed.
The other unsurprising addition is
Erfworld. I mentioned above I think the author is making a Walkistake, throwing a lot of useless uninterest characters and information at us and trying to get us to follow a storyline that requires knowledge only he has. It's also not funny, and not very imaginative. I can't be bothered to make the effort anymore, hence Dead to me.
One comic definitely edging towards Dead to me is
Striptease. You're wondering why?
You're kidding me, right? Could you be any worse at dramatic moments, Chris Daily? This is just laughably bad.
(the above comic would probably make a good template for the next campaign against alec, tho')
On to the good stuff...
First, hilarity because it is unintentionally funny:
Out There, a comic about a wild spontaneous girl who picks up a Zen Buddhist hitch-hiker while moving to her internet boyfriend/to work in a friend's cafe. Sounds good right, why not? Here's the funny bit: the wildest thing we've seen this wild spontaneous girl do is...er...play poker and...errr...drink...and dance in a club, I guess. For a wild spontaneous girl, she might be one of the most boring persons ever. It's funny when an author who has no idea about living it up tries to write a character who does. Highlight: in one of the strips the characters share the wildest things they've done in their lives. 'course, the author has no idea what wild things could be aside from drawing webcomics so instead of saying it the characters write it down and show it to each other. Intentionally hilarious ++
Which is kind of like
Least I Could Do. Both comics show very little realisation of what real life is like, and the funny thing in LICD is not how little wildness there is but how unrealistic it is. LICD is basically a really juvenile fantasy stuck together, the "ideal life" of the average teenager. Childish, but oh so much fun.
But that's an old one, of course. A new one, and staying in intentionally hilarious country:
95 gallons by Andrew Bilitz. Now I can't really figure it out, but Andrew is either not very smart or a pretty young guy. He keeps spouting these very basic truisms as if they're some kind of wisdoms, these painfully obvious observations on humanity as if they're clever wisdoms. 95 gallons (and, of course,
Phil Likes Tacos) are endearing because of that naivety.
I only recently discovered
Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic and it's fantastic, even if it is getting more and more convoluted and uninteresting. Great characters, tho'
Back to the old for a minute:
Goats is worth mentioning in light of what I said about SaF above. I don't think the Goats storyline is of the carefully plotted type like SaF's, but for the most part it's been running its epic storyline very effectively for quite some time now. Good stuff.
This, of course, also applies to
Gunnerkrigg Court,
Girl Genius,
Nuklear Power,
Starslip Crisis and
Order of the Stick. Gunnerkrigg and GG in particular combine a solid story (GG's is the typical chosen one-esque story, but it's well done, GC is a fantastic coming-of-age story) with absolutely brilliant settings, whether it be GG's gaslamp or GC's yet-unnamed-oh-so-unique setting.
Back to new stuff:
Menage a 3 only recently started. It's ok-to-good, endearing certainly, but the girl-with-huge-boobs schtick is getting a bit old isn't it? It worked well for
Sore Thumbs, but it was a catastrophy for Wapsi Square. It might well be the same here. Though they're the most well-drawn unrealistically huge boobs webcomics has seen so far.
F Chords is also recently started and I don't know what to think of it so far. I'm thinking I might not be the intended audience.
Atland is cool. Nice concept, the jokes aren't too funny but the stories are well-developed and the drawings well-done, as long as they're not of women because the artist goes overboard on them every single time. Kinda like
Looking For Group, where the jokes with the necromancer are definitely becoming tiresome, but it's also well-drawn and occasionally funny.
The Phoenix Requiem is - after Inverloch - more or less definitive proof that Sarah Ellerton can draw a fantastic comic...but doesn't know shit about storytelling. Seriously, have you ever seen a dynamic as unconvincing as between that Anya and Jonas? And how cliché can you get in building up the suspense and mystery around Jonas? Epic failure, but boy it's a feast for the eyes. And no furries this time.
Superdickery finally got a proper content system, and don't you doubt that it's worth it
The commented-old-comics genre is getting more and more popular, and while no one does it quite like the classic Superdickery, two great sites are
What Where They Thinking?! and
Mr Kitty's Stupid Comics.
And last but not least is the heart-warming, fantastically stylized
The Abominable Charles Christopher, starring a mute abominable snowman assisted by the yapping snow fox Townsen. The style is incredibly heartwarming and richly imaginative. The narrative so far is a bit hazy, as the main storyline is interspersed with comedy relief bits from the forest dweller. It works ok but not ideally.
Still, the comic is really endearing. I've rarely seen emotional expressiveness or effectively drawing in the reader as well as its done in
this comic or
this one.
Also, one of my old favourites
No 4th wall to break seems to be on bi-yearly updates. Hey, if it works...
