After one gentle nudge a while back (with mention of fixing some text?) and one bold comment on last week’s column, I thought I’d finally turn some attention to Thine Appellation, a recent entrant in the Bomb Shelter Comics Webcomic Idol competition that Gary, one of the new judges, mentioned in an earlier post. Hailing from somewhere in the United Kingdom, Thine Appellation (funny punny title, by the way) is a webcomic about four cops (mostly bald), police brutality (kind of), some gender stuff (sort of, but not really), and bombs filled with icing? Or yogurt? I think. I’m not totally sure.

Weirdly, it kinda works for what it is. I know that sounds a little lukewarm, but the things that I found most captivating and quirky about this webcomic aren’t what you’d expect and weren’t much to do with the storyline (obviously). It took me a minute to figure out how to navigate (Paperwork? Questions?) and the episodes aren’t titled or dated in an easy-to-follow manner, but I really love the handwritten title and navigation bars. It’s a distinctive detail in a webcomic with a number of quirky details.
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But before I go too much further away from that topic: for the record, I am dead impressed. That’s amazing and kind of crazy. Please keep sending in webcomics suggestions; I’m still trying to build up a little bit of a buffer of reviews while I start work on some items for future columns, including (with any luck) a post-SPX interview with Matthew Reidsma about webcomics, more about webcomics and print, and maybe a piece ramping up to SPX….and my cool new bumpersticker, maybe.

Anyway, after a little time away from the computer (which was ideal and exactly what I needed, despite the grief I got from a bunch of my comics-minded colleagues at a recent get-together), I returned from my digital sabbatical to find an email from a friend of mine recommending Michelle Au’s Scutmonkey. Scutmonkey is a comic series (available online as well as formerly in print–I think it’s sold out at present) that Au started in the spring of 2003 about medical school and residency and such. It’s a fascinating (and wickedly funny) peek into a world most of us likely know very little about. Her FAQ section pretty deftly handles any ethical twinges you might be having (in theory at least) about the subject matter, and she’s got such a great sense of humor about the weird quirks of her job that’s it’s almost impossible–for me at least–to stop reading. Part of it are the quirky expressions on some of her characters, part of it is my autobio bent, and part is because it’s just weirdly compelling to me. It’s easy to read and interesting.

While Au is primarily a blogger, her blog does have her comics posted (and current ones, mind), when she isn’t busy with lots of other things (including, yes, really being a doctor. How awesome is that?). She also has two Scutmonkey submissions–“The Great Escape” and “Burn Baby Burn”–written by other folks working in healthcare, one of whom makes a grand escape and the other by a ‘beeper doc’ frustrated by particular restrictions about ways to convey instructions.

Again, Scutmonkey’s another webcomic I’d never seen (though, on that topic, I have to point you toward this cool article by Adrian of Count Your Sheep fame, which I totally enjoyed reading). I had an almost instant affinity for Scutmonkey because it visually reminds me so much of this zine called Velvet Grass that I loved, years and years ago. Au’s linework is bold and accessible, and at no point does any of the medical stuff sail over the heads of her readership. Even the ones which seem like they’d need some kind of medical context knowledge, like “The 12 Types of Med Students,” are more than able to stand on their own and are well worth the time it’ll take to have a look.

I think this week’s post (which I’m trying to write in advance, so as to have a little lead time and to be able to stay away from my computer during Rosh Hashanah; hopefully the timestamp works…) is just going to be a very quick shout-out for Kelli Nelson‘s work. She’s another one of those artists who I first encountered at SPX a whole lot of years ago, in minicomics form. There’s something endearingly familiar about her style to me–which is, to me, a bit evocative of Marc Hempel‘s work on Sandman: The Kindly Ones. You might recognize her name from her work on True Porn, and of course she’s got a story called The Three Men over at Tragi-Comix (I won’t tell you much, for fear of wrecking the story, but her color work is lush and compelling; particularly well-done for a story involving blood, tragedy, and some very deft revenge.)

She’s one of those webcomics artists who I don’t know if I’d consider a webcomics artist, exactly. This is an issue I’m hoping to continue to discuss and explore in coming weeks, in that there are comics published on the web that I think of as webcomics, even though their creators don’t consider themselves as webcomics artists. Does having something on the web simply make someone a webcomics artist? I once thought so, but I’m not as sure I agree anymore.

