For some reason, webcomic creators really love mashing two unlikely subject matters and making a story out of it. (Though, to be far, it’s not only webcomics. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, anyone?) There are doctors who are also ninjas, doctors who are also dirtbike riders, dinosaurs who are ninjas, cops who have axes, barbarians who are Americans, and American patriots who are rock stars. It embraces an internet appetite for the absurd, which is why it’s actually fairly amazing that a lot of these comics can actually maintain a long term story.

I mean: think of that movie, Snakes On A Plane. Why did that fail? The biggest one was that once you got the title, you pretty much got the whole joke already. On the other hand, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has been going strong for 8 years now. I think the webcomic format is more suited for silly ideas like these. They feel far more like they’re genuinely off-the-cuff and not focus-grouped to death. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down to reach as wide an audience as possible. It only needs to reach the fans of eccentric humor … which are not in short supply on the internet.

And now, something with a mash-up premise is a nominee for the Eisner Awards: Battlepug, created by Mike Norton, who’s done work in the comic industry (Runaways, Queen and Country, and Young Justice to name a few). You mash together a barbarian and a giant pug. What could go wrong?

The origins of Dr. McNinja and Battlepug are strikingly similar. Dr. McNinja got its start when Chris Hastings made a short comic based on the handle he used on the Something Awful forums. Mike Norton, meanwhile, created Battlepug as sort of a gag at iFanboy. The iFanboy folks asked him to make a signature t-shirt for them. However, Mr. Norton had worked at DC for 4 years, and thus had no unique characters to call his own. So he drew a barbarian (referred to as “the Kinmundian”, but since that’s a spelling error just waiting to happen I’m just going to call him “the barbarian”) riding on the back of a giant pug. It also featured “Battlepug” written in heavy metal font because irony. Well, clearly such a striking image is just asking for some backstory, and thus the Battlepug webcomic was born.

I imagine that the thing that keeps Battlepug going is the same thing that give every other mash-up style webcomic its longetivity: the art. It’s practically part of the joke. On the one hand, the premise is so goofy that it could’ve been invented by a five-year-old and a box of toys. On the other hand, he artwork itself is so good that it flies in the face of the concept, creating something not so easily dismissible as “stupid random internet humor.”

Mike Norton’s illustrations have the sort of relaxed-yet-grounded style would look at home in both a humor mag like Mad Magazine or an issue of Justice League. Do you know what Mr. Norton’s art reminds me strongly of? Alan Davis’ work. And coming from me, that’s high praise indeed, because one of li’l El Santo’s first ever comics was Mr. Davis’ run on Excalibur. The characters’ faces can be cartoony and silly or traditionally chiseled.

There’s a sense of texture. Skin looks rounded, fur seems soft, armor feels hardened. It feels like it should be a mix of styles, yet it’s all internally consistent. Compare that to most of the work done by hihger-profile DC artist Jim Lee. Now, I like Mr. Lee’s work (X-Men #1 being one of my other early comic purchases), but his liberal use of cross-hatching tends to imbue the Batman’s skin and clothing texture with the same Brinell hardness value as the surrounding stonework. Mr. Norton’s art style, on the other hand, feels more organic.

So what’s the story about, you ask? Well… it’s about a Battlepug. It’s … right there in the title.

It’s pretty much how most of these mash-up comics go. If you establish right there in the title that, yes, there is a giant pug being ridden by a barbarian, the novelty is going to wear off at some point. So what do you do? Well, two things generally. You can stick with the silly aesthetics, and yet write a story that demands to be taken seriously. I’m pretty sure that’s how Marvel and DC comics got to be where they are, where you’re not supposed to question why a rich guy dressed up as a bat is starring in psychological thrillers.

Or… you start introducing more and more ridiculous elements… each more ridiculous than the last.

Our comic begins with a framing device. A naked woman lying on a bed is telling the story to two attentive small dogs. This is a little problematic. Not because of the naked lady, who’s at least just as much eye candy as the half naked barbarian dude. No, my issue is with the too dogs. There’s cute, and then there’s way too cute. And these dogs are right up there with “this is how grandparents talk about their angelic little grandchildren.”

We get a glimpse of the barbarian when he was but a young child growing up in an Arctic village. One imagines the future that may have lay ahead of him. He may have been a seal hunter. Perhaps the town healer. Maybe even a United States senator! But it all came crashing down one day, when his town was attacked by … giant baby seals! It not just the big seals and the big pug. Oversized animals seem to be a recurring theme in this comic. Sometimes they seem like sentient beings with malicious intent. Sometimes they’re gophers that join up to form a giant gopher. All I can say is that somebody seems to be actively lobbying to be the next artist for Mark Trail. Joke’s on you, Norton! They only use previously drawn art on that strip these days.

The barbarian boy is adopted by a society of Northern Elves. They live in a jolly-looking castle festooned with candy canes. They introduce him to their king, a dude dressed in red and has a big white beard. I know what you’re thinking… but no, it’s not that dude from ZZ Top. Our Elven King gives our barbarian the greatest gift of all: servitude, Conan style.

Eventually, our hero hooks up with a bunch of strange characters. There’s, of course, our Battlepug: the Pug Who Battles. There’s also a crazy old hippie with big bug eyes who inserts the words “scribbly” and “scrabbly” in every sentence. He’s probably my favorite character, mainly because the whole speech affectation is a genuinely random character trait that seems to have dropped out of nowhere. There’s a foul-mouthed little girl who has the power to control plants. And a large Black female barbarian with a mighty ‘fro. They’re, like, the Avengers of barbarian mash-up webcomics!

One of the funniest things about Battlepug is how grim our barbarian always looks despite being surrounded, 24/7, by such bizarre weirdness. Seriously, he always has the frowny expression like he just swallowed a pepper. I mean, sure, his entire village was wiped ut as a child, but remember… baby seals did it. That, to me, sounds like a war story that you’d tell at the nursing home, then quietly laugh at how ridiculous it all was. Here, though, it just heightens the absurdity. The growling strong man always looks silly, whether he’s riding a giant dog or wielding a huge candy cane as a weapon.

Battlepug is a goofy and charmingly illustrated webcomic. While it can go a little overboard with the cuteness, it manages to keep up its absurd, “random” sense of humor without getting tiresome. Fifteen to twenty years down the line, when we’re looking at examples for 2010 campiness, I imagine Battlepug will be one of the foremost examples. Which… probably also means that some genius is also going to come up with a Legend of the Dark Battlepug gritty reboot… along with legions of killjoys who demand that a barbarian riding a giant dog be taken seriously.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Webcomic short stories tend to make a big splash with two audiences: the people who read Reddit and the judging panel of the Eisner Awards. In 2009, for example, a whopping three short stories were under consideration: Speak No Evil, Vs., and The Lady’s Murder. A fourth, Bodyworld, was longer, but structure to come to a finite ending. It’s a format, that, in a way, is more appropriate of an award that bills itself as “The Oscars” of comics. There’s a complete story, a more cohesive theme, and character progression… things that Oscar-worthy movies are typically judged by.

