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.

Scenes From A Multiverse takes place in different places and setting across different universes. Theoretically, this means a mix of different settings and locations, with hosts of alien worlds to explore. New worlds and civilizations! Boldly going where no man has gone before! I’m enough of a Star Trek fan to be pretty giddy over the concept.

In the end though, it really could have just taken place in the same world. The aliens, for the most part, looks very similar to each other. They all look vaguely sci-fi, and all the aliens bear pretty much the same round faces with bulgy eyes. (There are a couple of anthropomorphic creatures, but they seem to be exceptions.) It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to image all of them co-existing on the same planet and the same timeline. We spend very little time at one particular location, anyway. Scenes From A Multiverse rotates the settings at a blistering pace. For the most part, you’re at another universe in the very next strip, so you can’t get hung up at any one particular spot (which, for the most part, looks like Earth but with different colors).

Much of Scenes From A Multiverse devolves to talking heads, anyway, and everyone — from a crazy homeless guy to a lawyer to guys impaled on spikes — tends to sound the same after a while.

I suppose it could all be allegorical. The Multiverse could act as a symbolic stand-in for the world, and the sameness of the difference universes parallels how all cultures are gravitating toward the same monoculture.

I think.

The comic’s main gag is to point out the absurdities in life by ramping up the silliness. This is done mainly by spinning the dialogue through goofy little tangents. For example, here’s one vignette where two characters muse over the latest killer app. One character goes on a long monologue:

Forget those other networks. Suprbook Plus is the real thing! Look a the granularity of control you have. You can block unwanted messages. Mute hundreds of people with a single click. Filter annoying friends into hidden buckets. And it’s so new, your parents haven’t even heard of it yet. With Suprbook Plus, you won’t have to communicate with anyone ever again.

So, long story short, this comic is very prosaic.

Rosenberg uses Scenes From A Multiverse to discuss the social and philosophical issues that we used to BS about in our college dorm lounges. (Or, I imagine that’s how the stereotype goes. Realistically, we used our dorm lounge mainly to catch the latest episodes of that X-Men cartoon.) He touches on navel-gazing topics like the nature of reality, intelligence, and self-awareness… namely how you can be over-analytical to a fault.

A favorite target of Scenes From A Multiverse is religion. Rosenberg is a staunch atheist. A good number of comics taking shots at religion, specifically Christianity. You can expect to see a lot of jeers aimed at religion, such as referring to a holy text as a “magic book“.

Rosenberg upfront admits that he’s not the sort of person who respects others’ beliefs, as elaborated in the blog post accompanying this comic: “Why do people assume that their beliefs should be respected by people who don’t share them? I know people who believe shit that makes Winnie the Pooh look like a nature documentary. They do not need additional encouragement.” This is quite possibly because the whole “Love thy neighbor” thing came from the mouth of a magical caveman wizard or whatever.

As a result, Scenes From A Multiverse can come off as a little smug and condescending. Part of me does genuinely admire the testicular fortitude on display here, proudly brazen as it is. Another part of me, though, finds it a little tedious. I’m tempted to repost a link to that reliable Shmorky comic distilling the familiar pattern of most politically-minded webcomics.

Historically, Scenes From A Multiverse seems to follow in the footsteps of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County. There are plenty of parallels. Ridiculous circumstances are seen for what they are when they are filtered through silly-looking characters. There’s a general air of academia mixed with absurdity. Characters are known for spouting bizarre nonsequiturs. (Opus, for example, hit superstardom when he first misinterpreted a Hare Krishna pledge as, “Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts!”) Both try to stay contemporary with pop culture. Where Bloom County made fun of Star Trek, Garfield, and Disney, Scenes From A Multiverse parodies of Dr. Who, House, and Castle. There’s a very good reason this comic was chosen as the first Reuben Award winner. Of the three nominees, this one was closest in spirit to the comics represent some of the finest the newspaper medium had to offer. Penny Arcade got where it is thanks to a loyal, previously underrepresented geek niche; The Oatmeal got to where it was mainly through social networking. Scenes From A Multiverse, on the other hand, is a true descendant from the lineage of Bloom County, Pogo, and Doonesbury.

However, there’s a big difference between Scenes From A Multiverse and, say, Bloom County. Bloom County could be frequently humorous, even divorced from its political and social commentary. Scenes From A Multiverse is … well … it’s … kinda boring.

One thing that I think hurts Scenes From A Multiverse is the lack of any real characters. There’s no interaction between any of the few recurring characters between universes, and we get to spend so little time with them anyway to get any sense of characterization. It’s probably by design. After all, if any of the characters developed a personality beyond, say, “totally wrong” or “totally right,” then the reader might develop something not unlike sympathy. That can’t happen! If you started actually liking any of these creatures, then hurling polemics at them would suddenly seem cruel and unneighborly.

