This November, Dark Horse put out a the graphic novel the Shepherd’s Tale.  It provided us Browncoats with the long awaited back story of Shepherd Book.  While it was interesting to finally find out what he was hiding, and it was a well written story, it didn’t really feel like an installment of Firefly, since most of the crew only appeared in a couple of pages.  When I think of Firefly, the first thing I think of is the fun of spending time with the nine, very distinct, people living aboard Serenity.  Well Shepherd’s Tale writer, Zack Whedon, has given us just, that in an online only, eight page comic called Serenity: Downtime.

Surprisingly it is available on USA Today’s website, along with a brief introductory article about Firefly/Serenity.  It is awesome!  It feels very much like an episode of Firefly.  It even has close ups of River’s feet!  Here is a little blurb about the comic.

Whedon has tried to create an atmosphere resembling a scene from Firefly. “I wanted to reward those fans by showing these characters like it was a part of the show,” he says.

Downtime follows crewmembers snowed in on a planet filled with, as Whedon puts it, “a bunch of people you don’t want to run into.” Though the whole crew is included, the focus is on the mysterious (and fan-favorite) character known as River.

Check it out here!  Serenity:Downtime

Here’s the new banner:

I had to make some hard choices while making this, what to pull from and what to leave out. Here are the comics, from right to left:

• XKCD‘s geek anthem needed including, of course.
• User Friendly was probably one of the first webcomics I read with any regularity.
• Don Hertzfeldt‘s famous Rejected video is probably the outlier here. It feels like a webcomic to me, but maybe just because I associate it with that early-internet-days “thrill of discovery” you got whenever you found a new link of note.
• Rounding out the top row, Jesus and Mo is a new-to-me webcomic that’s both hysterical and irreverently poignant.
• Axe Cop, another new-ish webcomic, is notable for both its hilarity and the fact that its author is a 5 year old kid.
• Dr. McNinja is both a doctor… and a ninja.
• I managed to squeeze a tiny frame of Penny Arcade in there. In case you’ve somehow been living in a webcomic void, it’s mostly about videogaming, and sometimes features snarky comments reviewing the latest games. This frame is from one of their first comics, and if you follow the link, you’ll see that they were all about the reviews right from the start.
• Underneath Penny Arcade is a piece of Scott McCloud‘s very early webcomic, My Obsession With Chess.
• PvP is another classic videogame webcomic. Notably different from Penny Arcade in that it has characters that do stuff.
• Order of the Stick is an awesome D&D parody. I almost replaced it because its bright colors made it stand out, but I spent a lot of time finding a panel with all the main characters in it (that I liked). Plus, it was great to get the fighter saying “.org”.
• It’s possible I thought myself really clever when I positioned these characters from Sinfest underneath Jesus and Mo. Sinfest is a webcomic that I found looking through old bookmarks. I was happy to see they still appear to be coming out.
• Finally, Little Gamers is another comic I had in my aging bookmarks file. (And no, I didn’t do the right corner last, it just happened that way.)

Update: The full interview has been posted, so you should go over there and read it!

…and…

I, for one, cannot wait to read the entire interview.

Oh, and in related news, there is now a Blank It Comic Reader App available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And what’s more, it’s free!

Penny Keep Your Head Up

I really hope to see more of these, they really flesh out the world of the web series.  Of course I would love to see a sequel to the musical, and now that Dollhouse, How I Met Your Mother, and Castle are all on summer hiatus it may happen.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #031 (18 MB, 38 minutes)

Here are three I don’t think have been mentioned on this site yet.

Anders Loves Maria

I love this strip!  It is about a young Swedish couple who are having a baby, and probably shouldn’t be.  Given that Anders can’t stop getting involved with other women, and Maria can’t seem to grow up.  It is wickedly funny and terribly authentic.  The art work some how manages to be simplified, and sophisticated at the same time.  I was really tempted to buy an original page, but unfortunately the I did not get my tax return before the half off sale ended.  It should be mentioned that even though the people are drawn in a very non photo realistic manner, 60% of the strips have included extremely explicit sex, that is probably not safe for work.

