Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Webcomic Overlook #159: Toonhole

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I’ve brought up the subject of John Kricfalusi on this blog before. Needless to say, I’m not much a fan of his style. Now, I appreciate his love and respect for cartooning history, since I too have a similar love the cleverness and creativity in classic newspaper comic strips as shown in my “Know Thy History” entries. While I don’t agree with him, I love how he seems to have a disdain for Pixar, The Simpsons, and anime. It’s a refreshing, unconventional stand, and I like how he backs himself up with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

However, I don’t think he’s as revolutionary of a cartoonist as many think he is. In fact, at the risk of drawing hatemail from hardcore John K fans, I think he’s a bit overrated. Much has been said of how he brought the veiny “ugly” style of cartooning and gross-out gags into the mainstream. It’s revolutionary! Maybe. But to me, the intentionally off-putting art style was just that… off-putting. Some people will see Powder Toast Man thrust his hairy nipples in Ren’s eyes and find it the pinnacle of humor. I am not one of those people, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

In fact, I think Craig McCracken and Bruce Timm have had more influence. Powerpuff Girls made it safe for simple, retro-style cartoons that dominated Cartoon Network for over a decade. Meanwhile, Batman: The Animated Series signaled a significant improvement for action toons: the static, kitchy 80′s styles from Dic and Sunbow turned into a fluid, flexible style that emphasized action and movement. Heck, I’d go so far to say that Mike Judge did more for the “ugly” style of cartooning than John K. What did Ren & Stimpy influence? Spongebob Squarepants … and that’s about it.

(You could probably argue that John K. is a major influence for KC Green, and for that I’m thankful. However, I’d still read way more KC Green than watch one episode of Ren & Stimpy. It’s like KC Green was better at being John K. than John K. was.)

It’s probably fair to say, though, that Aaron J. Paetz, Chris Allison, Ryan Kramer, and Mike Nassar don’t feel the same way. They’re the cartoonists behind Toonhole, which oozes the Spumco style from every pore.

Now, I should warn you, the links on this site are definitely not going to be of the safe-for-work variety. I don’t feel like tagging every link with an NSFW, so I just warn you now: proceed at your own risk. Don’t click on any link lest your boss look over your shoulder to see… well, we’ll go into detail later.

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Achewood… boned?

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After a hiatus of several months, fans of the unconventional (yet highly popular and highly acclaimed) webcomic have been asking, “Is Achewood … boned?” Well, not necessarily. But Chris Onstad IS burned out. From his blog:

As you have likely noticed if you have any interest in Achewood, output has been next to nil for the last several months, and was slowing down before that. Here, let me explain. Have a seat wherever you like.

You see, whenever I sat down to write over the last year or so, I had a growing, nagging feeling that, after nine years, 1,700 strips, 1,000 character blog entries spanning twelve characters, thirty books, 700 subscriber pieces, the New Yorker pieces, tours, hundreds of interviews, terabytes of vitriolic hate mail (incoming), running a merchandise mini-empire, and just generally feeling under the gun to dance for the public, I was getting a little burned out.

Whenever I cracked my knuckles and attempted to start a fresh strip with an idea that had popped into my head that day, I’d get halfway through it and realize I’d already done that particular gag, say, six years ago. Frustrating. Had I run through everything that my finite brain knew to talk about? Couldn’t be…I’d boasted in earlier times that a good writer could write his way out of anything. What a cocksure young man I was. Maybe it’s time to recharge.

…

Like a sparrow birthing a clenched human fist, Achewood must be reborn in strange ways over time to achieve this ideal. This may mean the occasional hiatus, or span of dark strips that do not make you laugh. This may mean a week of heavily-Photoshopped scans of pencil sharpeners, or simply stenciling a “bobby” on my garage door in a cheap imitation of Banksy.

I know it’s irritating that I can keep no regular schedule; that’s what RSS is for. Also, whatever I put up on Achewood.com is free to the world, and I won’t entertain a bunch of entitled whining. Here’s a great essay by the wonderful Neil Gaiman on that subject. This essay is a gift to writers and artists everywhere.

…

One thing that’s always made me a bit sad is how Internet presentation seems to devalue content. So much art, writing, and news is suddenly available to us that each piece seems nearly a throwaway, lost in the gullet of our now-insatiable appetite for information. Here in the future, everyone is famous for 15kb. Fifteen reTweets. Fifteen LOLs. Should I work fifteen hours on something that will take fifteen seconds to read? The answer is yes, of course, because I love what I do, but after nearly a decade one wonders if one couldn’t do more for people with that time. Create greater and lengthier entertainment. I’d like to focus more on prose; despite the heavy foot I seem to have planted in the comics world, perhaps I can balance both by shifting the weight a bit. Some might count themselves kings of infinite space when bounded in the nutshell of six panels, but personally I’m finding it a bit cramped.