This year, we also have three short stories vying for the Eisner. There’s Sarah and the Seed (which I looked at here), perhaps the shortest work every submitted for Eisner consideration. There’s Bahrain (which I took a look at over here), which muses about politics in the titular country.

Then there’s Outfoxed by Dylan Meconis. Ms. Meconis has, perhaps, more webcomic-cred than the authors involved in this year’s round of Eisners. Her previous works, Bite Me and Family Man, have taken a look at classical horror elements (vampires and werewolves) in historical settings. There’s nothing of the sort in Outfoxed. I mean, maybe a werefox… if that’s a thing.

Outfoxed is a short comic that Ms. Meconis have originally conceived for the Flight anthology, a comics series edited by Kazu Kibuishi to showcase up-and-coming comic artists.

Our story starts with a laundress, who’s hauling a bag full of filthy unmentionables. Soon, she enounters a talking fox, and she hides him from some scary looking hunters in powdered wigs who look like British Redcoats. Well, as it turns out, the fox is magical and a shapeshifter. He turns himself into a man, who looks kinda like the perpetually horny Marvel Comics’ character Starfox. What can I say: the devil hair is all the rage with fox-men these days.

The laundress scoffs. He can’t be a man. To be a man, he has to jet a job and fall in love. The fox-man tries on a variety of clothes and plays around with different jobs. He also declares his love for the laundress. The laundress tells him that she can’t fall in love with him because he’s a fox, suggesting that there’s something deep down that he cannot change.

So the fox turns himself into a lord… the same hunters who’d bedeviled him earlier. Now possessing social status, the fox-man throws it back in the laundress’ face that she’s just a laundress and rides off. In the end, the laundress is totally pissed off and screams Fox’s name like he’d just stranded her on Regula 1 after stealing the Genesis Device.

Outfoxed is a fine looking comic, rendered in muted colors and sepia tones. Ms. Meconis clearly loves drawing period clothing judging from the lovingly detailed outfits she has our fox try.

However, as the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland once said, “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” I’m not entirely sure what the moral behind Outfoxed is, though. That if you help someone in trouble, they become total jerks when they don’t get their way? Is it a cracked fairy tale — specifically the Frog Prince — where the girl stands up for herself? At the end, she doesn’t get any of the riches or power with marrying a lord, but she gains her self-respect and the right to fall in love with someone else who’s more up to her speed.

Perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way. Maybe it’s not the fox that’s in the wrong, but the laundress? After all, her main problem with not being with the fox is not because he’s a total stranger who’s she’s just met. It’s because he’s a fox. So maybe our laundress is a little … prejudiced? And she pays for it when the fox proves to have upward mobility? Weirdly, I almost prefer that moral to, “Don’t bother helping people, because they will totally sass-back you in the end.”

Rating: Four Stars (out of 5).

One of the genres that has surprisingly thrived under the webcomic format is the weird western. Now, I ain’t saying that readers cotton it, particularly — the same way they cotton those comics what make fun of video games, I mean. Weird westerns, though, sure do cut a swell during awards time. High Moon, which is about the Wild West with werewolves, won a Harvey Award. Guns of Shadow Valley, which is about cowboys with superpowers, was nominated for an Eisner. It makes sense when you think about it. Weird westerns hearken back to the Golden Age of movies when heroes like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood lit up the screen. At the same time, they play to more modern audiences when you add some sci-fi, the supernatural, fantasy, and steampunk.

Who could have imagined that The Wild Wild West was the future of storytelling?

Which brings us to Erin Mehlos’ Next Town Over. It sure is a mighty unassuming name. You hear it and you done think to yourself, “With a fancy title like that, this is surely some sort of romance comic.” Which, come to think it it, may not be all too far from the mark. At its heart, this is a webcomic about two lovers. They also have superpowers. And a couple of souped up horses. Set down a spell and you’ll see what I mean.

Let me tell you a story about a desperado named John Henry Hunter. To common eyes, the man is simply an gambler and a lothario in a stylish snowy white duster. ‘Neath that, though, the man is as vile as they come. He is also an arsonist, a murderer, and a practitioner of witchcraft. There is a $10,000 bounty on his head, soon to be raised to $15,000. You ask me, I think that ain’t enough money to cover the trouble. After all, John Henry Hunter ain’t yer typical outlaw. He’s some sort of crazy pyromancer. He can summon columns of flame. He can breathe fire. He can kill horses with a fire sword, then resurrect them as fiery elemental creatures.

It’s going to take someone just as ornery to bring down such a wily villain. That’s when we’re introduced to Vane. She may not look like much. Heck, she looks positively sickly, like someone dying of the typhoid. She may already be dead. But she’s a score to settle with ol’ John Henry Hunter, and she don’t aim to stop lest it take her to the ends of the earth … or the next town over, as it may be. She is so dang determined to send Hunter to hell that even hanging won’t kill her. She’s armed to the hilt, with a couple of six shooters, a fancy steampunk rifle, and … a rocket propelled grenade, apparently. She also has a cyborg horse.

But most importantly, she is crazy.

The two seem destined to knock galley west till the sun comes down. Neither will ever get the upper hand. Neither will ever go down. They’re two overpowered opponents, and like a cyclone rippin’ through Oklahoma, they cannot be defined as good or evil. That’s the best way to describe what these two are, I reckon: forces of nature. Now there ain’t much of a story, but there don’t need to be. Oh, there some mystery there, which can be boiled down to, “Why are these two hosses fightin’?” That ain’t the reason to be reading this. Rather, Next Town Over is an all action webcomic — with shoot-outs, chases, lassoing and the like — and it ain’t ashamed of what it is. It’s for folks who swill Tennessee whiskey and are in the mood for some rootin’, tootin’, shootin’, gun-totin’, sassafrassin’ Texas-sized brawls.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5).

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? Unless you’re an English teacher, my guess is your answer would’ve been, “What’s poetry?” I, frankly, wouldn’t have known either if one of my co-workers didn’t sorta make it a thing over here by posting verses on a nearby board.