Sister Claire

This strip is only a few months old.  It follows the adventures of a very naive young girl who was raised by nuns.  It is drawn in the style of  kwai(cutesy) anime.  Claire  wants nothing more in life than to be the best nun ever, while still getting to indulge in all things sweet and cuddly.  Unfortunately for her a sexy messenger from God disrupts her cloistered existence.  I am totally digging it!

Finally we have Finn and Charlie are Hitched

It is a slice of life styled strip centered around a gay male couple and their circle of friends.  It is not as serialized as the previous two I mentioned, going with the more traditional 3 to 4 panels leading to a gag format.  It is consistently funny and done by local Chicago artist.

Once I do catch up (and even before), I’ll be using the awesome Piperka to keep track of my progress! Rob mentioned Piperka in the panel, and it’s basically a very light-weight site designed to do nothing more than keep track of your progress in all the webcomics you read. The sweet thing is that it lets you know which comics have new entries since you last visited, making it a perfect one-stop location for webcomic reading.

Rob (and the other panelists) also mentioned a bunch of other webcomics, including Menage a 3 (which florence and I just read all the way from the beginning–contains mild nudity). If I find more good ones, maybe I’ll post them here also.

Questionable Content

A well drawn comic centered around pretty much nothing. It has a very consecutive plot, and is quite hysterical. This is a rather generic description, but I can’t think of anything else to say. sorry. just check it out. The art starts out pretty bad, but one nice thing is watching the art advance. it gets very good by the end.

XKCD

A geeky, sarcastic, intelligent, stick figure comic. it has a rudimentary recurring cast, but definently no plot. it is absolutely hysterical, and all the humor is very intelligent. The beginning of the archives is just a bunch of pencil sketches, but eventually he figures out photoshop or something, and the drawings get nice and crisp. for a little bit extra, don’t forget to check the alt-text by mousing over the comic.

Partially Clips

A comic for grownups. That’s how it bills itself. Each comic is a series of repeated frames with word bubbles. that’s it. but the comics are so bizarre, so out of the ordinary, you can’t help but laugh. the humor is definately sarcastic, cruel, and sardonic.

Goblins

An unconventional comic, following a party of D&D goblins, as opposed to the party of heros. It gives the reader a different perspective, something new. it has decent artwork, but starts out in black and white.

Looking For Group

This is one of my favorites. A fantasy based comic with great artwork, sequential plot, and hilarious dialogue, there are no flaws with this comic. it places the epitome of good, a light elf named Kale, into a party with the epitome of evil, an undead warlock named Richard.

Commissioned Comic

A well drawn (usually) non-sequential comic following the main character O. it pretty much about nothing, and every once in a while it comes up with a mini arc. it is just a kind of laid back comic. sometimes they play D&D.

Dan and Mab’s Furry Adventure

A comic featuriang a wide variety of anthropomorphic characters in a fantasy setting. the characters have very nicely set personalities, and are all very well defined. As per usual, the art starts out like crap, then progresses. it has a very sequential plot, but sometimes jumps into self reference when the artist doesn’t feel like making a strip. or is sick.

The Peons

A great comic centering around the denizens of Antarctica. there are three human characters (to begin with). the King, and his two servitors, Meryl and Balthazar. Meryl is basically the straight man for Balthazar’s EVIL tendencies. the rest of the cast are penguins, who are all unnamed and basically interchangeable, save for the fact that a couple of them have odd personality quirks. like the one who only says “Q-tip”. ever.

One Manga

A massive compendium of manga, all readable online. what else is there to say?

The Webcomic List

If all else fails, then you can check this website out. it is an archive of pretty much ALL the webcomics out there. seriously.

