It isn’t enough that I must be indebted to Mr. Logan for producing the exceptional work that is Sam and Fuzzy. Oh no, now I have to owe him for steering readers towards Sordid City Blues.

See, Sordid City Blues isn’t actually a new comic for me. Some months back I devoured the entire archives in one sitting, and discoveredI quite liked it.

…at which point I promptly missed adding it to my daily links, and when I remembered it a week later, had forgotten its name, address, and any location that might help me find it again.

(Have I mentioned I have a really bad memory?)

Fortunately, after having given up all hope of finding it again, bam! There it is.

Reading back through it again (it’s a relatively quick read) reminded me exactly how much I liked it – down to earth characters, some of them funny, some of them crazy, all of them dealing with the stupid little troubles everyone has to deal with. The characters are also nicely color-coded for convenience, which is just one of several little nice touches it has!

All in all, its a good comic, and as mentioned by the Sam-man, it is at the start of a new story arc and in a good position for people to check it out.

If I sat down and tried – and I mean, really tried, bent my mind to this one sole task – I could probably come up with a premise for a webcomic that was as convoluted as the premise behind Arthur, King of Time and Space.

But I don’t think I’d have a shot in hell in showing the creator’s skill at realizing that premise in a fashion that avoids overwhelming the reader with sheer complexity.

The concept at hand is that the comic follows the adventures of King Arthur and his merry band, and interprets their story over the course of 25 years.

(As an aside – plotting out a 25 year long comic is innately awesome. Anyway, back to the business at hand.)

The twist on the traditional story is that we flip-flop from one alternate reality to the next, following the story as we go – though each setting has its own variations.

So we have fairy tale Arthur, space Arthur, modern Arthur, cowboy Arthur, superhero Arthur, etc, etc.

(Another aside: I mispelled Arthur as Author every time in that above paragraph before realizing my mistake.)

So, A:KoTaS is obviously filled with a significant number of complex, interweaving storylines, each with its own subtlely different cast and crew. Somehow, Paul Gadzikowski pulls this off without hopelessly losing the reader.

This isn’t to say there is never confusion or turmoil – there is, and the occasional strip will be hard to follow, especially for those not already familiar with the legend of King Arthur. But such confusion is the exception, not the norm.

It helps that Mr. Gadzokowski seems to be a quite organized individual. He color-codes the characters. Arthur is always in yellow, Lancelot red, Guenevere blue. He has a cast and FAQ page that details a lot of these little factors that can help new readers keep things sorted out.

I only just read that FAQ myself. Some of those elements – such as the colors corresponding to each character – I had easily caught onto while reading the archives. Other elements I didn’t catch – the background of each strip is color-coded as well, reflecting whether it takes place in the present, past, or future of its specific continuity. So such understandings aren’t required to read the strip – but getting more insight into the way of things is certainly handy.

And that’s really one of the things I like about the strip. Sure, it has a good story, good characterization, and good jokes. The art… well, the art isn’t my cup of tea. But even if not exceptional in my eyes, it is functional, and that is enough for me.

But what makes the comic so unique is the way it weaves all these realities together. The way those connections are set-up, the order and organization behind it all – that is original and exciting.

It lets one read it plainly if they wish, without paying any heed to the levels of development. And it allows readers who want to go a step further to help understand all the connections, and interpret them as they wish.

I kinda like that.

A confession: I do not read Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North.

I have nothing against those comics, mind you. I am quite tickled by the concept of it all – I was simply never able to get into it.

Part of it, perhaps, is the intimidating archive, especially given the nature of the material. I know, I know – I wouldn’t need to get into the archive to read the strip. There isn’t continuity to worry about, or storylines to follow. Each strip is self-sustaining, and I could join the readership anytime, anywhere.

But the strips I read didn’t really work for me, and it didn’t feel like it would be a complete comic without acknowledging the archives.

Hence, I’ve never read Dinosaur Comics.

But there is a newcomer in town.

Birdsworth Comics, done by fellow webcomic’s blogger Gilead Pellaeon, has just begun.

This is good, see.