But that also robs the strip of any character-derived humor. Something that was present in Bloom County, for instance. Like Opus being the naive optimist, or Steve Dallas being a sleazy yet likable womanizer. Their character development tied directly into the larger political and social points that Breathed was making.

Still, Scenes From A Multiverse tries really very hard to make you laugh. Rosenberg’s simple style, where characters all tend to look like mudpuppies, tends to be cute. So, robbed of any characterization, the comic aims for the lowest common denominator of all.

No, not puns. I’m talking internet humor.

How about gags where cute things are gross, messy, or murderous! It worked for Happy Tree Friends! So there’s this one strip where there’s a nonsequitur where a large piece of popcorn shows up out of no where. “I’m popcorn!” he says, showing that he’s a bad widdle boy. Upon reading that, I sorta sighed and said to myself, “This is on a T-shirt, isn’t it?” It was.

I’m not going to fault Mr. Rosenberg for making money off of shirt sales. Heaven Rotting in the ground knows that monetizing your comic is tough business. But that’s what most of the gags feel like: the cutesy, out-of-place “LOL RANDOM” stuff that’s currently infesting webcomic-themed shirts. There’s a joke about the economy that ends with a newscast that includes the caption “OMG HATS“. Characters will spout catchphrase-worthy lines from out of nowhere, like “Entities be crazy delicious.” There’s mention of something called a “funstinguisher“. And yes, just in case you were wondering, there’s a reference to a “knife dildo ninja squad“.

This kind of humor can work. It does work at times for more thematically compatible. Something that’s a pure catchphrase generator. Something like, say, The Oatmeal. In Scenes From A Multiverse, it’s all so obvious, and as a result its ill-fitting. Absurd gags demand spontaneity, and that’s very hard to pull off in a wordy comic like this one. It’s like being at a lecture hall with a very dry professor who, at some point in his lecture, tries to describe this great LOLCATS that he came across. It’s awkward, it’s weird, and at best it gets a courtesy giggle.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

So with that pleasant image logded in your mind, I should remind you that the National Cartoonist Society awarded its first ever Reuben to a webcomic. And that award went to — ta ta ta dah! — Scenes from a Multiverse, by Jon Rosenberg, which beat out The Oatmeal and Penny Arcade. It’s too bad I don’t have a Sugarshock-o-meter for this one, since I had a feeling that this would be the easy winner. But honestly … it’s the Reuben. You know … the one where The Duplex also won an award for best comic strip.

NOTE: I should point out, by the way, that the Reubens were actually named after one Rube Goldberg, who was awesome.

Today’s Follow Friday is Lily and Zentheas, by Edgar Recinos.

“Lily Mageworth is an unwieldy, low level Mage fueled with ambition to become the greatest adventurer in the online world of Solendium.

Zentheas Sylvant is a mid level Berserker with an ironically laid-back attitude and little interest in putting an effort in anything.

The only thing bringing these clashing roommates together, besides the fact that they’re both programmed into a video game, is the recurrence of a nearly impossible Quest: keeping up with the rent.

In order to avoid the wrath of their creepy landlady, the two must embark on various amazing and unpredictable Quests that will put their lopsided fellowship to the ultimate test.”

Elzie Crisler Segar grew up in the small town of Chester, Illinois, where he worked at a theater. This being the silent era, he helped out with the musical accompaniment to the films by playing on the drums. Eventually, he got a job as a projectionist. Cartoons eventually caught his fancy, and he took a correspondence course from a fellow in Cleveland, OH.

After Segar moved to Chicago, he met up with Richard F. Outcault, who was a bit of a cartooning pioneer and superstar after creating The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown. Outcault helped Segar network, where he bounced from one comic to another. Eventually, he ended up at the New York Journal, where he debuted his new comic, Thimble Theatre.

The comic seems to draw experiences from Segar’s theater days. There was a regular cast of characters. The main one was Harold Hamgravy (later just known as “Ham Gravy”), a sort of clueless everyman with a fondness for drink. There was Bondo Bitter, a Dirk Dastardly sort of fellow with all the accoutrements, such as the fiendish little mustache that wants stroking. And then there was Ham and Bondo’s love interest, a rail-thin gal that you may recognize as the one-and-only Olive Oyl.

So while these were characters with names and all, they acted more like actors in a play. The title is structured like a playbill. In one strip, Olive Oyl may be credited as “Lizzie Lampshade,” and Harold Hamgravy would be “Jed Simpson.” In the next strip, Harold would be “Percy Pieface,” Olive would be “The Fair Maiden,” and Bondo would be “The Willian.” Then there’s my favorite, where “Ezra” is played by Harold, “The Female” is played by Olive, and “The Vamp” is played by … Winnie Woogle.