Back when I was looking for this stuff, I discovered the official watchmen movie site hosts a feature/page they call The Gunga Diner, that looks to basically just aggregate all the Watchmen parody stuff it can find. It’s cool, but what I don’t like is that there are a lot of entries that don’t cite their sources. Maybe they just had the stuff emailed to them, but the Watchmen Peanuts sketch they host can easily be found to have originated from Evan “Doc” Shaner’s DeviantArt account. (Looks like it wasn’t a totally original idea, as Jeff Parker did something similar a while back.) Likewise the Lil’ Watchmen comic Gungan Diner hosts can be found (with quite a bit more digging necessary) over at the Silver Rage Archive/TOC.

An image that Gunga Diner doesn’t actually have listed is this awesome Jay Ward’s The Watchmen sketch by Jay Fosgitt, AKA, Four Panel Hero. (Jay Ward created Rocky and Bullwinkle.)

KO Fight Club, who I have linked to before, because it is a board gaming webcomic, has a whole page devoted to how they parody Watchmen (and another page about why).

Here’s a cool illustration of Watchmen Watches.

The Watchmen Movie site also hosts a page that links to a bunch of Watchmen fan films. I haven’t really watched them all yet, so I don’t know if that page is better about sourcing its material.

And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, the Mad Magazine folks made a seven page Watchmen Parody (PDF format) in their signature style. It was apparently distributed at San Diego Comic Con earlier this year.

I’ll also admit that before I read this, but after I read the two mock non-fiction introductions about the history of The Great Outdoor Fight, I didn’t honestly know whether the event was real or not. Yes, I had to google for it. Then, I wikipedia’d for it. The answer: No. It is not a real fight. It is just a funny premise for this comic.

This physical collection is supposed to contain some material not found on the website, including the two aforementioned introductions, and some stuff in the back of the book, like a page of recipes, some fighter/character biographies, and some blog posts written by one of the characters in the comic. If I were an Achewood fan, I would be really happy to own this collection.

Even admitting that I’m not really all that much of a fan, I still enjoyed this book more than I expected to, and would probably recommend it to anyone who wants to read a silly story about a giant brawl that takes place annually over the course of three days.

There’s actually a lot more text inside than there is comic book, but you can see a couple of example pages on flickr: Vote Theft for Idiots: Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.

Completely coincidentally, I have been meaning to post a link to The Pain–When will it end?, which is the site for the (mostly political) cartoons of Tim Kreider. It appears to be updated more or less weekly, and the archives are very definitely worth a look. If I had a complaint though, the images are pretty damn large, and scrolling is not really an option so much as an obligation. Good stuff though.

Okay, this one wasn’t all that random.  The first comic I pulled out had risen flesh-eating dead in it, so clearly I couldn’t review that one.  The second one, I just wasn’t feeling.  So this was the third pull.  Or maybe fourth.  Anyway, I loved it.  It appears to reprint webcomics from David Steinlicht’s All Small website, most of which are one or two page commentaries on life called “On My High Horse”.  The balding, bespectacled narrator of these wry observations covers topics like logo design and ironic packaging.  I particularly liked his dissection of the Superman symbol.

Steinlicht self-compares his art to Chris Ware, among others, what with it’s simple geometry and clean lines.  I have to admit, though, that I’m often left cold by Ware’s work, whereas I felt a much stronger attachment to our High Horse commentator.

Steinlicht currently works for the Pioneer Press doing a comic called “In This Corner”, along with other art chores for the daily (I found a link on the paper’s website about golf courses, for which he drew hole diagrams).  The comic looks to be a similar commentary style, but a little on the softer side than his webcomic, much as you’d expect to find in the Sunday supplement.  He also maintains a blog, in which I really like this entry.

I like the interface more than either Zuda or Marvel Digital Comics.  They’ve eschewed a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles that some of the others have for easier navigation, and really high quality images.  Some of the comics have only a few pages up so far, like Action Ohio with six, and Hannibal Goes to Rome with eight, while a couple of others give you a bit more to read.  Brat-halla is up to sixty so far.  Of course, a good webcomics junky is going to plow through all of them in an afternoon, but it looks like they plan to add some more titles regularly.

