Getting Nifty with Sluggy Freelance

Welcome back, everyone. Today's post follows up on Wednesday's, in which I shared a Sluggy Freelance experience. Today the ensharening continues, with further reflections on Sluggy Freelance and some of my favorite Sluggy memories.

Like I said before, I'm well aware of Sluggy's flaws: a convoluted accumulation of backstory, a rocky transition from high weirdness to epic drama, and artwork that's decent at best. But no matter what John "Your Webcomic is Bad" Solomon may say have said, I don't consider a bad webcomic. It's no Penny Arcade, but if you can appreciate a "when weird things happen to normal people" story, it's worth reading.

Well, some of it, anyway. Thing's been running daily since '97--that's a lot of comic to read.

As I mentioned before, what I most enjoy about Sluggy is the central cast. They have genuine personalities, and as you spend more time reading their adventures, it gets to be like visiting good friends. Moreover, in a weirdness-driven strip, much of the fun comes from their diverse reactions to the bizarre phenomena around them. Torg meets the weirdness with boneheaded optimism; Zoe faces it with frustrated sarcasm or the occasional freak-out, and later on starts rolling up her sleeves and tackling things herself; Riff's basic response is "more firepower." Riff and later addition Gwynn are instigators of weirdness themselves. Sluggy's got the kind of cast that you can throw into a situation and just let them be themselves, and it's at its strongest when it does precisely that.

The art, moreover, has improved. It started off sketchy, with its share of stiff poses and proportion gaffes, but over time it's shown definite and substantial progress. Characters are drawn much more consistently now; Pete Abrams has developed particular strength with dramatic use of shadow and camera angles. Sluggy Freelance demonstrates that if you consistently pick up a pencil and go to war with the blank space, you will become a better artist. Never underestimate the value of dogged daily perseverance.

And that's true of more than just the art. Sluggy Freelance is significant for the webcomic world in that it showed new possibilities for cartoonists. As one of the longest-running comics online, and one that supports its creator as a full-time job, it's one of the success stories. Moreover, much of that support comes from its donor club "Defenders of the Nifty." As much as merchandise and ad revenue, Sluggy is supported by its fans simply saying, "We like what you're doing, and we want to enable you to keep doing it." Pete Abrams is willing to experiment, develop, and grapple with the balancing act between comedy and drama, and the cumulative effect of his tenacity is greater than any single flaw.

With that said (and said and said and said...get to the fun stuff, Jackson!), it's time for my favorite Sluggy memories.

Probably my favorite storyline of all time is when, after Torg has gone missing in the Dimension of Pain, the gang reach into the wrong alternate universe for him and retrieve a purple-haired Portuguese-speaking Torg. Meanwhile, the Torg we know finds himself in an alternate reality where everything is nice. The weirdness and humor are vintage Sluggy, including the fourth-panel reversal in this strip. In "Fire and Rain," a reference back to this story alleviates the drama with some much-needed humor. Sluggy often relies on classic setups with reversals and "What could go wrongs?" for its humor, but you've never seen them done with purple-haired Portuguese body doubles.

Another of my favorite storylines is Sluggy of the Living Freelance. It's a textbook example of the dynamic between the main cast that I mentioned before: Pete Abrams coops his cast up in a cabin, surrounds it with zombies, and lets the panicked terror do its work. The gags are entertaining, and the conclusion has two ridiculous twists to it.

One last strip bears mention in my Sluggy experience, but first a bit of backstory. In high school, my brother David began wearing gym shorts under his pants everywhere he went. If his pants developed a stain or a hole, or if he suddenly decided to go swimming, he would simply take them off. "You never know when you'll need them," he told us. One day Charles IMed me a link to a Sluggy Freelance accompanied by a single word: "Dave." As they say, great minds think alike.

What's been your Sluggy experience? What are some of your favorite strips or storylines? Drop a comment--I'd like to hear what you've got to say about Sluggy Freelance.

Sluggy Freelance: Jackson Gets Personal

It's Saturday as I start writing this, and I'm sitting here staring at a blank blogpost form. I know I have to write this. It's not that I don't know where to begin; I know where to begin. But sometimes beginning is hard.

I'm going to open up in this post, and it's going to get personal. And that can be uncomfortable. I know we're all comic fans here, but still, it can be embarrassing to admit that comics mean something to you. What kind of a nerd-boy gets into webcomics this much? But you gotta start somewhere, so here I am: starting.

Let's start with high school.

I first got into webcomics in high school. Or rather, I got into webcomic in high school. My friend Jason introduced me to Penny Arcade, and while I didn't tune in for every update, I'd check it from time to time in the library before school started. That was 2000: when Metroid Prime was just a news headline at IGN, when there were still things to be filled with cream. I graduated in 2001.

College afforded me much more free time, and I began to fill that free time with more webcomics. I made new friends who introduced me to their favorites. I pulled late-night archive binges and caught up with Megatokyo, Real Life, Mac Hall, and Rob and Elliot. I started keeping up with update days. And my friend Charles introduced me to Sluggy Freelance.

I'm well aware of the criticisms of Sluggy Freelance. It's been accused of Cerebus Syndrome, bloated continuity, and artwork that one cartoonist has said makes him "want to murder puppies." Moreover, the charges have a measure of validity. All the same, it's a good thing I had more relaxed standards for artwork then, because otherwise I would have missed out.

Because Sluggy was funny. It had a freewheeling, make-it-up-as-we-go quality to it. The characters' schticks, from Zoe's beleaguered-everygirl bit to Riff's "let me check my notes," lent familiarity and consistency to the madcap sci-fi and parody adventures that befell the core cast. Pathetic, overconfident Sam Sein got turned into a vampire; it's only slight exaggeration to say that Sluggy Freelance lampooned the Twilight trend ten years before it started.