Right now there is one – count ’em, one – strip in the archives.

That’s a surmountable challenge.

The strip itself looks good. Gilead chose a very, very nice piece of artwork to use – bright, colorful, full of action. I can tell that I will enjoy looking at the image itself, regardless of the content – and while it is easy to assume that a comic like this (where the focus is on the writing) could care less about art, you can’t forget that whatever images you choose will be used, day-in and day-out, forevermore. (Or close enough, in any case.)

So, a good piece of artwork. The first one is also well written, which in no way hurts. I know from his blogging that Gilead is a high class writer, so I have confidence in his abilities to continue producing such quality.

The birds themselves establish an exceptional amount of personality in just the first strip. I don’t know if the strip will be engaging in such shenanigans as continuity… but it is still nice to have some actual flavor to the characters.

In any case, I’m excited about one of these fixed art strips, especially one full of such promise, starting while I can get in on the ground floor.

He’s already got a month long buffer, which is a sure sign of professionalism. My webcomic reading time is at a premium these days, and I have been trying to trim down, rather than expand, my list – but Birdsworth easily found itself a spot. Here’s looking forward to more to come!

First off, I just noticed the Sam and Max personal comic generator, and thought it was pretty rad. It’s a nice little thing for folks to play around with, and though my own skills aren’t enough to produce any works of art from it, it may still be worth giving a whirl.

The Sam and Max comic itself is somewhat interesting. I’ve never played the Sam and Max games or known anything of their characters, so this was my first introduction to them. As such, areas of the comics are rather unsurprisingly like being tossed into the middle of a bizarre dream.

That said, they are fun characters, and I like the wacky absurdity of it all. So maybe I’ll have to hunt those games down and give them a try.

Speaking of crazy stories, I’ve been liking Spells and Whistles of late. This was one of my favorite comics, and then it vanished, and then it came back in a different form, and then that stopped and the original started again. So yeah, chaos.

Perhaps as a result of all that (in addition to a change in writers), the plot has gone stark raving mad (not, albeit, necessarily in a bad way), and changed gears several times.

Fortunately, regardless of where the plot is going, the characters stay fresh and the jokes stay funny, and that’s really all I’m asking for.

Today’s Count Your Sheep is not a new joke. The curiousity of children is something I’ve seen referenced in any number of places, something you expect in any tale of youthful mischief.

And yet, the strip is still good. It’s a new take on something classic. It works, even for all that the punchline is to be expected.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons I am such a fan of CYS – it takes standard little pieces of philosophy and merriment, and brings them to life through its own unique view.

People have compared it well to Calvin and Hobbes, which was know for doing the same, and I can’t disagree with that comparison.

My best friend is a huge fan of Count Your Sheep. He is a gamer (once a goth), fond of dark humor, intense games, and the like – but this is one of his comics of choice.

He is a math teacher at an all girls school. He can hardly go to his workplace and post strips from comics like Something Positive or Penny Arcade.

But Count Your Sheep? Simply perfect. I think he appreciates the fact that he can share a webcomic he likes with that environment. That there is a webcomic that transcends communities in that way.

So keep it up, Adrian Ramos. The strip is as good as when it started, and I think we can all appreciate that.

As mentioned last week, I’ve been meaning to do a heavy review of My Nemesis.

First, though, I think I’ll read back through the archives to really get myself back up to speed.

…alrighty, all set. It’s a quick read – the full archives only take around 20 minutes. Being less then a year old, and with fast moving comics, makes it a surprisingly smooth read.

So. My first introduction to the comic was through a scathing review that loosely detailed how every aspect of the comic was a failure.

Given that, it might be surprising I decided I liked the comic so much.

Well then. Let’s take a look at the reasons why. It’s hardly a perfect comic, but there most assuredly are a lot of aspects that really work well.

In my humble opinion, at least.

ART:

Ok, I like the art. I really dig the art. Even from the start, when the strip was just a strict four panel formula, I liked the look of the characters. I liked how well the artist conveyed emotions despite exceedingly simple facial designs. And I liked that even early on, he made good use of color, even if it didn’t always seem to fit the scene’s mood.

