Despite playing some of the most popular video game franchises in history, very few of my most played games will ever make their way into a video game comic. Why? For the simple fact that they’re sports games. I played the hell out of the SSX games, the Midnight Club racing game and its sequels, three iterations of the WWE Smackdown series, the Madden football series, and various NHL games from both EA and 2K Sports. Yet, outside of the token “Madden is the same game this year as it is last year” joke, you’ll never see any of them mentioned in a video game webcomic.

Some of this, I think, can be chalked up to the sniffy, dismissive attitude gamers — and by that I mean specifically the ones devoted to first-person shooters, fighting games, and Mario — have toward sports games in general. (Never mind that players of Madden and SSX are technically gamers as well.) Oh, do I wish you could have been there to see the drama unfold when SSX 3 made the AV Club’s Best of the Decade list!

Or maybe it’s just not easy to make jokes about sports games where the playable characters are either real life personalities or anonymous avatars rather than something as well defined fictional creations like Master Chief, Cloud, and Sonic the Hedgehog. (I’d argue that this still isn’t true with the case of SSX, as the little fan community that clustered around the Merqury City site can attest.)

If there’s something I can respect about Phil Chan and Joe Dunn’s self-effacingly titled Another Videogame Webcomic, it’s their almost quixotic devotion to doing jokes about games that don’t typically get featured in a video game webcomic. Oh sure, we’ll get plenty of Bioshock and Bayonetta jokes. But we’ll also get some jokes about Madden and … Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine? The Grey’s Anatomy game?

… huuuuuuuhhhhh?

If the art for Another Videogame Webcomic looks familiar, it might be because Joe Dunn is the same artist behind the previously reviewed Joe Loves Crappy Movies here. (And by previously I do mean my sixth review ever. My how time flies!) I have no idea how Mr. Dunn fits in artistic duties between watching movies, writing reviews for movies, and illustrating two other comics … but there you go. At least he’s not writing this time. Writing duties (which involve both the webcomic and the accompanying video game review) fall to Phil Chan, co-founder (with Mr. Dunn) of the Digital Pimp Online site. Both seem like pleasant guys, and the tone of both the Joe Loves Crappy Movies and Another Videogame Webcomic strips can best be described with words like “pleasant” and “amicable.”

According to the comic’s first blog post, the original idea behind this comic was supposed to be something along the lines of Phil Loves Crappy Videogames. Mr. Chan abandoned that idea, though, in part because he was afraid it would come off too much like a Penny Arcade clone. Instead, he decided to go a slightly different direction:

After a few brainstorming sessions we came up with the basic premise of “Tron meets Office Space”. Our characters literally work in video games.

So, basically, it boils down to the literal interpretation of the word “literally.” Still, there’s a lot of the Phil Loves Crappy Games concept alive in this comic. First of all, if you’re at all confused as to what game Mr. Chan’s referring to, you can easily cross-check with the accompanying video game review (which I had to do many, many times). Secondly, the comic sure features a buttload of crappy games.

In the world of Another Videogame Webcomic, video game developers are more like actors. Our two main characters are unfortunately named Player One and Player Two — no relation to the monochromatic Ctrl+Alt+Del characters. They’re joined by The Girl, Damsel I. Distress, the sort of generic female character who you half expect to see shaking her head sternly and sighing, “Men,” half the time. They put on costumes to resemble the in-game characters and step into the game to act out all the in-game action.

So … how does this work again? Are these characters motion capture models? Or, if we were to take the Tron analogy more literally, are they aspects of computer programming who go into action every time someone boots up a game? Perhaps they live in a world like Toontown where video game events are dismissed as normal aspect of everyday life?

It’s hard to totally buy into Another Videogame Webcomic when the basic premise is so nebulous. Still, Chan and Dunn don’t seem that occupied with ever providing an answer, so maybe I should just repeat to myself that this is all just a comic, and I really should relax. After all, the setting is mostly just a flimsy excuse to draw the characters in gratuitous cosplay.