What I do know is that Nelson’s work is incredible and I don’t think enough people know about it. Or the range of it: in addition to the comics and the minis, there’s also an assortment of other stuff, including some very cool paintings. I’m particularly taken with her lettering, just recently leaving a job where I spent a lot of my day looking at different fonts. What’s remarkable about them in this case is that they lend the work a sense of whimsy in some cases without diluting the content or stifling the message. Quite the opposite, really. It’s remarkable how in something like the Summer Vacation mini the little perfect circles over the i give the strip a playfulness, while in The Three Men the subtle use of color in the narration lends it a more sinister feel in ways.

Just browsing through her site, you can check out web versions of her stellar minis, such as What We Did On Our Summer Vacation (watch out for the most awful looking sunburn ever), some other work (she calls it “doodly crap“), and even some archived “weekly comics” from a while back before book projects and moving and such. She works as easily in fiction as autobiography, which is a rare skill, and her stories are all very evocative; it’s difficult to read something of hers and not be moved by it, to not be reminded of something in your own life which is a little bittersweet somehow, something I find particularly salient for this time of year.

As some of you know, I have this other life as an academic. As part of that I’m on an email list for announcements and other comics related stuff, and it was through them that I heard about
“Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics.” It’s an exhibit opening at The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) next Thursday (opening reception starts at 7 pm) and running through 14 January of next year. Embarrassingly, I hadn’t heard anything about it until today, but it struck me as somewhat salient after that whole musing on “gateway webcomics” a few weeks back.

I’m cribbing some from the press release, the phrasing of which I find particularly savvy: “Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics” brings comics from the web page to the MoCCA stage. The exhibit explores three aspects of online comics: the unique format and design of webcomics, their appeal to niche audiences, and the transitions between web and print comics. I’m particularly captivated by that last part, even though I’m still thinking about what “niche audiences” means.

What’s also interesting is that the exhibit is curated by Jennifer Babcock, creator of C’est La Vie, which makes a lot of sense: a webcomic artist curating an exhibit about webcomics is going to have a particularly keen understanding of what to highlight and what makes webcomics–especially in this perhaps more traditional context on a museum wall (the last exhibit I saw there was quite well done)–distinct and unique.

Again, from the press release: This exhibit incorporates original artwork, prints of finished art, and digital displays. Featured in the exhibit will be the immensely popular Penny Arcade, PhD, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Diesel Sweeties, Mom’s Cancer, Finder, Supernatural Law, Questionable Content, Something Positive, Scary Go Round, Achewood, Narbonic, Goats, among many others. Of that list there was only one title which was totally new to me, so that’s pretty much the official end of my new-to-webcomics status.

There’s also an exhibit running at the same time for ACT-I-VATE, which “features daily installments of in-progress graphic novels from a group of accomplished cartoonists.” “We’ve discussed a showcase for ACT-I-VATE in the past, and including it as a feature within the webcomics show was the perfect opportunity,” said MoCCA Curator Bill Roundy. “ACT-I-VATE has some fantastic cartoonists, and it has a unique focus on serialized graphic novels.” I had no idea this group existed; in truth, it sounds kind of amazing.

All in all, I think this exhibit is going to be really interesting, even though I’m not going to be able to make it to the opening for a couple of reasons (Rosh Hashanah? Starting a brand-new extra-awesome job?). That said, I’m totally going to see it at some point: I’ve been fortunate enough to see little bits and pieces of some different webcomics as they’re in process, and I’m hoping some of those are part of the exhibit. I’m very interested in the various steps these webcomics take in order to land at the finished product.

One of them in particular which has some particularly cool behind-the-scenes that you don’t see on the screen is Overcompensating , which I’m very much hoping is in the exhibit (even though Topato from WiGU is on the poster). I’ve been getting back into Overcompensating lately, kicked off by a very random recent supermarket parking lot conversation to do with the infamous bumpersticker; two folks parked and got out of their car just as my housemate and I were returning to mine.

“You’re one of those Eastworks folks!” the woman said, excitedly.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I mean, I used to be,” I said.
“You’ve got the bumper sticker!”