More recently, the art has grown. There is a good reason for the change, and I’ll get into that later – but I don’t think there is any denying that right now, there is a helluva lot of visual elegance in his strip. The art is powerful and dynamic, and the artist seems inclined to keep pushing exactly how much he can accomplish with it.

DESIGN:

There is, in many ways, a sense of the surreal abounding in the strip.

Kal himself, the main character, is first presented as… a strange shadowy figure. Clad in a massive cloak of shadows, his appendages invisible save for his gloves, with not the slightest explanation – or even recognition – of his appearance.

So yeah, kinda weird.

The strip continues with that sort of thing. There are peculiarities to the world that are taken as granted. Sure, Kal’s a creepy shadow-man. Sure, he’s a genius and built his own city – and hey! No worries, his roommate tossed together a teleportation unit.

The same element of the surreal and the exaggerated continues throughout the strip – and, for me at least, it is a nice touch. I like the sense of fancy, and I like the way it shows up without any expectation of acknowledgement.

CHARACTERS:

One of the critiques I’ve seen is that the characters in My Nemesis are two dimensional and unrealistic.

To some extent, that is true, at least for the majority of the story. Kal is dark, Rob is dorky, Gabe plays video games and Truman smokes weed. Etc.

That said – they work well together. They have plenty of scenes that do, in fact, remind me of real people. They have the same casual banter that I see with my friends, and for all the differences despite that, it resonates.

I don’t expect every character to walk into the picture with a complicated backstory. Depth of substance does not define realism.

There is… change, as the stories go on. We see glimpses of character here and there – and, due to the speed of the story, it almost seems forced, over the top. I mean, we’ve never seen the characters do anything other than bitch at each other, why would they start showing emotion now?

But I like it. Most of the time friends hang out, they show their joking sides and not much more. That doesn’t mean more character isn’t there – one of the very points at hand is that the comic, up to that point, almost willfully ignored the depth of its characters.

The speed at which it did a turn around may have been a bit fast – but given the pacing, the story and character growth holds up surprisingly well.

And taken by themselves, those screenshots of Gabe and Truman showing emotion are pretty powerful little pieces.

Still, let’s put them aside. They are secondary characters – what about the main focus of the strip?

Kal himself… is a different story. His deliverance also seems too forceful, too cliche – and after it is done, it remains hard to get a grasp on him. He seems to almost be trying too hard to show how he has changed.

Kal started out as an asshole from the start. He bitched at his girlfriend, his friends. He was arrogant. He expected the world to hand itself over to him.

It is hard to accept a sudden character shift into a giving, generous human being.

But I don’t think that is what happened.

See, I know a lot of folks who sometimes are assholes. Interesting people often are.

I don’t think Kal has magically transformed into someone who will shower hope and joy over the world. I suspect he still has plenty of arrogance, and plenty of willingness to screw with his enemies – or even folks he merely has contempt for.

I think he is trying to show that he can look out for other people, but I suspect, at heart, that will by and large just extend to his friends. That the asshole within is still there – but tempered by a bit more understanding of relationships.

We’ll see. But I don’t think his own development has been as one-sided or cliche as it truly appears.

And of course, the final character of the hour – Rob.

Poor Rob.

I can sympathize with the guy. He’s the nice one, the responsible one. He’s the one who looks out for his friends, and the ones who gets the most shit from them.

And his best friend, Kal, goes off and vanishes. His other friends don’t seem to especially care about him, even when he’s confronted by heavy moral dilemmas.

I really was wondering how Rob would turn out, after being made beautiful by Hollywood.

I almost was expecting him to actually come out… bolstered.

As someone who could stand on his own, whether he ended up siding with the ‘evil’ of hollywood, or his old friends.

But no.

As ever, Rob is the victim, and things turned out about as badly as could be.

But for all that Hollywood seems to have twisted and corrupted him here, there is the feeling of truth in some of the words he says.

Sounds like character to me.

