All I Want for Christmas is Webcomics, 3: I Got All Types of Crazy Crap

Okay, so it's December 22nd. Holiday shipping deadlines are passing left and right. Topatoco can't even guarantee delivery by December 25th if you shell out the hundred bucks for next-day air! It's too late to order any of the sweet comic anthologies or tongue-in-cheek t-shirts that your favorite webcomics blogger recommended, and that little turd still hasn't written his promised third installment of his Webcomics Gift-Giving Guide! What are you to do?

Well, have no fear. There is hope for you yet.

I have said before that MS Paint Adventures has the best soundtrack of any webcomic out there, and the cool thing is that you can purchase much of that soundtrack on the nine albums available at homestuck.bandcamp.com. Tracks range from electronica to ambient experimental electronica to instrumental/orchestral with a dose of electronica, but in my opinion the standout album is Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead.

Drawing Dead is a concept album inspired by MSPA's gang of playing-card-suit-inspired mobsters the Midnight Crew--and ostensibly performed by them too. It features contemporary noir jazz that evokes both early-90s adventure games and 1940s detective flicks, and it will make you feel like a gangsta. (We're talking pinstripe-suit gangsta, of course. Not the other kind.)

The jams are slick, compositions are tight, and at its best it'll remind you of a Dave Brubeck tune. Best of all, you get 18 tracks for $5.25, and you can sample the full album before you buy. Give it a spin, buy it and burn it for your white elephant gift at your office Christmas party, or buy a couple different Homestuck albums for the MSPA fan on your Christmas list. Bam! And you're ready for the holidays.

I also wanted to mention one of the most creative webcomic products that I've seen all year: Dr. McNinja Battle Magnets. These feature the heroes and villains of Dr. McNinja in various action poses, ready to square off against each other on any metal surface. They look great and are every bit as crazy as the comic, and if you were to get me a set I would not object in the slightest.

If war is an art, these are the combat equivalent of magnetic poetry for your 'fridge. Get one of the two sets (seven magnets each) for $12, or buy both sets for $22 and get a secret bonus character too.

And that concludes your 2010 Webcomics Gift-Giving Holiday Guide Thing. I'm Jackson Ferrell, shameless webcomics promoter, wishing you a merry Christmas and happy holidays. Stay cool, and I'll see you in the new year.

All I Want for Christmas is Webcomics, 2: Give a Shirt

Welcome to the second installment of TWIW's Holiday Gift-Giving Special Feature. Today I am here to share holiday gift ideas that you can wear.

To purchase any of these fine garments, simply click on the corresponding picture, and be magically transported to its online store via the power of hyperlinks.

The first shirt on our list comes courtesy of Alexandra Douglass, contributing artist for MS Paint Adventures' Homestuck. It features Homestuck's four protagonists in their signature colors, expressing themselves through the magic of dance and being-on-a-shirt. It's great how the kids' personalities come out in their poses, and even if you don't know anything about Homestuck, it is a wicked cool design.

The shirt costs $20 and is available in white or blapck. This item is currently for pre-order only; orders will close at 11:59 EST on December 12th and will ship no later than December 20th. If you want one by Christmas, now is the time to act.

This shirt, from John "Pictures for Sad Children" Campbell, perfectly captures my sentiments about America. I can't tell you how long I have wanted one of these for. I can't tell you because I don't keep track of these things, but I'm pretty sure it's been at least a year and a half.

You should get it for me. And for anyone else who thinks America is sort of okay. But also me.

The shirt is $19.00, and can be guaranteed to arrive before December 24th as long as you order by December 15 for first class mail (Dec. 17 for UPS ground). See the TopatoCo website for more information.


I know these shipping deadlines are fast approaching, so I'll have the third and final part of this guide thing up for you as quickly as possible.

All I Want for Christmas is Webcomics, 1: Book 'em, Danno

Ah, my oft-neglected blog. I remember you! You're about webcomics.

Obviously, TWIW hasn't seen a lot of recent activity. Apart from my work on my new webcomic Sketch Comedy (GO VISIT MY WEBCOMIC), there's the usual business of the holidays that keeps us all crazy. I don't expect I have to sell you on the concept, but in my opinion, there's no better time of year to buy merch from your favorite webcomic creators. By shopping online, you can dodge the psychotic traffic, the hunt for a parking place and crowds at the malls, and you can introduce your friends and loved ones to the great strips you enjoy online.

