Category Archives: WCO Big Review

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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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 #198: The Secret Knots

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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.


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The Webcomic Overlook #197: I’m My Own Mascot

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Kevin Bolk is a drama queen.

Wait, wait, maybe I should clarify that statement. I should make it clear that I’m not talking about the real Kevin Bolk. In fact, I’m sure that he’s a lovely and wonderfully absorbing person. He seems like the kind of guy I can watch the NHL playoffs with at the local microbrew. For all I know, he might be a volunteer firefighter on the weekends, volunteering at the local soup kitchen on the weekdays, and a friend to all children. Maybe he doesn’t do such things, but I like to think the best in people, especially Kevin Bolk.

But Kevin Bolk, the character starring in the comic strip entitled I’m My Own Mascot, is —a capital D, capital Q — Drama Queen. Now, before you accuse me of being incredibly mean (which I am), the propensity of cartoon Kevin Bolk to overreact to things in “humorous” fashion is pretty much the meat and potatoes of this comic.

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The Webcomic Overlook #196: The Revolution Will Be Televised

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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.

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The Webcomic Overlook #195: Derelict

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Loneliness is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s kinda nice to be away from people. You can be alone in your thoughts. You never have to worry about behaving or others looking down on you. You are your own master.

And then there’s the flipside. It’s unnerving when the only voice you can hear is your own. There’s no one to help you if you get in trouble. There’s no one to comfort you when you cry, no one to laugh at your jokes, no one to tell you if you look good today.

Loneliness is both alluring and frightening. Thus, it’s a natural theme for most post-apocalyptic stories. Take the movie I Am Legend, for instance. Sure, an abandoned New York can be a pretty cool place where you can play golf on an aircraft carrier or break into houses and rummage through other peoples’ drawers or drive whatever exotic car you want. It’s such an alluring fantasy that there’s even a term for it: “cozy catastrophe.”

It’s also soul-crushing. When Will Smith is forced to kill his dog, you can sense that he lost something even more valuable than his utter surplus of freedom: companionship.

Which brings me to Ben Fleuter’s webcomic, Derelict.


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The Webcomic Overlook #194: Mystic Revolution

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No one really talks about RPG/MMORPG webcomics, even though I’ve encountered, literally, a poo-pile of them. 8-Bit Theater. Darths & Droids. Order of the Stick. Erfworld. The Noob. Ding!

Maybe it’s because the source material is not easily categorized. I mean, there’s debate going on whether MMORPGs (or, as Yahtzee Croshaw calls ‘em, “muhmorpergers”) are even games, since they’re really more about tedious grinding and chat room socializing. So it feels really weird to call an MMORPG webcomic a “gaming comic.”

Then there’s the whole dual nature of RPGs where characters often are two characters. There’s the character of the person in the game, which is usually a fantasy race like an elf, a dwarf, an orc, or a bard. And then there’s the flipside… the character in real life. Can the writer reconcile the fictional fantasy life with the real world? It’s not impossible. South Park‘s World of Warcraft episode, I think, did a good job portraying the stakes on both sides.

Many comics choose to ignore the duality. Not Jen Brazas’ Mystic Revolution, where the role-playping aspect is called out continually. Does it work as a webcomic? Let’s find out.


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