Last week, while preparing my daily ration of spaghetti with sauce, it struck me that I was ignoring, for the most part, a fairly large genre in webcomics. (I don’t suggest doing this, by the way, unless you want more than your fair portion of garlic salt in your artichoke sauce.) I suddenly became aware that this site was mainly catering to the indy comics of webcomics (which, for all practical purposes, can be argued as the new independent comic book scene). I suppose it shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. It reminded me of some online publications about independent comic books. They writers would prattle on at length about the latest great comic about a disaffected youth orsymbolic flight of fantasy or what have you. What they refused to talk about were superhero comics.
Perhaps the reviewers felt that they were too mature. Superheroes are, after all, childish power fantasies. Spandexed adventurers were no longer interesting unless presented in a brutally ironic way. Why review GI Joe vs. Transformers when you could be reviewing Jimmy Corrigan or White Rapids? You don’t see fantasy novel reviewers covering Dragonlance; they’re reading Gormenghast or Perdido Street Station. (What’s this? Did I just set the record for most nerd references in one paragraph? Sweet! 100 points for Gryffindor!)
Still, the number one reason anyone of any age steps into a comic book store is to see what Batman or Iron Man or Wolverine are up to. To turn a blind eye to them seems blissfully ignorant at best, and slightly arrogant at worst… especially since some of those superhero adventures can be surprisingly well written when attached to celebrated writers like Ed Brubaker or Grant Morrison.
I discovered that I’m guilty of the same thing here. For the most part, I champion fairly obscure strips like Horribleville, Scary Go Round, and Savage Chickens, while largely ignoring the reigning webcomic genre: the gamer comic. I suppose I could theorize that, really, the reigning genre also goes beyond typical tags to include xkcd and Dinosaur Comics in a massive uber-category of “Nerd Pride Comics” … but that’s just arrogant. And the only thing I’m ever comfortable being arrogant about is the quality of my spaghetti sauce.
Anyway, The Webcomic Overlook prides itself at being a review site for the common man. A f***ing William Jennings Bryan of webcomics, if you will. Ignoring these gamer comics makes me look like a snooty indy reviewer … and frankly I don’t have the ironic gold, silk-screened T-shirt and snazzy pinstripe fedora to pull the look off.
While gamer comics have lost some of their luster recently, they still boast a fairly large readership. Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del are still two of the most widely read comics on the internet. Today’s Webcomic Overlook examines a third chart topper, which smartly throws another internet favorite into its already potent cocktail of video game jokes: anthropomorhic cats.
Today, I review Scott Ramsoomair’s VG Cats (short for Video Game Cats).