So, with that in mind, I present to you part one of a three-part special feature: All I Want for Christmas is Webcomics, the This Week in Webcomics holiday shopping guide.

As always, we at TWIW are nothing if not biased. Everything on this list has passed the rigorous quality screening of being either something I have bought or want to buy. And I have been anticipating the release of the first item on the list for quite some time...

That's right, it's the F Chords print collection.

Long-time readers of TWIW know I'm an outspoken F Chords fan. Ash and Wade are two studio musicians, recording radio-ad music by day and struggling to get their rock band off the ground by night (that is, when they're not playing World of Warcraft or watching Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles). As dudes trying to keep a dream alive and banging their heads against the wall just to keep it from dying, the lead duo are eminently relatable, not to mention hilarious. While rereading the strips in this 60-page collection, it felt like I was catching up with Ash and Wade at the bar, sharing a laugh about all the crap they'd been through. The Hook Arc is particularly hilarious.

You're At A Nine, We Need You at a Zero makes a great gift for the struggling musician in your life, or heck, just about any artist trying to pay the bills doing what he loves. But don't bother buying one for me. I've got my own copy, suckas! You're At A Nine... is available at Kris Straub's online store for $12.99, plus shipping (see above link).

I'm a huge fan of F Chords. But, as you know, I'm also a huge fan of Blank It, which also launched its first print collection this year. Shirt...Goes...Down captures the first two years of existentialism, absurdity, and hand juice. Given that I've reviewed the comic, interviewed the creators (in comic form!), and basically ran my trap about it at every opportunity, you hardly need a reminder why Blank It is awesome. Get Shirt...Goes...Down for anyone on your list who wishes Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was a little more like the anime Fooly Cooly. Geez, that's a really narrow audience. Get it for anyone who enjoys extremely clever nonsense, witty repartee, and free-wheeling adventure. It's available in the Blank It store for $25 plus shipping.

Last on the book list is Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show. As a supporter of Multiplex's print collection project through Kickstarter, I received my copy around two months ago, and I'm really impressed with the final product. McAlpin has put together a quality book (no surprise, given that he's a career graphic designer), and he hasn't skimped on the bonus material either: over 30 additional comics, behind-the-scenes extras, and an exclusive 12-page prequel storyline. The whole package looks great. It's worth warning that the average Multiplex strip hovers somewhere between a PG-13 and an R rating, so this isn't a gift for your 10-year-old nephew by any means. However, it's unmistakably a quality present for anyone who's out of high school and really, really, really loves movies.

You can get your hands on Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show for $19.95, or $24.95 for the Artist's Edition, at (where else?) the Multiplex Store.

And that wraps up part one of this extremely special holiday feature. Stay tuned for part two, shirts and apparel, sometime next week (or maybe earlier if I get the chance!), and if you know of any webcomic print collections that you think would make a sweet gift, drop a link in the comments.

Robert Gryfft Reviews MS Paint Adventures

Hi, everyone. Long time no see.

Sorry I haven't had much to post lately--I've been working on a handful of different projects, so the blog has kind of gotten short shrift. But I, like everyone and his brother, have been reading MSPaint Adventures lately, and so has fellow blogger Robert Gryfft of Air Theremin. Gryfft is a screaming raving fan of MSPA, and he has graciously allowed me to share his gratuitous frothy fangushing review here on TWIW.

WARNING: Like MSPA itself, Gryfft's review contains F-bombs.

Tweet Dreams

Yesterday, Book of Biff creator Chris Hallbeck posted the following on Twitter:

This morning I woke up from a dream about twitter. #whatdoesitmean

And sure enough, after reading that, I myself dreamed about Twitter last night. I dreamed about retweeting a Theater Hopper strip for Wednesday's Pick of the Day; I forget exactly what the joke was, but in classic form, TH cartoonist Tom Brazelton was making fun of his inner Iron Man fanboy. I then dreamed about reading a webcomic titled "Terry and John's Guide to Time Travel," in which the titular characters attempt every bad time travel idea in the book. The particular strip I read featured Terry going back in time to try to eat his past self alive.

What the crud, subconscious.