Whether intentional or not, the tone and humor of Another Videogame Webcomic seems to be coming from two guys who are older than your average gamer. Wait … the Entertainment Software Association says that the average gamer is 34 years old. (This is one of those little tidbits us thirty-somethings like to throw around when are wives are wondering when we’re coming to bed/taking out the trash/paying the bills after we’re in our third hour of playing Mass Effect.) So at least AVW seems more mentally mature than its video game webcomic brethren. Joe Dunn’s character designs, for example, seem to place most of the characters at age thirty or older. Even Damsel, who is unsurprisingly depicted as the kind of girl the fanboys drool over, looks like she’s got bags under her eyes most of the time.

Then there’s the setting. Another Videogame Webcomic asserts its grown-up sensibilities by trading the overused two-guys-on-a-couch environ with something more domestic: the corporate office workplace. When our characters aren’t re-enacting videogame scenes, we see them in a world dominated by rows and rows of cluttered cubicles, conference room tables, and lazy chatter about fantasy football. The only other time I’ve ever seen this setting used before is in PvP.

Of course, there’s a reason why most video game webcomic creators avoid the office setting (other than having no employment experience whatsoever): the entire set-up reeks of desperate sadness. There’s not much difference between office jokes and gallows humor. Dilbert got it right when the modern cubicle farms are stand-ins for a veritable soul-crushing purgatory on earth. It becomes even more sad when emotionless business ethics comes into conflict with the zany, wish-fulfillment aspect of video games. One side’s going to win out. Judging from the tired yet smug faces of the middle management characters and the jokes that hinge on overanalyzing things from a business standpoint, I’d say the straight-laced, buttoned down corporate drone aspect won out.

The characters seem tired and utterly joyless, going through the motions to cash in a paycheck at the end of the day. There’s a way to make it work — Looney Tunes ran a series of fantastic shorts showing a wolf and a sheepdog going through the cold, robotic motions of a regular work day. But there’s nothing really enjoyable with these characters doing the same thing, mainly because most the strips boil down to the characters playing dress up, stating something that they did or didn’t like about the game, and closing out with a totally groan-worthy gag.

For example, how may times do we have to see a “Chris Hansen is tracking down pedophiles” gag? By the way, before clicking on that link, did you guess the video game being spoofed was Bioshock? If so, congratulations, you win the No Prize: the joke is that obvious. Another example, the minute the character in one of the strips mentions the Marvel villain The Shocker, did you guess the punchline would be playing up on the double entendre?

“Wait, El Santo,” you say. “A Shocker joke? That’s a comic book joke. Something I’d expect the Comic Critic guys would consider but pass up on because it’s been beaten to death. I thought this was … ahem … another videogame webcomic.”

It is … but hey, there was a video game made about Spider-Man, so the joke’s completely legit. In fact, a lot of the comics do read like they were aimed at the source material and not necessarily the video game spin-off. Here’s a partial list of some of the other video games spoofed in Another Videogame Webcomic:

• Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
• GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
• James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game

Again, I do applaud Chan and Dunn for aiming at games that don’t get must play in webcomics, but man, a lot of these are stretching. There’s a joke about the scene where Bumblebee pees on the agent, which is definitely about the movie rather than the game. But Players One and Two are talking among themselves, while playing the game, that the whole thing was Player One’s fault, which attributes the whole scene to the game. See what I meant earlier about how it’s hard to ignore what, exactly, the rules for the Another Videogame Webcomic universe are?

My other concern: why in the world was Phil Chan playing these games in the first place? Chan’s blog posts indicate that he did play these games, he knew he wouldn’t like them, and he played them anyway. I get that the original premise was that Phil Loves Crappy Games. Crappy movies, at least, will be over in about two hours. Taking time out of your day to learn the controls until they become instinctive, using your precious brain power to solve the terrible puzzles the developers throw at you, and getting far enough in the game to know if it was good or not? Good Lord, half of these games cannot be good for your health. (This is coming from the guy, by the way, who plowed through a seven year archive of Ctrl+Alt+Del to write a huge 6,000+ word negative review. *cough*)

Overall, the setting for Another Videogame Webcomic is interesting, but the execution is too dour and the jokes are too cliche to be funny. Joe Dunn’s artwork is as nice to look at as ever, yet even that cannot save how lifeless everything feels. And now, I will probably say something that I never expected to say ever in my life: AVW‘s Players One and Two are nowhere near as interesting as the ones in Ctrl+Alt+Del. Harsh, I know, but the fact that there’s a webcomic out there that made me even think this thought should tell you something.