“Oogle oogle oogle”! Because that’s totally how vampires talk.

Poor Winnie. Had she waited a hundred years, sexy vampires would be the total hotness. I’m sure ol’ Harold Hamgravy would’ve been clawing at his neck approvingly so you could have a clear shot at his arteries.

Eventually, the story would dispose of the theater setting, and it would settle down into “Ham and Olive and their crazy courtship hijinx.” Numerous relatives would be introduced, most notably Olive’s enterprising brother, Castor. (Because Castor Oyl. GET IT? Incidentally, I tried to determine if there was a Canadian member of the Oyl family named Canola, but came up zilch.) Ham would be a well-meaning yet unambitious fellow would would be constantly harangued by Olive. Olive, meanwhile … well, anyone who’s familiar at all with her character will notice that she’s exactly the same. Quite independent, a little opportunistic, and prone to the wildest of mood swings. Why Ham stuck around her for as long as he did is pretty much a mystery. I blame the booze.

And yet, Ham’s days were numbered. The strip has some popularity in its time. If it had, however, remained the “Ham and Olive” comedy fun time, it probably would have remained in the dustbin of memories, forgotten like … that one strip … people can’t remember. Things all changed as of January 1929, a little more than nine years after the strip’s debut, with the introduction of THIS GUY:

That’s right. POPEYE THE ******* SAILOR MAN. It’s a moment so momentous that King Features Syndicate has an entire page devoted to reprinting the 250 strips chronicling Popeye’s debut. It all starts with Olive and her family, the Oyl’s, chilling while her brother Castor ponders over a package he just received, which contains a mysterious Whiffle Bird. (Incidentally, weird creatures from far off lands was going to be one of the hallmarks of Thimble Theatre.)

If you notice, the title still retains that old time movie feel, this time giving each strip it’s own title card. It even had a sort of “Next on…” title, too, which revealed what sort of adventures awaited our her- … wait a minute. “A Sex Problem Solved”?

Sorta gives new meaning to “Well, blow me down,” huh? (Har, har, har.)

Anyway, it turns out that the Whiffle Bird can escape anything. Boxes. Being buried alive. Death. It also grants anyone luck if you rub its head. The bird had taken a liking to the chagrined Castor. However, he’s not blind to the bird’s multiple benefits, so he does what any right-thinking man would do: he’s gonna go gambling!

Booze, gambling, sex problems: see this is why classic Thimble Theatre is so great.

Castor ropes Ham into his little scheme. His plan is to make it to Dice Island, for a profitable day of gambling and riches beyond his wild imagination. (I should point out that the Great Depression would officially kick off October of 1929, so Castor’s easy get-rich-quick scheme is a fantasy story ahead of its time.) After ditching Olive (or so he thinks), Castor gets a boat and hires a sailor to run a boat to get there. You know what comes next. Cue the hornpipes!

Almost immediately, Popeye establishes himself as the alpha male, especially where Olive is involved. She snipes at him about his looks. (And yes, for all those hacky jokes by two-bit comedians about how malformed Popeye looks, he’s pretty much intended to be that way.) Popeye don’t care. It rolls off his back (and he makes a similar observation about Olive’s feet, though more innocently).

But this is what Popeye is: he is the baddest mofo on the Seven Seas.

See that? He gets shot sixteen times — SIXTEEN TIMES! — and Popeye shrugs it off like it were no deal. It’s one of the most stone-cold moments in comic strips ever. Storywise, it’s because Popeye’s been hogging up the Whiffle Bird’s luck, stroking its head so much that he’s been granted nigh invincibility. Eventually, though, Popeye and his superhuman strength would be integral to his character, which would be augmented by a greeen, fiber-rich vegetable.

This is pretty much where Olive’s attraction to Popeye begins, where she muses that she’d kiss him is he weren’t so darned ugly. Ham might as well send his bags packing now. I imagine he’s hanging out with Bondo over at the bar filled with Olive’s former beaus.

Seriously, what the heck is it about Olive that makes men want to crawl back to her? I can’t be the looks … or the personality. At least with a salty sailor like Popeye, you know the dude is going to be faithful… but he ain’t going to get all mopey, neither.

I always figured the guy deserved way better than Olive, though.

That was supposed to be the end of Popeye … but readers had taken such a liking to the character that Segar brought him back. From that point on, Thimble Theatre became a new strip. We were introduced to Swee’Pea (Popeye’s adopted baby), Popeye’s rival Bluto, hamburger-lover J. Wellington Wimpy, Poopdeck Pappy, The Sea Hag, Alice the Goon, and Eugene the Jeep … the latter being the likely origins for the name of the motor vehicle called the “jeep“.

