Monthly Archives: May 2011

It’s a Month of Webcomics at CBR!

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It’s a month of webcomics over at Comics Should Be Good (hosted at Comic Book Resources)! Every day this month, Brian Cronin will be spotlighting a different webcomic. What will he be taking on today?

Will he be writing about a webcomic featuring a pregnant superheroine who gets her powers from her unborn baby?

Or maybe something with a dysfunctional restaurant staff?

Perhaps it will be a webcomic with a couple of homocide detectives and a living cash register?

Or maybe you’re in the mood for some aliens?

Mr. Cronin’s choices seem to be highly eclectic, to say the least. There’s some familiar webcomics in there, but mostly they’re titles and sites I’ve never heard of before. It should be interesting to see the webcomics he chooses to spotlight for the rest of this month.

(h/t to reader algeya)

The Webcomic Overlook #165: L.A.W.L.S.

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Have you and your friends ever tried to do round-robin storytelling? You gather around in a circle … or, if your friends are online, a message board maybe. Someone starts off things by tossing out the first sentence.

You start the ball rolling. Once upon a time, a woman got stranded on a desert island.

And then it’s the next person’s turn, who adds: On that island was a hat.

The next storyteller is a bit saucy and chimes in. And the hat is alive and he bleeds rainbows.

It’s a silly story. You all have a good time, especially when the story gets really out of hand. The webcomic called L.A.W.L.S. seems to practice the same storytelling ethic. It’s written by by Denis Caron (a.k.a. Joenis Norac). The acronym, incidentally, stands for “Large Air Whales Like Silence.”*

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Don’t call it a comeback

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F Chords is back. Now more frequently than ever.

From Kris Straub:

A lot of people said that F Chords was written closest to my sense of humor, when I wasn’t trying to be dumb (chainsawsuit) or highbrow (Starslip). So it was disappointing to have to stop it.

But let’s not talk of such things! Those days have gone. Start at the beginning, or return with Ash and Wade now, a little older than when we saw them last, back in the quaint old year of 2009.

Oh, I mentioned it being twice-weekly. That was back then. It’s now here Monday through Friday, five days a week. See you tomorrow!

The Webcomic Overlook #164: The Boy With Nails For Eyes

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A small part of me is fascinated by motion comics. Their creators face an uphill battle that stem from the limitations of the interface. Motion comics exist in that strange netherworld between static comics and animation. They are eye-catching, admittedly. And they attract a lot of attention. Several pundits seem to think that motion comics are what a webcomic should strive to be, unencumbered as they from the static limitations of a page and expanding artistically into realms unknown and embracing the liberating tools available to all that use HTML, Flash, Java, XML, etc.

However, there are drawbacks. Most readers are familiar with them. They are issues that bring into question the definition of “comics”. Unlike with traditional comics, the reader of a motion comic has little to no control over the pacing. When reading a motion comic, the flow becomes intermittently interrupted. You tend to cruise along for segments at a time when suddenly you come to a complete stop. There’s a second or two where you hesitate until you click the prompt to continue. Why is this such a big issue? After all, you still click on the “page forward” link as a reader of a traditional webcomic. However, the action becomes such an integral part of the experience that it become barely noticeable. When watching a cartoon, you don’t click anything at all. But when you’re forced to switch between the two modes, you tend to get self-aware for a moment. The jarring transition between hands-free animation and hands-on comic tends to yank me out of a story.

Yet, there are a lot of motion comics that I do like. Nawlz, for instance, which I gave a positive review here. I think one of the biggest reasons that Nawlz works is how natural the controls felt. Cut scenes didn’t feel overly long. Scene transitions weren’t alienating. You retained the sense of control over the dimension of time, one of the key elements that separate comics from movies and videos.

Not too long ago, Shaun Gardiner sent me a request some time ago to check out his motion comic, The Boy With Nails For Eyes. While he’s currently a resident of the UK, he lived in the Middle East until he was 15. During that time, the first Gulf War broke out. While The Boy With Nails For Eyes can be intentionally esoteric, several elements strike me as autobiographical.

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Know Thy History: The Dragon Lady (from Terry And The Pirates)

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What does the name Terry And The Pirates conjure up? Perhaps you’re thinking adventure on the high seas. Likely there will be a bunch of salty dogs, parrots, and eye-patches. Everyone would perhaps be wearing either red-and-white striped shirts or white frilly blouses. They’d also be going “Arrrr” all the time. And likely, one of those pirates would be named Terry. Not exactly the most threatening name for a pirate, amirite?

Well… you’d be wrong. The comic wasn’t set in the 17th to 18th century, when pirates like Captain Kidd and Blackbeard roamed the seven seas, strapping prisoners to the mizzen masts or making them walk the plank. Instead, the comic was set in the modern day … or the modern day of the era that it was written in. 1934 and onward, to be specific. It wasn’t set in the Caribbean, either. Terry And The Pirates took place in a world that was considered foreign and exotic to Western readers: the mysterious land of China.

Terry And The Pirates is considered the primary influence on Johnny Quest, which in turn was the influence behind The Venture Brothers. And why not? The hero is an American kid named Terry Lee, and he’d joined by a square-jawed journalist named Pat Ryan. It doesn’t take too much to see the parallels between those two and Johnny and Race Bannon. Terry and Pat are looking for treasure in China, but their progress is hampered by the local pirates.

One pirate in particular managed to capture the imagination of Terry And The Pirates readers. Creator Milton Caniff deserves his reputation as one of the most legendary comic artists. His panels were full of small details and the panels never failed to be cinematic. But if there’s one thing he’s known for above all, it’s his depictions of sexy ladies. And the most famous of those sexy ladies was the female Chinese pirate known as The Dragon Lady.

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The Webcomic Overlook #163: Zahra’s Paradise

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Iran is a terribly tricky country to talk about. On the one hand, we all know that it’s a potentially frightening country from a political standpoint. There’s concerns about government corruption and their nuclear capabilities. We know about the official stance of Antisemitism and the Green Revolution protests. That’s serious stuff.

On the other hand, a lot of news that comes out of that country is completely ridiculous. Not too long ago the Iranian government threatens to threats to boycott the 2012 London Olympics because they claim that the logo spells “Zion”. And remember Boobquake? Remember when Hojatoleslam Kazem Seddiqi claimed that immodestly dressed women were the cause of earthquakes? This somehow spurred the really silly “Boobquake,” a viral tongue-in-cheek internet movement set to discredit Seddiqi by proving that naked boobs do not cause earthquakes. (I’m a little frightened, by the way, to see if Seddiqi has been using the recent worldwide tragedies in Japan and New Zealand to somehow prove that Boobquake was, indeed, to blame.)

So Iran is both a known threat and a punchline. Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen … we can understand. Iran remains a country most people just can’t figure out.

Amir and Khalil attempt to convey the problems in Iran with Zahra’s Paradise. The comic deals with one man’s attempt to find clues as to the whereabouts of his missing brother, Medhi. The story and characters are fictional. Several real life events, however, make their way into Zahra’s Paradise to give the reader a full picture of the oppression that people in Iran face every day.

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