1/30: Week in Review

Welcome back! It really is good to see you back here. It's been a fun week so far at TWIW, and it's also been a fun week out there in the internet. Let's have a look at some comics--and, as part of my ongoing endeavor to talk about comics with you rather than talk about comics to you, let's have a look at them together.

First of all, Shortpacked. This week, Ethan laments that Batman has died in comics yet again, while trying to keep his best face forward running the store. In today's strip, Shortpacked creator brings the heavy stuff, and with the Batman parallels here, Ethan's character, and the recent events in which Ethan and the staff helped save the store from a hostile takeover, the crazy thing is I think it works. Shortpacked readers--what do you think? Legitimate drama, or self-indulgent Willis-babble?

Next--and this is a quick one--those familiar with The Book of Biff know that it typically has "themed weeks," with a common thematic element running through each comic. For the life of me, I cannot figure out this week's theme. Here's Biff from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Can anyone discern what the theme is?

And with a couple of questions on the table, let's also address that central question that this blog endeavors to answer: What were darn good comics this week?

• Penny Arcade wrapped up its epileptic fit of continuity, "Further Songs of Sorcelation," in which Gabe forces Tycho to watch a DVD based off a hideously-written fantasy novel series. A hilarious, well-drawn extended parody of crappy geek franchises: in my opinion, it's PA at the top of their game. "Further Songs of Sorcelation" begins here.


• In Wednesday's comic, Hijinks Ensue levels the funny cannon at Microsoft's new product, Songsmith. The strip's clever dialogue satirizes a product that nobody needs, and while the art isn't daring or anything, it's expressive and it gets the job done. This is what I love best about Hijinks: the witty, acerbic geek-culture commentary.


• In two of its installments this week, Nobody Scores delivers sardonic laughs on the topic of popular art vs. fine art. The latter comic in particular features a lavish illustration that drives home the joke.

Leastways, those were the comics I found to be outstanding this week. What rocked your socks off? Drop a comment and share the excellence.

Discoveries from the Internet: Sheldon Audio Tour, and More Dresden Codak

Did you know that Sheldon has an audio tour? You may already know--I discovered it just yesterday while browsing the net. If you click the above link (also accessible from Sheldon's "NEW HERE?" page), it will give you a guided audio tour of the Sheldon site. It makes a great introduction if you've never read Sheldon before, and even if you're already familiar with the comic, Dave Kellett gives a really funny audio tour. If you've got ten minutes to spare, I recommend it.

Does anyone else know of a webcomic with an audio tour? This thing is the first of its kind I've seen.

Anyway, another quick item of news is that Dresden Codak has finished the second half of the Advanced Dungeons and Discourse comic. The art continues to be spectacular (no surprise there), and one thing I particularly liked about the second half is that Kimiko doesn't take center stage. In the first D&Dis, she severely upstaged her companions, the beginning of a Mary-Sue complex that lasted largely throughout the Hob storyline. In the newest comic, however, everyone gets a chance to shine, and I think it works really well.

Bengo, over at The Floating Lightbulb, is particularly critical of webcomics that substitute pop culture references for genuine humor, and I've wondered more than once whether Dresden Codak's "Dungeons and Discourse" comics don't fall victim to this tendency, merely substituting esoteric philosophical references for pop culture. Sure, it's amusing the first time to see philosophies recontextualized as a tabletop RPG, but there's only so much riffing you can do on that theme before it ceases to be creative. However, I do think the latest D&Dis comic succeeds as a comic. All the references serve as an extended build-up for the final joke, which enhances its humor, and the joke is character-based. It's genuinely funny, and it's good art.

What's next for Dresden Codak? Only time will tell. I've got my fingers crossed for innovation.

Review: Luke Surl

Sometimes, when you blog about webcomics, guys who have webcomics ask you for reviews. This is a cool thing, because you like to read webcomics and say things about webcomics, and bam, here is another webcomic to read and say things about. I have been approached by a couple such cartoonists. Today's cartoonist is Luke Surl.

Luke Surl's comic doesn't exactly have a name, other than LukeSurl.com (which I initially thought stood for "Luke's URL"). It doesn't really have a consistent form, either; sometimes it's single-panel, sometimes multiple panels in simple configurations, whatever Luke Surl deems will best fit the joke. A common topic or theme also eluded me initially; it seems that these comics are about whatever strikes the cartoonist as making a comic about. Now, the comics do tend to hover around the subject of academic humor, the sorts of musings from a college student's studies that one might find funny, but at the end of the day, it seems to me that the unifying element here is Luke Surl.

Which is okay. Luke Surl is not the funniest guy in the world, but he has amusing ideas. He enjoys verbal twists and plays on words, so it should come as no surprise that he often bases jokes on familiar lines from Shakespeare. Sometimes he plays meta-games with the comic format. I particularly liked the joke in this single-paneler, where Surl puts a clever fourth-wallish twist on the despairing-economic-analyst-leaping-from-a-window gag. My two favorites, though, would have to be the comics where he puts Santa Claus and Waldo of "Where's Waldo" on the psychiatrist's couch. I laughed out loud at these, and I think he's got a good thing going with the "psychiatrist's couch" motif. More of these, please.

