SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS

by Robert Lopresti

I grew up on comic strips. I suppose most of us did; it was a form of narrative you can get into at a very young age, and stick with.

My problem nowadays is that half the cartoons in my local newspapers are zombies. Either they are flat-out reruns (Peanuts, For Better Or For Worse) or they are no longer written or drawn by their original creators (Shoe, BC, Blondie, too many to list).

No wonder so many of the fresh talents are telling their stories on the web. And using the new technology, they are finding strange new ways to tell their narratives. I am going to tell you about a few of my favorites, moving from perhaps the most traditional to the most unusual.

Click on the images to see them full size.

Unshelved

….Gene Ambaum is a librarian; Bill Barnes is a cartoonist. Together they create Unshelved, a daily strip about life in the Mallville Public Library. The hero is Dewey, a young adult librarian and total slacker with a wonderful attitude problem. He does not suffer fools gladly, and we are lucky that he has so many to choose from. By the way, Gene and Bill have wonderful merchandise for the book junkie on your shopping list, like LIBRARY raid jackets, and t-shirts that say FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS.

PvP

Life in the office of a videogame magazine; better than it sounds. The strip, I mean, not the life. I don’t understand how Scott Kurtz does his pictures (there’s both drawing and computers involved) but I do know that his characters have surprisingly rich personalities. Protagonist Brent Sienna is a jerk, but a jerk who sometimes turns out to be a better person than even he expects.

Irregular Webcomic

David Morgan-Mar is an Australian engineer, and some sort of mad genius. His daily comic is made almost entirely with photos of Legos, and he has about a dozen separate story lines going, including Pirates, Space, Harry Potter, Mythbusters, Ancient Rome, etc. One of my favorite characters is the Nigerian Finance Minister, who can’t understand why no one ever answers his emails. And in the Espionage storyline he is remaking the entire James Bond movie series. (Sadly the Ursula Andress bikini scene in Doctor No is not as interesting when done with Legos.)

I actually wrote this blog entry months ago but I held it up because on New Year’s Eve Morgan-Mar ended the universe (well, his universe) and since then his characters have been standing around the Featureless Plain of Death, waiting to be processed into the afterlife by Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs. (And the fact that Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is a regular character tells you a lot about the strip.) But now the comic is at a less confusing point in it’s life, so here we go.

Darths and Droids

Another Morgan-Mar (and friends) project that defies rational explanation. Imagine a world in which Dungeons and Dragons-type role playing games exist, but the Star Wars movies do not. Now imagine a group of role players sit down to a new game that requires them to pretend to be something called Jedi Knights. Still shots from the movies tell the story of the players’ quest, while pointing out holes in the original plot (George Lucas’s stupidest ideas are blamed on Sally, the kid sister of one of the players). Each of the players has a personality quite separate from the Star Wars character he is portraying. For example, Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn is played by a hothead who can’t keep track of his own schemes, much less the plot of the adventure. And the annotations at the end of each strip explain what point is being made about role-playing games in general. Incredibly complicated stuff going on here, but funny….

Ask Doctor Eldritch

Doc Eldritch writes an advice column for vampires, werewolves, and the like. He shares his home with a troll named Trevor, a professional dogwalker named Kari who wants to be his apprentice, and whichever monster from another dimension happens by. Evan Nichols’ art seems to be a weird combination of action figures and Photoshop, or its equivalent. My favorite character is a gnome who is, for some reason, on the run from “those bastards at the Library of Congress.” And don’t forget Nahina, the sweet little fairy. Don’t you dare forget her.

Wondermark

David Malki’s comic strip consists of Victorian magazine art paired with post-modern comments. Sometimes hilarious. Sometimes … well, strange. “The revolution will not be telegraphed!”

Partially Clips

Take a boring, anonymous piece of clip art. Repeat it twice. Add captions. Welcome to Robert T. Balder’s world.

Dinosaur Comics

Ryan North has reduced the comic strip to its final absurdity. Every episode of this comic features the exact same art. All that changes from day to day is the dialog. T-Rex is an enthusiastic, but not too bright carnivore who engages in philosophical debate with two other giant lizards and the narrator, who may be God.

Read a few of these strips and you’ll never look at Prince Valiant the same way again.