The poets.org site tells me that “National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.” There’s a Poem In Your Pocket Day coming up April 26, where you’re supposed to recite verses that you happen to have stored in your shirt pocket. (Good think I checked; I’ve got a week or so to raid my library of dirty limericks.) The site also suggests reading interviews and literary criticism. Now, this is the “Webcomic Overlook,” unfortunately, not the “Poetry Overlook,” so I don’t be tossing out my scathing opinions on Sylvia Plath.

And webcomics can’t be poetry … or … can they? After all, webcomics are visual, and, as poetry critic Jan Schrieber says, poetry is partly defined by sound: “To make that formula a little more explicit, we can say that a poem, being a creature of language, has meanings that are conveyed through linguistic means, and being also a creature of sound (which is not incidental as in prose but structural), has the potential to affect the hearer’s sensibility through auditory stimulus, including rhythmic patterning, the repetition or modulation of phones (speech sounds), and the strategic deployment of silence.”

If I were to dabble in the realm of evoking imagery through aesthetic language, then perhaps one place to start would be with Chilean comic creator Juan Santapau and his webcomic The Secret Knots.

I’ve been two days in bed, feeling alternatively cold and hot,
mostly reading and watching the birds in the wirepost.
I get to know them well. I give them names:
Ana, Carlos, Barry.
I dream that I discover my true parents, or a son, or some unknown brother. Like in a soap opera, I’m not who I thought I was.
Anagnorisis, they call it. Or is that a spider’s name?
When I was a child, there was a man who used to cut your silhouette from black paper. He glued it to a card and sold them.
I think my mother may have it in some box. But I wouldn’t want to look at it
for fear the little shadow has grown old as I did.
During the night, the coats in the hangers have a little party.
I can feel them insinuating themselves, dropping used bus or movie tickets in each other pockets. There’s only one song, playing on repeat. I don’t like this party.
And in the next day I feel better.
I find strange notes in the bed and some new tickets in my pockets. I get up and go out, and my shadow probably does too.
There is also a song stuck in my head ad some anonymous birds up there.
It’s supposed to be spring.

This is “The man who cut shadows and other fever vignettes” if divorced from its imagery. Now, I don’t know much about poetry. All my interest died down in my high school Honors English 3 class when I got a C+ in our poem-writing exercise. (I think it was about a clock.) But I do like it.

It’s got a bit of a stream of consciousness thing going on without becoming too unfocused. There’s a bit of a dreamlike quality to the hazy first-person recollections. And there’s some simple symbolism (like the “silhouette from black paper”) that feels nostalgic, simple, and mundane, and yet is tied to the larger theme of aging and contemplating the ephemeral aspects of life. It’s deeply rooted in the rhythm and flow of the words.

At the same time, the images are secondary. In a way, they provide the negative space to frame the words themselves. The names of the birds appear atop illustrations of them, but it’s more to provide a contemplative pause as you read through “The man who cut shadows and other fever vignettes.”

The theme of finding a fulfilling mysticism — and thus, meaning — within the daily routines of every day life is a recurring one for The Secret Knots. It can get rather poignant. In “Fantasy Novels“, a young woman reads Harry Potter for the first time and inspired to write her own stories. Thing is, it’s basically just Harry Potter but with different names. She writes tales that no one else will ever read, something that plenty of us aspiring amateur writers can relate to. Eventually, she passes away, imagining that the attendants are fairies taking her to another realm. It’s a poignant little comic… one that makes you reflect on the trivialities of life that, despite being completely internal, are not wasted in the end.

One of my favorites looking into this theme, by the way, is a more fanciful one entitled “The Spirit Cabinet“. Here, Mr. Santapau explores repetition and variations. While it’s a common practice in music, with artists changing the routine ever so slightly with each performance, Mr. Santapau examines a world where the same technique is applied to television. The show, called “The Spirit Cabinet,” is the same episode, reenacted and filmed over and over again, but with slight variations. By season 3, though, the show’s ratings would decline, and the producers had to cancel the show. The last episode was about moving forward … something that angered the fans so much that they declared it “non-canon.”

I like it because, while I’m not quite sure what Mr. Santapau was trying to say with this strip, you can interpret it in many different ways. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the manufactured frozen-in-time aspect of television programming. Or maybe it’s about our fear of the progress of time and aging, and how we search for an anchor to avert our gaze from reality, if only for a time. Maybe it’s about how the search for answers, not the answers themselves, are what give our lives meaning. I like how this is all encapsulated in a tale about a television show, perhaps the most mundane and unlikely thing to write a poem about.

Hey, all I’m saying is that if modern poets would stop writing about plastic bags floating down an interstate so much and branch out into other areas where the everyday can be turned into the magic, the literary world would be in a better place.

Much of The Secret Knots reflects on romance. Mr. Santapau takes a look at the modern standards of courtship, and he muses on the triteness of conversation on a date. The settings are modern, but the themes of attraction, anxiety, and longing are as classical to poetry as you can get.

There are times when The Secret Knots is dryly humorous. And by that, I do mean dryly humorous. Like New Yorker humorous. Mr Santapau also tries his hand a little in horror with his long-running “Unspeakable” arc. It’s mostly an exercise in setting a mood rather than anything truly gory. Truth be told, I thought this was a little disappointing, feeling like a lot of set-up with little payoff.

In general, the strips have a hazy dreaminess as if Mr. Santapau — or rather, the characters he’s speaking through — are using butterfly nets to ensnare fleeting thoughts and memories as they flit through the landscape of the mind. Sometimes a stray thought about how you wanted to write a song with an enormous beginning like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” It’s not exactly the most essential thought to share, but the thought itself is so personal that it gets woven into the patchwork quilt of the strip.

Adding to the dreaminess is the washed-out color palette. It’s primarily cyan, orange, beige, and olive green. It recalls wrinkled old magazines, perhaps from the late 50s – early 60′s. It’s a design choice that works well with a lot of the strips that deal with aging and reminiscing. It’s also makes the romantic moments more powerful. The palette suggests a romantic glow without hammering you over the head about it.

That was perhaps one strip with no words that let the imagery do all the talking. However, as I mentioned earlier, the pictures are here not as the main attraction but to aid in metering the pacing of the words themselves, which can survive as works of art on their own. As a result, The Secret Knots tends to be wordy, and in some cases very wordy.

Some who’ve read The Secret Knots see it as a little pretentious … “expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature,” according to Merriam-Webster. I have to say that much of poetry anyways is naturally pretentious. After all, you’re trying to assign a great importance to somewhat everyday objects, whether it’s a road that forks in the middle or a caged bird that happens to sing. It pretty much goes with the territory, and hard to fault Mr. Santapau if that’s what he’s going for.