Rating: 2 Stars (out of 5)

• HARK! A VAGRANT, by Kate Beaton — a Webcomic Overlook favorite; when’s someone finally going to hand her an award, people?
• HIGH MOON, by Steve Ellis, David Gallaher and Scott O. Brown — which is also good, but won the award last year.
• POWER OUT, by Nathan Schreiber — reviewed here, and, along with Sin Titulo, was also an Eisner nominee.
• SIN TITULO, by Cameron Stewart — which would probably have been my favorite to win the thing based on Cameron Stewart’s name alone. Good thing I don’t keep track of the Harveys, huh? I would’ve looked pretty silly.

The awards, which coincidentally were also being emceed by Scott Kurtz, were presented at the Baltimore Comic-Con. Kurtz joins a very short list of Online Comic winners, which include James Kochalka (American Elf), two-time winner Nicolas Gurewitch (Perry Bible Fellowship), and the High Moon guys.

As for the other webcomic-related nominations, the Act-I-Vate Primer was up for Best Anthology, but lost out to DC’s Wednesday Comics. A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge lost the Best Previously Published Graphic Novel Award to Image Comic’s Mice Templar. Jenny Frison of The Dreamer, which has been nominated at the Harveys before, was up for Best Cover Artist, but lost to Hellboy (but, let’s face it, it’s hard to beat Mike Mignola). Steve Ellis was in the running for Best Inker for High Moon, but came runner up to Klaus Janson (The Amazing Spider-Man). Finally, Rob Guillory took home the Best New Talent award for Chew, which meant that Nathan Schieber of Power Out had to settle for the “Nominated for Best New Talent” title.

All in all, not a bad year for webcomic recognition at the Harveys. Still, if the nominations handed out this year and last year are any indication, there’s a movement toward something we can now call established brands: several multiple nominations for Zuda Comics, Act-I-Vate, and Transmission-X. Transmission-X has now established itself as a formidable brand with the Shuster and Eisner Awards going to Sin Titulo.

Despite the High Moon win last year, the Harveys seem to be leaning toward gag-a-day strips while the Eisner seems to be favoring long-form webcomics. It might be some time before either award recognizes short-form and long-form as two fundamentally different genres, but at least we seem to have a clear division regarding the nature of the awards themselves.

(h/t Robot 6)

There’s been a lot of scary hullabaloo in the media lately asking “What is it about 20-somethings?“, i.e. “How come my unemployed, lazy-ass kids are turning 30 and still living in my basement?” Seriously, my wife turned on the TV this morning, and that’s what they were talking about on the Today Show.

The argument boils down to the idea that 20-somethings are afraid of growing up. Now, I personally believe that a lot of this is the typical sensationalist media panic. When I was but a young El Santo, I remember being handed a similar article by my dad from the Reader’s Digest entitled “The Lazy American Teenager.” I imagine my dad afraid I was turning into a burnt out teen. (Guilty as charged!)

But, for the sake of putting together an intro for this here webcomic review, I’m going to go ahead and take this humbuggery seriously. Here’s a quote form the New York Times:

DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their ideal­istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.

In the end, the emotional paralysis stems from the attempt to maintain, for as long as possible, the elusive pipe dream that you can still mold your own destiny into something that’s better than the pains that the previous generation experienced. It rises from a fear that if you don’t get started on the right foot, you doom yourself to screwing up the rest of your life.

The webcomic I’m reviewing today, Rich Barrett’s Nathan Sorry, taps into the same anxieties. However, unlike others, he gains a priceless gift: an exit strategy for the curse of a life lived badly.

The hero of our story is Nathan Sorry. Yes, that is his real name. We begin on the day he misses his flight. This turned out to be a lucky thing. He was supposed to fly from Phoenix to New York on the evening of September 10, 2001. Now, it is September 11, 2001. The offices Nathan reported to were located in the Twin Towers. Now, after the terrorist attack, all of his co-workers are now among the nearly 3,000 civilian casualties.