Unfortunately, the art is a sticking point. Early comics especially suffer from pixel-grit, and while this condition improves, later comics still have problems with rough, jagged line quality and uneven line weights. Humans tend to look stiff and flat, with unnatural-looking limb positions. Surl often employs oblique projection with a lofted camera pointing downward at 45 degrees, and as Wikipedia notes, oblique drawings look very unconvincing to the eye. On occasion Surl makes the oblique projection work, as with these clever blueprints, and sometimes he finds workarounds for the perspective problems through judicious use of close-ups.

And sometimes, he even does pretty good art. Coloring is bright, perhaps a little over-saturated and unsubtle, but rarely hard on the eyes. This comic is well-drawn, shows a good use of perspective on a close-up, and contains an amusing reference to an also-amusing former comic. Another comic, featuring anthropomorphic numbers, is well-drawn, and a nice subtle touch is that each number's height is proportional to its numerical value. Other comics occasionally feature little jokes in the background--again, a nice touch.

Can I recommend Luke Surl? Not as wholeheartedly as I usually recommend comics, to be perfectly honest. His work is decent, sometimes funny, but one can see the influence of comics like The Far Side, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and XKCD, and these are all hard comics to stack up favorably against--Lord knows I couldn't. These guys are professional humorists, and it feels to me like Surl is still finding his voice.

But the thing is, he's finding it. The art, for its shortcomings, shows definite improvement in the long run, getting cleaner and sharper, and while the first ten comics or so in the archive fall flat joke-wise, the humor consistently improves. Looking at the dates in the archive, I can see that he keeps up with his update schedule (initially weekdaily, but scaled back to MWF after about three months), and his persistence shows that if you diligently apply yourself to cartooning, you will get better. If he keeps at it and seeks constructive feedback and criticism, he could have a really good comic on his hands down the road.

So, give Luke Surl a look. Decide for yourself if his humor is your style. I can't make any guarantees, but if you can look past the dodgy art and stick with him as he improves, you might just find something worth tuning in to. At the very least, he's fun for Shakespeare fans.

Luke Surl
Updates: MWF
Style: color, variable-length, generally 1-4 panels
Bottom Line: not too shabby

1/23: Week in Review (Is It Funny Today?)

By now you've probably seen Is It Funny Today, the reader-determined toplist of daily webcomic humor, and its subsite Is It Good Today for more story-based webcomics. IIFT users can track their favorite comics, quickly share comics via Digg or StumbleUpon or other content-sharing sites, and cast their vote on each comic in the form of a yes-or-no answer to the question "Is it funny today?" In a way, it gets to the heart of what we, as webcomic readers, are looking for--we want to read good comics.

But good comics can be hard to come by, even with the collective wisdom of the internet at your disposal, and poking through the day's Top 20 doesn't guarantee you the funny so much as give you a chance to compare your tastes with others'. If you only read a few webcomics or have only recently gotten into them, the IIFT rankings can a good way to find a new strip or two to follow, but if you're already knee-deep in webcomics like I am, you'll recognize the powerhouses of funny that already dominate the lists: Dinosaur Comics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Cyanide and Happiness, Garfield Minus Garfield, and others. So here we are again, back where we started as readers: looking for good comics, sometimes satisfied, sometimes disappointed, but always coming back to the medium in the hopes that it will deliver what it promises.

That's the spirit in which I started this blog. I'm seeking to do qualitatively what Is It Funny Today does quantitatively: I want to share good comics with you, the internet. But I guess there's more to it than that.

There's this drive inside us to communicate. Some of us communicate with pictures, some do it with words, and some combine the two and communicate with comics. My brother and I used to talk about webcomics a lot because when they were done well, they said something to us, even if what they said was just really really funny. This blog has given me an opportunity to keep talking about webcomics, but it's never quite captured the way that my brother and I could talk about webcomics with each other. Maybe that's just the internet, you know? But I'm thinking about this blog, and I'm thinking about how to really talk about comics with you, and not just stand up in my pulpit every Friday and give you my webcomics sermon.

So, you know, I'll keep thinking about that. In the meantime, I want to know what you've enjoyed reading. What did you find to be really, really good in the world of webcomics this week? If you've got a moment, drop a comment, maybe drop a link. It'd be great to hear from you.

Here's what I liked this week.

• Thinkin' Lincoln continues a storyline that's been going on since mid-December, in which Amelia Earhart gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle, and Darwin, Shackleton and Pythagoras set out to find her. Very amusing stuff, with some inspired sight gags. You can start reading the story arc here.


• For those familiar with Jason and Kurt's custom of sitting at the manager's station and riffing on movie news, this installment from Multiplex is guaranteed funny. When Jason discusses movie news with Kurt's girlfriend Melissa, somehow it's just not the same for him. Great comic exaggeration in panel six there.


• Gunnerkrigg Court's latest issue has been treating the dichotomy between science and magic with its usual wit and charm, as Kat fiddles with robots and Annie discovers more about her Blinker Stone. I went through a spell recently where I was kind of jaded with Gunnerkrigg Court, but I picked it up again a week or two ago, and it's good to be back. The GC art's generally okay, but every so often there's a moment where it really shines. For instance, last Wednesday.


