Multiplex Celebrates 5th Anniversary

This week marks the 5th year of Gordon McAlpin's movie-theater comic Multiplex, and Multiplex is celebrating with a week of daily updates. In addition to its usual Monday and Thursday updates, it's bringing guest strips and guest art (today's update even includes a poetic ode written by a Multiplex fan!). You can check out this week's guest updates in the guest strip section.

There will be a guest strip on Friday, and even a few more bonus updates next week, so be sure to head over to Multiplex and check out the festivities. Congrats to Gordon on five years of webcartooning!

Review: Eben07: Operation Mongoose

Gentlemen, behold! Following up from yesterday's post, it is time for the promised review of:


The first thing to note is that this chapter is a quick read, at a brief fifteen or so pages. However, it's not necessarily the best intro to the comic--for starters, its focus is not the present-day protagonist Agent Eben07, but rather his grandfather Abel, founder of the ICA. The storyline, told in flashback-style black-and-white rather than the brighter colors of Agent Eben07's contemporary adventures, covers Abel's assignment during the 1970's to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Truth be told, I'm not sure what to make of it.

It's not the art--I've always been impressed by Eben07's artwork, and although it loses a little without color, it's still a strong point. And the story succeeds at its goal of placing the ICA and its founder into American History. What it comes down to is the tone.

There were spots I found funny. Abel's present attempt on Castro's life is interspersed with his reflections on his mission, accompanied by snapshots of past attempts, which are absolutely ludicrous. Plus, the seriousness of Abel's internal monologue and the whole "men in suits" vibe are juxtaposed with such images as Abel in a dress. But that's the thing: the seriousness. Throughout the storyline, there are some rather gravitous musings on the nature of choice and fate in a political context, and Abel, it appears, is intended to be taken as a sympathetic victim of greater machinations, a pawn trying to maintain some semblance of human dignity.

There are numerous moments of humor in the fifteen-page story, but it ends on a deadly serious note. If it's trying for that whole-spectrum-of-human-emotion thing that I discussed earlier with Marooned and Superfogeys, I can't say it succeeds as well.

In all honesty, I've never been sure entirely what to make of Eben07. There's no denying that it's a well-executed comic, but the whole thing is so odd that at times I wonder about its accessibility. The janitor/secret-agent juxtaposition at the core of the thing has a lot of potential, but there's some inscrutable part of it that seems to be taking the whole endeavor too seriously--or perhaps taking it seriously in the wrong way. It's not mine to say that a secret-agent-janitor story can't have its serious moments.

But neither is it mine to say exactly how you can take a secret-agent-janitor story seriously. Such answers are decidedly beyond me.

To conclude, despite everything it does right, Operation Mongoose may not be the best introduction to the comic. Fortunately, though, the latest version of the site includes a page for new readers, and if the comic has piqued your interest, that may be the best place to start.

An Introduction to Eben07 (Now with More Musings!)

It's been about a month and a half since I started my full-time job, and lately I've felt unsatisfied about the quality of the posts here at This Week in Webcomics. It's Sunday afternoon, here I am sitting down to write a post, and I can't remember the last weekend where I wasn't putting together something at the last minute. I suppose it's to be expected--I have less time to work on the blog now, especially if I have a busy weekend, and I guess that's as it should be. But none of that means I have to feel completely at ease about it.

I just wanted to get that off my chest, and it also sets the tone for the upcoming post, which will discuss the comic Eben07, specifically the chapter "Operation Mongoose."

As the Guy Who Does This Blog, sometimes I get press releases from various cartoonists. There's a side of me that feels kind of weird when I do, because--tying into the quality thing I discussed before--I'm not doing serious journalism here or anything. I'm just a guy who can't shut up about webcomics. Still, it's cool to catch word of new developments...so it's not as if I don't appreciate the press releases.

As you know if you've noticed the You-Choose-the-Reviews polls lately, I've been batting around Eben07: Operation Mongoose as a possible subject for review, and on Friday I received a press release announcing that the print edition of Operation Mongoose was up for preorder. I figured it was as good a time as any to finish reading through the chapter and give my assessment.

First, though, a word of introduction for the comic Eben07.

Eben07 is, in essence, a comic about a secret agent janitor. Its titular main character works for the Intelligence Cleaner Agency, whose task is to ensure that the classified operations of America's intelligence operatives stay classified. The Eben07 website presents itself as an official publication of the ICA, disclosing to the American people the information that it is required to disclose by an obscure clause of the Patriot Act. In the form of a webcomic.

A bizarre hook if ever there was one, but it certainly is inventive.

I've seen Eben07 a number of times across the internet, first finding it through the now-defunct comic site WhoShotMyRobot.com. At the time, the website was a confusing mess of HTML, and the "Official Declassifications of the ICA" presentation did little to alleviate my confusion. The site insists on presenting the ICA as a real entity, and framing the comic in a reader-friendly way without breaking character has always been a challenge for it. I've seen the website go through several versions, each one an improvement over the last, and the archives are now accessible and navigable. Presentation-wise, the current version seems to know what it's doing.