I heard a rumor last night that the same guy had started a new comic doing all the Star Wars movies, but I can’t seem to find it. I’ll post again if he gets back to me with the link.

Bonus link, there are a TON of people’s favorite programmer comics in this thread over at StackOverflow.com. That should keep me busy for a while.

UPDATE: Note that this is the 200th ReadComics.org post! W00-H00!

It all started today when I stumbled onto this comic called Ko Fight Club. There’s lots of other topics, but the author Russ Williams created a nice archive page with just the go comics on it. Unfortunately, the last entry is from Oct. 15, 2002.

Making Life hasn’t been updated since Feb. 2006, but it’s worth a read, even if there are only 14 comics up there.

Another go comic called Stones is written/drawn by Andreas Fecke (in dutch?). Apparently there also used to be another go webcomic called Almost Sente, but the site is down.

Chess comics seemed harder to find for some reason, but I did find this one called The Chess Comic that is all about teaching chess to beginners. Pretty cool idea, really. And it’s being actively updated!

The funny (and relevant) thing about this is that they’ve created a comic book that explains why and what they’re doing, drawn by none other than Scott McCloud.

It reads like a textbook, or maybe like a complex user manual, but the illustrations are clear and overall it does a good job of explaining some difficult ideas and concepts. It feelt a bit simplistic to me, but I’m a web developer, and these concepts are part of my job. I’m probably not the target audience. Also, I sort of wished there were links at various parts of the comic. I’d have liked to read more about some of the things they’re claiming this browser will do for us. But probably those links aren’t public yet anyway. The beta (for windows first) is supposed to be released sometime today.

UPDATE: Scott McCloud has a page on his website about this project. (Via Blogoscoped, where you can view some additional screenshots of Google Chrome in action.)

Apparently this is being used in some schools as a history textbook, and I can attest (from what I’ve read–so far just the first 10 pages out of 77) that this includes a ton of interesting quotes, citations, and even some photographs, in amongst the illustrations. I used to have a copy of The Cartoon Guide to Physics laying about somewhere, and I guess I’m reminded of that because this is also non-fiction and written in a similar matter-of-fact style.

It looks like author/illustrator Joel Andreas has only really ever written political comics. I think it might be interesting to write a “long-form comic books and politics” blog post sometime, but I am not particularly qualified.

Having the book online is really just a self-professed ploy to get you to purchase a physical copy, so if you really like it, go ahead and buy a copy or fifty. (They sell boxes of 56 for $175.) I found out about it from True Majority, where you can buy a single copy for $8.

But I did manage to enjoy this anyway, and along the way I wracked my brain for additional references to circuses in space. (I did some web searching too.) More space circuses after the jump.

Apparently Batman and Robin join a space circus in World’s Finest Comics issue #130. I wanted to see this so bad that I managed to “find” it online. Actual copies tend to sell for a pretty penny, so I’ll post the only really relevant panels here. You can see Batman and robin doing the flying trapeze, and Batman on a tightrope on a unicycle, with robin on his shoulders! There is also a rather disturbing William Tell reference.

Valerian features a space circus in the last story. I’ve talked about that some in one of the podcasts, but I should really have written a review. It’s a translated (french) TPB I brought home from the library, and liked it so much that when I found it on Amazon (for cheap) I bought it anyway.

Then there is a novel called Lord Valentine’s Castle that is the first in a series by Robert Silverburg that I absolutely adored when I was about 13 or so. I haven’t read it since, but it’s the reason (along with Stranger in a Strange Land) that I used Valentine for my first online alias. Basically, a prince loses his memory, and falls-in with a traveling troupe of alien jugglers.

An episode of the TV show Lost In Space was called “Space Circus“, and apparently features one. You can watch it on Hulu.com, but I haven’t yet. There is also an episode of Super Friends that features a space circus, also unseen by me.

