Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: Kean Soo is a creative powerhouse. He’s the assistant editor of Flight, does the disarmingly charming Jellaby over at The Secret Friend Society (which holds slot number three on the Why The Hell Aren’t You Reading This? list), had previously done a journal comic, and contributed to volume 1 of You Ain’t No Dancer. But today we’re going to talk about exitmusic.

It’s a series of autobiographical stories, which is always dangerous ground; done wrong it comes off as lame, and done right you end up exposing parts of yourself to the world. Secondly, it’s set to music clips, which is also risky — a reader that disagrees with your musical interpretations or taste can come away with the wrong message from the work. It’s also tough to reprint it later. And yet, he’s managed to make both of these risks pay off.

Soo’s art is expressive, especially as he draws himself; the character design is simplified to the point that the reader can’t help but to identify. Two-arms-two-legs-one head-glasses could be that Kean guy, sure. It could also be me. Or you. Secondly, even if the musical choices didn’t perfectly fit the mood of each story, the art is strong enough to stand on its own (in fact, one of the stories is an excerpt of his Flight 2 contribution). But forget all that, because there’s something else here that’s most interesting about this work: silence.

That’s an odd thing to say about a series that’s using music as an integral part of the experience, but take a careful look at how few words show up in these stories. In the language of comics, silence is when the reader loses out on cues in the story and has to participate actively. Silence carries an emotional resonance beyond the most profound words (especially when the stories deal with loss and leaving). Check out the simple pleasures of drivin’ to LAX with your hand out the window, or the heartbreak of saying goodbye for the very last time.

Even with the soundtrack, it’s the dialogue that tells us how long a scene is supposed to play out; take that away, and the reader can get lost in the moment. The scene plays exactly as long as you think it needs to in order to convey that emotional payload direct into your brain. Not my brain, or anybody else’s: yours. This is storytelling that’s customized to you and you alone. The littlest details here (a fast-food sign, a dog to scratch behind the ears, a musical chord) invite you to reflect, relive moments of your own life, and shift into a non-causal experience of the story. It’s the sort of thing that professors of literature like to bullshit about when they read Proust, which is a ballsy trick for any classically-trained student of literature to attempt.

So how incredibly ballsy is it if you’re not a student of literature? Soo trained as an electrical engineer and has the Iron Ring to prove it. I’ve got a similar degree and ring, and if this didn’t predispose me to like him, there’s this: I went to nerd school. I immersed myself in the world of electrical engineering and engineers. Yeah, sure, everybody’s unique, hidden propensities, blah blah blah … engineers are not an artistically creative people, as a rule. Just trust me on this one. We compromise, improvise, design, test, and make things work in the most direct manner possible; little bits of silence and elegance were not part of the curriculum. That Soo is able to make this aspect such a central part of his art is more than refreshing — it’s astonishing. Now go revel in the silences.

Apparently, Ken Krekeler read a lot of webcomics that sucked. So he decided to make one too.

My Nemesis seems to be a pastiche of a lot of other things, without a well developed plotline or believable characters. It starts out being a story about a guy writing a webcomic. It then fairly quickly skips around to different parts of the world and then turns into a comic about a guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend.

The over-the-top attitude and characterization of Kal is obviously intended to be humorous, but it ends up being dull and trite. Having been dumped, the overly angsty Kal then sets off on a journey to find himself.

Pretty much all the jokes fall flat. The artwork is competent, although fairly uninspired – like the rest of the comic.

Ken seems to have talent. But he doesn’t seem to be using it. So, Ken Krekeler, I hope you fucking get shot and die.

Machinima is the growing art of using video games to build films. One of the classic examples is Red Vs. Blue, a twisted series of short clips built using Halo. But machinima is a term exclusively for animations/films (“machine” “cinema”, see?).

We seem to need a new word for comics like Concerned: The half-life and death of Gordon Frohman. It’s not a sprite comic, and it’s not a collage comic. It’s definitely not a pixel comic, and it’s not really a gamer comic either.