Yes. Yes, I do. So did a random woman I passed last week on I-91, and so did the dude at whom I honked last week who snuck out in traffic in Holyoke in front of my car. Now that I’m looking, I’m kind of seeing these bumper stickers everywhere.

I think I might have to give them out at Halloween…

Until recently, I had not considered gateway as a term used to indicate something one might outgrow. I figured it primarily as a passageway through which one is introduced to other things, so much so that I once got into a little trouble for calling Art Spiegelman’s Maus the “gateway drug” of comics in classrooms. Whether you believe that or not, my experience at the time teaching comics certainly proved it true; I just didn’t expect to see that phrasing in print (and in The Comics Journal, no less. Oops.)

Webcomics-wise, I suppose this shift makes sense. Gateways are liminal. I know a number of readers whose online reading wanes depending on storylines, offline time commitments, finding other favorites, intentionally paring down their reading lists, and so on. Some of them have outgrown the webcomics they started with, even if they’ve found new ones to read in the meantime, for a host of reasons. I can empathize: I still feel a little overwhelmed knowing that there are some major-name webcomics I should read and haven’t yet, even though my preferences still skew in certain, very particular, ways. I’ve found new favorites, but I’ve also looked at a lot of webcomics that did absolutely nothing for me. I don’t feel like I know enough to offer critiques, and, as a rule, I prefer to not write negative reviews. I hear that little voice: If you can’t say something nice…

But the comments in last week’s column made me realize that while I might not know webcomics all that well, I know comics. Not so much that I can keep up with you Spider-Man freaks (easy now: I say that with affection, not scorn), but I know how comics work, about panel transitions and zip lines and such. I think those things are transposable to webcomics. And I know reviews, in a less-defined sense; I’ve been writing for Xerography Debt for a while and I’m sure my old reviews lurk even still in the Popmatters comics archives.

So I thought I might tackle this week’s column with those things in mind–and also issue something of a challenge. Mike Luce was first out of the gate last week in commenting, and so I decided to highlight his webcomic Fite! (where the webcomic’s billed as “By Mike Luce (drawing as Thomas Blue)” which I’m not sure I understand…).

What sealed the deal for me to write about Fite!, even after clicking the link, was finding Joey Manley‘s review: “Following the story of Fite! is kind of difficult, since the characters speak in symbols.” After that, I was convinced.
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Last week I found out, somewhat to my surprise (though, really, I shouldn’t be surprised at all), that there are still about eighty-five hundred MILLION webcomics I’ve never even heard of (such as this one and this one..and, uh, this one too). I had a look at them–thanks for the suggestions!–and it was interesting to compare them to the list of webcomics I’d ended up showing the poor suckers captive audience in my office.

Here’s the list I mentioned last week, which is sort of a short list of my favorites.

Cat and Girl. This is one of the few webcomics I actually read (as a minicomic) before I ever started thinking about webcomics. Wacky Icelandic t-shirts, quirky pop culture references; what’s not to love? If I only knew about it during grad school…

Diesel Sweeties. One of my favorites. I know us Fleen folk get a fair amount of grief about the whole Rah! Rah! Dumbrella! criticism, but over time DS has proven itself as one of the very few webcomics to which I return on a regular basis even though I have friends who’ve lost interest in it (though one, who has gotten back into it lately, recently exclaimed on the phone, “Hey, Diesel Sweeties is kinda dirty!” which made me laugh like crazy).

And he’s got killer t-shirts, trumped perhaps only by Creatures In My Head. I swear, I look at this site and I start this bizarre Pavlovian drooling (less nasty than it sounds, really) over the shirts. Please, fellas, Halloween–the most awesomest holiday ever–is mere weeks away. What marvels do you have on tap for this year?!

Many of the others I pointed out in the office are webcomics I’ve written about before, like Exploding Dog and Teaching Baby Paranoia. While I don’t know Questionable Content all that well, it made the list, along with one of my perpetual favorites, High Maintenance Machine (with cool new site design!). And I still really enjoy reading Minimalist Stick Figure Theater. (Plus, y’know, we’re actually kind of pro-Comic Sans here in the office, for all of the font and typeset geekery which goes on here).

And I’m not sure I could show people webcomics and not mention one of my newer favorites (Scene Language) and one of my long-standing favorites (Overcompensating, which I especially love when it goes over-the-top with referencing a whole stack of other webcomics). I’m, embarrassingly, a little out of the loop on Scary Go Round at present, but I adore it (especially the color work and the wacky hand-lettered stuff from a while back).