Which, in turn, makes it eminently possible for me to review


Full review to follow Monday evening; it's been a busy weekend. Be sure to check back then.

A Quick Recommendation: Hijinks Ensue

You may have heard of this comic before. Hijinks Ensue has been running about a year and a half now, updating three times a week on a MWF schedule. It is a good comic, with solid art and well-developed jokes. The art takes a page from Penny Arcade's stylebook, but cartoonist-entrepreneur Joel Watson brings enough of his own artistic style to keep it visually interesting. Honestly, this comic may not be as big as Penny Arcade (no comic is as big as Penny Arcade!), but Hijinks Ensue is doing for geek-culture at large what PA does for gaming: it approaches its task with clever wit and takes critical jabs at media and entertainment where they come up short. From NBC's Heroes to digital music copy-protection, it goes beyond pop-culture references into actual industry commentary. And it's good.

Of particular interest to comic creators will be Joel Watson's accounts of The Experiment--the things he's doing to make a full-time living with his comic and support himself and his family. While working an unengaging job in sales, he started doing his comic and connecting with new fans through it. When he was let go from his job, he decided to no longer be "a closet artist wearing a business man disguise" and to go full-time with the comic. He's not yet making a full-time income off the comic, but he's taking steps to get there, and he remains optimistic. The "Experiment" portion of his website is equal parts inspiration and practical tips for making a creative living with the aid of the internet, and if you're a webcomic creator as well as a reader, it's worth checking out.

So, there's your quick-and-dirty recommendation for this Wednesday. If you're a geek that likes to see the world of geekery cleverly mocked, or if you just want to see a professional nerd humorist in action, go take a look at Hijinks Ensue. Joel Watson, in my estimation, is a webcartoonist worth supporting.

Review: Thinkin' Lincoln

Welcome to a special installment of TWIW. Thinkin' Lincoln turned three years old last week, so I want to do a special feature on what Thinkin' Lincoln means to me personally. (FUN FACT: "Personal" is just another word for "biased!")

Thinkin' Lincoln is a daily webcomic, created by Miles Grover using Adobe Flash, about the anachronistic adventures of Abraham Lincoln. It takes place in a strange world where various historical personages (Abe, George Washington, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles Darwin, Amelia Earhart, and others) exist alongside each other, generally carrying on in the way that roommates and coworkers do, having ridiculous banter and putting up with each other's crap. Their world is also populated by a fish deity, a fish devil, and a bunch of undead historical personages, like Zombie Mark Twain and Skeleton Shakespeare and Vampire Charles Dickens. And a crocodile with a beard. Oh, and did I mention everyone is a disembodied head?

WTF, Miles Grover. W. T. F.

Initially I was really weirded out by the disembodied-head thing. The art is decent, but it's primarily a vehicle for the day's joke, so it tends toward minimalism. The historical figures' faces are highly stylized, as if someone took a portrait of them and removed all the shading and traced their facial details with a thin-point sharpie. Which works, but will be a turnoff for some people. It was for me. I liked the idea of historical characters interacting with each other and having arguments about who was the better president, etc., but oh man those DISEMBODIED HEADS soooo creeeeepy.

But I kept coming back to it. There were all these links across the internet, and they kept leading me back to Thinkin' Lincoln! And I would read the day's comic and try to get on my way, but one day I found myself reading through the archives again--and this time, I was laughing out loud. In spite of the creepy disembodied heads! As much as I would have preferred a comic with humanoid presidents, this was still a funny comic, and who knows, maybe some people prefer the disembodied heads from a stylistic perspective. I can't deny that it makes for some funny strips, especially when it gets subverted. And Miles did this hand-drawn comic with embodied Lincoln while his computer was in the shop, so I think this is something I can live with.

In short, I had to admit to myself that I reluctantly enjoyed Thinkin' Lincoln. The premise of the strip is fundamentally juxtaposition: specifically, the juxtaposition of Very Important Historical Figures carrying on with all the emotional maturity of fourteen-year-olds. I think it gets the balance right when it takes the characters' historical roles and personas seriously, basing its absurdity on the foundation of history. Sometimes the absurdity still works without the presidential context. Other times, though, Miles Grover abandons his historical base, and it ends up as just an excuse for Abe Lincoln to utter Napoleon-Dynamite-esque euphemized swears like "holy pooping craps" or "butt-cruds." It's like standing in the middle of a seesaw and trying to keep the ends from striking the ground: it's hard, but it's pretty impressive if you keep it up for a long time. And Miles Grover has been keeping it up for over three years.

Which brings us to last Friday's three-year-anniversary comic. This is definitely my favorite TL comic in awhile: it essentially takes the Thinkin' Lincoln premise of ahistorical absurdity and turns it on its head. Lincoln, ostensibly the strip's crazy guy with impractical ideas, suddenly observes the ridiculousness of the world he lives in! It's the sort of strip one could only create with three years of comic history to draw on, and it's a great capstone for everywhere the strip has gone so far.

So, in summary: Thinkin' Lincoln? Pretty good webcomic. Good for a daily laugh, if you can get past the floating-disembodied-heads thing. And if I can, then you can too.