However, there were parts that I thought were a little awkward, and they mainly have to do with the placement of words. Integrating the words into the art itself looks awkward and a little amateurish, a weak attempt to perhaps seem deeper than it really is. There was another sequence where the a single word to a panel at the conclusion is timed with imagery of a bird taking flight. I imagine it was supposed to impart a sense of light-headedness to contrast with the more grounded imagery from previous panels. Instead, it saddles the simple, straight-forward phrase “out of a cage” with needless flourishes.

In the end, though, I rather liked The Secret Knots. It was a nice break from the typical webcomics I read, which are more about brash humor or in-your-face action. Those are fine, by the way, but they have a very extroverted personality about them. The Secret Knots, on the other hand, is very introverted. Sometimes you want to get away from it all. The Secret Knots is like a tropical, beachside vacation in webcomic form.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Ethan Nicolle made his mark on webcomics with Axe Cop. This much celebrated comic proved that if you added stellar illustrations to a six-year-old kid’s rambling storytelling, you come up with something that’s pretty magical. We all knew though, that it was destined to end. Little Malachai would soon become self aware or tired, and you can only hang on the adventures spouted by a kid for so long vefore it no longer becomes cute.

Fortunately, Ethan decided to follow up his initial effort with a story from his own creation: Bearmageddon. Now, I know what your thinking: between the title and the webcomic’s header image of bears with different animal forms (which looks like a kickin’ rad album cover for a 70′s metal band). You’re saying, “Man, El Santo, not another webcomic with random humor!”

This webcomic does rely on goofy nonsequiturs like an octopus bear. But, thus far, you know what this comic reminds me of? Animal attack movies like Anaconda or Lake Placid. And that is not a bad thing.

We start our story with Joel, an employee of mega-superstore chain Wow Mart. His life, as is typical of young people in their early twenties, is not a very charmed one. He’s hassled by his boss for having ugly facial hair. He lives with his dad. Perhaps not for long, though, because, after failing to pay the rent, his dad has boxed up all of his belongings in an attempt to try to force his son to become self reliant. I believe that nowadays we call these things “First World Problems.”

Joel’s friend, Nigel, proposes a new, low carbon footprint life inspired by a DVD called Into The Woods. It’s about a guy who “ditches college and runs off to live in the woods with nature.” Joel and his friends are inspired. Before they know it, they’re piling into Nigel’s (very dangerous) hippie van and off to live a life free of the cares and worries of modern life. Nigel, though, hasn’t been 100% upfront with them. It turns out that he needed them to chain themselves up to the trees so they can protest “greedy logging companies.” Joel’s about to complain, but then he meets an attractive girl there, then it’s all about chains and locks and saving the spotted gray tailed loon.

And then the bears attack.

And this is where the comic turns into a straight up animal attack comic. (Wait… do any others exist?) This thing could be adapted into a SyFy Original Movie. It’s straight up about trying not to get eaten and flinging nasty things into the bears’ faces. It doesn’t go off the rails into random kookiness that we’re conditioned into thinking a “Bear Attack!” comic should be. Even when we’re introduced to a hulking, bear-killing woodsman, things aren’t as “random” as they could’ve been. After all, what’s so bizarre about a survivalist who has keen knowledge on hunting wild animals?

I think one of the things that anchors Bearmageddon nicely is that Mr. Nicolle seems to genuinely care about fleshing out his characters. It’s kinda nice when you can stick a guy with a line like, “If some guy bombs a school bus full of kids to keep you from getting run over, do you let him get away with it?” and you’re nodding your head and thinking, “Yes, that is exactly something he would say, isn’t it?” Plus there’s Ethan Nicolle’s art, which is always a treat. Bearmageddon may yet go into random acts of mindless absurdity, but as of now the story is pretty solid and actually makes sense… or as much sense as a webcomic with an octopus bear in its opening scenes can be.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5).

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi had had enough. He’d been us he’d too far by local authorities. He was a poor street vendor from Tunisia who was struggling to feed his family. Unfortunately, his small wheelbarrow, from which he would sell produce, would constantly be confiscated by corrupt local officials. Eventually, he would find himself in debt. He would not have enough money to bribe officials to keep his stand open.

after his latest confrontation with an official, Mohamed went to complain to the governor’s office. They refused to see him. So Mohamed got a can of gasoline. He stood in the middle of traffic, and he shouted, “How do you expect me to make a living?” Then he doused himself in gas and set himself on fire. Mohamed would die a couple of weeks after at the young age of 26.

What would happen after would go on to be known as “Arab Spring.” The violence of Mohamed’s death shocked young Tunisians, who took to the streets in protest against corruption in the government. and it was not confined to Tunisia. The protest spread to Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt. And then they spread further. The winds of change spread throughout the Arab world. It was a calamitous time. One one end, there were the indelible images of women handing flowers to soldiers. As the other end, there’s the bloody toll: Wikipedia has listed the number of deaths at 32,000 to over 50,000.

Dov Torbin and Asher Berman planned on taking a vacation to Egypt when all hell broke loose. What had been a trip to see the sights of ancient Egypt suddenly becomes a struggle to find a working phone so they can talked to loved ones back home. They recount their experiences in The Revolution Will Be Televised.

Dov and Asher are off on a fun vacation to see the antiquities of ancient Egypt. Dov is a little hesitant first. The protests had just broken out a few days ago in Tunisia after Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Asher, with kind of a pissed off look, tells him, “Nothing is going to happen here. Trust me.”

Things prove to be more hazardous from the beginning. On a trip to the antiquities museum, Dov and Asher encounter protesters and police in riot gear as they exit the the subway. The incident doesn’t bother them much, though. They snap pictures, not because they’re witnessing history first-hand but because it would make a great profile pic for Facebook.

There’s a reason Asher retains a rather cool attitude, though. He’d been in Egypt long enough to know that there had been protest for as long as he’d been there, and the police had always been around to “use heavy violence to nip it in the bud.” Still, they’re taking precautions. The two head to Asher by train to go sightseeing until the violence in Cairo dies down.

The two undertake an adventure that, when viewed in light of the events of the time, seem rather mundane. They find amusement in watching a singing kid who pulls alongside their boat on a floating piece of driftwood. Their biggest concern is how to sneak in photos from restricted areas inside Egyptian temples. (In a fairly nifty parallel scene, the two later get yelled at for taking photos … only this time, they’re taking photos of the protests, and the reprimands are from a nervous taxi driver.) They can no longer ignore the protests, though, when the movement reaches Aswan.

