Archive for the ‘webcomics’ Category

My favorite not actually a comic book, comic book stuff

May 9th, 2008 by Susie

I love comic books, that is pretty obvious, but I think I may like these things even more.

 

1) Marvel/DC  

No I am not talking about the rival comic publishers, or their occasional cross company crossovers.  I am talking about the youtube webseries starring action figures of both companies most popular characters.  It started as a parody of, the hi I am a mac and I am a PC comercials.  And it was funny.  Superman played the uptight PC role and Spiderman was the laid back Mac. It worked as a parody of the comercial as well as poking fun at the characters and their respective companies. Observe

Marvel/DC#1

It is clear that the creator Some Random Guy, has a deep affection for the characters he has borrowed. As the series progressed more characters were worked in and the format shifted from the mac ads formula to a narrative.  The Universe threatening crisis that concluded the first season was far more exciting and engaging to me than anything being published by either company right now.  The second season Marvel/DC: Happy Hour has just started.  I must admit I was more giddy about this than about the upcoming release of the Dark Knight.

 

2) Year One 

This webcomic strip is currently on a long term hiatus, presumably so Matt Parkinson the creator can find work that will pay.  The archive is definitely worth taking a look at.  The first month or two of strips can be skipped unless you want to see how far his skill as a stripist(?) stripper(?) progressed.  The premise is simple, all the marvel characters are children that go to school together. The charecthers are pretty adorable my favorite being the hyper and a bit dimwitted Speedball

Sometimes the strips are simple gags like Beast from X-Men morphing into Cookie Monster at the sight of a plate cookies.  Other times they are dissections of the often ridiculously complicated Marvel continuity.  Here is a strip featuring  the kids from the school across the road.

 

 

3) Cat Tales.  This a long runing series of fanfiction.  There are currently 5 books and at least 2 spinoff projects.  So far I have only read the first seven chapters of book one.  It centers around a relationship between Batman and Catwoman, but whole batcast is featured.  It is very well written and a pretty funny and compelling look into their heads.  IUt also is conveniently available to download in PDF, making it easy to transfer to portable devices.

So that is it, my favorite comic related stuff.  Ooooh!  One more.  Larry Niven’s essay Man Of Steel, Women of Kleenex.  It was written in the seventies and deals with the problematic realities of procreation for Superman and Lois Lane. It’s funny y’all.  It was collected in his short story collection All the Myriad Ways.

I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space – Issue 1

May 5th, 2008 by Martin

Who would not want to read a comic with this title!? I mean, the story practically tells itself! The title already told the story! In fact, just having read the title, this comic could not possibly have lived up to the innuendo-laden science fiction odyssey that I then imagined. And all this for only $.99!

Oh yeah, so how was the comic? Well, go see for yourself. Turns out you can read the whole thing online. And the next one too! (And I think the reest of the series, although it looks like the author may be only partway through the last issue–number six.)

UPDATE: Re-reading this review, I really sounded lackluster about this comic. I put a lot of exclamation points in there, but while I’ll admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by the first issue, I did really like it. The story is light and fun, and it kept me reading and wanting more.

I’m now through issue 5 (reading them online, page by page), and reading “In search of the fourth wall”, which the author —Megan Rose Gedris, who according to this interview is only 21– calls an intermission issue. This isn’t even Megan’s first comic. She also has an apparently quite successful webcomic called YU+ME.

Anyway, I regret that I was in a bit of a rush when I wrote this. I think having discovered that the comic was available online kept me up that night well into the wee hours, and I think I basically pushed this out because I wanted to write something before I fell asleep staring at the laptop.

So give IWKBLPFOS a try!

Theater Hopper

April 23rd, 2008 by Martin

All these new comics (it’s Wednesday, yay!), but I haven’t had time to read any of them yet.

For some reason, I did find time to get distracted rediscovering Theater Hopper, a simple but awesome webcomic whose unique premise is simply to write about movies in comic form.

I actually first discovered Theater Hopper a little less than two years ago, the first time Florence and Susie and I went to Wizard World Chicago. Tom Brazelton had a booth and was selling copies of Theater Hopper – Year One and this Spoilers T-Shirt, one of which caught my eye through the crowd in that overly-busy convention space, and both of which I happily purchased. I’ll admit that I was mostly attracted to the t-shirt, but that the idea of theater hopper was also quite compelling to me.

I really liked that buying the book meant getting additional snarky commentary about each and every comic printed therein. It’s like director’s commentary, in book form. Tom was also kind enough to draw Jason Voorhees (from Friday the 13th) chasing the main character of the comic (also named Tom) with the caption “Run for your life!” in the inside cover of the book for me.