Unless Nathan says something about it, everyone will assume he, too, was incinerated.

Nathan finds himself in a pretty choice position. The night before, his co-worker had disclosed how he’d been funneling money into a dummy account: $20 million under the name of a deceased artist named James Goode. The access to the accounts are stored in the laptop that Nathan’s holding. So, with his life not going exactly the way he wanted it to go and with a convenient stash of money lying around that no one alive is going to lay claim for, and Nathan makes a fateful choice that really isn’t much of a choice when you think about it: he decides to let everyone go ahead an assume he’s dead. Nathan assumes the James Goode identity and becomes a drifter — walking the earth, meeting people… getting into adventures… like Caine from Kung Fu.

Now, the adult part of your brain starts to think, “Wait a goshdarned cotton-pickin’ minute, El Santo. Doesn’t he have family that’s worried about him? How about loved ones? You expect me to believe that Nathan can just disappear and be such a total loser that he doesn’t have obligations to worry about? Isn’t all this just a bit convenient?”

To which I say, “Look, this is going to be an adolescent fantasy. Put the old fogey part of your brain to bed and enjoy the escapism.”

OK, so it’s not quite becoming a masked crusader of the night or a dashing archaeologist or a suave superspy. But it IS an adolescent fantasy nonetheless. In this world where potential employers can learn about your life story by accessing your Facebook account and anyone who ever got hold of your home address can use Google Maps to find out where you live, the idea of living off the grid is powerfully alluring. It’s a variation of the “cozy catastrophe” you see in apocalyptic fiction. Sure, being on the run would be hellish… in theory. But let’s look at Nathan’s situation here: he’s got a ton of cash, he’s still sampling all the wonders of modern civilization, he lives in a well-to-do town, and he has no real responsibilities.

That’s an adolescent fantasy if I ever heard of one.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism now and then. The overall tone of Nathan Sorry reads like a fast-paced suspense thriller that you take along with you for some light reading while you lounge on the beach. If you’d heard that this comic had something to do with “Sept. 11″ and expected a grand political essay, you’d be a tad disappointed. The event is a framework. The characters react to the events from the world around them, like the story of a small town girl who has to deal with her boyfriend being stationed overseas.

Like I said, Nathan Sorry is a suspenseful page-turner in the spirit of paperback kings like Clive Cussler and Elmore Leonard. A story about Nathan living off $20 million consequence free probably wouldn’t be very exciting. We’re introduced to several elements that haven’t yet come to fruition, but will likely upset the idyllic hobo lifestyle that Nathan’s set for himself. There’s the question about where the money came from, for example. Part of the reason Nathan keeps moving is that he’s becomes paranoid, afraid that the people who stole the money in the first place will one day find him out.

Plus, other circumstances that begin to spiral out of Nathan’s control. While waiting at the airport on that fateful Sept. 11, Nathan’s alarmed when he discovers that the FBI is looking into a murder that may be tied to his previous employer and the stash of cash. To evade them, he hits on a hot, tattoo’ed waitress They sneak off to a secret hotel room and spend the night. The next morning, she’s disappeared … and his wallet is missing. A month later, an officer shows up at the waitress’ door, wondering why she’s using the credit card of the supposedly dead Nathan Sorry.

Jean Valjean, meet your Javert.

The problem here is that Nathan’s no where close to having the intestinal fortitude of a Jean Valjean. In fact, he’s a bit of a milksop. He’s never really portrayed as the kind of person who would abandon everything about his previous life. Eventhough his tough-lookin’ five-o’clock shadow suggests a hard life on the road, his features are typically drawn to be exceedingly pleasant and friendly. When he talks with strangers, he’s the quintessential nice guy. So why doesn’t a nice guy like Nathan settle matters by simply sitting down with the local authorities?