A lot of comic strip and cartoon characters have starred in movies. However, how many can claim the legendary Robert Altman as director? Because that’s who directed the (really weird) Popeye movie.

And, as if you need any further reason as to why Popeye is awesome, I direct you to this Fleischer cartoon:

So let’s overlook the casual racism for a second, which is something you have to deal with for any cartoon of the era anyway. This is a cartoon where Olive Oyl dances with pots on her feet. This is also a cartoon where Popeye punches Bluto so hard he LAUNCHES HIM INTO ORBIT … and then, for good measure, wallops him when he gets back to Earth.

Michael Bay only wishes that his fight scenes were this over the top.

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.

Now, to be fair, Shädbase does offer glimmers of actually being funny. As Metalocalypse showed us, there is something quite silly about excessive blood, guts, and violence (which it gets away with by depicting its leads as oblivious yet likable boneheads). There’s a comic where a soldier — which is from one of those first-person shooters that all look alike to me — shoots at propane tanks, and he incurs the ire of a famous propane enthusiast. A very early one shows a dude getting off on a dirty magazine, but his demeanor totally changes when he sees the date on the magazine. It’s dark humor that reminded me a lot of Sexy Losers, which went so far over the edge that, after your initial shock, you laugh because of how ridiculous the whole set-up was.

I was even slightly amused by a comic that many would consider to be highly controversial: a comic that depicts the Ku Kux Klan lynching an African-American man. I know. I’m a horrible person. Still, it’s kinda funny to imagine a bunch of frightening, racist Klan members cracking up at a really corny joke from Family Matters.

The thing that I cannot easily dismiss though, is Shädbase‘s depiction of women. And man… does this comic ever hate anyone with a double-X chromosome. I haven’t done an actual tally, but seems like fully half the jokes are about humiliating, raping, and graphically brutalizing women. It’s even the payoff to some of the comics’ multi-part storylines. In the world of Shadbase, women are dressed in the skimpiest of clothes, yet are not usually naked. They are playthings to be used however you see fit and disposed of like garbage whenever they become inconvenient. It’s done so often that you start to expect the worst by the end of each strip. Hell, do you know how relieved I was when I reached the end of a comic and it was just a joke about a woman’s period? Very relieved. And then the next comic was about Mystique from X-Men dead with a wrench to the head.

Oh.

Again, Sexy Losers could get away with this kind of stuff. While it did include a strip about a dude raping a dead, headless woman through the trachea, it never let your forget how utterly stupid and silly the whole situation was. “Don’t take this seriously!” it seemed to blare in big bold letters. Here, it’s just depressing. There’s no punchline beyond, “This bitch didn’t put out, so she deserved what she got.” What the hell kind of punchline is that?!?!?! Let’s face it, despite its trappings as a humor comic, Shadbase is really for those creeps who, for some reason, feel morally obligated not to click on the Rule 34 site, but are turned on by seeing their favorite cartoon ladies get their eye sockets dislodged.

Or … maybe someone out there actually does find it incredibly hilarious that April O’Neil is getting her head impaled by Shredder’s gauntlets? How? They’re pretty much robbed of shock value, which is the only way I can imagine that they’d every be funny. Maybe the humor is in the mutilation itself? God, do loyal readers of Shadbase find the Holocaust to be a laugh riot, too?

Wait… don’t answer that.

Rating: 1 star (out of 5).

Today’s Follow Friday is Sandhill. (I’m leaving the author’s name out of it for now since it doesn’t show up in the comic itself.)

“The comic loosely chronicles the lives of a bunch of weirdos who reside in the titular town.
Sandhill is the kind of small town rock and roll singers are always running away from.
Originally built as a mining outpost during the second world war, with the sole purpose of making sandbags for the eastern front.
During the few years the outpost remained operational, the hill was depleted of nearly 70% of it’s original mass and what
remains is a monument to the futility of war or something. Only one tree remains on the hill, legend goes it was planted
there by an unnamed soldier to commemorate the hills contribution to the war effort.
How the tree manages to subside on what is basically a big pile of sand, however, is anyone’s guess”

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).

… webcomic cookies.

(h/t Comics Alliance)

“My study plan is to extensively research Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution, which I did a short piece about for Cartoon Movement,” Neufeld said in an e-mail. “I plan on taking courses in the history of the Persian Gulf, Islam (specifically the Sunni-Shia divide), and the language and culture of the region. The ultimate goal is to produce a long-form comics-format book on the topic.”

I always love it when webcomics are used as a starting point for something even greater. Neufeld’s accomplishment is a pretty important touchtone in using comics in the field of journalism: “Neufeld is the first comics journalist to be offered this fellowship, and the second comics journalist to receive any sort of American journalism fellowship.”