I’m also trying to gently withdraw from life as a semi-public figure, impossible as that sounds given my medium. I just don’t feel suited to it. It’s very bad for your head (well, my head, anyway) to be intensely praised and intensely hated by a decade’s worth of strangers. I loved meeting the thousands of kind readers on my tours, but the stress of the constant travel, constant demand, and unstanchable 24-hour communications have me longing for a wingback chair, a quiet inbox, and perhaps a calming agent in some cut crystal. That said, you can follow me on Twitter!

In sum, I think Achewood will be back sooner than later. As will other projects, and the sun, and my solo album with Greg Lake (he’s on vocals and guitar). I’ve needed time to reflect on what all this is, but it’s been a good long time, hasn’t it? I still love the work when I look back over it, and don’t want to take it off the ventilator. Cross your fingers, do that RSS thing, and I hope to see you again before too long.

So, in short, while he’s not giving up on Achewood, he’s sort of run out of fresh jokes to tell. Hence the hiatus. And other projects. Also, keep checking your RSS. And this putting comics on the internet thing? Not entirely all it’s cracked up to be.

I can sort of understand the “being burnt out” thing, by the way, especially after ten years of putting out a comic. (Heck, around this time, a guy like Al Capp would be working on spin-off comics within comics and Agatha Christie would start writing Hercule Poirot mysteries not focusing on Hercule Poirot.)

Best of luck to Chris Onstad in his future endeavors, whatever they are.

One Punch Reviews #43: Space Avalanche

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There used to be a time that whenever you ran into a Star Trek gag, it had to do with the original series. Why not? While the show took itself incredibly seriously, it had that ineffable 1960′s cheesiness that was so easy to make fun of. There were the redshirt jokes (which made it into the recent movie). There were gags about the transporter malfunctions. Kirk’s womanizing ways. Clint Howard as that weird baby alien. Heck, the official (and very funky) commercials for the Star Trek DVDs made fun of how they used the exact same footage for each planet the crew visited.

Lately, though, the nostalgia has started to shift toward its heralded progeny, Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was a time when most fans would think that TNG was far too stuffy a show to milk any humor out of it. Oh, but how time makes a fool of us all. After almost 25 years, what once looked cool in your childhood youth now looks hilariously cheesy through older eyes. Our beloved bridge now looks less like the nerve center of a Federation flagship and more like the local Lenscrafters. It’s TNG that becomes one of the recurring themes in Eoin Ryan’s webcomic, Space Avalanche.


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Hmpf. Wombats.

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It’s the end of an era as Ursula Vernon’s Digger (reviewed here) comes to a close. From Ms. Vernon’s blog:

I have been doing this for so long that I find myself somewhat at a loss for words. For the last six months or so, I have been very focused on finally finishing Digger’s unexpectedly epic journey (some of you undoubtedly remember those first five pages, and my constant refrain that I was just doodling and not to get attached!) but I didn’t actually spend much time thinking about what to say once I did.

I guess the only thing to say is “Thank you!” So many readers have given me so much encouragement and support and time over the years that I won’t even try to name them all. I’d say it has been a labor of love, but that’s both a cliche and doesn’t really cover the obsession and stubbornness and the desire to prove that I really COULD finish a giant project, damnit, and the vague fear that if I just stopped in mid-comic, I would be hunted by an angry mob, which all factors. Also, love.

The final print volume of Digger should be available from Sofawolf Press later this year. I’ll put up a post here, and of course the comic will remain up as long as the hosts are willing to host it.

Congratulations, Ms. Vernon!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Get yourself some corned beef and cabbage and lots of green beer!

And now a short Know Thy History: the gal pictured above is a Marvel superheroine named Shamrock. Her alter-ego is Molly Fitzgerald, a redhead whose base of operations is in Dublin, Ireland. She’s the daughter of a militant member of the IRA. Her superpower is “good luck” (a.k.a. “The Luck of the Irish”).

She may be the most stereotypically Irish superhero EVER.

(Apologies to Banshee. Look buddy, that fancy pipe doesn’t forgive the fact that you took on a girly superhero name.)

The Webcomic Overlook #158: Ectopiary

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In the middle of Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary, or young heroine, Dale, looks out her window. Staring back at her, sitting in a tree, is a glowing dog. It looks to be a German Shorthaired Pointer. Pointers aren’t necessarily the world’s cutest dogs, but they are friendly. They’re also very useful. German pointers are natural hunters, and as such are blessed with intelligence and natural hunting abilities. They’ve also got a very reasonable look to them.

If Dale were visited by, say, a Golden Retriever, you’d almost expect them to star running out in the fields immediately to play fetch. Or if it were a spectral Doberman Pinscher glaring at Dale with its pupil-less, ice-cold eyes, it would only be reasonable for Dale to scream out in terror. A Pekingese … well, you’d probably assume someone’s toupee had died. On the other hand, a German Shorthaired Pointer possess just the right combination of qualities to inspire both caution and trust.