This is like the worst list ever for newbies, isn’t it? Oops. (But you know what everyone went nuts over? Creatures In My Head. No joke.)

Unrelated, I loved this question in the comments: Have you had the ‘No, I’m not a republican, that’s a character from a book’ conversation yet?”. I don’t think anyone who sees me near my car makes that assumption, and certainly not the ones who recognize this. Yeah.

Despite the risk of this column beginning to sound vaguely like a gossip column, I’ll proceed. I have a wacky day job making custom rubber stamps, and recently we fielded a few orders from some very notable webcomics folks. I ran around the office, very excited, waving hands and exclaiming, Hey, y’all, look at this order! and ending with What do you mean you don’t know who [name redacted] is! Have you seen his website?! Here, lemme show you…. So I accidentally got to introduce my entire office to a bunch of cool webcomics, which was kind of interesting. These are not folks who really even read comics, let alone comics on the web. “Webcomics” was mostly an alien concept, actually, to most of them.

And then, a few days later, I ran into two other awesome webcomics creators while running errands in town. They author two of the webcomics I had ended up showing off in the office, and it got me thinking about what webcomics are, basically, representative in some way (or, if that’s even really possible, given the huge amount of webcomics out there) of the field or are particularly innovative. It also got the gears turning, again, what things draw me to a certain webcomic and what things are offputting. Embarrassing Admission #1: I’ve never been able to get into Achewood, despite lots of recommendations from smart people whose opinions I value. I swear, I tried–it’s just not resonating with me somehow. I haven’t been able to figure out what it is in specific, but…yeah. No.

It also got me thinking about subculture. I have one of those rad Republicans for Voldemort bumperstickers on my car, and since I put it on there I’ve been seeing a lot of others on other cars. It’s weird for me to have a bumpersticker in common with someone else even though I have a few on the car (mostly music, but there’s also the older style of this design). In a much more corporate setting this week, I ended up explaining webcomics to a Harry Potter fan who’d seen the bumpersticker on my car in the parking lot, and really wanted to find out where it came from! Not a conversation I was expecting to have in that work context.

Weirdly, while giving blood earlier this week, these ideas kind of fused. I’m one of those folks who has to stay a bit later than the other kids and ends up with lovely bruises. (Always fun to explain at work.) I was thinking about what to write this week, with an eye toward becoming a little more critical now that I’m past the 6-months mark with this column (Totally Embarrassing Admission #2; I completely missed it…), and so I don’t quite feel like a newbie anymore, though I also don’t by any means feel well-schooled yet in all of this.

But I’m schooled enough to recognize Jeph Jacques! I was walking to my car after being sprung from the post-donation eat-cookies-and-relax holding pen, and thought, Oh, cool! I’ll say hi! as we passed, and then realized it would be kind of awkward somehow, since I’m not really a regular reader and, well, the rational brain kicked in just in time: hello, blood loss makes you sound even crazier than usual…. Still, I wonder: do webcomics artists get recognized and stopped on the street the way other famous (or famous-ish) artists might? Or does the web allow or even promote a kind of anonymity somehow, some kind of distance from that sort of fame?

Anyway, it links in a little since I’d argue that Questionable Content might be one of those, y’know, gateway webcomics which hooks readers in, and gets them clicking back. His readership’s pretty loyal from what I’ve heard; more so than most of the other webcomics I’ve considered in the past (though last week’s column on Wes Molebash’s work prompted much more talk on that topic than I’d expected). For example, when I mentioned to folks way back last February that I was picking up this column, almost everyone mentioned QC. (Embarrassing Admission #3: I haven’t made it all the way through the archives yet. I’m sorry! I know this is bad; I know.)

So, I guess what I’m asking is more on the Recommend Stuff topic. But what would you recommend to the person who has never read webcomics–and, really, more to the point: why those webcomics? What should I have shown the folks in my office? (Next week I’ll tell you what I did actually show them.) What do you feel is distinctive, notable work in current webcomics?

