Category Archives: comedy webcomic

The Webcomic Overlook #202: Scenes From A Multiverse

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Nestled among the sands of the American Southwest lies a city where fortunes are lost under a kaleidoscope of gaudy lights: Las Vegas. There, last week, old men and some old women gathered at the Green Valley Resort to hand out awards named after a quick-witted man who spent his time drawing impossible machines. It’s tradition that dated back to 1946, when a group of cartoonists banded together to entertain the troops. They were here at the resort to hold a black-tie banquet evening to recognize excellence in cartooning. The past honorees are legend: Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Alex Raymond, Charles Schulz, Chester Gould, and Hal Foster, to name a few.

This year, however, an award would be given, for a the first time, to a comic that had been published entirely online. Two of the nominees had readerships in the millions: Penny Arcade, founded by two smartasses from Seattle who had parlayed their success into a larger media empire; and The Oatmeal, created by another Seattle cartoonist who successfully made a profit through poster reprints.

The third was by a guy from New York who had toiled in the webcomic world but had not met the same amount of success. He’d put together two webcomics previous to this one: one that was semi-autobiographical, and another with the unpronounceable name of megaGAMERZ 3133T. This one probably had the oddest concept: a series of small vignettes with few recurring characters set across different settings, which were located in separate universes.

That comic would be the eventual winner of the first Reuben Award for an Online Strip: Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse. (Gary Tyrell, a judge at the Reubens, posted a first-hand account of the events here.)

It was a boon to Mr. Rosenberg. I looked at the Project Wonderful stats right after a win, and pageviews were up from a typical 24K to a very respectable 120K. To be fair, though, a lot of that new readership arrived from a gracious link posted at Penny Arcade, where Mike Krahulik praised Mr. Rosenberg for being “a great guy and talented cartoonist.”

I think it deservedly won, a point on which I’ll elaborate later.

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One Punch Reviews #66: Shädbase

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Hey, kids! Do you like webcomics? Sure you do! But do you think that webcomics have gotten a little … sissy these days? You read Penny Arcade and you say to yourself, “You know, dickwolves was funny. But it sure could’ve been a lot funnier if they’d actually shown the rape. And in graphic detail.”

To which I say: “What the hell is wrong with you?”

But, boy, do I have a comic for you! It’s a little something called Shädbase, by a creator who goes by “Shadman.” It’s a darkly humorous take on pop culture. Shädbase takes references from video games and cartoons, and it physically forces itself on those references without any consent, horribly abusing those references with blunt force trauma, and violating and humiliating those references until they’re emotionally scarred and bereft of dignity.

Suffice to say, links contained in this review are not going to be safe for work.

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The Webcomic Overlook #201: Battlepug

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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?


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The Webcomic Overlook #200: Least I Could Do

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Well, it’s finally come to this.

If you’d asked me five years ago that I’d be approaching this milestone, I would’ve thought you crazy. My goals were simple when I started this site. I only wanted to review more webcomics than any other site ever has before. I think that mark has long passed. Then, after I’d reviewed my 100th review, I thought to myself, “Well, I have nothing more to prove. I think I’ll wrap up this site in, oh, six months.” Well, it’s been two and a half years since I crossed that milestone, and this site keeps on going.

I have reviewed everything from Jack to Rice Boy to Ctrl+Alt+Del to Lackadaisy. I have seen the stunning heights of Gunnerkrigg Court and the Stygian depths of Grim Tales From Down Below. I’ve seen the fall of Zuda Comics, the controversy over dick wolves, and Order of the Stick netting a bunch of money on Kickstarter. I’ve been interviewed by a Canadian magazine for an article on Kate Beaton, and I’ve presented an hour lesson for a class on webcomics.

And now … just now … I’ve reached the milestone that I thought I’d never achieve.

