Of late, Modern Tales has definitely been winning me back.

The site’s design remains… well, not what I would expect from something calling itself “professional webcomics.” Navigating to the latest updates requires extra clicks, trying to determine if you missed updates requires checking every strip one by one, and the design itself is a tad cluttered.

But, you know – I can live with that. Because MT has finally gotten it’s groove back, with a ton of new content that seems perfect for the site. Being able to load the page and see over a half-dozen updates a day? That means the site is alive, and that is totally awesome.

The latest additions in particular have been a great crop. Not long ago I reviewed the brilliance that is Alma Mater – now that the rest of the line up has hit the page, I see that they definitely know how to pick ’em.

One of the other big winners that has really grabbed me is Steverino! The title character is a hopeless little guy who fails at life, and relationships, and yet makes for an incredibly charming read. It’s odd, because normally I shy away from humor that revolves around failure, and people making fools of themselves – but Steverino is a modern Charlie Brown, still forlornly chasing after his Little Red-Haired girl, and I’m able to empathize with his heartache even while it keeps me laughing.

Now I’ll just cross my fingers for Girlamatic to breathe again,and then I’ll be a happy camper.

Looking For Group is a comic by Ryan Sohmer, the guy responsible for Least I Could Do. While they are rather vastly different comics on the surface, any reader of LICD will know that Sohmer is as much a geek as the next man, and it’s no surprise that he now has a comic more directly focused on it.

More of a surprise is exactly how well his humor works in the new setting. LFG, which is a pretty clear-cut parody of a certain MMO out there, follows a band of characters from the horde side of things, and their merry travels across the land.

Despite being loosely based on Warcraft, though, Sohmers is telling his own story. In WoW, regardless of the faction you join, your characters are presented as the good guys in their own fashion. The characters in Looking For Group, on the other hand, seem to have no qualms about being the evil guys on the block – though ones with character, and their own brand of snarky humor that Sohmers excels at.

So it’s a good comic. Big, brilliant pages of art, good characters, good humor, yadda yadda. Now it’s moving to twice a week, which floors me – given that will be in addition to the six pages a week of LICD, plus the work on the LICD animated series, and the running of Blind Ferret in general. That’s a ton of output from Sohmers – as well as Lar DeSouza, the artist behind the constant, full color output. Credit where credit is due – Sohmer gets a lot of notice as the public face of the comics, but DeSouza must be a working machine to produce all those strips.

LICD might not always appeal to me (what with my ‘morals’, and ‘sensibilities’), but I have to give props for the quality strips these guys keep on delivering.

I was pleased to discover a new comic, Alma Mater, over at Modern Tales today. I was surprised to discover it – namely because I hadn’t heard of it before, and MT has a tendency to pretty thoroughly hype new additions to the collective.

But there it was, updating 3 days a week, apparently available for mass consumption. With nothign to lose, I took a look – and was rather glad I did so.

It wasn’t the strip’s characters that won me over, though they are good, quality characters. It wasn’t the humor, though it definitely had moments where it shined. It wasn’t the art, though I really enjoyed it once I got used to it – and thought was especially cool on occasion.

No, what did it was that the creator, Whitney June Robinson, knows her material, and knows it well.

Given the name, one can pretty easily extrapolate that the comic is about going to school. But a comic could easily be set in a school without being about one, and in a lot of cases, setting is just that – background material, scenery, nothing more. Alma Mater, on the other hand, perfectly captures a lot of the school experience, and delivers that material brilliantly.

It may not have experiences that will tap into absolutely everyone’s memories – what with being set at an all-girls secondary school – but it manages to capture a lot of the fundamentals, and that can be all one needs to connect with an audience, and win them over.

There are surprisingly few good webcomics about superheroes. I suppose on the one hand it is understandable – superheroes have been done. You’ve got as many as you can handle in the print world of comics, and it is hard to find a story that hasn’t been already written a dozen times before.

A few good ones do still manage to crop up – and the latest one I’ve stumbled across is Special School.

The name… yeah, leaves a bit to be desired. But the comic itself is good.

The premise of the comic, as one might surmise from the name, is that is about a handful of young, super-powered kids who are taking a government-sanctioned class training them to be heroes. So it is both a superhero strip and a college drama, and maybe that’s what works so well.