Circus World is a science fiction novel by Barry B. Longyear, about a world where the entire population is descended from a space circus that crash landed on the planet centuries before. It’s actually part of a trilogy. I’ve only read this one, but when I realized it was missing from the disambiguation page, I added a very short entry for the novel it to wikipedia.

Unread by me, Beast Master’s Circus is another science fiction novel, written by Andre Norton and Lyn McConchie. It’s actually the 4th in a series.

I also have a game for the N64 laying around somewhere called Starshhot: Space Circus Fever, as I recall, it was a pretty awful platformer, and I never played more than a few minutes into it. (Obviously I bought it for the theme alone.)

There’s a myspace page for a hardcore band called Space Circus. Also, little closer to my musical tastes, (anyway, easier to listen to) a band from the 70s called Return to Forever has a clip labeled Space Circus on youtube. I’m pretty sure it’s the name of a song.

That was it, that was all I could find or remember. Many of the top results on google are to a weird educational site in the UK, but I didn’t include it here because it’s neither sci-fi nor really a circus. If anyone has any additions to this list, I’d LOVE to hear about them. I really feel like there must be a ton more that I’m forgetting, or just don’t know about.

Simply put, xkcd is the best webcomic for internet-related “geek” humor out there.

I remember the first time I read the “sandwich” comic (you won’t get it if you don’t know what “sudo” means), I had to explain it to florence because I thought it was so funny. Of course, Florence, not knowing what sudo meant until I explained it to her, did not really think it was all that funny. Reading through some of the archives with her, she did admit she liked some of the others. I believe that may have actually been my first exposure to xkcd. It’s possible I’d seen some of the others in email forwards or other contexts.

XKCD is written and drawn (mostly with stick figures) by Randall Munroe, who was a physics major and worked for NASA before he started writing xkcd full time. Here is a relatively interesting interview with Munroe posted on Wikinews.

El Gorgo is published online in a standard 28-page (well, really 56, being a double digest and all) format, in PDF and Comic Book Archive formats.

And it’s…. well, I’ll be honest. I just don’t know what to make of it. Is it satire? Is it campy?

I think it’s both– it’s a campy satire about the amazing adventures of a super-ape/Mexican wrestler/millionaire/novelist time traveling superhero. Yes, really. It is that campy!

But it’s also fun! With references to H.P. Lovecraft to fill in for those needing a bit more “meat” to their storyline, there’s a definite sense of the “potluck storyline” going on here, with an almost ADD-like bouncing in place, time, and character focus. We have eldritch cults, big fancy celebrity events, a love interest, time travel, and, of course, dinosaurs.

How can you not love a Mexican wrestler in a throwdown with a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

Besides, I only need two more UPC codes before I can send in for my Deep Ones sea creatures (advertised in the back of this clever parody).

My only complaint? The PDF is laid out with 2 pages side by side, which makes it hard to read the text without scrolling both horizontally and vertically. This issue is resolved if you read it in the Comic Book Archive format.

Update: This should be required viewing (I mostly just listened) for anyone wanting to start out and make a webcomic. Some of the names dropped were Scott Pilgrim (not a webcomic, unfortunately), Kate Beaton (interesting, I’ll have to look at this more), jonathan rosenberg (who does Goats which is AWESOME), MC Frontalot, Scott McCloud and Ryan North who does Dinosaur Comics. This was part of the Authors@Google series, and there are hundreds of these videos, including one of David Hajdu (who, as you may recall, wrote Ten Cent Plague).

They appear to be going up at a rate of about five comics a week, but the entire first 21 issue series is already available. The quality of the scans is very nice from what I’ve seen, and I intend to read them all… someday.

All this via a rather old post on boingboing. But some more recent news is that there is a movie in the works, to be directed by Rawson Thurber (who directed Dodgeball). I think it’s a bit early to be announcing this, frankly, as a script hasn’t been written yet, and the format is also yet to be determined.

