Unfortunately, it wasn’t a webcomic exactly. But look at these freakin’ cool socks! I like Exploding Dog, I really like Diesel Sweeties, and before you guys jump all over me with this Dumbrella rah-rah-rah stuff again, let me clarify a few things that I think are particularly nifty here.

To start: socks! What webcomic has ever done socks before? We’ve established that I’m a sucker for good merchandising and funky products. I also do believe that folks should support the artists and creators who make stuff that you like, especially if it’s free content. Especially if we’re talking about holiday gifts. I really like the idea of gift subscriptions or original art as gifts, or some clever twist on a functional item.

Something about that just seems cool to me in a few ways; buying art is always nifty, and supporting an artist while you’re doing it is even cooler, I think. Particularly if that artist is someone who offers free webcomics all year round. For example, I like not having to pay to read Diesel Sweeties; I don’t spend a lot of time reading each strip, but it’s always the first I click when I go to read webcomics. It’s where I start. I’m totally excited that James Kolchalka opened his site, because I never did subscribe even though I really like his work.

It’s even cooler, at least for me, when those items are also functional. I have enough books. I even have enough t-shirts; I went from having one webcomic-related shirt to probably six or seven at this point. While I don’t think I could get away with wearing t-shirts at my day job, I’m fairly certain the Red Robot socks are going to be a hit. It’s clever merchandising (and advertising) with a catchy image from a cool company of which I was already a fan. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any product online when I saw it, thought, Whoa! That’s wicked cool and I gotta have it… and then went right to the ordering.

That, to me, speaks to the product’s uniqueness. I think of it the same way that folks (I include myself here) email links to interesting things online, or particularly good webcomics, or cool, goofy products. I think these socks (there’s more than one version, by the way), speak to that. I also think they’re going to be an insanely hot seller, because they’re doing something different, something outside of the standard webcomics merchandising model, and I think that’s worth noting.

The ongoing interview/discussion I’ve been having with two very patient artists (both folks I’ve written about in the past; I’ll write more once we finish) has lately turned to the question of length of webcomics. Specifically, we’re talking about the difference in reading a shortform piece online as opposed to a longform piece. Yes, we’ve been on this road before. Yes, we (by which I really mean I) keep coming back to it. I still think it’s an issue; it was something I’ve been thinking about particularly now that I work somewhere where I don’t have ready internet access at my desk.

Obviously these terms are open for discussion and of course there’s complications. For example, imagine a webcomic which is a daily updated strip (and here I mean ‘strip’ in the more classic sense, though it doesn’t have to adhere to the traditional design or pacing where there’s a punchline in the final panel). Each strip is self-contained. The characters, naturally, carry over from strip to strip, and while there’s no set overarching narrative these characters go about their lives, jobs, air hockey, whatever. Eventually there’s 500 or 1,000 of these things; sometimes collected into print versions, sometimes not. While not longform comics, that’s a pretty daunting archive; for a daily-updating strip, that number often represents years of work.

But what about the works out there which are kind of more like minicomics in their design? (more…)

Today’s the first post-Thanksgiving-Friday I’ve had off from work in a very long time. Even while in grad school, Thanksgiving wasn’t so much a break as it was a chance to catch up on grading before the flurry of finals and the semester ending. It’s nice to not be surrounded by research papers; it’s nicer still to have today free with no research papers and nothing which must be finished. I had a recent toe-dip back into academia on Monday, where I guest-lectured a course on comics at UMass; as sometimes happens, we ended up talking a little about webcomics, which was interesting.

Don’t get me wrong; I actually really enjoy my job. I’m finally working in a field where my Ph.D. is an asset, and I’m able to speak with a range of different people about a number of different things; it’s never the same day twice. But it is corporate. It’s my first real foray into the corporate world (which feels really different from the academic/corporate world); I have a cubicle, I work in a department, I wear a badge…so, yeah, it’s a little different from what I’m used to doing for work.