See, the characters have character. They are normal, fun-loving college kids – who just happen to have powers. The powers aren’t irrelevant, but don’t define them. They tend to reflect their personalities, sure – but they are themselves first, superheroes second, rather than the other way around.

At four panels a strip, gags and punchlines about, but that doesn’t stop the strip from developing a story – and generally doing so with ease. We’ve got one conflict after another within the first dozen strips. The ability to blend drama and humor without letting either take control is the sign of a very talented creator.

And, of course, he pays homage to the evil overlord list. Which gets him a free win in my book.

So check it out – Special School, by Andy Mason. Enjoy.

Candi (by Starline X Hodge) (which is one of those officially awesome names) is one of my favorite comics out there.

It is yet another one of the ones that suprises me when I realize its been around for several years now, and how much plot has developed over time.

Lately the strip has been at absolutely the top of the game, and the county fair storyline (which it has been building up to for over a year) has left me laughing harder than I have in a long while. But despite all the laughs, I’ve got the sense some more intense moments are about to come to the fore.

It’s easy to overlook the more serious plot in Candi. We’re talking about a comic centered around a relatively care-free college student hanging out amidst your typical college crowd, with the occasional flying, intelligent ferret thrown in for good measure.

Now, college being college, that means that one can expect most conflicts to center around drama dealing with relationship, classes, etc.

The current storyline certainly has some, as all manner of badness is cropping up at the same time. Rebecca, who has started dating Jon, has already shown herself to be a bit jealous of Jon’s friends, and threatened when he isn’t devoting his time to her – so she’s off to the fair to make sure he doesn’t enjoy himself without her.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a slightly less down-to-earth plot, as the students’ faithful telepathic ferret Menjou is confronted by the deadly squirrel mafia, and has no one to turn to for aid.

Yeah, I never imagined I’d be writing a sentence like that either.

So we’ve got some pretty ordinary drama going on, and we’ve got some slightly surreal (and certainly silly) plot unfolding at the same time. So far, not too different than what one would expect from most webcomics.

Of course, we’ve also got the sinister reappearance of Andrew, the mildly creepy brother of Jessica. When he first appeared, recently released from a mental hospital, it was easy to give him the benefit of the doubt – he seemed earnest in seeking a second chance. Of course, it was also easy to see why Jessica wanted nothing to do with him… and that nothing good would come of that.

He may well be in collusion with the squirrels, he may well be running around in a ridiculous get-up – but that doesn’t make it any less scary that Jessica is being stalked by her psychotic and disturbed brother. This is a guy who tried to kill her when they were children. That’s not an entirely light subject, now is it?

And there’s the impressive part, the element that has me really excited about the current storyline in Candi. It’s not just that all these different conflicts are interwoven, from the ordinary to the absurd to the downright frightening – it’s that the strip is able to hold all of them at the same level without losing anything of itself.

Each of the different dramas fits equally well into the strip’s atmosphere without missing a beat. I don’t see that often, and unsurprisingly, it impresses me whenever I do. Candi certainly isn’t an exception.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about Erfworld.

It’s a brand new webcomic. It just began last week, with a hefty start in the form of six full pages, each one a pretty impressive production. It came out the gates running, and even had a cast page all ready to go. That’s a damn good start – though it isn’t what caught my attention.

The comic is written by Robert Balder, the brilliant (and occasionally evil) mind behind Partially Clips.

The comic is illustrated by Jamie Noguchi, the enlightened artist responsible for Angry Zen Master.

The comic is hosted at Rich Burlew’s website, Giant in the Playground, most well known as the home of the Order of the Stick.

That’s a pretty impressive bunch of names. That’s a lot of individuals whose work already impresses me, and whose creative opinions I’ll put a lot of faith in. So right off the bat, I’m inclined to expect good things from Erfworld – and right off the bat, it doesn’t disappoint.

The comic takes a graphic novel style format, and seems to be unfolding a lengthy and elaborate story – but despite this, is filled with humor and just plain silliness. As soon as one sees the curiously familiar titans forging the world, it becomes obvious this isn’t just another epic fantasy.

It seems too soon to say much more. But the writing is sharp, the art is gorgeous, and the story is already intriguing. With less than a week under it’s belt, it’s hard to do better than that.