The return trip to Cairo proves to be a little trying. The bus stations become overcrowded. Cellphone minutes, all of the sudden an important resource, are hard to find. They have to sleep in bathroom stalls. Despite all that, they make the best of it. They crack jokes. They declare their space as their own nation. They make the bet of things.

They are soon hit by the grim reality of the situation when they return to Cairo. Alex, Who is Asher’s Italian roommate, had been shot during the protests. From this point on, it’s a story about holing up in an apartment while the reality of the events slowly sinks in.

The comic’s main weakness is that it feels a little distant from the events. Dov and Asher end up getting most of their information from TV while events rage outside. This rings true … It reminds me, specifically, of when my high school history teacher recalled how he watched the Detroit riots from a hotel downtown while listening to reports on the radio. Again, though, there’s the weakness from both approaches: they may have been there, but much of the information is as second hand as our own experiences.

Compare that with AD: New Orleans After the Deluge, where the writer, though not a first-hand witness, did take care to retell first-hand accounts of victims of Hurricane Katrina. The stories have more impacts because the people telling them had felt the consequences more intimately. With The Revolution Will Be Televised, I felt it sounded more like, “I heard from a friend of a friend that….”

The comic even plays up how Dov and Asher are removed from the events. Dov tries to play up how he was in a KFC when the lights went out. This was sort of a humorous response to a story recounted by Sam, a friend who recounted a tale of how local street vendors stood up to officers firing canisters of tear gas at them. While their generally coolness toward everything may be a front to help cope with the situation, it also makes our protagonists a little hard to sympathise with. They crack wise about Asians sleeping in a cellphone stand. They distance themselves from events by watching Hot Tub Time Machine. The unrepentantly cut in front of people at the airport. I applaud the authors for painting themselves in a less than favorable light, which I assume is a true account of events. At the same time, they do come off as a little callous.

The comic is filled with plenty of interesting moments of conflicting emotion, though. There’s a painful scene where Asher discovers that his grandmother died. While he’s cultivated an aloof veneer throughout the entire comic regarding Egyptian revolutionaries, Asher cannot quite hide his sadness when tragedy strikes close to home. The world-shaking events are nearby but too big to fully grasp; a death in the family, though, is a gut punch.

The person who does take the situation seriously, though, is Sam. Coming back from Egypt, Asher tells the media, “We actually had a pretty good time.” Sam, on the other hand, angrily chastises the American media while predicting more violence if Mubarak doesn’t step down. While Dov and Asher can’t fully comprehend Sam’s position (Dov’s art does a good job of showing the two shifting uncomfortably as Sam angrily tells off a reporter), the story about Asher’s grandmother helps put things into perspective. Egypt is Sam’s home, and the people whom the riot police had attacked were his neighbors. To him, the violence hit him on a personal level.

When I first encountered The Revolution Will Be Televised, it was billed as “a frank but humorous observance of the revolution, with a focus on the media phenomenon of communicating the experience to spectators around the world.” It’s not quite that. There are wry observations here and there, but I’d hardly call it humorous. It got downright philosophical at times, with our characters musing about religion and ideology. We certainly didn’t get a sense of the impact of “spectators around the world,” since the point of view was limited to two guys just trying to make their way through Egypt. But it is frank. And it does convey a sense of how a revolution can seem ordinary and chaotic at the same time.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Once upon a time, there was a TV show called Two Guys, A Girl, and A Pizza Place. It was mildly successful, lasting for four seasons and picking up twelve million viewers on its first season. The show then went all, “Hey, man, I’m sorta getting tired of pizza. Want a try something different tonight? Sushi? Mexican? Anyone?” So they dropped the “Pizza Place,” giving the show the new title of Two Guys And A Girl. Eventually, the entire title and most of the cast was chopped down until there was only Ryan Reynolds, who went on to kill the still-in-its-infancy Green Lantern movie franchise.

The show has disappeared beneath the inky black waves of television history, yet that title lives on. It seems that the Two Guys have hooked up with another Guy, because that’s the title of Rickard Jonasson’s Two Guys And Guy.

I guess that “pizza place” is still plum outta luck.

As you may have guessed, the comic revolves around three characters. Let’s start with Guy. The first thing you should know is that Guy is a girl. This is why the webcomic is entitled Two Guys and Guy, and not Three Guys.

Or, alternatively, Three Guys, A Baby, A Little Lady, and a Pizza Place.

Guy got her name because of her huge wang. Before you stare too much, fellas, and try to dissect the art to show that clearly her pants are too tight for … you know … it turns out it’s all metaphorical. She just likes to throw punches because that’s how she rolls… though you can’t rule out demonic possession.

Wayne is Guy’s oldest friend, someone’s whose companionship she’s cherished since childhood. Only .. he’s not, really. It turns out that he’s just some dude she met on the bus that she mistook for her friend, and she’s been hanging around him since. Frankly, Wayne has no idea if they’re actually friends. There’s actually a weird romantic undercurrent between the two. However, Guy has made it clear she won’t hook up with Wayne unless he’s the last man in the world… a scenario that happens more often than you’d think.

Also, Wayne is probably a clone.

Frank is the third member in our core trinity. He always wears shades. He is generally stoic. He is also a mad scientist who conducts ungodly experiments and is probably immortal.

It strikes me that Two Guys and Guy follows a similar structure that has been blazed years before in webcomics. Coupling a the three-person cast with sci-fi weirdness is the formula that’s kept Sluggy Freelance going for all these years. Even the characters sorta line up: Frank is similar to Riff in the field of mad science and fashion sunglasses, Wayne is sorta like Torg in that both are lovesick and jobless, and Guy and Zoe are both girls. Both casts live fairly mundane lives as young people trying to pay the bills until something weird comes their way.

The biggest difference, though, is that Two Girls and A Guy is a straight up three-panel gag comic. The comic thrives on wackiness, which usually centers around Frank’s experiments. There are no ongoing marathon stories, the hallmark and legacy of Sluggy Freelance. However, there are also no bunnies with switchblades, which is a goddamn blessing. (The strip, however, has a lot of similarities to one of my favotire Sluggy recurring features: the generally excellent one-off strips that the Rob and Elliot guys did.)

The three main characters are pretty strong character archetypes, the kind you can explain in one phrase. Guy is the “tough chick,” for example. Additionally, the character design are nice and distinct, passing that all important silhouette test. Frank’s got a hilariously emotionless face, which is accentuated by the featureless shades. Guy has features that quickly alternate from “cute” to “enraged.” Wayne has an adorable Stan-Laurel-esque tuft of hair that makes him look permanently clueless. Just by looking at ‘em, you know what the characters are like.