But I’m getting the joke, as it were, about office life. A friend recently sent me a link to We The Robots, Chris Harding’s new ‘thrice-weekly’ webcomic. Now, before you start thinking, “Robots? Another webcomic about robots? Aren’t robots and ninjas and pirates, like over?” let me plug. It’s kind of about corporate life, and it’s kind of about family, and the artwork is done in this vibrant, colorful way which belies the sterility the title might imply. It reminds me a little, weirdly, of Eric Carle and Ed Embley, and I really love the lettering (I’m still kind of a typography nut). Color is used very effectively, and the overall look of We The Robots is fairly different from other webcomics I’ve seen before.

It’s also wickedly funny. On one level, it works as kind of this satire on corporate life and corporate culture, kind of in the vein of (of course) Dilbert and Office Space in that ‘it’s funny because it’s kinda true’ sense. But it also manages to skewer
mass entertainment and compulsory education in some very deft ways. It’s worth just sitting down and reading through the archives, since the archives are very short, as the webcomic just launched in October of this year, with three very entertaining sections by way of introduction.

This week’s been busy, and so I’m trying brevity this week. It’s fitting, actually, since I’m all kinds of into The Superest lately. You’ll get through the archives quickly, but hopefully the site will continue and generate a larger body of work (because what they’ve got so far is fabulous). According to their website, The Superest “is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”

The primary players involved are Philadelphia-based illustrator and designer Kevin Cornell and, also hailing from Philly, Matthew Sutter, an animator and designer. Though there are, from time to time, invited guest artists, these two are pretty much the driving force behind the site. You might, however, be asking something more along the lines of What the heck is My Team, Your Team?!

The Superest sprang up as a result of a comment made on Cornell’s site by Andy Havens at TinkerX (listen up, you Pioneer Valley Comics Schmooze folks; I think we need to do some of these the next time we do jam strips!). Apparently Havens invented the game as a way to help keep his young son occupied while waiting in a restaurant queue, and it kind of spun off from there. He’s scanned the images that he and his son drew at the game’s genesis, and they’re totally charming. In fact, the whole passing along of this idea is kind of awesome, no? There’s even another site, Bayou Battle, inspired by TinkerX; it’s more of a Photoshop sort of thing in the vein of OMG! I can haz webcomic? than scanned drawn images, but it’s also entertaining.

Anyway, to get the full cumulative effect, you’ll so want to start reading at the beginning. It’s really entertaining.

Ever since the So, what are webcomics anyway? question popped back up a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about what I like about webcomics. I’m midway through a conversation which I’ll eventually write up and post; both of the folks have interesting, smart, and somewhat critical things to say about webcomics, much to do with definitions. I’m still making up my mind about much of it, though I have to say that I have shifted a little in my thinking. Initially I took this kind of inclusive position, thinking about accessibility.

I realized tonight, midway through my banjo lesson (yes, really), that I’d made kind of a weird glide in my thinking. If something’s online, ostensibly anyone could access it. That’s great. But how do you get people there? And how do you get them to click back on the second day? I’ll never be able to read all the webcomics out there; as it is, I can’t keep up lately with the ones that I like! I have a fabulously geeky friend who just twigged to Questionable Content; he’s trying to read all the archives. I’ve been trying to read through the archives for months.

Peter, my banjo teacher, has a MySpace page (about which I give him much grief). He’s got another website as well, but, primarily, he uses this social networking stuff as a way to keep people updated about shows and releases and such. Now, I use him as an example because I did the artwork for his most recent CD. While that artwork’s available online, I don’t at all think of it as online art. You can’t see the quirks in the design, the individual aspects of the print (we hand-printed ’em), or any of that stuff. Still, if not for the link, you might never have seen it at all. Or you might have run across it through some wayward Google search, or someone might email you a link, or whatever. Who knows?
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This week, I completely fell for Tom Humberstone’s Vented Spleen site. I’d originally been referred by a friend who knows my taste to his recent post for 24 Hour Comics Day, the aptly-titled Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Crohn’s Disease. It’s a straightforward autobio account about the creator’s diagnosis and about living with Crohn’s, what it means for his life, and thinking through some of those issues in a public forum. I think my friend sent the link along for a few reasons, not the least of which is that every year I talk a good game about doing a 24 Hour Comic and yet I never quite sit down and do it. It’s less a lack of stick-with-it-ness (I did finish NaNoWriMo the year I signed up, plus, y’know, there was that grad school grudge match thing) and more just poor scheduling on my part (I had tickets to see They Might Be Giants…and the guy sitting one row in front of me was wearing a Republicans for Voldemort t-shirt).