I’ve only just read the first issue so far, so if you’re at all knowledgeable about ElfQuest, please forgive my inadequate summary, but from that first issue, it seems that the premise is essentially that elves are descended from an ancient civilized alien race who somehow found themselves on earth. (That first issue isn’t terribly clear on whether they close Earth as their home, or whether it was a magical appearance, or what.) Anyway, these descendants are in constant in fear of destruction from the evil humans.

I’m sure some of this will become clearer as I read more, since there is a handy ElfQuest Timeline, and those first issues are somewhere in the middle of it. Enjoy!

For instance, one of the main stories in this first TPB is about Dr. McNinja returning home (to the cave he was raised in) where his family of ninjas are all a bit disappointed that he’s a doctor. His mother leaves him pamphlets for what she considers to be more acceptable jobs where he can see them. Oh, my retelling really isn’t doing the story justice. Just go over and read the page I’m talking about. Then, after you’ve chuckled a bit, go back to the archive, and start reading at the beginning, with Dr. McNinja Vs. McDonalds, (which didn’t even appear in that first TPB, perhaps due to fear of legal repercussion).

It’s really funny stuff, and you can tell that a lot of thought went into these comics. I actually poured through the second TPB, Surgical Strike yesterday on a break at work, so I can attest that they’re fast and compelling reading material. Plus, who wouldn’t enjoy a story about banditos who ride velociraptors chasing after a guy they know only from a photo of his abdomen posted to myspace? C’mon, seriously.

I think the comic’s two characters (the first comic, pictured above, is the only one with just one) are based on the two creators/artists. So far not much has happened, but I’ll definitely be watching to see where they take it.

It was so great, in fact, that the site went down due to high traffic the first night, and they had to switch servers to get it back up and running.

Anyway, Captain Hammer, who is Dr. Horrible’s arch nemesis, (played by Nathan Fillion of Firefly fame) has his own comic, which you can read on Dark Horse’s myspace page. It’s pretty awesome, and I actually really dig the art, drawn by Eric Canete, which is almost crayon-like at times.

You can also buy some Dr. Horrible swag, but the Captain Hammer shirts aren’t nearly as cool as the style he wears in the comic. (I’d totally buy a shirt if it looked more like the comic.)

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

The comic was called “an inspired thing to do” by original Garfield creator Jim Davis in an interview with the Washington Post. Enjoy.

It’s such a great marketing ploy to incentivize readers to buy the trade just to finish the story they’re getting slowly in pieces on the website. I don’t think I’ve seen it done before. I would gladly pay extra just to get the TPB all at once rather than waiting for individual comics to come out. Of course, that’s a bit of a catch 22, since a lot of times I probably wouldn’t even know about the TPB without having seen (and flipped through) individual issues in a store. In this case, I’ve got the pages that are already online to give me a sense of whether I want to read the rest of the book. It turns out that, yes! I really do want to read the rest!

This kind of marketing is really aimed directly at impatient people like me.

(Link discovered this afternoon via Comics Worth Reading.)

Drawn by LiveJournal user auryanne, Bad Rabbit is not your typical webcomic. For one thing, there is no punchline. If you read this webcomic and think “I don’t get it,” then you’re thinking too hard. If you read it and think “wow, it’s like… a LiveJournal blog…. in pictures! With rabbits!” then you get it.

It’s a 3-frame autobiographical comic strip in which the “bad rabbit” (as portrayed by an anthropomorphic rabbit) goes through life, interacting with various friends and family and pets. Humans are anthropomorphic animals, but auryanne has a nice, natural style to her artwork that lends itself to a wide range of expression in her otherwise simple drawings. Pets are portrayed as animals (thank goodness, or confusion ensues!) You can learn quite a bit about auryanne’s world from 3 frames a week. But if you’re looking for story arc or superheroes… this isn’t it. This is a “reality webcomic,” like reality TV but without an annoying host or celebrities.