Almost … paternal, when you think about it.


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Blogger Matt Seneca takes a look at what webcomics do that print comics don’t

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Matt Seneca at the “Death to the Universe” blog put together an interesting exploration on what makes webcomics unique from their print counterparts, and why these innovations represent the future of comics. A few excerpts from his in-depth look at some of the more artistically inclined (and, frankly, more obscure) comics on the web:

Today’s boom of young creators making web-specific comics that not only work better online than in print but engage with the visual experience of computer reading is comparable to the boom of formally audacious material that hit comic books in the early 1940s, a little while after the format got its start. The washed up and/or aspiring newspaper strip artists who staffed the comic book ranks at the format’s inception couldn’t see the page turns and opportunities for extended visual narrative that the new way of making sequential art offered. It took a few years of young kids who weren’t from any other world coming into the game before the Eisners and Kirbys appeared to show everyone the potential inherent in comics magazines. Same again during the rise of the “graphic novel”, which started out with some pretty embarrassing fumbling around in Extended Pictorial Storytelling by comic book-format natives like Jim Steranko, Gil Kane, and Eisner himself. There too, it took quite a while before anyone (in America, mind you) was producing long form comics-with-spines that both stood up aesthetically and actually utilized the long form to do something more substantial that 24 pages could fit.

And here we are once more, with a fucking crazy new format that anyone can see has the potential to massively expand what comics can be. It’s in the how that it gets tricky. More than tricky really: impossible to address critically. How webcomics are going to change the substance of what the medium is is impossible to say because it hasn’t happened yet. All we can possibly do is look around at the work that’s different from your average printed-object comic, that’s operating in a way that’s not the same, and catalog it to be recognized when its mode of operation pops up again and the real fun — influence — begins.

If I had to pick a “most-influential” webcomic out there right now it would probably be the aforementioned BodyWorld, which Dash Shaw serialized on the web between 2007 and 2009. It was hardly the most widely read webcomic (from what I understand, that honor goes to Penny Arcade, shudder), but it was certainly the only one to push the webcomics-specific “scroller” format into print — wide-release, major-publisher, New York Times-reviewed print, no less. 2010′s printed BodyWorld featured a vertical, rather than horizontal, facing-page orientation, to be read down in the manner of a scrolling web page rather than across like a book, and fold-out inside-cover flaps designed to mimic separate browser tabs. (It looked like this.) Oddly enough, and though it’s a great comic, I think BodyWorld’s greatest legacy is going to be formal rather than content-specific: the printed version was the earliest prominent formal expansion of beyond-web comics that led back directly to comics as they’re experienced online.

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Probably the most exciting webcomic currently running is Blaise Larmee’s 2001, a monochromatic experiment in bracing literalism that feels a bit like Jaime Hernandez’s “Maggie and Hopey” stories reconstructed for a post-millennial audience of ADHD computer lifestylists. 2001 is a full-screen scroller webcomic: a single one of Larmee’s wide, deep-focus panels takes up the full width and twice the height of the average laptop’s browser window. Scrolling through it is disorienting, a demand for constantly realigned perceptions as the characters’ motions are tracked around inside the box of the computer screen. The between-panel motion in 2001 is almost animation, the perspective constant, the figures’ movements captured in painstaking, diagrammatic detail. They move across the screen and gesture dramatically. They recede into the black background and come so close to the viewer that their white forms fill up the window almost completely.

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Willumsen’s “Blackhold” is something else entirely, a completely panel-less single image that goes even further into the scroll. Like 2001, its images take up the full width and many times the length of the screen, but in “Blackhold” there are no dividers, none of Larmee’s demarcations between separate pictures, separate moments. Instead the whole thing is one astonishingly smooth slide from beginning to end, a progression from one place to another that presents disconnected single images in the manner of all comics, but moves through them with a speed and slickness that has nothing at all to do with the typical gridded, bordered-in reading experience. It’s about as close to animation as comics have gotten, panel-less and easy to read without stopping the downward motion of one’s scroll. Movement on a screen, the only difference being that the reader dictates how fast everything goes. And though the black-and-white dot matrix background behind the images can get downright hallucination-inducing if it’s scrolled through at too constant a speed, there is one element of “Blackhold” that absolutely can’t be replicated on paper, no matter its size. Willumsen’s drawings for the comic are not digitized in the standard tiff or jpeg formats, but rather as moving gifs, which flash staccato bursts of bright red and yellow from Willumsen’s still drawings. It’s a fascinating addition to the comics artist’s toolbox, one that leads the reader to question whether it’s still comics at all. But then, these things are supposed to be successions of still pictures that somehow manage to move, and given that the light wherever you happen to read a comic dictates so much of your experience of it, why not let the digital environment allow its artists one extra element of control over their work?

(h/t ComixTalk)