If nothing else comes of ComicSpace, it has already done me one great service – it has reintroduced me to the works of Corey Marie.

Some years ago, when the internet was young(er), she was the artist of a strip called Life’s So Rad. It was a brilliant fun little comic – and then it went away. It was taken down for personal reasons, and I can’t find any fault in that, though I remained sad to see it go.

Fast forward several years. Corey Marie apparently has a new comic: Scene Language. It’s been around for almost half-a-year now, but as is often the case, I only discovered it through sheer chance.

I will momentarily pause to belabor a point I’ve touched on before – keeping track of comics or artists who have gone on hiatus is difficult. I don’t know how many strips are out there that I once read, paused when they stopped updating, and never checked back with when they returned to action.

That’s one of the reasons I make posts like this, both for comics new and old – a comic tends to be almost entirely carried along by word of mouth. Advertising can help, sure, but that only does so much. A group can notice new comics (or returning ones) much, much easier than a single person can. That, in my opinion, is one of the real values of the webcomic blogs and news sites.

Anyway, back to the comic itself.

I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about the scene. I enjoy music, but my knowledge of the subject is supremely limited. All I know about rockers I learned from… well, from webcomics much like this one. There are certainly comics with all manner of inside jokes that I just don’t get.

Fortunately, this isn’t one of them. My knowledge (or lack thereof) does little to impair my appreciation for the comic. Despite the setting, the subject isn’t really about bands and music – it’s about people. Which people isn’t entirely obvious at the start – we follow the misadventures of Phil for a bit, but he’s hardly the hero of the story. (Or, really, at all…)

The cast page lists four main characters. It seems clear the story is going to be about them, even if it isn’t entirely just yet. One of them has only just arrived, and the connections between the four are still immersed in a mess of other people and other lives.

It’s interesting, seeing where a story is going, and how far it has to go.

The comic is only in it’s infancy, despite already having 64 strips under the belt. But I can already tell that I like it. The art is solid and lively, a stronger version of the style I liked from Life’s So Rad. The characters are… well, human, to start, which means they are engaging, interesting, and flawed.

Which, really, is about as good as it gets.

It’s not Life’s So Rad, but it isn’t supposed to be. It’s good, and that’s all that matters. I know I’ll be watching it eagerly.

Not long ago I reviewed Minus, which remains a phenomenal strip.

Some of the discussion arising from that brought to light that Koala Wallop, the collection that Minus was a part of, did not recieve nearly as much attention as it rightfully should. Intrigued, I poked around the other strips on the site, and lo and behold, found myself quite taken with them.

The one that most caught my eye – in much the same vein as had Minus itself – was Dresden Codak.

Dresden Codak is, similarly, a hard comic to describe. Both philosophical and fantastical, each strip is generally a self-contained clever adventure following the principles of wit and whimsy. A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible is mentioned as an inspiration, and the influence is clear. A Lesson Is Learned may be in absentia these days, but it’s legacy lives on in Dresden Codak and many others who follow in it’s footsteps.

You know, I like this genre of comics. I like it a lot. There seems to be more and more quality comics emerging that deal in the absurdly profound, in surreal humor, in both intellectualism and childhood innocence, and their presence is a damn good thing.

Dresden Codak only cements my feelings on the subject. The material is both beautiful to behold, enjoyable to read, and intensely thought-provoking. I like my gag strips, sure, and I love my comics that tell a deep and emotionally powerful story… but the ones that leave me thinking really are gems found few and far between, and all the more important for their rarity.

The greatest strength of Aaron Diaz (the genius behind Dresden Codak) may be the ability to tell a powerful story in a single moment. It is in this that I see the strongest influence of A Lesson Is Learned, and Dresden Codak may be the only comic able to pull of the simple story just as well. A single strip can contain laughter, philosophy, and a heart-wrenching story.

And as with A Lesson Is Learned, the art plays as strong a part as the story. The scenes come to life with brilliant colors and gorgeous images. Each page is a full dose of webcomic goodness.

The only downside? The archive is small, and updates seem to be on a monthly basis. Each update is a world of awesome, but they are few and far between.

Still – there are worse things than to have the quality of a comic leave you desperate for more. Dresden Codak is another font of genius, and all the more proof that Koala Wallop has something special going for it.