Things have been a little busy lately. Work’s good (and hectic). I joined the rollerderby (I’m learning to be a referee). I’m in an art show that opened this week in Greenfield (we had Twinkies at the reception), and I was interviewed for a local blog where we talked an awful lot about webcomics. I was actually able to keep up with the conversation, which was exciting, and the reporter and I talked an awful lot about art and commerce and economy. I had a little epiphany in the middle of it, where I realized I’d begun to let go a little bit of my dedication to print. Surprise, surprise.

But all of this is a long way of saying that I’m totally behind on my webcomics reading.

While I was poking around the web looking for something new and different to read, I ran across this page, and it absolutely cracked me up. I know the pictures are kind of old news (last updated about two years ago, I think), but I sort of love the concept. I know there are more out there; there must be legions of Scary Go Round tattoos (and if not, why not?!) and I saw a photo of a cat tattoo in a recent issue of High Maintenance Machine.

I guess my question is less about the why (I have tattoos; I understand, in some way, that piece of it) and more about what images folks might have tattooed. Any image stand out as something you’d have tattooed? Creators, does having your work inked on someone’s skin kind of freak you out and completely rock at the same time?

Shane Johnson sent us a press release about his My Life In a Cube, which he updates “weeknights” (Monday to Friday, after work), and the second I saw it I knew I had to mention it here. I do actually work a job where some of the time I am in a cubicle, what with this excellent not very corporate for a corporate job gig that I have, and it’s actually…yeah, it’s my first corporate job and suddenly cubicle humor is, embarrassingly, funnier. (In my defense, I have a lot of webcomic-ey things up in the cube, including some extremely cool Teaching Baby Paranoia sketches.)

But in addition to funny (in that bleak cubicle humor kind of way), Johnson’s got this great, fluid style where the lines just seem to naturally flow. It conveys motion and and speech in a direct, immediate way, where the image is both simple and complicated. I also love that they seem to be created on whatever’s closest to hand. The site, like the comic, is simple and kind of spare–there are almost no archives and it seems very, very new, but you’d never guess it by the quality of the art and the droll humor of the comics.

Plus it’s got the best disclaimer ever: ” In no way does this actually reflect what I do at work all day. Obviously.”

I’m totally taken with it. Go have a look.

Last week, while I was down with the weird miserable head cold I’ve been fighting, my friend Chris sent me a link to Maria Schneider’s wickedly funny Pathetic Geek Stories. Like Jesse Reklaw’s masterful Slow Wave, PGS consists of reader-submitted material. Where Reklaw draws dreams, Schneider’s work is more the stuff of nightmares: true stories from readers detailing firsthand humiliating geekery. What’s not to love?

There’s a seriously impressive amount of archives to sift through, from rattails to inopportune giggles in class to falling asleep on the school bus and becoming the target for a prank. In addition, the FAQ is probably one of the more entertaining, well-written such documents I’ve seen on a webcomic’s site. Speaking of which, there’s also a subcategory–not illustrated–called “Functions.” You’re smart readers. You can figure out what’s happening there. I’ll merely caution that, depending on your workplace, it might be a little NFSW. Just so’s you know.

Submissions are welcome.

From time to time I ask my housemate, who’s been a webcomics reader for quite a while, what she’d recommend I read. I’m trying, in large part, to seek out things I wouldn’t find on my own. Her taste sometimes surprises me, but there’s something to be said for that: when I asked her this week, she chided me for not having written about Looking for Group yet.

Oops, I said. Remind me what that’s about?
“It’s kind of a fantasy comic and it’s kind of making fun of fantasy comics,” she said. “I assume it’s making fun of World of Warcraft, but I’m not totally sure.”

Oh, I thought. Oh dear.

Written by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by Lar DeSouza, Looking For Group began about a year and a half ago and since then has garnered a fairly dedicated following (as well as a substantial archive, what with updating both Mondays and Thursdays). My housemate is much more of a fantasy reader than I am, so she’d twig more easily to some of the references and influences (turns out there is something of a surface World of Warcraft connection after all).