That’s right: today’s the day I review Least I Could Do, a rather notorious webcomic by Ryan Sohmer and Lar De Souza. It has published a comic strip every single day for almost 10 years now. That is a whole buttload of comics, people. And to a comic with such a deep archive… this is madness. THIS … IS …

…wait. Now’s not the time for a 300 parody. It’s 100 reviews too early, and… LICD has it covered. *sigh* Let’s just move along, shall we?

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The Webcomic Overlook #199: Paranatural

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Some time ago, I was helping some folks clean up an old building downtown. I was there with my wife and a fellow helper. It was getting late… and our companion did the one thing you should not be doing when it starts getting dark: she started telling stories. Namely, that she had seen ghosts here.

She told us of two occurrences. She said she once saw a young girl playing near the pulpit. She seemed like a little girl who was just playing around, laughing and giggling and the like. The girl ran off to the back room. The lady went to check on the girl, but, as you might guess, the girl disappeared. The other ghost she saw was a soldier. The lady had done some research, and she found out the building next door was once an infirmary at the turn of the 20th century. She said that these ghosts weren’t dangerous. They were, in fat, rather friendly. She wouldn’t have thought them to be ghosts except that when she’d run after them, they’d disappeared.

Now, maybe I’m not the type of person who believes in ghosts. Maybe I had nothing to be afraid of, since it was made clear that the ghosts were harmless. Friendly or not, though, you best believe we shut off the lights, locked the doors, and got out of that building as fast as we could. The very otherness of a non-corporeal being is enough to get your hairs standing on end.

Zack Morrison knows this. There are many ghosts in his webcomic Paranatural. Some are dangerous. Some are not. But even the friendly ones possess the sort of innate creepiness that makes you want to lock the doors and get out as fast as possible.

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Random Quickie: Things Could Be Worse

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Every entry of Benjamin Dewey’s Things Could Be Worse is labeled a “tragedy”. I suppose that is technically so. After all, is it not a tragedy if you are a Boiler-Bot who cannot love or a bunny who has just read a bunch of sad books? Still, the humor of Things Could Be Worse is less tragic and more quirky and surreal. There’s a very strong Far Side influence, in that the non sequitur nature of the jokes seem to be more geared toward throwing you off balance than going for the cheap gag. A large part of the charm is the old-timey language. One entry, for example, has the tongue-twisty caption of “Paranoid Pugilists Annual Picnic Yields Inevitable Fisticuffs Flurry.” Another plus is the great art, which apes the style of magazine illustrations you’d find in the Victorian era. The sepia-tinted drawings of fashions, animals, and architecture feel appropriate for the late 1800′s and are very eye-catching.

One Punch Reviews #62: Life In Aggro

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It’s probably a sign that I’m getting increasingly out of touch with the gaming crowd, but I’m not entirely sure what “aggro” means. The last time I heard that term used in the context of games was in Midnight Club 3. If you were driving a truck or a luxury vehicle, you could fill up a meter depending on how many times you ended up rear ending other vehicles. When the meter filled up, you could activate a mode called “Aggro,” which let you plow through heavy traffic without taking any damage at all. It’s especially useful if you needed to both smash through to the finish line and also to scatter crashed cars in an opponent’s their path.

It was, suffice to say, absolutely ridiculous. I mean, how does that mechanic work when translated to real life? The more damage you take, the more you’re likely to plow over other vehicles? It makes a little bit of sense when applied to a human being; the idea is you’re sick and tired of being a victim, so you reach for that last bit of adrenaline rush to lay the smack down on your opponent. But how does that work when you’re driving a car? Does the car suddenly get an adrenaline boost? And how is it all of the sudden invincible? Is the car suddenly equipped with a force field generator?

Anyway, my meager understanding of the term leads me to believe that “aggro” refers to plowing things down with reckless abandon. If that’s true, I a little perplexed by the title of Casey Vasquez and Fei Hsiao’s Life in Aggro, a webcomic about … you guessed it … video games. The comic stand-ins for the two — Bear and Pie — seem to be chill for the most part, and I can’t see either of them getting into a Cadillac Escalade to tear up interstates in the greater Los Angeles area.

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