Constant Thoughts

Angels2200 is a comic that really shouldn’t be be as good as it is. The basic premise: It’s the year 2200. People have colonized the solar system. Nearly all males die from some kind of disease, but the sudden loss of testosterone hasn’t stopped the government from waging useless war.

My initial reaction to the comic, especially considering that it was written by two men, was, “Oh, come on! This is just a bad excuse to write a comic about lesbians without letting male readers feel rejected!” But when I finally managed to start reading it (I was bored), I found that it works surprisingly well. Sure, there’s lots of gratuitous skin, and some very silly storylines (West Side Story? On a military spaceship? Really?), but it is more than made up for by the quality of the characters. They are relateable, mostly realistic (for a comic, anyway), and somehow, I find myself really caring about what happens to them.

The main relationship of the show is between ‘Kid’, a stereotypical French girl, and ‘Hammer’, who is not living up to her father’s war hero legacy. (Those are their callsigns – they have real names, too!) Kid is completely naive, a Pollyanna type. Hammer is rather cautious and reserved, and as her commanding officer, doesn’t want to take advantage of Kid – who is clueless about Hammer’s affection. The whole thing comes to a head when Hammer sacrifices herself to save the others. I was shocked when they did this! Webcomics never kill off the most popular character. But they did, and it worked amazingly well. (It looks like they might bring her back, though. I don’t know if that will lessen the impact of her death, but we’ll see.)

The other characters are interesting, too. The captain is tough, smart, and makes quick decisions that are usually right, and her second-in-command/maybe-love-interest is pretty cool too. The only character I really don’t like is ‘Quetz’, basically a stereotypical bitch who can’t seem to learn. We keep thinking she’s going to start acting nice, but she keeps acting like a jerk. After a while, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Angels2200 is also one of only two webcomics (that I know of) with a live-action short film based on it! (The author is a director/screenwriter, and made it himself on zero budget.)

It’s probably not an understatement to say that Alpha Shade is the most visually beautiful comic on the Internet. As far as I know, it may be the most beautiful comic in print as well. It’s drawn in a mild anime style, and each page is almost like a painting. The colors are perfect, the lines clean and varied, the characters wonderfully drawn. The only complaint about the art that I have, is that in the first chapter the characters look too young, but even that flaw was quickly fixed.

The story is fascinating as well. The characters are unique and detailed, the setting has a rich history, and the plot seems to be interesting and complicated, without being confusing.

And this leads me to the problem with this comic. The plot only seems to be interesting. In reality, we really haven’t seen enough of it to really tell! Alpha Shade moves very slowly. It’s partly a function of the art. The pages are so intricate, that they take a long time to produce, and each page contains much less story than a page of most other comics. This makes Alpha Shade rather frustrating to read – it’s been around five years since it started, and we still don’t really understand what’s going on!

It’s definitely worth looking at for the art alone, though. The discerning reader might be better off waiting until each book comes out – it would be less frustrating.

But stay away from the podcast. The authors may be good writers and artists – but they are rather rude and annoying to listen to. They tend to criticize without reason, and are generally whiny and intolerant. It’s just best to stick to the comic.

For lack of any other inspiration, I’m making this week webcomics week for my blog.

(I think there’s actually a official webcomics week, too, but who cares…)

I discovered webcomics in a rather interesting way, particularly in light of my ideas on linking. I used to play a funny little game called ADOM. ADOM had a usenet group (if you don’t know what that is, don’t ask). One of the regulars on the group was a woman named Frances Moffat, and she had a website, with a little webcomic called Random Scratchings. She also had links to several other, bigger webcomics. I was hooked immediately.

When I was younger, I used to love newspaper comics, but when I was about 6, we moved, and the paper in the new town didn’t have comics. As I got older, I also found the newspaper comics to be boring and repetitive, and I’ve never liked comic books. But I always missed the newspaper comics I read as a very young child. Now, I don’t know whether the comics back then (it hasn’t been very long!) were better, or if I’m just nostalgic, but webcomics captured that childhood feeling all over again. And this time, the comics were actually good!

The most wonderful thing about webcomics, is that there are so many of them, and that they are generally free. This means that you can go from comic to comic until you find the ones that you really like. And regardless of your tastes, there’s almost certainly a comic out there that fits it (whether it’s being updated or not, is another question, though!). Webcomics are a fascinating medium.

So this week, I’m going to go through a few comics that I like, and ramble about them for a while.

The first comic I’d like to look at is called Sluggy Freelance. Now, if you know anything about webcomics, you’ve probably heard of Sluggy. It’s one of the ‘big three’ webcomics (the others are PVP and Penny Arcade). PVP and Penny Arcade are just like regular comic strips – there’s a joke every day, the characters don’t change, and they are generally rather light and fluffy. They are also rather computer geek oriented strips – PA in particular is focused on video games. I don’t read either of them – if I want geek humor, I’ll read User Friendly.

But Sluggy is different. It started out as a humor strip – but it had a plot, of sorts, right from the beginning. The jokes are rarely of the stupid juvenile variety (except when we laugh at the characters who think that such a joke is funny), but are reasonably clever. As the strip continued, the storylines became more intricate. There are several parodies, three of Harry Potter, one of Alien (the alien, Alyee, becomes a main character), and two generic horror movie parodies. Some of the storylines even border on serious, even tragic, but even the more serious stories always keep a sense of humor. This keeps the strip from developing a ‘very special story’ feeling that humorous media frequently has when treating serious subjects.

The overall feeling of Sluggy is one, not of a ‘comic strip’ type story, but of a brilliant, insightful story that takes place in a rather humorous universe.

Sluggy is not perfect. Sometimes, the jokes aren’t funny. Sometimes, the strip make no sense. But there are mad scientists, a violent rabbit (in the Monty Python tradition), a rather homicidal Santa, a brainwashed assassin, demons, the aformentioned alien, and evil corporations! All at once! So it’s definitely worth the time to read, if only for the uniqueness of the strip.

Emergency Pants!