• And not to be One-Note Jones around here or anything, but Blank It, since I started reading it regularly two weeks ago, has continued to provide biweekly installments of inspired surreality. If you're looking for a reason to go check out Blank It, allow me to refer you to Monday's review.

And on that note, this is your friendly neighborhood webcomics enthusiast, Jackson Ferrell, signing off. Have a good weekend, everyone, and keep talking about good things.

Ding Changes Gears

I don't play World of Warcraft, but I have a couple of friends who do. I know a little bit about the lingo from them--the tanks and shamans, the DPS, the drawing of aggro. Some of my friends even try to get me to play World of Warcraft. But then I look at what a huge presence it is in their lives, and I tell them: "Thanks, but no. I don't want to commit that much of my time to something that's going to dominate my life like WoW will. Now hold on a second, I've got to see if Dr. McNinja and Penny Arcade have updated today."

It's not exactly the newest of news, but Scott Kurtz's WoW-based comic, Ding, recently made a switch from chronicling the in-game exploits of the PVP cast to chronicling the in-game exploits of...you. Readers can email Kurtz their stories, which he will then render in comic form. Today I stopped by the Ding site, and it turns out that the first of these stories went up about a week ago.

And I actually chuckled out loud at it! It's kind of an amusing story, even if you've never played WoW yourself. You know what kind of comics you like--you can decide for yourself whether you'd like to check it out.

Review: Blank It

Are you familiar with the Theater of the Absurd movement of the 1950s and '60s? It was a new approach to drama that flew in the face of theatrical conventions and presented a world that was fundamentally confusing and ridiculous, defying rational explanation. Dialogue often degenerates into preposterous back-and-forth wordplay, setting and identity are ambiguous and fluid, and meaningless plots with bizarre notions of causality are the norm. In "Theater of the Absurd" productions, sets and props are often minimalist, and some plays have a cast of as few as three or four. Classic examples include Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which recontextualizes Shakespeare's Hamlet through the eyes of two minor characters, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two everymen wait listlessly for a man who never comes.

Now imagine, for a moment: what if the Theater of the Absurd ethos were applied to a webcomic?

Blank It, a comic co-created by writer Aric McKeown and artist Lem Pew, plunges absurdly right in with two unnamed protagonists standing around in an utterly blank space, with no explanation of where they came from or how they got there. With no one else around, what do they do? What else but strip down to their boxers. The two of them reflect on the opportunity to create new social norms for clothing in this new featureless environment--and when the goatee'd guy re-dresses himself, the guy with glasses is suddenly uncomfortable and must follow suit. The two of them set out to explore their surroundings, and as they begin to encounter other things in the blankness, things rapidly take a turn for the surreal.

It's a real testament to the strength of the writing that it's a full eighteen comics before the two protagonists encounter any object in the blankness other than themselves, yet the comic stays interesting and engaging. Quickly, distinct personalities emerge--the goatee'd guy with the hat is an impulsive optimist, while the guy in the jacket and glasses is a circumspect pessimist. The contrast of their personalities makes for clever, sarcastic, and ridiculous banter between them: particularly when Glasses Guy proposes to conduct an experiment employing Hat Guy's hat.
The strip often toys with the fourth wall without ever quite breaking it--such as, later on in the plot, when a distant mountain range is revealed to be a theater-style backdrop, which collapses when Hat Guy runs into it.

Is this play backdrop a subtle shout-out to the Theater of the Absurd movement? I don't know. All I know is, for all this critical contextualizing and intellectual analysis...I have honestly not laughed as hard in months as I did while reading this comic. You don't have to know a thing about Theater of the Absurd to recognize that this thing is hysterical.

Additionally, the art is solid. The minimalist approach, in both theater and comics, gives an advantage for budget and artwork, as sparse scenery reduces the effort needed for set design. Blank It could easily have had much simpler artwork or even been a stick-figure comic, but Lem Pew is clearly not half-assing it as an artist--and it pays off. The characters' facial expressions and body language are as much a part of the humor as their dialogue. The detailed, Ian-McConville-esque character designs lends detail and sharpness to what would otherwise be a nondescript visual environment. And when the characters' situation starts getting really, really bizarre, it really gives the artist a chance to shine.

For all of its similarities to absurdist theater, though, there is one key difference for Blank It: its tone. Absurdist theater, as a movement, has strong connections to existentialism, grappling with the despair that threatens man when he comes to believe that his world is meaningless and absurd. There's not a hint of despair with Blank It. It's lighthearted, playful, high-energy surreality and sarcasm, rather than darkly comic reflections on the human condition. It's not a tragicomedy--it's just straight-up comedy, and you get a strong sense that the creators are just making it up as they go along, and seeing where it leads.

Blank It is fun, experimental, and exceptionally clever. Plus, with nothing worse than a sporadic profanity or two, it's a good time for just about any comic reader. Instead of making a profound statement about what it means to be human, the sentiment of the comic and its creators seems to be: here's a ridiculous world, so let's have some fun with it. From this reviewer, Blank It comes highly recommended.