The story is called My Nemesis. It never really provides exactly who that nemesis is. Is it the readership that demands satisfaction? Is it Kal himself, his own worst enemy? Is it Rob, now Kal’s worst enemy?

Or has it been that Kal, the hero, has been Rob’s worst enemy all along?

I don’t think the question has been fully answered, yet. And it might be that any number of possibilities could all be true.

But pondering the question gets me thinking, and that is a good thing from any comic.

BACKGROUND:

A lot of the strip is based on the author. Ken Krekeler has said himself he set out with the intent to create a fast and easy strip to make buckets of money.

It didn’t work out so well.

He might have been able to do it, if he didn’t have such immediate expectations. He had the formula down pretty well – a bunch of witty characters, who sat around gaming, doing crazy hijinks, with various superhero jokes and humorous anachronisms.

And the jokes are good. Not every one is a grand slam, but he hits a punchline well, and writes the sort of dialogue that makes the reader consistently chuckle.

But, as mentioned… he thought the fame and fortune would come in instantly. And when it didn’t, he got tired of pandering to the perceived audience, and instead decided to do the comic for himself.

Guess what? I think it is a better comic by far. You can see it in the art – he let himself indulge his inspiration. You can see it in the story – for all of its cliches, it was still compelling. And it practically invited the cliches, and indulged in them – much as the art itself and setting were exaggerated and symbolic, so were the characters, so was the plot. Sure, webcomics aren’t necessarily meant to be taken this seriously – but in the world of the story, they are. And that’s ok.

I like a lot of the little touches in the comic. I like Kalbot’s attitude. I like that the Wiseman accepts Kal’s offering of art.

I like the almost unrecognized appearance of Marla.

It isn’t a perfect comic. More of the development could have been drawn out. Some of the behavior is too forceful. Some of the philosophy is overdone.

But it’s a fun read. It has a lot of potential. It has developed into a good story, and it is hard to say how far it will go from here – I know the author has an ending planned, but I don’t know when or where.

So it may not be perfect, but I like it. And as always – I like to focus on the good, rather than the bad.

Ken Krekeler may not have attained instant fame and fortune through his comic.

But he draws cartoons that make people laugh and make people think.

That’s a good thing. That’s worth being proud of.

Gunnerkrigg Court starts out as a deceptively simple comic.

The first chapter was a standalone story about a girl, her shadow, her second shadow, and a robot.

The second chapter was also, by and large, standalone – but it began introducing other characters.

By chapter three, relationships begin to form. Backstory starts to be revealed. The story grows a bit more. More direct mysteries come into play, as opposed to the simple curiousities of where this school is, and what is our intrepid heroine doing there?

We are currently in the midst of chapter seven. Things have developed, as they have a mind to do. We have seen a bit more into the depths of the characters. We still don’t know all that is going on behind the scenes, of course. But we now have a sense that there is stuff going on.

The chapter began with an ominious scene. We have a lot of the characters we know quite well by now, all brought together – Antimony, the protaganist. Katerina, her best friend. Reynardine, a demon now bound in the form of her doll, and bound to her will. Mr. Eglamore, a dragon slayer – and one of her teachers. That strange bird that keeps showing up.

And of course, our friend Robot, the charming little automaton from the first chapter, now looking somewhat the worse for wear.

The chapter pauses for a moment, jumps back a few hours in time, and takes a short break to return to a bit of mundanity, and give out some more background on the nature of things.

However… it appears we are about to return to that opening scene on the bridge. Stuff is liable to, well… happen. Now is a very good time to be paying close attention to the things happening over at Gunnerkrigg Court.

Now, the words I have written thus far may make it sound as though the comic is nothing but serious, heavy story. Nothing could be farther from the truth – every aspect of the strip has a sense of wonder and amazement, and as mentioned, many parts of it can easily be read entirely on their own. There is a clever humor to the characters, a charming sense of youth, and a wondrous design to the world they inhabit.

But right now, it looks as though the storm clouds are brewing, and we may have some mysteries revealed.

Not all of them, I am sure. That is likely a long way off, and there are more surprises and unknowns about Gunnerkrigg Court than I can imagine answers to.