What hooked me was that Everything You Never Wanted… is not only autobiographic work by a man about corporeality, but the images are also reminiscent of two of my favorite artists (one being Seth, the other Craig Thompson) in terms of some of the lettering and the use of color as well as some of the line work. Years ago, I scrambled to find a text much along these lines to include in an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory course I taught at the University of Delaware. While the work I chose (it was Fight Club…) worked well, I would have loved to have had more of a range. Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Crohn’s Disease would have fit spectacularly. It’s very compelling.

Humberstone’s been writing, drawing, and publishing for about three years; he’s based in London and his work does have a range; the 24 Hour Comic has quite a different feel to it than some of his other work, including How To Date A Girl In 10 Days. The latter’s a lovely little story, but when you click the link be careful to note the order of the pages since they were posted in sections. Organizatiuonally, it’s tough to read since you’ve got to remember to start at what looks like the end and kind of read backwards. It’s a complicated process, but it’s totally worth the work.

And, of course, we should note: they’re originally minicomics which have been scanned and made available online. In most cases I prefer print, since images don’t always come up as crisp on a computer screen and in Humberstone’s case much of the artwork’s fine lines and precise lettering don’t translate ideally to the screen. Still, being that he’s in London, getting actual copies of the print works is unfortunately cost-prohibitive. And here’s where this issue links to my recent posts about webcomics: it’s an online version of a print comic created by someone who does regularly update a website with his varied work. There are some fabulous sketchbook images as well as illustration work ranging from promo posters to EP covers for bands. It’s work I wouldn’t have seen without the website. So that’s tempered some of my thinking about webcomics and print; perhaps next week I’ll go looking for something toward the other end of the spectrum.

First, thanks for all of the interesting comments last week. I’m getting ready to talk webcomics with two folks who will surely have interesting things to say. They’re folks whose work I read both online and off, and have written about here on Fleen, so we’ll see how it goes. Watch for it in a few weeks. In the meantime, keep sending along suggestions. I was deciding what I wanted to write about this week since I’d gone looking for something very hypertexty, very different from some of the works I’ve seen so far.

I actually had a candidate in mind (who will likely be the subject of next week’s column) until I ran across Nobody Scores!, “a little comic about inevitable disaster.” Started about a year and a half ago by Brandon Bolt, the webcomic details the lives of four people living in the same building. One of them, Raoul, lives downstairs from the other three. Mostly he wants them to die; they’re terrible upstairs neighbors and he’s an academic with two doctorates, lots of articles, and a crappy adjunct teaching job.

The three people living upstairs, Sarah, Jane Doe, and Beans, in the words of their creator, “strive and dream in their second-floor apartment and unfortunately elsewhere as well, and see their dreams bear fruit, causing frequent death and millions of dollars of property damage. Exactly the way it is for countless young adults the world over! I think it should be real easy to relate to. Because I’m keeping it true to life.” Sarah’s the ‘responsible’ one of the group (and why the rent gets paid), whereas the other two are a little more slacker-ey. Still, I like them. It’s taking me some time to read through all of the archives, in part because these images are so densely packed with really rich detail that I want to read slowly and savor them. That’s a new experience for me reading webcomics, where it’s usually just, you know, click, click, click.

Bolt’s got an amazing page with explanations and character bios. He’s got colorwork which reminds me of Corey Marie Parkhill’s Scene Language and of Mice Luce’s Fite!, some images which evoke Cathy Leamy’s Geraniums and Bacon, and really cool lettering. I like the way the words look on the screen; all the different elements work together in what I imagine webcomics do best when they’re really well-composed.

Overall, the webcomic surprised me with how sassy and sharp it is. I like the characters even though they’re sometimes kind of mean. The characters are snappy; they snipe at each other, shirk on the rent (well, two of them do), freeload (ditto), try to parallel park (and instead ignite all the cars around them), and other sundry and strange things. Like turn into zombies. Or die.