As a result, Barrett has to work pretty hard to come up with reasons why, exactly, Nathan would go through such a drastic lifestyle change (besides, you know, the inherent coolness of being a drifter with millions of dollars). Unfortunately, sometimes Barrett tries a little too hard. It’s established that Nathan’s old company was unethical, a dead end that he’s all too happy to leave behind. Still, their travesties are ramped up to the point of being comical. For example, this white collar business with offices in the Twin Towers is basically run like a frat house. And Nathan’s co-worker? He doesn’t think twice about feeling around Nathan’s groin to see if he got a stiffy from all his talk about being eeeevvvviilllllll.

Shouldn’t the fact that Nathan is running for his life and that his former employer was engaged in shady money laundering schemes be villainous enough? When the comic’s framework is based on a real life tragedy, this sort of cartoonish, mustache-twirling villainy becomes far too distracting.

Nathan Sorry is a breezy, fun read. It’s not as polished as the thematically and artistically similar Sin Titulo (reviewed here) … but very few webcomics are. Nathan Sorry‘s got intrigue, mystery, and the adolescent fantasy working for it. Do you like reading webcomics with a dash of Robert Ludlum? This one may be right up your alley.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Congratulations!

Let’s not forget, the Emmy is the first step to the elusive EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony). I’m guessing Mr. Haspiel, though, would probably be closer to acquiring an Eisner (which he’s been nominated twice for, including “Best Webcomic”) and a Pulitzer first.

Haspiel had also signed on to do a comic for Zuda Comics. He shared his idea for what he expects Zuda to represent now that it is no longer providing free comics online:

A tough racket this comics making business. But, if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it’s good to be different. And, if Vertigo, my bread and butter publisher the last few years, has been dubbed “the HBO of comics,” then I posit that Zuda is “the IFC of comics,” where, like ACT-I-VATE, alternative concepts are refined online with the distinct intent to expose and develop fresh voices that could otherwise be lost in the gutters.

“The HBO of comics” and “The IFC of comics,” huh? That sounds like highfalutin Emmy winner talk to me. Still comics are now more closely tied to the Hollywood entertainment industry than ever before, and Mr. Haspiel has shown that webcomics and webcomic creators are coming to the party, too.

The Webcomic Overlook: making young (fictional) women cry bitter tears since 2010.

Located to the lower left of the AmazingSuperPowers webcomic title is a jolly-looking creature with no arms, no legs, and no nose. His head sways back and forth at a comfortable pace, while his face, for the most part, maintains a pleasingly blank expression. Typically, there’s a halo over his head … but not always.

The FAQ calls him the “Godslug.” He looks more like a worm, if you ask me.

Every time you refresh the page, Godslug dons a new and different costume. Sometimes, he appears as an angel or a demon, sometimes he appears as a tourist or a redneck, but most of the time he runs the pop culture gamut. Sometimes he is dressed like Mr. T. Sometimes he is dressed like Queen Elizabeth II. Sometimes he’s dressed like Homestar Runner. And, if you’re very lucky, sometimes his face morphs into a remarkable facsimile of Barney Fife.

This may seem like a lot to write about a simple webcomic mascot, but trust me, Godslug is easily the most entertaining part of AmazingSuperPowers. The comic was written by two guys only known as Wes and Tony, two guys who met on a college improve comedy team who now are putting their own sense of humor on the internet for all to see.

So, as you might be able to guess when it comes to humor webcomic titles, AmazingSuperPowers has nothing to do with guys in capes or the two Cold War rivals or the tag team of Hulk Hogan and “The Macho Man” Randy Savage. It also has nothing to do with Godslug, quelle dommage. Rather, it is sort of a violent sight gag webcomic in the tradition of Cyanide & Happiness.

While reading through the archives of AmazingSuperPowers, one particular strip baffled me. The first panel showed the exterior of a strip club, with a bunch of cheesy neon signs, including a big one advertising “Live Nudes.” The second panel showed a man being hauled away by the police. The last panel was exactly the same as the first one, only with the “Live” sign shorted out. I stared at it for half a minute, trying in vain to figure out what the punchline was. Defeated, I scrolled down to the comments section to see if anyone provided an explanation. It turns out I wasn’t the only one confused.

My God, had I stumbled on a latter day “Cow Tools”? That is, was it a strip so baffling that the bafflement itself ends up making the reputation and elevates a simple gag strip into one where befuddlement becomes part of the charm and a hallowed component of AmazingSuperPowers lore?