Normally, the one-dimensionality of a character is a bad thing, especially when it comes to things like character development. This isn’t an issue with Two Guys and Guy, though. This is a gag strip in the Looney Tunes sense. The simpler, the better. Once we have a basic grip on their personalities, Jonasson goes on to screw with our expectations. Sure, a lot of the gags are rather “random.” Though, I should point out, it handles this better than most. It has a mad scientist in the cast, after all, and the punchline hardly comes out of nowhere. There’s one joke, for example, that introduces the idea of space camp in the first panel. When that’s your launching point, a space party with goofy masks really isn’t less random and more a natural progression.

Nevertheless, even the jokes where they’re just standing around and shooting the breeze have a decent set-up, and that’s primarily because the characters are so simply yet distinctly drawn that you know how they’re going to react. You can hear the venom in Guy’s voice, and you can see the defensiveness in Wayne’s face. It’s all aided by Jonasson’s crisp, clean art, which keeps things upbeat.

Still, you know, it doesn’t hurt throwing in a unicorn here and there.

Interestingly, Two Guys and Guys also contains the slightest undercurrent of existential despair. Wayne is more or less the most normal of the three. In fact, there are some hints that he would be well adjusted if he didn’t have such terrible friends. We get a sense that he’s grounded by a sense of inertia, unable to improve unless success is literally handed to him.

“What are you, a stranger to your own generation?” Wayne says. “We’re wishers and dreamers, Guy, not ‘doers.’”

Dang. That cuts to the quick, yo.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

PS Incidentally, before I decided on comparing Two Guys and Guy with Sluggy Freelance, I’d though that these characters also lined up fairly well with the cast of Ctrl+Alt+Del. Wayne is like Ethan, Guy is like Lilah, and Frank is like Lucas. And then I realized that comparing any comic to CAD is a terrible, terrible idea.

I am something of a fan of stories about he software industry. It probably has something to do with taking the driest subject matter possible (programming) and turning it into a story that’s dramatic or epic. One of my favorite biographies is Masters of Doom, the story about the creators behind the revolutionary first person shooter, Doom. It starts off with hard times with the creators being forced the work around the clock in a dank room and ends with a truly remarkable fortunes for its two principle characters: John Carmack went on to become so rich that he amassed enough money to build his own space ship, while John Romero had a momumental rise and fall, going from the rockstar to the laughingstock of the video game industry.

And you can bet that I am totally on board with seeing Man On A Mission, the documentary about Ultima creator and longtime cosplayer Richard “Lord British” Garriott, who also amassed so much money he eventually fulfilled his childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut.

The creators of The Trenches, Scott Kurtz, Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins, also achieved some pretty amazing — albeit less galactic — milestones. Between them, they’ve established one the premiere game expo franchises in the world, emceed the Harvey Awards, were named as Time’s most influential people, and are regarded as the founding fathers of webcomics. Still, I don’t expect this partially autobiographical webcomic about life in the software development industry to arrive at something quite so mind-shattering.

Maybe if one of those lazy bums should get off their butts and build an actual space ship, huh?

The Trenches is staffed by a cast of characters whose noses are represented by various sorts of legumes. Our point of view is anchored by Isaac, a software programmer who’s way overqualified to be testing video games. Still, it’s a tough job market. When you’re living out of your car, beggars can’t be choosers.

We follow Isaac as he tries to desperately get his foot in the door. He finally succeeds when the boss takes Isaac to an Applebee’s, gets drunk, and hires Isaac on the spot. I was going to say that a similar bit happened on the Jaleel White sitcom, Grown Ups, but then I remembered that the boss in that case was a sexy babe, a hot tub was involved, and no one in the world watched that show so I should feel undying shame for even remembering it.

Immediately, Isaac is hated by the people in the company, mainly because his hiring meant someone had to be fired. Chief among his antagonists is Scott Kurtz Quentin McKenzie, a.k.a. “Q”, the team’s Test Lead who’s a big fan of the obscure (and fictional) 80′s cartoon, Lawstar. Isaac makes the mistake of disparaging the cartoon, and he soon finds himself at the tail-end of an office hazing ritual where he has to test a game that doesn’t exist. Fortunately, he finds a friend in Jade Sienna Cora Anders, a veteran who is probably the only normal person in the cast.

If there was a standardized scale gauging the subtleties between Penny Arcade and PvP, The Trenches would fall much closer to the PvP side. First of all, there are no parodies of games, which is the bread and butter of Penny Arcade. The comic is played as a generally straight office comedy with random goofy stuff thrown in. Like, most of the comic will be about the team coming together for crunch time, and then something like a “feral office baby” shows up.

So… PvP, basically.

And naturally, there’s a marketable cute, lovable animal named Mr. Toots. He tests video games because awwwwww wook at the cute widdle bunny wabbit and his cut wittle paws. His presence in the cast that seems to be a throwback to an earlier era of webcomics when everyone was required to have a waaaaacccckky animal somewhere under penalty of death. (Thanks, Pete Abrams.)

All in all, though, The Trenches isn’t a bad comic. It’s shaping up to be on more solid footing than either Penny Arcade or PvP. That’s the way it should be, given the maturity of their creators (despite being the focal points to some of webcomics’ most contentious online dramas, Kurtz, Krahulik, and Holkins have some decent business sense among ‘em). It’s early, so I guess it can be forgiven for being a comic that’s still in search of an identity. Is it going to be a straight-up twisted reflection of the foibles of office culture, like Dilbert? Is it going to be a light-hearted relationship drama? Will it be a comic that’s practically usurped by the cute animal star? Will it…

… Screw it, it’s probably just a rebooted PvP.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5).

Greg Rucka is the sort of comic book creator who’s developed quite a reputation for writing strong female characters. I mean, real strong female characters. Not the unrepentant cheesecake masquerading as feminism that Kate Beaton famously mocked that studios like Top Cow have exploited to the extent that you’re actually more embarrassed reading their comics in public than if you were reading, say, Maxim.

Rucka, though, is the real deal. He was at the helm for the controversial launch of the new Batwoman, Kate Kane, perhaps the first prominent lesbian superheroine with her own title. He turned Batman supporting character, Rene Montoya, into the mysterious, faceless Question, which is about as far from the girls-in-swimsuits look that most superheroines sport. He’s been given writing duties on other notably headstrong female characters like Elektra and Wonder Woman.

His most famous independent work is Whiteout, which starred a female Deputy US Marshall. In 2009, was turned into a movie starring Kate Beckingsale. Another independent series, Queen & Country, centers around a female secret operative who goes no dangerous missions. For his efforts, he’s won 4 Eisner Awards, 1 Harvey Award, and 1 GLAAD Media Award.