Narratively, Bolt explains these things away pretty simply: there’s “no continuity in Nobody Scores! Unless specified by a handy sign that says “Part One” or “Part Two.” So when the world gets overrun by wombats or Sara becomes a vampire or Beans dies of consumption, everything goes rewind before the next comic, exposing our beloved cast to more horrible, horrible fates. Imagine Groundhog Day without a victory condition.”

Gotta love it.

Besides, how can you not love a webcomic which namechecks Homicide: Life on the Street? Come on. (Even more slick? Check out the names written on the board behind the characters.)

Yeah, we’re back here again. Bear with me, okay?

I’m gearing up to revisit the question of Webcomics/Not Webcomics? with which I started all those months ago. In truth, revisiting this question’s been inspired by a few things. First, I’ve been conversing with folks I’d been thinking of as “webcomics artists” who, as it turns out, don’t really self-define as such. They see themselves more as minicomics artists who also share their work online. While having comics online is a way to reach a wider audience, it isn’t what they consider their primary delivery system and these artists don’t do anything particularly hypertexty. I empathize: I certainly do not consider myself a webcomics artist even though comics I’ve done are available online. I didn’t put them there, but they’re findable. (It’s the Internet. Everything is findable.)

It’s also been spurred on by looking at pictures of SPX this past weekend. It was a lot easier to get there when I was living in Delaware and presenting with ICAF (back when ICAF ran at the same time and place as SPX; it’s actually starting tomorrow in the Madison Building in the Library of Congress in Washington DC), but it makes me wonder a little. One of the things I liked so much about SPX (and MoCCA, to a lesser extent) was the amount of non-comics items made by people who do comics. Like fabric robots, for example. It’s something I’m more familiar with from zine fairs, but it’s that same “Hey, check out this cool thing I made!” vibe (Gary also mentioned this point in his SPX recap post). You get to meet in person the people behind the work. That’s something I don’t feel like I get in quite the same way with webcomics. (Not to say it isn’t there; it’s just different in that it’s mediated by technology—emails, blogs, comments, etc.—rather than a face to face conversation.)
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Or, the alternative title: My Chronologically Awkward Review

My housemate doesn’t describe herself as a webcomics reader, exactly, even though she does have a number of regular comics that she reads on a regular enough basis. Though she’s emphatic that she doesn’t consider herself part of “webcomics culture” (whatever that means), she knows enough about it to point me towards new webcomics.

Take for example K. Fuhr’s Friendly Hostility over at Keenspot. I’d never heard of it and I was looking for a strip which discussed non-hetero sexuality (it is National Coming Out Day, after all). “Oh!” my housemate said, “Have a look at this one.”
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This week I’d like to introduce you to The Secret Knots by Juan Santapau. It’ll evoke connections to A Softer World, as it should, plus it may get you thinking about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Erratically updated but beautifully done (perhaps these things are not mutually exclusive), The Secret Knots is worth your time.

It’s also, I think, worth noting that the comic’s creator is based in Chile. While we think a fair amount about webcomics as a global medium, I can think of maybe a handful based outside of the United States which have popped up on my radar, and even fewer where English is not the creator’s first language. He started “posting these single page comics on a blog, in 2005” and decided to continue the series through its own website. He explains that the “name of the series comes from something Athanasius Kircher wrote once: ‘The world is bound with secret knots’ which I find somehow connected to the tag line that I’ve been using: ‘comics about things we do without knowing why‘ (even though Kircher was talking about magnetism…).”

While Santapau has a disclaimer explaining that he isn’t a native speaker of English, his writing shows a degree of precision I haven’t yet seen in any other webcomic. There are occasionally a few very small errors, but they do not by any means adversely affect the work. Honestly, the language usage is so breathtaking in its range of vocabulary–and combine that feeling with reading those words in some of the evocative lettering Santapau composes. The total effect is almost haunting in places; overall, The Secret Knots is a fabulous example of just how powerful the combination of skillful word choice and the way in which those words are represented can be. Simply put, the webcomic is truly striking.
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