But still. Stuff is happening. The comic is, at all times, highly engaging to me, due solely to the beauty of the strip and the story. But right here, right now, I am on the edge of my seat, waiting for the next installment.

Gunnerkrigg Court is one of the comics I would classify as a masterpiece – and right now, I suspect, it is right about to hit a turning point. I don’t think I want to miss that, and I highly recommend others take a look towards it as well.

See that, over there on the right?

Now that is a cool weapon.

Furthermore, it is a mad scientist’s weapon. As the author puts it – “a gun which pretty much requires the wielder to say ‘Bwa ha ha ha ha ha.'”

It should be noted, however, that Benjamin is not doing just that.

A Miracle of Science is one of my favorite webcomics. As with certain other popular strips, mad science is fun.

We have the main hero, who has been struggling as a recovering user of mad science – and here we find him putting together a ball lightning gun from a variety of spare parts.

Is he returning to his weakness? Is he transcending it and putting that skill to greater use?

Dude, like I care? Ball Lightning Gun, man! Is that not awesome? I say it’s awesome.

And yeah, I’m definitely in it for the story.

But still. Ball lightning gun. Wicked.

Given how many webcomics I read (a lot), and the amount of time available in the day (not enough), it is rare I stumble across a new comic that immediately pulls me in and gets added to my list of daily reads.

So I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Belphegor. The latest strip thus far (as shown on the right) immediately convinced me the art was to my tastes, with lively (er, so to speak), interesting characters.

I took a walk through the archives and was not disappointed. Despite the prevalance of dick and fart jokes, political humor and obscure references – all things that often aren’t my cup of tea – it works. Perfectly. The concept is great, the characters are great, the jokes are great.

It’s a clever little comic that has a very unique identity, and fulfills its promise well. The cast of characters is enough to have some diversity of behavior without being overloaded. The overarching story is present, but not especially intrusive on the everyday jokes.

All in all, it’s a combination of unexpected elements that comes together to rate very high on my list. For those who haven’t checked it out before, I recommend it.

No Need for Bushido is a comic that succeeds in many ways.

Each strip is extensive, with clean, colored art that is pleasing to the eye. The characters are a combination of cliche and unexpected, with excellent interplay between them and plenty of humorous quirks. There are tons of fleshed out and entertaining side characters. There is an overarching storyline, as well as plenty of minor plots. All the good things a comic needs to succeed.

But what impresses me, what really stands out to me when I visit the site, isn’t the comic itself – it is the amount of content available.

The update schedule for NNFB is not as extensive as many other comics. It updates the main comic once, twice a week.

However, I have rarely felt the lack of comics. Perhaps it is due to the Alternate Script pages – former strips with the text replaced with surreally absurd dialogue. The first ones were a bit weak, but some of the more recent ones have been absolute winners.

The vote incentives provided for the top webcomics list aren’t just casual sketches, as with many other comics. Instead, they are generally elaborate drawings. Good deal.

Glancing around the front page, what else is there? Tutorials on the comic’s cell shading, exclusive content available for purchase, links to past bonus art projects (flash animations, past April’s Fools jokes). They don’t even have a cast page proper – instead, they link straight to the webcomic’s wiki. And the latest feature is the inclusion of a blog written by one of the villains of the series.

I like having that much material at hand when I visit the site. I like having filler at hand that I can actually enjoy, rather than filler that is simply an effort to provide content, rather than provide humor or any sort of, you know, actual enjoyment. I like having a site that throws material at the reader, rather than make them hunt down for the merest scrap of information. When I can’t even find an archive page, I generally know I’ve got a struggle in store for me. When, on the other hand, the archive is the least of the material offered, it makes for a good experience.

Part of being professional about a comic isn’t just about the comic itself. There are obviously plenty of those elements involved – good art, writing, consistency, and so forth. But it also helps to have a good site. That helps make the reader feel like a part of something – and establishing that reader community can be a very good thing.

So here’s a shout-out to No Need for Bushido, for providing a good comic when it updates – and a whole hell of a lot of other good stuff the rest of the time.