Last year, alongside artist Rick Burchett (a fellow Eisner Award winner for his collaboration with Paul Dini and Ty Templeton on The Batman and Robin Adventures), Mr. Rucka also launched his won webcomic: Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether.

The world of Lady Sabre is called The Sphere, a place where, I am told, the aether is absolutely ineffable. The setting is very steampunk. I imagine that if you placed a sample of aether under a microscope, all you’d see are tiny springs and gears.

In the Sphere, you’ll see steam-powered paddleboats flying to the air like some crazy retro Leiji Matsumoto concept and people shoot each other with crazy steam-powered guns. Do you remember that Nissan Leaf commercial where everything runs on gas, even the dental drills? It’s like that, only everything runs on hot water vapor. It makes you sorta wonder of living in the Sphere feels like being in a sauna 24/7.

Masses of land are suspended in aether, each developing a society that roughly resemble those in the late 19th Century. Some are islands. Some are large continents. This information isn’t divulged to us in the comic itself. Rather, it’s included in the fairly prosaic “About” feature, which gives a Lonely Planet-like lowdown on the geography, the major powers, and the local weather. Normally, I’d be annoyed that such key pieces of world building was being relegated to the appendix. However, I think that shoehorning exposition may have been detrimental to the story’s flow. Mr. Burchett likes to use a lot of open spaces. Stretches of Lady Sabre appear balletic and cinematic.

Our heroine is Lady Seneca Sabre, a pirate with a quirky crew and a ship that navigates the vast expanses of space. No, you are not reading Sluggy Freelance‘s “Oceans Unmoving” storyline. (One of these days, were going to find out that The Starjammers was the most influential superhero group to come out of the 1980′s.) We first see her evading a bunch of armed gentlemen who are dressed in what looks like Prussian military dress. She has stolen … something that looks like a really fancy can of Pringles. As the men give chase, she ditches her dress to get into swarthy pirate gear, something that has sorta become standard protocol in stories featuring lady pirates.

And then it’s fight time! Now, I can’t say that Burchett draws the most action-packed fight sequences I’ve seen in webcomics, Shi Long Pang, for example, does a better job of conveying the speed and impact of each strike and each block. However, the fights in Lady Sabre thus far seem to take on a more symbolic nature. As Lady Sabre fights off five armed men, she seems to take on the appearance of a many-armed Hindu diety. A one-on-one fight looks something like a dance sequence. Given the already zen-like nature of the comic, it’s not out of place.

Burchett also does a lot of close-ups of characters’ faces. She possesses a steely gaze, a mischievous smile, and is that a slight twinkle in her eye? I’m impressed by how much personality Burchett is able to convey through subtle expressions.

So Lady Sabre gets away, and suddenly, the action shift to … the (wicki-wicki) Wild Wild West! And a new cast of characters! It’s Drake and Drum. They’re the slickest they is. They’re the quickest they is. Did I say they’re the slickest they is? It’s a world full of card games, saloons, six-shooter duels… but, sadly, no giant mechanical spiders.

And I have to say … the transition is a little jarring. I mean, at this point, we hadn’t learned much about Lady Sabre, and now we’re in another genre altogether? It’s like you’re in the mood for some swashbucklin’ Captain Blood action, and instead someone slips in a DVD of John Wayne’s Rio Lobo. I mean, cowboys? Really? I thought I was reading Lady Sabre And the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, not Mustachioed Marshall, His Bowler Hatted Friend, And The Wild West Bonanza.

The Drake and Drum story, though, gets us some nice gunfight action. It also eventually dovetails with the A-story when the Marshall comes up with a key that likely belongs to the case that Lady Sabre is futilely trying to open. I suppose that, in the long run, this whole comic is going to be a huge genre mash-up. There’s hints, in a visit to the fortune teller, that there’s going to be a trip to a medieval-themed continent, too. This gonna turn out to be The Dark Tower, isn’t it, Greg Rucka?

Now, I have one complaint that is going to be incredibly nitpicky. Hell, it’s so nitpicky that I generally avoid it because when other people point it out, it’s one of those annoying complaints that make me want to say, “OK, get over it.” But I’m going to do it. I’m gonna get mad at fonts.

I mean, look at this sign. I mean, Papyrus font? Really? Comic Sans gets all the hate, but for me, Papyrus (a.k.a. “The Massage Therapist Font”) is the worst. And it only got worse when James Cameron latched onto it and used it prominently in Avatar. And that’s not the hell of it. The words underneath it are rendered in a head-ache inducing grab-bag of standard fonts and mismatching colors. Everything else in this world has a hand-crafted, old timey look to them. This sign for the fortune teller looks like it was pounded out of Microsoft Office in five minutes.

And it’s not just that sign where I have troubles look at the font. Any time Burchett uses onomatopoeia, the results look really slapdash. It really stands out, too, because the art that it’s covering up is so nice.

Lady Sabre And The Pirates Of the Ineffable Aether is still pretty much just starting out, so it’s very easy to catch up to the story. It’s just wrapped up Chapter 3, and we’ve yet to be introduced to the characters beyond Lady Sabre and Drake and Drum. It is a very solid introduction, presented with the confidence of two seasoned comic book veterans.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

It would probably be fair to say that I was too old to get into the whole Pokemon phenomenon. Oh, I watched the episodes when they first aired on the Kid’s WB. I did have a younger brother and sister after all, who, I suspect, actually watched the show semi-ironically.

The magic of the show, too, was that it was one of those rare instances that a young adult or adult can watch a kid’s show without feeling too weird about it. Frankly, I blame Beanie Babies and Tamagotchis… which, for you youngsters, were like NeoPets but way, way more annoying.

However, if you asked me to identify a Pokemon beyond, say, the core 20, I’d probably be at a loss. I would totally fail those infamous “Who’s that Pokemon?” stingers, thus bringing shame to my ancestors. I never played the game on the Game Boy, nor was I part of the card craze, nor am I familiar with the show after Ash, Misty, and Brock disappeared. I don’t remember the name of that lame-o Brock replacement guy. Hell, I was totally befuddled by the whole “Gary F***ing Oak” meme and had to google it just to get caught up. Let me tell you, when you have to resort to “Know Your Meme,” then you know you’ve truly lost the pulse of what makes young people tick these days.

So you’d think that I’d be the totally wrong audience for Mokepon, a webcomic on Smack Jeeves written by someone who apparently goes by “H0lyhandgrenade.”

Au contraire, mon ami! Mokepon turned out to be a surprisingly fun read, full stuff that can entertain even a reader with only a passing familiarity of Pokemon. Let’s dig in, shall we?

