No More Snow Please
I went home early yesterday, sick and trying to avoid snow, and promptly got hit with both. (At least the Red Robot socks arrived in enough time to provide some solace while I was excavating my car). So, when I was looking for a subject for this week’s column I thought I’d try something that had worked in the past: Googling “webcomic” and “weird” and “snow” to see what came up. It landed me at an out of date website, but along the banner at the top was this very cute image of two folks smoochin’, and so I clicked: Geeks Next Door by Jessi Bavolack and Matt Pascal. They’ve just finished posting some funny fan art, and I scrolled down to find wee Project Wonderful ads (again, one of my favorite webcomics’ ads appeared there with a link to today’s vaguely smutty comic).
And I clicked on David Best’s Taking The Bi-Pass. It’s an interesting webcomic, started in 2003, centering around a couple and their day to day lives, with a pretty good streak of geek in there. I haven’t read through the entire archives, so I have a few unanswered questions (like, um, the title?), but in time I trust all will be revealed. It updates twice-weekly, and is one of those webcomics which reminds me of other ones I’ve read (in a good way, I mean). Like You’ll Have That, for example. (Here’s one of those odd chronology moments where even though YHT‘s just celebrated its third anniversary, I think of it as ‘older’ only because I was introduced to it before I found Taking the Bi-Pass, published regularly since 2003. I wonder if this chronology issue’s just another facet of reading webcomics and the unchecked potential for new discovery–I mean, literally, every time you get online there’s a possibility of new work out there…!).
The strip does have the occasional webcomic in-joke and I had been thinking it looked kind of Simpsons-influenced, so imagine my glee when I found this Halloween strip. The webcomic’s got a bit of an autobio bent to it, what with Canada, the Maple Leafs, and having kids (there’s a great series of guest strips in the archives which were stockpiled in preparation for a birth), much of which you either have to guess from context or from the notes running alongside each strip (something that Questionable Content, for example, does particularly well, and this webcomic reminds me a bit of that one).
There are moments, however, where it feels a little patterned; one of the tricks that Best uses frequently is to have one of the four panels be the silhouettes of the characters, or to have the characters in one general position throughout the strip. It might not even be something you notice in following on a regular episodic basis; it only jumped out at me as I was reading through the archives. In fact, it’s not unique or specific to Best, and, given his history (hello, new baby!), it’s not something with which I can really take much issue. Particularly when he does neat things like this: look at the arm in the third panel, breaking the frame. I love that.
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