Concerned is built entirely (except for lettering) inside Half-Life 2, and takes a very Rosencrantz & Guildenstern approach to the story and script of that game – at least as far as I can tell. I haven’t played anything in the Half-Life oeuvre.

Concerned follows the misadventures of the extremely stupid Gordon Frohman as he wanders about trying to secure a future as a member of the Combine. As a comic, Concerned suffers a bit from trying too hard to follow the plot of the game – there are some mildly disconcerting story jumps. But then again, this is also part of the humor of the comic – Christopher C. Livingston is making fun of Half-Life and other games.

All in all, Concerned is a good, snarky read. And the notes at the bottom of most strips are informative and humorous as well.

But we need a name for this type of strip. Has someone come up with one, and I’m just ignorant? Any suggestions?

Edit – I hate to nip this rolicsome debate in the bud, but Chris Livingston has told me I’m ignorant (in the nicest possible way), the proper term for his type of comic is Gamics.

Edit 2: Gamics may be a trademark of Gamics.com. So we do still need another word.

This is the first is what will likely become a semi-regular series of looks at webcomics that no longer update. Some of them will be finished stories; some of them will be early projects that inform later, more well-known work; some will be on permanent hiatus. All of them will be worth your while to investigate.

Vera Brosgol is the best webcomicker not presently doing a webcomic; big words, let’s back them up. For a couple years there, she did a webcomic that never finished, has done some primo spot art, contributed to both Flight anthologies, and has made her way into the more-than-indy-not-quite-major print comics world via Oni Press. Quite a lot for somebody who’s not yet 22 years old.

Most people initially noticed “Verabee” through her webcomic, Return to Sender. The first thing to catch you is the art: there’s a looseness that reminds you of Chynna Clugston-Major’s work on Hopeless Savages (especially with Vera’s use of in-panel margin notes), with a wash of blue-grey that provides shadows, contrast, highlighting, and depth to wonderfully expressive faces. Ah, the faces. Check out the look of shock on Our Hero (his name’s Often — the only question is exactly how many times he got beat up in grade school) in that bottom panel as he hears the collision of car and pedestrian. Oh, wait, he’s just reacting to the no-longer-skipping CD playing too loud. Hmm. Well, that’s just … just….

Just hilarious, actually. That sweetly vicious sense of humor becomes quickly apparent as we follow a bizarre chain of events that culminates in a little girl getting hit in the head by a rock from outer space; the entire reaction from Often’s friend Colette when watching the news consists of, “Did you see me? I looked GOOD.” Colette’s casual brutality towards life (in general) and Often (in particular) continues with a game of “Made You Look!” when Often’s attempts to buy Girl Scout cookies, goes spectacularly wrong. When messing with his head isn’t enough, she’ll consider messing with his internal organs, too.

But that’s just life when the magic mail slot in your apartment starts spitting out instructions that lead to those dead little girls, spooked pigeons and hobo fights. It’s that mail slot that all the monsters apparently want to get their hands (or whatever) on, whether or not they’re invited in. So where does the magic mail slot come from? What’s the reason for following the instructions, other than the fact that Often gets killer nosebleeds when he doesn’t?

Well, kids, sometimes webcomics get interrupted because of school, work, a shift in artistic desire, whatever … and that’s why when you’re done reading the RtS archives, you should keep it on your “check it once a week in case it resumes” list of bookmarks. After all, it had delays before, and this could be just another one. But just to be sure, one of these days I’m going to bribe one of those sick Make-A-Wish kids to ask Vera how it ends. Until then, we’ll just have to wonder. By the way, when a story intrigues you so much that you’re willing to exploit a dying child, that’s how you know that you’re dealing with a master storyteller. There’s an enormously wide set of possible directions for the story, and in your gut you know that she could make any of them work.

