Webcomic Reviews Pt. 4

Books, Beers, and Ballpoint Pens: The best word I can think of to describe this darkly humorous gag-a-day webcomic is "rough." It's got rough art, rough writing, rough punchline delivery... There's craft underneath it all, but not much polish. Infrequently updated, and sometimes it just falls flat. So, why do I read it? Because every once in a while it comes out with something absolutely golden. The birthday skeleton won my readership for at least a year.

Pictures for Sad Children: Deceptively simple art is perfectly blended with the subject matter for this webcomic, which presents an overwhelmingly cynical view of the world at large. Very witty and humorous, but the laughter it elicits is often accompanied by a certain dawning horror at just what you're laughing at. A very sophisticated gag-a-day comic, but its sophistication only emerges in retrospect.

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: A once-a-week gag webcomic done with Adobe Illustrator, following the absurdist exploits of slacker superhero Wonderella. Extremely funny, though I imagine readers familiar with supers comics and genre conventions found therein - particularly conventions related to legacy heroes - get more out of the comic than others. Other frequent themes include celebrity, pop culture, dating, and modern life. At first I found the art style somewhat annoying and cheap, but it's grown on me and now I find it adds to the webcomic's charm.

The Meek: A fantasy comic that follows the adventures of a dryad in her quest to save the world... I think. Art-wise, this comic is incredible, right up there among the best - just a few notches below Lackadaisy Cats, which I consider to be the pinnacle of webcomic visuals. Writing-wise it's harder to assess this webcomic, because while the scripting is good and it's drawn me in quite well, I find the pace to be rather maddeningly slow... We're on the third chapter and the creator Alexds1 is still introducing the cast, so it's hard to make any statements about the broader strokes of storycraft that might be at work. Still, like I said, it hooked me pretty quickly so I highly recommend giving it a try.