I’m going to intentionally keep the field wide open on this question, even though in this column I’ve been working with an eye toward some of the less-well-known pieces or things which are new from already-established creators, and so forth. It’s not intended as a top 10 list (I think there are already quite a few?) or any kind of ranking system, exactly, but I wonder what webcomics pop up on many lists. I have a few guesses–the lovely Scary Go Round being at the top of that list–but I’m curious…

Sometimes I plan out what I want to write about in a certain week. For example, in coming weeks, I hope to become a little more critical and maybe a little less Rah! Rah! Comics!, since that’s something I haven’t really done before. I’m thinking also a bit about why I don’t want to do webcomics myself, but how much I think I’m getting inspired by some of them (particularly the ones which use color in such interesting ways; see last week’s column) in the offline work I produce.

Partially I want as ever to parse through why I like what I like, since it seems still to be all over the map. What I’m starting to find tricky is finding new work to check out. Part of my goal here is to search out some of the webcomics which aren’t as well known. Sometimes that comes from folks emailing in (I get the promo emails as well), and though I usually leave the reviews to Gary I thought I’d jump on one in particular this week.

Wes Molebash, who creates a webcomic called You’ll Have That emailed in, first with a promo blurb and then followed it with something that piqued my interest: a print book. Like this isn’t gonna catch my eye: The You’ll Have That one-shot should be in comic stores tomorrow. But in case your comic shop didn’t order it, you can buy it right now ! Once you guys get your hands on the one-shot, please let me know what you think of it! I’d love to have some feedback on the “floppy” issue of the book compared to the trades.

Here’s a little background on the comic; I find his info page weirdly charming. (I like it when webcomics folks have a little information about the genesis of the comic and all that behind-the-scenes stuff). The strip itself is kind of disarming, in that it’s got all the gender stuff I think is kind of interesting, and the geekery, and the weird fusion of the two. Even though the style reminds me of some other strips I’ve read, I’m still enjoying it. It isn’t visually super-unique, but the interaction of the two characters is fairly entertaining even when the strip kind of defaults to the main premise (it’s about a couple).

I don’t have the print version, though it looks interesting. I’m still reading through the archives and the way they’re set up it’s hard to tell how much there is in the archives, material-wise, at a glance. I suspect there’s a lot, and it’s going to be one of those comics I read through in a few sittings rather than all at once. Still, points for diligence: if it wasn’t for all the promo emails, I wouldn’t have clicked the link.

So, keep ’em coming. I could use some reading suggestions.

Confession: I totally pinched that title from Corey Marie Parkhill’s charming, quirky Scene Language, which is about a bunch of folks in a “Midwestern music scene” dealing with band drama, getting older, surprises, tattooed dudes, awkward moments, and a host of other stuff like roommates and spur-of-the-moment haircuts. I ran across this strip (which looks like it’s just about a year old or so? I think it just hit 200 episodes?) through the Harry Potter meme I mentioned a few weeks back, and I’ve spent a lovely recent afternoon reading through the archives.

If you aren’t familiar with Corey Marie, or Young American Comics, you might have a little reading to do after excavating yourself from the rock you’re under. (They’re also about to launch what looks to be like a very cool project.)

Anyway, Scene Language is one of my new favorites. It’s clever, it’s catchy, and I’m totally sucked in. Corey Marie’s color work is amazing (check out some of the way characters are dimly lit when they’re in bars or at shows) and she’s got a way of spinning characters as just familiar enough (hello, Garrett!) they remind you of someone you know without feeling too close to home.

I love it. I totally love it. I’m all overcome all-emo-like and all that for it. But check it out anyway, yeah?

Since last week’s column, I’ve been thinking more about trying to figure out what’s going on with this print edition thing–I recently found that, to my surprise, I was actually kind of ambivalent about the recent created-for-print version of a webcomic that I generally enjoy. It’s actually one of the few I read regularly, and I was kind of expecting to really like the collection in question. When I didn’t, I tried to figure out why–particularly given how much I generally like print, and also what happened the last time I asked this question.

Hence the experiment: while you might be able to figure who’s who by the end of the piece, for the purposes of this column, let’s say there’s Webcomic A, Webcomic B, and Webcomic C—but I’m going to leave out any details which would make it immediately obvious which is which. They all update regularly; A is published daily, new strips for B appear once per week, and C is on a MWF schedule. Everyone is excellent about holding to each respective publication schedule; nobody updates late. (more…)