But before you get mad at not knowing how it ends, consider what Vera’s been up to since: a new website, some brutally funny animated shorts, eight pages of a Hopeless Savages one-shot, a college degree, and lots of art that makes you smile. There’s big things on the horizon, and every reason to expect that seeing Vera’s name on the cover or masthead is reason enough to plunk down money for that comic or trade. She’s going to be crazy huge one day (probably much sooner than we all think), and there’s still just enough time to get in on the ground floor of loving her work. Get reading, and stay away from the hobos.

This was going to be a fairly long post about a departed comic that had been an excellent read.

But it looks like it’s been updating again, at least for a month or so.

Ashfield Online was an early comic that can be seen as a prototype for what we are now calling static comics. Professor Ashfield almost never moves, and the humor is always funny and extremely quirky as well. Among other things, the first and the one-thousandth episodes form a closed loop in time. Not many other comics can achieve that.

All in all, it’s a jolly and surreal read, and it’s good to see some new episodes.

It’s not clear if Aric will be updating this more. If he doesn’t, I think it’s a candidate for Alexander Danner’s relatively new Full Story, a site he is putting together to collect comics that have completed their run. It may not be ideal, as it’s not “a complete beginning, middle, and endÂ? reading experience”, but it does have that whole “closed loop in time” thing going for it.

It also has atomic fireballs!

New York, the city where … no, wait, let’s start over.

NEW YORK! The city where anything is possible. Where your co-workers are an Orthodox rabbi, a secular Muslim, a half-Columbian half-Dominican future supermodel, and a Liverpudlian former electrician who managed to marry into an old-money New England dynasty. Your neighbors come from every ethnic group and subdivision you can think of, your block is defined by the local bodega and homeless guy, and the transplant from upstate that lives below you hates the bridge-and-tunnel dicks more than any native-born Manhattanite ever could. The city has nurtured generations of industrialists, writers, geniuses, and crooks. Now it’s a seething powderkeg of differences, class frictions, and resentments, overrun by rats with wings, hipsters, high-glamour drag queens, Paris Hiltons in training, token Republicans, society matrons, and performance artists who, in a reasonable world, would be hunted for their pelts. Here, their shtick is met with acclaim, or at least small-c celebrity in the form of a local-access cable show.

So where else would an Alien and a Predator share a walk-up? Every week, Bernie Hou brings us a slice of New York in the form of Alien Loves Predator, as Abe (the Alien) and Preston (the Predator) try to get by. They should hate each other. A decade of comic books and movies and video games has taught us that they should be trying to kill each other and everyone around them. Sure, they don’t like each other much, but eh. You know how hard it is to find a roomie you can tolerate? Besides, the apartment’s probably rent-controlled and they have other things on their minds: is a mutual acquaintance doing Abe’s Ma? Is that really hot girl you hit it off with a psycho just because she’s a Mets fan? And like all New Yorkers, Abe and Preston understand it’s not really that other person over there that’s pissing you off, it’s just New York.

And that’s the great secret of ALP: not Abe, not Preston, not the supporting cast … New York. It’s lovingly photographed in detail, and our actors (in the form of action figures) are composited onto the backdrops. Sure, the little visual gags (like Preston being the only near-sighted Predator, and having to wear glasses) are funny even without the context of the city. And the interior scenes can set up some great gags, but they lack that little extra something. Check out Abe and Preston wondering what to get sometimes-roommate Jesus for His birthday; it’s the sort of bizarre philosophical discussion — it’s bad enough if your birthday falls on Christmas because you get cheated out of a present, but when your birthday is by definition Christmas? That’s gotta suck — that works perfectly on a stroll through Bryant Park.

Whether it’s Central Park, the subways and stations, Times Square, or Washington Square Park the location is critical to the gag. It also lets Hou get topical on occasion. And even when the action takes place elsewhere, New York is still the lens that Abe and Preston see life through. With almost zero exceptions, the fact that our heroes are an Alien and Predator is completely irrelevant; the title could be Bridget Loves Bernie or Joanie Loves Chachi (okay, maybe not), and the edge would still be there. Because it’s New York, and that grim cheerfulness that New Yorkers exhibit in the face of the city trying to grind them down? That’s goddamn hilarious.