Eventually, though, someone chimed in with the actual explanation: “he killed them.”

After which, I slammed my head onto my desk. Of course! How could I have been so blind? I mean, the punchline of 50% of every AmazingSuperPowers strip is either “he killed them” or “they all died in the end.” It’s as if my mind was searching for a much better punchline and managed to skip the most obvious and laziest one.

I do like it when you have to do a little work to get the joke … even though thhe payoff, in this case, was totally not with it. Still, despite not being remotely funny, “Live Nudes” is, at least, clever. That’s better than I can say for the solid majority of strips in AmazingSuperPowers.

Remember that chainsawsuit strip that showed “Every Perry Bible Fellowship” ever? Obviously, Kris Straub is exaggerating. The comic ignores Gurewich’s fantastic artwork and overall pleasant cadence so that, even when you get to the ironic punchline, it doesn’t feel at odds with what came before. However, Wes & Tony seem to have taken that chainsawsuit‘s farcical ethic to heart. The early strips, especially, read like bad PBF parodies.

AmazingSuperPowers is the sort of comic where two people are just talking — all normal like, ho hum, nothing to see here — and the punchline ends up being someone getting their eyes gouged out. Or maybe we switch it up, and the punchline is “people are assholes.” Or, I don’t know, “Rape.” (Seriously, Shakesville got upset over Penny Arcade and not over this?)

Scandalous! Have you ever seen such vulgarities?

Well yes… and better done, even. A lot of great webcomics that rely on shock value for humor. The difference? They do it well. Both Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (reviewed here) and Buttersafe (reviewed here) do a fantastic job setting up the reader to expect one kind of shock joke only to be delivered another kind entirely. Thingpart (reviewed here) lulls you with its cuteness, while Gunshow (reviewed here) heightens the gags with impeccable timing and old school cartooniness.

AmazingSuperPowers does none of these things. There is no shock value, only predictability. And there’s something off-putting about the art. The current strips are more polished than the early versions, which were crude looking affairs. Yet modern strips, awash in solid colors and thick lines, end up looking absolutely generic, as if it should be stocked at Costco under the Kirkland brand. It’s like Wes & Tony had hit the Uncanny Valley between stick figure webcomics and garden variety video game comics.

There is one benefit to being so predictable, by the way: the strips that had nothing to do with a crude, “shocking” punchline actually turned out to be pretty funny. For example, you’re bracing yourself for something bad to happen in a strip entitled “Test your strength,” but when a different outcome happens, I let out a laugh. Genuine humor? Relief? It’s complex.

On the same token, I ended up looking forward to any comic featuring a clueless hobo, whose commitment to panhandling is as integral to his DNA as catching a rascally rabbit is to Elmer Fudd’s.

I even enjoyed a fair number of the early strips for their sheer surrealism. Why does this chicken have muscular arms? Who cares? It’s a buff chicken. That’s all the joke you need.

But I didn’t enjoy any of the strips starring the smug, pissed-off fish. God, I hate that fish.

Still, the good jokes are clocking in at around 1 good to 10 bad. With that kind of batting average, I can’t really recommend AmazingSuperPowers. Or, should I say, UnderwhelmingStuper… Depowers. (Whatever. Back off!) Still, if Wes & Tony somehow update this webcomic to include the Adventures of Godslug, I may feel a little more charitable in the future.

Rating: 2 Stars (out of 5)

Yesterday’s Penny Arcade,a webcomic centered around video gaming and its culture, featured a joke a lot of World of Warcraft players make, in a sense. In WoW, you’ll often get quests like “Kill 10 of these terrible people” or “Save five prisoners”. Because the game has millions of players all existing in the world who will do that quest, even if you kill all the bad guys and free everyone, they’ll reappear against quickly, so the next person can do their good deeds. It’s a silly conundrum if you let your suspension of disbelief lapse.

Penny Arcade took it to another level. In a strip titled, “The Sixth Slave,” the comic features a (white, male) slave begging for rescue from another character. “Hero!” he pleads. “Please take me with you! Release me from this hell unending! Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves.” The hero tells him, “I only needed to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete.” The prisoner protests, “But…” The hero interrupts him, “Hey, pal. Don’t make this weird.”