What drew me in, despite my substantial initial reticence, was that I actually found myself laughing out loud at my computer screen as I was reading. I started at the very beginning (I mean, just look at the archives–the design is compelling, eye-catching, well designed, and easy to navigate) and read through. It didn’t take long to figure out which character was which, who was the ‘good’ guy (Cale’Anon, generally just called Cale) and, well, who wasn’t (Richard, an undead Warlock, who’s a little Red Robot-ey; my housemate invoked Jack Sparrow). There’s a stack of other characters as well, ranging from panthers to imps to dwarves, but I’ll let you discover them on your own. It’s kind of cracking me up, even still, and I’m enjoying it very much.

Right, everyone who already knew about the awesomeness that is Rachel Nabors, put your hand up. (You folks can skip right to the fundraising link in the following paragraph.) She creates weekly webcomics for gURL.com, where she’s been publishing for years, but has a mighty impressive list of accomplishments on her Portrait of a
Comicker bio page (and particularly for someone who’s still fairly young). Her work’s influences are evident, but they really work; it’s sort of charming and autobiographic and very accessible. (It reminds me a little of Karen Ellis’ work as well.)

I first saw her site because of a link to her fundraising drive on Barry Deutsch’s Hereville (which I will write about at some later point). I was struck by her smart webdesign, even though the home page can be a little tricky to navigate. In addition to an impressive gallery of work, her webcomic work is funky, and quirky, and totally something I would have loved to have found as a teenager (I mean, as an adult I still love it).

(A note on that fundraising thing: go look. Holy crap.)

What I think I enjoy most is that the whole site, from the comics to the bio and back again, seems to be really infused with this creator’s personality. It’s vibrant and dynamic, and really caught my eye in a way a lot of webcomic sites don’t. (In part it might be because her site includes more than webcomics; there’s a lot of other material there, but overall it creates this fascinating portrait of a webcomicker. It’s worth your time to go through the site.)

I thought I’d offer something bite-sized this week, in the form of Rick Smith’s Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. It’s a very new webcomic, started on 22 January of this year, but it’s updating daily, apparently. It follows the main character, Yehuda Moon, who owns a bike shop, called (yes, you guessed it) the Kickstand Cyclery.

I’m waiting to see how it develops. In part, I’m pre-disposed to like it, I think, because I get some of the references (like what a ghost bike is), and because I’m one of those folks who’s a fair-weather rider. I don’t ride in the winter, and I’ve been missing it like mad lately. It keeps snowing. There aren’t bike lanes near my house. You get the idea. Some of it’s poking fun at bike commuters, and others very much making fun of, well, …just look here.

Since the webcomic itself is so new, the storylines are all fairly nascent. We don’t know, for example, how these characters will continue to interact, how Yehuda’s commute will change (if at all), what happens come spring and everyone wants a bike…but the comic’s done by someone who enjoys biking, at the least, and is kind of right on with bike shop culture (from what I’ve seen of it).

It won’t take you long to get through the archives, but it’s worth a look. The color is snappy, the dialogue is funny, and I think it’ll go in some interesting directions.

I thought this situation was kind of interesting. I’ve read a lot of webcomics over the past year or so, but I’ve read fewer discussions of those webcomics. I know many sites have forums where folks can get together and discuss them, which is totally fascinating both from a marketing/advertising standpoint and thinking about reader-response. Many of the webcomics I follow have blogs or forums or some way for readers to post and discuss.

That said, I don’t know Randall Munroe’s xkcd very well. It’s always been one that’s highly regarded and comes well-recommended. An associate recently pointed me at the Pandagon blog, particularly a recent post where author and cultural critic Amanda Marcotte posted (it’s titled “Musing on autonomy”) a piece writing about the panel you see above. It’s an exceedingly interesting and well-written piece, and I was struck by the discussion.

The xkcd forums for this one comic include a very wide range of comments, but many of them don’t have too much in the way of analysis. (Which is fine; the forum isn’t so much the place for that?). Pandagon, however, is. I think Marcotte’s post is right on, and it’s fascinating to see how very much these straightforward, simple lines are charged in this particular context.

What I mostly wanted to highlight with this post was how evocative this specific xkcd piece is; I mean, look at all these posts about this very spare composition which all elicit this kind of wide response. That’s the mark of doing something well, I think, and I wanted to make note of it this week. There are many folks out there reading webcomics, and when a debate goes this wide-ranging, I think it’s good for webcomics as a whole.