At 1 in the morning, I was stifling my laughter and trying not to wake up my roommate. Oh, the relentless puns! Puns saved the world.

But as I made my way through the archives each day, the cast began to feel like good friends to me. I tagged along on their bizarre adventures because I liked being with them. I got invested in their world; I genuinely liked them, and their ups and downs affected me. By the time I'd caught up with the archives, the recent dramatic storyline Fire and Rain had reached down in my chest and grabbed tight. I was hooked.

That was 2002. As I kept reading over the years, while Pete Abrams' art improved to decent levels, his storytelling spun out of control. I didn't get hooked on Sluggy because it had epic grand-scale plots spanning time and space. I got into it because I cared about the characters. Zoe and Torg's star-crossed, never-quite-on relationship was central to my interest in Sluggy's continuity, and as the central cast's lives took a backseat to weird events and cosmic power-plays, I lost interest.

Somewhere around Oceans Unmoving, I started tuning in weekly rather than daily.

Somewhere around Oceans Unmoving II, I started forgetting to tune in weekly.

And shortly after Years of Yarncraft, I stopped tuning in at all.

It had been about a year since I'd had a real look at Sluggy. Then, Friday night, I came across this post at Damn Good Comics. Apparently, Pete Abrams had recently opened up the Zoe-Torg-Oasis Love Triangle of Death again, and the story thread was pushing toward a resolution.

I busted open the start of the story arc in a new tab and tore in.

There's a lot this story arc did right. Pitting the unstoppable force of Bun-Bun against the immovable object of Oasis was a good move. Riff's Mark 19 robot was another one: in a throwback to Riff's previous mecha, everything that could go wrong did, at first comically, then with mounting gravity as failure mounted on failure. Bottom line is, after so much time away from Sluggy, the storyline got me engaged again. Fast.

And by the time I reached the resolution in Friday's strip...sure enough, Sluggy had reached one of those moments where it reached down inside of me, grabbed my heart, and jerked hard.

If you've been away from Sluggy Freelance, this is worth coming back for. It's sad, and it changes things irrevocably, but if you're invested in these characters like I am, it'll move you.

It's funny how things coincide sometimes, how they all seem to come full-circle at once. Somehow this arc feels like a lot of things in my life: there's a tragic side to it, but at least you've gotten some closure. It's time to stand up and move forward now. And yes, this post is personal and a little rough around the edges, but I felt like I had to get this off my chest while it's still fresh. Sluggy Freelance is not without its shortcomings, but despite all its flaws, I've enjoyed it, and I'm not ashamed of that.

Check back on Friday, where I'll be revisiting a few of my favorite Sluggy moments. Also tune in this coming Monday for an important announcement. A few things are gonna be changing, but many things will be new and cool.

The news this week is that Rice Boy was great.

That's actually not news, of course. Rice Boy has been finished for awhile now--like not just stopped or ended, but it actually reached the finale of its overarching narrative. A webcomic with a natural beginning, middle, and end, imagine that! A genuine story. And the "old news" that Rice Boy was great is not even new news to me--I finished reading it some three weeks ago. So why am I mentioning it? Because it was great and engaging and creative and I want to talk about it with you.

But that'll have to wait. For now, I've got a week-in-review writeup to write, and it's coming rather late in the day here. Thoughts on Rice Boy, maybe later next week. Right now, the writeup.

Let's start with today. Today's installment of Dr. McNinja simultaneously cracked me up and made me go "Wow," which it actually does fairly frequently. Honestly, it's been awhile since Dr. McNinja did that for me--it was starting to get all "Oh, the grocery chain owner with the big purple monster alternate form got stuck halfway into his transformation, and oh look, now his quadriplegic dad has turned into a giant purple monster that is still paralyzed, that's kind of unusual I guess." But today's comic ended with a total non-sequitur twist punchline that leaves you wondering, "How the crud did he know that?"

When you're piling on the weirdness, sometimes the best way to make things weirder is to throw in something comparatively normal. Go figure.

Next up, we've got Real Life continuing its storyline from last week with Alternate Tony and the plot hole. Tony's gunfight with his female counterpart gets interrupted for exposition in Tuesday's comic, and then in Wednesday's comic, Dave strolls in to deliver another interruption. Initially I was bummed--way to drag all the momentum out of your gunfight, Cartoonist Greg! But the gunfight didn't resume in Thursday's or today's strips, and instead we got another monkey wrench thrown into the equation. Female Tony ain't the only one out for blood, it seems. As it turns out, the whole storyline was well-paced, and my feeling on Wednesday just came from differing expectations.

Just goes to show, sometimes it pays to stick with a storyline and see it out to the end before passing judgment. Heck, that's half the reason I keep reading Sluggy Freelance! The other half is the puns.

Now, let's turn our attention to Starslip Crisis. In the most recent storyline, Vanderbeam has received his first exhibit job as curator aboard the Sai Kan: a collection of mask pieces. Interestingly, the artist himself has specified a detailed layout for the exhibit, ostensibly making Vanderbeam's job easier...but the artist has requested that the centerpiece of the exhibit be hung up across from the curator's bed. The centerpiece turns out to be a soul-harrowing monstrosity! And in Monday's strip, we witness Vanderbeam's first night sleeping across from the thing (I use the word "sleeping" loosely). Once again, a good storyline that gets better as you get into it. You can start reading it here.

And let's round things off with a clever setup and punchline from today's Dinosaur Comics. That's all I got, fellas. Tell me what you think of the storylines in Real Life and Starslip, or maybe drop me a comment and tell me what you enjoyed this week.

Me, I'm gonna go watch Iron Man on DVD with some friends now. Adios!