Rape isn’t a part of the game, so for the slave to explicitly state he is being raped is a “humorous” exaggeration. When he hero tells the slave his quest is complete and instructs him not to make it “weird,” we’re meant to laugh: “Haha, what a strange underreaction!” (Or not.)

…

The problem is, I just don’t find rape funny. Because rape survivors exist among us, and after being victimized by rapists, they are revictimized by a society that treats even real rape like a joke, forced to live in a culture that actually has a lot of rape jokes, including those about rape victims being actively denied justice for no other reason than because people don’t take rape seriously. I don’t find rape funny because rape victims are often doubted, mocked, and insulted openly.

The very next strip, the guys issued an apology (albeit a snarky one), along with the following response in their news section:

What surprised me most about some of the reactions to our Dickwolf joke was not that people were offended. But that this was the comic that offended them. In each case the emails I got started with something like “I’ve been a long time fan” or “Been reading the comic for years…” and then they go into how this particular comic really bothered them.

I just don’t understand that. Did the comics about bestiality, suicide, murder, pedophilia, and torture not bother them? Or how about the fruit fucker? I mean, we have a character who is a literal rapist. What comic strip have they been reading all these years?

For the most part I think that people are perfectly happy to laugh at offensive jokes until the joke offends them. Then it’s not funny anymore. There is no way we can know what each and every person who reads the comic has decided to find offensive.

In the end I just disagree with these people about what’s funny and that’s perfectly okay.

The apology actually managed to tick off some people who had been defending them earlier, like Amanda Marotte of Pandagon.

I found the blog post an annoying rationalization for disliking humor in general, which the blogger admits she does. I find the “but rape is real!” argument against jokes of this nature to be a disingenuous one. Slavery is also real, as is murder and general violence. But there’s no way that the blogger would have gotten mad about jokes in those veins, but a joke about a form of torture that is supposed to sound over the top and mystical got her into offended mode.

I also didn’t like the post because I object to people who use survivors as a rhetorical device to shield their arguments from criticism. I feel, as a rape survivor, way more dehumanized by this post that purports to speak for survivors than I ever could by the Penny Arcade comic. I reject and resent the suggestion that having been sexually assaulted in my past makes me unable to see that this joke for what it was.

….

That said, the guys at Penny Arcade responded in officially the worst possible way to respond. As Melissa correctly notes, they attacked strawmen, and this time they really did make light of rape. Jokes where you condemn rape in a sardonic tone really do imply that rape isn’t a big deal. In the time it took them to write the response, there were probably like 10 rapes in the U.S. alone. The cartoon implied that rape is less common than it is, that rape culture isn’t real, and that the whole subject is beneath you. This was tone deaf, sexist, and stupid.

Both sides have legitimate arguments, I think, and I strongly agree with Amanda that the PA guys handled this badly. It’s also a sign that popularity is a double-edged sword. In part, webcomics got to where they are today because they could get away with being “edgier” than the mainstream. But you’ve got to brace for the backlash when, all of the sudden, you’re the mainstream.

If you were, say, stuck in a post-apocalyptic world, there are basically two options at how to approach life. You could either become either a grim n’ gritty loner voyaging the land like a wandering samurai, or you could go insane. The first solution may be inherently cooler, but the second will probably leave you happier. At least, The Captain from Vitaly S. Alexius’ Romantically Apocalyptic seems to be having the time of his life, and he’s complete bonkers. (In this case, the “romantic” in the title refers to the “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized” definition, rather than the romance one.)

The Captain, who’s dolled up like a Gestapo officer in a gas mask, spends his days with his three officers: the Sniper, the Pilot, and the Engineer. (No, this webcomic isn’t some sort of TF2 fanfiction… at least, I don’t think it is.) While civilization has been ground into a tangled mess of steel girders and crumbled concrete by some apocalyptic even that has yet to be defined, the Captain knows how to keep himself busy. One day, he’ll be reenacting that one scene from Titanic. The next, he’s chilling at the McDonald’s with a giant mutant worm. Life may not be perfect. Yet when things go wrong, sometimes you’ll do well to remember that maybe all you need to make things right is a good cup of coffee.