There are basically two things I find I don’t like about comics printed on paper. And both of them have “being printed” as the big cause.

The first is just ink. The facts are that ink on paper is a complicated problem (much much more complicated than it seems at first glance), and ink in general is produced through propriatary black arts by massive secret consortiums of chemical companies. This means that when you go to draw a comic that you want to print on paper, you have to spend some time thinking about what it’s going to look like after it’s printed. And so you think twice about that shade of orange, and you reconsider whether you’ve made those lines too thin, and you need to broaden them a bit. And as you spend more time doing this, you end up squeezing yourself into this kind of strangely distorted artistic sensibility, where you are shutting down avenues of expression before you’ve even read the street sign.

The second thing is really the same kind of thing. Because you’re thinking about getting this comic printed, you’re usually doing it for money. And so you’re thinking about the mass market point of view – or having to deal with distributors and agents that are doing that thinking for you. And so rather than throwing in a gratuitous piece (that happens to be really funny) about a guy laughing at a girl who’s just admitted to a deep trauma and then forcing her to give him a blowjob… you censor yourself. You say “Just because I think it’s funny, maybe it won’t sell well in Salt Lake City…”. And the more you focus on this, the more you lose track of making the best comic you can make.

The freedom from both of these weird mental distortions that working entirely for the web gives to artists is why I like web comics a lot better than paper comics. Sure, tentacle porn has it’s place too, but it’s not what really does it for me, you know?

Stephen Notley manages to draw Bob the Angry Flower – which gets most of it’s distribution through print (certainly I first saw it in the City Paper… I think?) – without being trapped like this. Like Bob, he really doesn’t seem to consider what other people think before he writes. And he doesn’t seem to worry much about ink on paper, either, or generally the quality of his artwork.

So is it a web comic?

Who cares. It’s funny.

Alexander Danner and Bill Duncan have been collaborating for a while now on Picture Story Theater (Warning, all links from here out are Modern Tales links, and may require a login). They have managed an amazing job of making the art and the writing combine to produce something much better. The stories that have been told vary from the whimsical exploration of “Fantastic Zoology: The Coastal Giraffe” to a cautionary tale of “The Little Bear Who Knew Fear”, but most of their stories revolve around the interacting lives of a set of middle school students, and their supernatural or not-so-supernatural experiences.

Danner’s writing is a wonderful act of minimalism (in fact, the first PST doesn’t have any dialog at all). He also does an excellent job of conveying the idealized and romanticized vision of life as a tweener that anyone who’s grown up still clutches to (if only to try and banish the memories of the peer-induced trauma we actually lived through). His dialog is convincing, and his stories are fresh and interesting.

The artwork of Bill Duncan perfectly compliments Danner’s writing. He explores different compositional and linework styles to match the general tone of the piece – Amy Plays A Game of Chance is composed using only four hues to emphasize that it has no dialog. Duncan reaches a bit into the grotesque side of comics for the opening scenes of Together Again, to illustrate a bit the malaise of Humpty Dumpty, and then softens his focus as the story changes tone as well.

Despite the consistantly high grade art and writing, and the pure professionalism shown by both players, they still manage to maintain the willingness to experiment and change everything that is the hallmark of great web comics.

In short, Bill Duncan and Alexander Danner are a webcomic powerhouse team-up, and it’s worth three bucks for a one month subscription to Modern Tales just to check them out.

EDIT:
A brief follow-up. The interconnected stories about school children is being re-released in a free offering as Portraits of Nervous Children.

It just started, so there isn’t much there yet. But keep an eye out – this is good reading.

Anyone who has actually met John Kovalic knows that in person he is articulate, funny, well mannered and also tall.

It makes a very strange contrast to his comic, Dork Tower, though. All of the jokes seem very predictable.

To illustrate, his December story arc is a retelling of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. But with some politics thrown in.

It’s kind of like Garfield, with dice.