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the Movie

Scott Pilgrim is making some noise.

At a Glance:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Kieran Culkin
Director: Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead)
112 mins
PG-13
TWIW rates: 4/5

Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel recently released its sixth and final volume, concluding the story of young-adult slacker Scott Pilgrim's battle for the heart of Ramona Flowers against her seven evil ex-boyfriends. Scott McCloud calls it "the funniest comic book on the planet right now." There's a Scott Pilgrim video game for PS3 and XBox, and "Scott Pilgrim vs. the Animation" on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. And this past weekend, the Scott Pilgrim movie hit the box office.

23-year-old Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a loser. He's unemployed, plays bass in a noisy rock band, lives in a tiny apartment with his "cool gay roommate" Wallace (Kieran Culkin), and has recently started dating a high schooler. But all that changes when he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the literal girl of his dreams: as a courier for Amazon, she keeps showing up in his subconscious because of a convenient subspace portal running through his head. But in order to date Ramona, he must first defeat her seven evil exes. Not only does he have to deal with the same messy relationship history that we all must in meeting someone new, but he actually has to fight out that history in a string of escalating boss battles.

Like the comics, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World captures the ethos of our generation. Scott and Ramona Flowers navigate a sea of "It's Complicated" histories, grappling with the interpersonal relations of young adults who never emotionally graduated from high school. Characters speak in a vernacular of humor based on repetition, repetition, and jokes about how lame jokes are. Scott's battles with the evil exes are peppered with tongue-in-cheek, cheesy pun-liners like "You were a little bi-curious? Honey, I'm a little bi-furious!"

The movie is also steeped in video-game culture, up to the 16-bit pixelated Universal logo with accompanying bleep-and-bloop soundtrack. Contemporary movies often take their action-scene cues heavily from video games (e.g. Clash of the Titans), but SP uses video gaming as a framing device for its love story: battles are laden with pop-up score counters and special power-up modes, and defeated enemies burst into showers of coins. When mistaken for a band member and asked "What do you play?" one character responds, "Legend of Zelda, Tetris..." and a running gag has Scott explaining the history of Pac-Man as a pick-up line. With its audio-visual mash of digitized SFX, comic-book popups, and rock music, it's visceral and entertaining. And director Edgar Wright knows how to use a framing device to tell a comic story: what he did with zombie flicks and buddy-cop movies in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, he does again with video games in Scott Pilgrim.

So there's style. But does it bring the substance? To a degree. It keeps the plot, premise and characters simple, but Cera transcends his usual role of awkward slacker; he projects a Scott who, when given a second chance, steps up to admit his past screw-ups and set things right. As in the comics, Scott is an idiot who learns from his mistakes: a hero with a hair more nuance to him than one would expect. Winstead as Flowers brings a fitting measure of reserve to the table for a character with seven evil exes. The exes themselves rock their performances with outrageous energy; Indian guy Matthew Patel breaks out into bollywood dance-fighting, actor/skateboarder Lucas Lee delivers tough-guy panache, Vegan hipster Todd Ingram exudes arrogance, and sinister music mogul Gideon Graves plays his evil-concealing nice-guy facade to the hilt.

The movie stays as faithful to the comic books as a movie can. It faces the same challenge as Watchmen: condensing a large body of work into two or three hours and arranging the plot into a coherent cinematic presentation. And while Watchmen staggered under a slavish devotion to the source material, Scott Pilgrim enjoys considerably more success in striking the balance. A few elements such as the Katayanagi twins (evil exes 5 and 6) and secondary characters' backstories get short shrift, but the film actually bests the comic in its effective foreshadowing of main villain Gideon Graves. As a result, the film actually has a more fulfilling climax. Certain plot elements are changed slightly or rearranged to fit the cinematic medium, but all but the most diehard Pilgrimite will be pleased with the result.

The big question is, of course, is it worth your eight bucks? I can honestly say it's an entertaining production and a quality movie. Those outside of the comic-con crowd may have accessibility issues with it, as it appeals heavily to the viewer's inner dork, and in some instances I found the pervasive sexual jokes off-putting. However, the action rocks, the humor is laugh-worthy, and Scott is (more or less) a worthy hero for this generation. If you're looking for some quality fun for the dork within, you won't go wrong with Scott Pilgrim.