Alexius’ art comes from a combination of “Photoshop, live actors, dead actors, sexy assistants, greenscreen, a camera, and a Wacom tablet.” In lesser hands, that description would lead to something that looked a little hap-hazard. Alexius, though, is no amateur, and the imagery in Romantically Apocalyptic comes together surprisingly well. I’m guessing that a lot of the scenes are photographs taken by Alexius and run through a photoshop filter. If so, the sources aren’t glaringly obvious, and Alexius does a great job depicting a world, not unlike the one found in Fallout 3, dominated by rows and rows of burned out buildings and rendered in a gloomy black-and-white. Some of the angles are pretty impressive. There’s a ground-view shot in the midst of a circle of abandoned towers that heightens the sense of emptiness. Alexius arranges these panels in long vertical sequences, which gives Romantically Apocalyptic a strongly cinematic flavor.

Unfortunately, this is a humor comic, and the humor can get awfully cutesy. Like, “I Can Haz a Cheeseburger” cutesy. Romantically Apocalyptic includes frequent references to internet short-hand, and the jokes can best be described by that one word that tends to send chills down my spine: “random.” There’s a running gag, for example, where cake is prominently involved, and those of you who have lived long enough to see the “cake is a lie” joke beaten to death over and over again by humor-impaired fanboys are right to be wary. It can, though, be brushed off as a sort of Captain-vision, though. I mean, the guy’s been exposed to high levels of radiation, which can cloud one’s perception on things. Besides, when you’re dealing with soda-worshiping cults and space aliens on a regular basis, maybe it makes the most sense in the world to let go of reality just a little bit.

Final Grade: 3 stars (out of 5).

Drew Weing’s breezy, lyrical graphic novel Set To Sea (Fantagraphics) opens with a full-page panel of an enormous sleeping man, then pulls back on the next page to reveal that he’s asleep in a pub. When the bartender demands that he wake up and pay his bill, the man answers that he’s a poet, and will need a line of credit. Soon he’s kicked out into the street, where he’s promptly kidnapped and pressed into service on a clipper ship. And so Set To Sea continues, one full-panel page at a time for 140 pages, as Weing tells a simple story about art and experience, delivered in one-step-follows-another fashion. Weing’s cartoony figures and detailed backgrounds—rendered with precise cross-hatching—suit his one-picture-per-page format well, making Set To Sea look like an animated film slowed down to a slideshow. And while the book’s “you gotta live to write” message is fairly pat, Weing’s beautiful art and masterful pacing are so pleasurable that Set To Sea stands up to multiple reads. It’s a catchy little tune that sounds better with each spin… A-

Also loving Set To Sea? Brigid Alverson, who calls it “one of the most beautiful webcomics around.”

I couldn’t agree more: the online version of Set To Sea got 5 stars on this very blog.

1.) Medusas

If you’ve ever wondered where we should go after sexualizing vampires and werewolves, the obvious answer is: medusas. (Or gorgons. Whatever. Shut up, you folklore mythology majors.) Enter Tressed. The above example from the first page is all you need to know about Tressed, really, which spends every other page devising unlikely situations to get its three female leads either half-naked (NSFW) or fully naked (NSFW).

2.) Orcs

Man, even Legolas from Elspeth knows, once you go orc you can never go … uh … elf? Help me out here, people. Anyway, orcs? Totally sexy.

3.) Sexy Park Rangers (who are actually bears)

If Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows taught us anything, it’s that big bosomed forestry ladies are drop dead sexy. So how to top that? Well, in the case of Babe in the Woods, it’s including a big bosomed forestry lady … that’s actually a bear in disguise! She’s not the only one, either. The comic also includes a big bosomed forestry lady that’s actually a giant bunny. Curse them anthropomorphic critters … puttin’ on disguises and stealing our menfolk. For example…

4.) Cute girls (who are actually pugs)

Because pugs are the sexiest breed of dogs. And just to make things even sexier, our gal was transformed by a Toilet Genie, the sexiest genies of all.

…

Yeah, I probably should stay away from the internet for a while.