One really amazing observation is how much better Tom’s art has gotten over the years. When I clicked into the site today (while searching for comic book movies) I almost didn’t recognize it. I recognized the name, however, and went downstairs to find my book to see if it was the same comic I remembered. You can see the improvement just as easily by clicking “First” underneath the current comic. There is promise in those early comics, but nowhere near the skill level, I don’t think.

Anyway, I’ll finish this post this with a quote from the Introduction to Year One:

I’ve met some of the nicest people imaginable through this comic. It’s been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. I’m no one special. I’m just like you. If you want to start your own web comic, there’s no grand secret to it.

All you need is a little gumption.

I found that particularly inspiring. Then again, I’m no one special. Just like Tom.

Long Distance Web Comic Collaboration

March 26th, 2008 by Martin

So… I’ve mentioned to a few people that I might have some interest in creating my own web comic. But now I’ve got a better idea… if we all collaborate, then it’s less work for me!

One of the problems is that none of us can draw… so this way when it sucks, it’s nobody’s fault in particular!

My only real plot idea is that it’d be a bunch of robots standing around talking about how much humans suck.

I’m picturing some really simple line drawings of robots at first. I think it’d be really cool if everybody did their own, and then we unveiled them all to each other at the same time. Maybe everyone does one robot to start out with, in say… three different poses? That should give us plenty of art work to do our first three panel webcomic. We can always write the captions after we choose the art. I (for some no doubt baseless reason) think that’ll be the easy part.

So who’s in?

Legend of BLAR!

March 17th, 2008 by Martin

I quite enjoyed The Legend of BLAR!, which I believe to be one third of a book that is temporarily unavailable from Little House Comics. Interesting stuff.

UPDATE: Jason is forcing me to write more about this. I guess I thought the comic was interesting for several reasons. First, it is slightly self-referential, as in, it could be a “strange loop” We get to the end, and it could start all over again. Not only that, but BLAR’s “worst enemy” is himself, (which he doesn’t hesitate to dispatch, nonetheless). Secondly, I found it interesting because of how representative the last panel is of a particular moment that all gamers know. The moment when you know you should stop, and you want to stop, but you also really want to keep going. Of course, this is probably the very reason that BLAR is his own worst enemy. He cannot stop adventuring. He cannot stop killing. (Perhaps BLAR is a psychopath, just like all the rest of you role playing adventurers!)

Gary Gygax Memorial Webcomics

March 11th, 2008 by Martin

Gary Gygax, one of the creators of D&D died a week ago. Here are all of the webcomic tributes I could find:

Ultimate Game — XKCD
Order of the Stick
Dork Tower
Dueling Analogs
Achewood
“The Journey’s End” GU Comics
Full Frontal Nerdity
Penny Arcade
No Parking
WereGeek
Exiern
Ben Towle

(These are in no particular order, except that XKCD is one of my favorite comics, and was the inspiration for this post.) Please comment if you find more.

Dork Tower / Sandman crossover

February 28th, 2008 by Martin

Susie just sent Florence and I this awesome Dork Tower comic. For those of you who haven’t read Dork Tower before, it’s easily one of my favorite web comics.

I even got a chance to meet John Kovalic at last year’s convergence. He was on the other panel about Board Game creation (I had presented earlier in the con on nearly the same topic). He’s worked on a bunch of board games, including Munchkin, Apples to Apples, and of course Dork Tower the game. There was also an issue of Dork Tower called A Brief History of Gaming that was particularly good, I thought. Although when I asked him about it at the con, he said he’ll probably do the rest of the history of gaming as a TPB, rather than additional Dork Tower issues. I know I’d buy it!

more free online comics

February 19th, 2008 by Martin

Ran into this article on free graphic novels through some random twitter link. I’ve actually already read a bunch of these, but some of them are really good. I’m going to check the rest of them out sometime soon.

Kevin Cornell’s web creations

February 19th, 2008 by Martin

While we’re on the subject of webcomics, my friend Kyle introduced me today (yesterday now) to Kevin Cornell’s Bear Skin Rug (via Typesites). Cornell is an illustrator by day, and it shows in that his site features mostly one-off newspaper-type comics, but they are pretty funny, and well worth a look.

Also, Cornell is one-half of The Superest, “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.” (From the site.) Anyway, it’s pretty… um, super. Check it out.

Freak Angels

February 19th, 2008 by Martin

Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield have just launched a new weekly webcomic called Freak Angels. Not bad so far. I’m certainly not hooked, but as big a fan of Ellis as I am, I’ll definitely be back for future issues.