Strangely enough, despite my a-little-more-than-cursory knowledge of Pokemon, the Mokepon webcomic and I go back a long way. I first came across it when had just started up back in 2008. There were perhaps only 20 pages up. While the idea of a cynic’s take on Pokemon was a promising one, I didn’t have much material to go on. It was mentally earmarked as something I would get to later.

And now it’s three years later, which is a surprisingly long time for a Pokemon fanfiction comic to be going. And yet, somehow has H0lyhandgrenade found new twists on age-old Pokemon gags, she’s also figured out how to craft an enjoyable cast of characters.

Mokepon is set in the world of Pokemon, the same one with cities named Pewter City and Viridian Forest and populated by the likes of Ash Ketchum and Professor Oak. Our hero — of you can call him that — is a sneering, sarcastic slacker named Atticus Brent. He can be easily be identified by the permanent scowl on his face and the cigarette dangling from his lips. And he doesn’t want anything to do with Pokemon. He seems more like the kind of guy who’d enjoy kicking back, watching General Hospital, and popping Vicodin pills, if you catch my drift.

How can you not like this guy?

Unfortunately, his mom doesn’t feel the same way. For being a master at Pokemon means everything. EVERYTHING. So Atticus gets thrown out on his butt and he’s not to come home until he makes a big name for himself in the world of Pokemon.

And so that is how Atticus got his first Pokemon. He calls him “Dragonthing.” (It’s Charmander.) Atticus decides to train Dragonthing the best way he knows how: through utter neglect. He figures Dragonthing can learn more by learning how to fend for himself, and lets him wander around, getting into fights.

Surprisingly, it turns out to be a pretty effective training technique. You know what they say: give a Pokemon a command, they’ll fight for a day. Leave the Pokemon alone so he can figure out how to breathe fire by himself … well, he’ll probably bite you, but at least it didn’t cut into your brooding time.

Atticus finds a rival in Kahn Miles. Atticus has a pretty irrational hatred of Kahn (KAAAAAAHHHHHHNNNN!!!!), mainly because he’s good and unselfish and is pretty devoted to becoming a champ in this Pokemon thing. Their relationship is a bit like the Homer Simpson/Ned Flanders dichotomy. It’s one part Atticus’ refusal to accept defeat, one part jealousy, one part a petty and innate desire to destroy anything pure, good, and innocent. Hey, who can’t relate? I’m pretty sure we’ve all had moments where, like Edward Norton in Fight Club, we’ve wanted to destroy something beautiful.

To fuel his hatred, Atticus accuses Kahn of stealing his Bulbasaur. They’d dueled earlier for the Pokemon. Kahn had wanted to win it for his sister, Mana (who, compared to Kahn, is quite bubbly). Atticus, though, is a little miffed. Though he was definitely outclassed by Kahn, he didn’t think that they’d finished the fight and that Bulbasaur was still up for grabs. They reignite their duel. Atticus sends out his Dragon Thing to fight off Kahn’s three Pokemon.

And surprisingly, Atticus wins.

It turns out, though, that Kahn had been training his team all day, and his three Pokemon were already half dead. Kahn, though, is such a chill bro that he didn’t have the heart to tell Atticus about it. The battle, though, catches the attention of a masked stranger who assumes Atticus has been poaching helpless Pokemon trainers. He summons a towering, dinosaur-sized Pokemon, and Atticus realizes he’s suddenly in for the fight of his (and Dragon Thing’s) life.

Half the fun of Mokepon is how Atticus just does not buy in to the “Pokemon training is about friendship” mantra. It’s easy to forget that he’s supposed to be 14 years old, given his
world-weary demeanor. Driving that point home is how much older Atticus seems than the other contestants. A lot of the trainers he’s competing against are cherub faced kids with big saucer eyes.

There’s George, for example, a Pokemon obsessive who will follow Atticus around like a lost puppy. She guesses, probably correctly, that Atticus (who she calls “Brent,” since Atticus doesn’t think they’re on a first name basis) has the potential to the a great Pokemon champion. However, she’s appalled by his coarse attitude and his slash-and-burn tactics. They make a good pair, actually: the wide-eyed innocent that could probably use a few few lessons in how the world is a brutal place, and the hardened cynic who could probably stand to lighten up a little.

And besides, it’s not that Atticus is completely in the wrong about the way he views Pokemon. His more practical view of matters turns out to be an asset, especially when he comes face to face with a new, more homicidal Team Rocket.

So maybe you Pokemon fans … Poke-fans … um … Poke-heads … Poke-men? No that can’t be right. Anyway, you Pokemon fans can probably refresh me on this: what were Team Rocket up again on the show? Were Jesse and James really given the one job of capturing Pikachu, which they failed to do day in and day out? Why? Was it a special Pikachu? Or did Team Rocket HQ know that Jesse and James were totally useless and had them casing the world’s most thankless assignment?

Anyway, that seems like small potatoes to what the new Team Rocket has up their sleeves. This version of Team Rocket, Thad and Trix, look more like charter members of the Pewter City Biker Club. They’re cruel, they’re murderous, they swear a storm, and they have no use for Meowth. That’s right! Their plan is to breed so many of the insect Pokemon in Viridian Forest that random encounters become inescapable. I think this crosses the line beyond denouncing the evils of truth and love and into outright terrorism.

Maybe … just maybe … the only thing standing in their way is a cynical jerk with a nicotine addiction.

H0lyhandgrenade generally sticks to a very solid and very appropriate manga style for Mokepon. She does add a few flourishes of her own — the hand written word balloons, for example — that lend her own personal touch without straying too far from the Pokemon house style. She’s especially adept in setting up the sight gags. They remind of Rumiko Takahashi’s work on Ranma, where she would similarly set you up for one scene (say either a heroic attack or a sad, inflective scene) and then completely undermine your expectations on the very next panel. Which is to say that while Mokepon is, in one way, just following one of the now standard conventions of manga, H0lyhandgrenade executes it so well that it doesn’t matter.

And, well, Mokepon is just so much fun. What impressed me is how much I did genuinely like the characters, and how, when I reached the last page, I was a little sad that I couldn’t follow their adventures any longer. It got to the point where it no longer mattered if this was Pokemon fanfiction in the first place. I thought that Brent, George, Dragonthing, and Kahn were highly enjoyable characters in their own right, characters owned and licensed by the Nintendo Corporation be damned.

Is this … is this truly the magic of Pokemon? To view these fictional characters as … friends? As George says in a wisdom beyond her years: “This journey’s all about making friends. If you don’t have friends, or people to enjoy the adventures with, is there really that point in doing them?”

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)