Monthly Archives: February 2008
Metapost: I just realized…
… that every single one of my posts this week had something to do with zombies. That was purely accidental. Although… I did just download Thriller (both the song and the music video) on my iPod. Is the disembodied voice of Vincent Price guiding me from from beyond the grave?
Could be!
Just for fun, here’s clone Ben Franklin and a bunch of undead ninjas doing the Thriller dance from The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
This week is retroactively ZOMBIE WEEK!
Crabcake Confidential: A Fine Example
What do you get when you have a webcomic that features … get this … both pirates AND zombies? Bet you didn’t guess “a surreal, stream of consciousness comic with subtle, absurdist humor.” But that’s what you get with Brian James’ very strange series, A Fine Example.
The Webcomic Overlook #34: Last Blood
Bobby Crosby.
Creator of webcomics with questionable quality, such as Pupkin and Marry Me (which I reviewed here). However, has managed to win over several skeptical reviewers with +EV, a webcomic about online poker. (The world is full of surprises, huh?) Burns with the passion of a thousand suns, and has a flair for drama punctuated by groanworthy goofiness. Fancies himself as a movie director in the making. Love him or hate him, his webcomics seem to draw a good number of loyal fans… so he must be doing something right.
Chris Crosby.
Co-founder of the popular Keenspot webcomic hosting site, which will always have a soft place in my heart for hosting Matt Wilson’s Bonus Stage webtoon. Creator of well-received webcomics Superosity, Sore Thumbs, and WICKEDPOWERED (reviewed here). A mad genius, his webcomics seem to always be perched precariously on the fine line between sheer brilliance and sheer stupidity.
What happens when you bring these two together? I imagine it would be a combustible, brotherly alliance not seen since the Duke brothers ran roughshod in Hazzard County, or since the Undertaker and Kane joined forces to become the Brothers of Destruction, or since Peyton and Eli Manning grafted on a pair of laser rocket arms and…. No wait, that’s getting a bit indulgent and way inaccurate. However, the Duke Boys and WWF tag team analogies still apply.
Add Keenspot veteran artist Owen Gieni to the mix, and you get Last Blood, a webcomic about a world ruled by zombies.
Metapost: Revisiting the first five reviews (or, PBF is DEAD! Or not.)
Is there a Webcomic Overlook curse? Let’s look at the fates of my first five reviews, ever:
- Nedroid’s Bad Webcomic Challenge: The Bad Webcomic Challenge is a yearly contest it seems, where different webcomic authors try to churn out 200 webcomics in a very short time frame. Despite worthy efforts from KC Green and Shmorky, Nedroid’s efforts remain king. However, by design, Nedroid’s comics only had a limited life and were destined a swift end. Did this curse the rest of the Webcomic Overlook entries?
- Year One: M. Parkinson’s Marvel babies series comes to an end. His follow-up series, When Fanboys Attack!, disappears as soon as it launches.
- Perry Bible Fellowship: You’d think that one of the most acclaimed series on the internet would be the one with the most staying power. Nope. The officious sounding Editor and Publisher website reports that Perry Bible Fellowship … is DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! No, wait a minute, maybe not. (I highly recommend this link. It includes a description of Nicolas Gurewich’s appearance on a bizarre Fox News segment.) In any case, the spectre of death looms ominously over the PBF venture.
- Lowroad: If you click on the Lowroad link, you’re no longer greeted with the comic adventures of Natasha and the gratuitous T&A. Instead, it’s a kid-friendly adventure of a dimension-hopping family called The Smashing Adventures of the Bottomleys. The original Lowroad has been relegated to a .rar or .zip download (neither of which I’ve been able to do at all). I’d like to think that this is a happy consequence of Carlos G. getting married and having kids. However, this also means that all the links on my old review are now non-functional, and it pisses me off.
(EDIT: I’ve been able to download Lowroad via the first mirror site. T&A ahoy!)
- Irregular Webcomic!: And finally, the comic that keeps going because David Morgan-Mar is a sheer workaholic. God bless your weary soul, Morgan-Mar! And frankly, I can’t see Irregular Webcomic! ending until Morgan-Mar dies, which probably won’t happen for another 80 years. And thus, IR! breaks the curse. I suspect that, if it falls, some crazy domino effect is going to happen … and soon we may see the end of Joe Loves Crappy Movies and Marry Me.
So the moral of the story is … I’m not sure there is one. Basically, I wanted to exploit the PBF news (which is still kinda shocking, given that it was often held up as one of the most successful webcomics around) with some crackpot theory on my end. And … it’s not totally successful, since almost every other webcomic I’ve reviewed is still going strong. (Exceptions are Wickedpowered and Fite! … and they were concluded by the time I started reading them, so they don’t count.)
Metapost: LOLCATS R WEBCOMIX? F DAT!
I love checking out T. Campbell’s rankings on the most popular webcomics by readership at his webcomics.com site. It soothes my inner statistician. Plus it’s always fun to see what webcomics people are reading. However, T’s latest list had a strange new addition, which is now occupying the #1 slot. And that would be LOLCats. No, not Ape Lad’s Laugh-Out-Loud Cats (which can be seen at the beginning of this post).
I’m talking about the friggin’ I Can Has Cheezburger? internet site.
Read the rest of this entry
The Webcomic Overlook #33: Fite!
Not too long ago, fellow blogger Reynard Noir asked me to take a look at a webcomic he particularly enjoyed. Now, Mssr. Noir certainly knows his funny animal comics. His blog, subtitled “The Seedy Underworld of Slylock Fox,” takes the vulpine hero of “Comics for Kids” and rewrites him as a hard-boiled detective with a thing for a particular feline dame. This pretty much assures his place in Cool Guy Heaven where he can hang with Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, and Jack Kirby. The best I can manage with this blog is Nerd Heaven, where I imagine I can shoot hoops with the likes of Curly Joe DeRita, Al Scaduto, and Voltaire.
And you just know Voltaire would win, because he’s a goddamn cheater.
But there’s another thing that prompted me to review this webcomic. From what I’d seen, the webcomic starred an otter wearing boxing gloves on his hands. Now, is there anything in the world more visually intriguing than an otter wearing boxing gloves? Probably a doctor that is also a ninja … but a boxing otter comes pretty damn close.
So put on your mouth guards and set your iPods to Gary Glitter’s “Rock ‘n Roll, Pt. 2,” because we’re taking a look at the hard knocks world of a furry brown pugilist with a big black nose and the heart of a warrior. Today’s Webcomic Overlook is the recently concluded and sensibly titled series, Fite!, written by Mike Luce under the pseudonym Thomas Blue.
One Punch Reviews #6: Truck Bearing Kibble
Today, One Punch Reviews — the premiere blog article for short, punchy reviews — takes a look at the pop culture gag comic from Jeremy Kramer and Eric Vaughn, Truck Bearing Kibble.
