Webcomic tips
└ posted on Wednesday, 20 January 2010, by Novil
I NEED YOUR SUPPORT! Blog it on your blog… mention CK in a forum, anything!?
Scotty Arsenault posted this message to his readers on the website of his great webcomic Commander Kitty last week. And I can only repeat it: The easiest way to support webcartoonists is to post about their comic on your website or in forums you visit. Because all the work we put into our comics is only justified in the end when the audience is large enough.
So I want to set a good example and offer some new webcomic tips (a news topic which has proven to be very popular in the past):
Life Ain’t no Pony Farm is a journal-style comedy comic by the German artist Sarah Burrini, featuring herself and a bunch of talking animals as her roommates. While she was still searching for the right type of humor at the beginning, the comic strip has taken a very promising route lately.- Some of you have probably already heard of Daisy Owl and I’m not entirely convinced that the huge hype about it is justified. But it is certainly among the best new comedy webcomics. It features the girl Daisy, her little brother Cooper, their adoptive father Benjamin Owl (an owl) and Mr. Owl’s friend Steve Brown (a bear). Some strips are very weird/dadaistic, making them a case of hit-or-miss. But there are some real gems hidden in the archive, so you should check it out.
I have already talked about Duxter before, but that was a long time ago and I believe another mention is justified since it’s certainly among the most hilarious comic strips ever written by a teenager. Sadly, it has been on hiatus for over a year now, but at least the archive consisting of around 200 strips is back online. The titular character Duxter is a duck with a slightly severely skewed moral compass who lives together with two equally strange roommates.- Another archive resurrected from the dead is that of Alice!, a newspaper-style comic strip originally published from 1999 to 2006. While it’s heavily inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, it never really manages to reach its quality. Alice! follows the wacky adventures of the teenage girl Alice, who shares Calvin’s vivid imagination, and her friend Dot, who plays the role of the “straight girl” in the comic. Its massive archive is a decent read for long winter nights.
- But my favorite recently discovered “webcomic” are the very clever cartoons drawn by Bob-Rz for his DeviantArt gallery. A lot of the strips deal with the bitter aspects of love, seen from a male perspective. But there’s also a good load of cartoons that are just plain silly, often with rather suggestive gags. Unfortunately, updates have been few and far between for the last two years.