In finishing out the Transmission-X trifecta I mentioned two weeks back (but go look! There’s eight other webcomics I haven’t mentioned), and in anticipation of more lovely New England weather, this week I point you to Karl Kerschl’s charming The Abominable Charles Christopher.

It has its sassy moments, and, overall, the composition is very strong. Space is used very well, as in this particularly poignant strip, in a way I haven’t seen used as skillfully in many other webcomics. The wordless strips are often very beautifully done, and that’s particularly difficult to do. While it doesn’t have the splashy, bright colorwork of something like Mike Luce’s Fite! does (though his animals and these strike me as wonderfully similar), the colors Kerschl uses absolutely evoke a wintery feel and are better suited to creating a mood. They’re very effective, and the overall feel is very elegant.

What I especially enjoy are the moments where this elegance kind of contrasts with the characters, when they’re being emphatic with one another or at certain moments in their conversations. The webcomic is still new enough that you can move through the archives quickly, but the work has a depth of detail to it which may make you want to linger over each, to savor them rather than speed through. It reminds me a little of some of the Japanese animation I’ve seen, and I’m not quite certain of where the story’s going (plus, given the range of charaters–from the henpecked bird husband to the ongoing story of Vivol & Moon Bear–there’s a number of different things happening), but I really like this one. It is absolutely worth your time.

Last week I mentioned, briefly, Cameron Stewart’s webcomic Sin Titulo. It’s an eerie little webcomic kind of to do both with family and with memory, and I’m quite taken with it. For me it immediately evoked some other favorites in its very savvy use of pacing; one in particular is Max’s book The Extended Dream of Mr. D..

Beginning midway through June of last year and updating once per week, Sin Titulo is just now getting to the heart of answering some of its questions. Alex, the main character, begins the story by finding out that the grandfather he’s come to visit is, in fact, dead and has been so for more than a month. While looking through his grandfather’s things, Alex discovers a photograph of his grandfather with a woman he does not recognize. In trying to find this woman, he stumbles through a series of events he doesn’t understand that link his grandfather, a horrific orderly named Walter, and the woman in the photograph.

The art is crisp and well-suited to the story, and the pacing is that of someone who has worked in comics for many years; Stewart’s history shows in this particular story. I don’t want to stay too much, since it really is a work that achieves what it does through a cumulative effect (and it certainly makes the reader curious). You should start at the beginning and work your way through. At most, it will take an hour or so, but you’ll likely want to linger longer over the images.

Wahoo! So, thanks to last week’s recommendations, I ended up over at Transmission X. It took me a minute to realize that two of the webcomics on last week’s recommendation list are available through this site (one of them is Karl Kerschl’s lovely The Abominable Charles Christopher, the other Cameron Stuart’s magnificent Sin Titulo. I’ve done a brief toe-dip into their respective archives and hope to add them to the docket for coming weeks.

However, through a somewhat roundabout route (how I found Transmission X), I landed at a charming webcomic called Luz by Claudia Dávila. The image you see above is from early in the series (which started, I believe, in October of last year?), which follows the life of a quirky, smart kid. “Luz is,” as the About Luz link tells us, “a 12-year-old latina girl who tends to be on the serious side and finds herself reflecting on life. She ponders the state of humanity and where we fit in Nature. She is curious, cares about people and animals, and tends to assume the best in everyone.”

It might read as vaguely didactic, but I’m quite charmed by this webcomic. The linework is lovely; simple to process but with a solid use of visual flow and color, plus a great sense of pacing. I haven’t really seen too many webcomics so far which are taking on a responsibility to educate their readers as well as entertain, and I was thinking about this idea during the whole Super Tuesday delegate-updating. I don’t have television, so I spent an evening online following coverage (which is also how I kept up with the Super Bowl; somehow the timing of these two events with Fat Tuesday thrown into the mix was just too perfect), and reading through the relatively short archives.

What’s also kind of neat about Luz is that it’s obviously kid-friendly, and she’s a literate, clever kid; I’m not sure I’ve seen webcomics where there’s this obvious potential for a dual audience. It’s new, kind of nascent, and I’m interested to see where it goes; it’s interesting, relevant work from someone with a long history working in comics and visual media. Take a half-hour or so to read through her archives; I think you’ll find it time well spent.