all webcomics are terrible

[moxie]

j/k that just made a better title

Some webcomics are cool. Not even cool, but completely badass. The amazing thing about the internet is that it gives talented artists a creative outlet without having the endure that whole "getting published" business. (Hell, MS Paint Adventures couldn't work in a printed medium at all.) The downside of course is that there is no quality control, leading to terrible shit and mediocrity at every turn. But for all the Ctrl+Alt+Deletes, Dominic Deegans, Broken Mirrors, and way too many terrible furry webcomics to name, there are wonderful things like Beartato and Hark! a Vagrant. I follow a lot of webcomics and the greater community in general for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to; because I'm a huge gay nerd, I'm intrigued by the idea of doing my own when my art is good enough, and because most real comics are nothing but disappointment these days.

What do you read regularly? Do you have any likes/pet peeves concerning webcomics?

 

[moxie]

my list -

I'm gonna put these up even though I know most of you read them because there are a select few heathens have admitted to not doing so.
Nedroid
Gunshow
MS Paint Adventures
Achewood


Aside from those, some of my personal favorites -

The Meek
It's not that far along yet but it's some of the most amazing goddamn cartooning ever. It's also shaping up to be really awesome - the second chapter was crazy cool.

Axe Cop
Written by a 5 year old and drawn by his big bro, this is some of the most hilarious shit I've ever read, especially the "Ask Axe Cop" strips. They're funny in the sense that they're completely off-the-wall retarded, though, so they're not for everyone I guess. Like, if you're lame or a badguy or something.

Boxer Hockey
The humor is mostly of the goofy, absurd, and crazy face variety, meaning that it's like VGCats only not terrible and the artist isn't a bigger caricature than his characters. It starts off pretty mediocre but the artist's improvement is even more dramatic than Gabe's from Penny Arcade. Seriously, I can't gush over the art enough.

Gunnerkrigg Court
Read it because Jones may or may not be a robot. The characters are quirky and well-written but the main star is the setting itself, being a very unique fantasy world that borrows from a lot of really cool real-world mythologies.

 

[Ellie]

I like Cyanide and Happiness but according to everyone else that makes me a sheep.

 

[Spoo]

i dont care what you say this is awesome:

 

[Daxis]

read pretty much all of the popular ones. actually, power read them. Read all of questionable content in like 3 days. Then I drop them, never to check out their website ever again. :\

I don't really have much problems with things like quality as much as if it can damn well hold my attention, be funny(if that's what it's going for), and art works. For that reason, dominic deegan is a perfectly fine webcomic for me; even if the art is supposedly shit, it does improve, except a bit subtle; it becomes consistent, gets a lot more abstract and shit, and i just don't really have a problem with it. fuck it's better than what i can do so i'm not gonna complain. Fuck, the wotch had halfway similar art, yet look at its huge fan base.

i go for the serialized and story webcomics. Not the 1 page funnies that don't have any sort of story. least i can do barely held my attention, but at least it had a good joke every now and then despite the sexism and shit. Furries also don't hold my attention- my sense of logic goes "why the hell do all animals speak the same language" and the fact the story is unnecesarily furry when they might as well have been human sorta takes away the enjoyment.

 

[Daxis]

ps where the hell is the saturday .org comic?

 

[moog]

gunshow is the best.

 

[mawk]

even if the art is supposedly shit, it does improve, except a bit subtle; it becomes consistent, gets a lot more abstract and shit, and i just don't really have a problem with it. fuck it's better than what i can do so i'm not gonna complain.

except that in those "abstract" scenes, his grasp of anatomy and perspective are still incredibly poor (keep in mind, he's been drawing DD for over eight years) and his loose understanding of flow makes things really hard to follow when he isn't keeping with his obligatory eight panel setup.

for every strip like that, which at least aspires to do something stylish, there are literally hundreds of boring talking-head strips and lazy medium shots. this might be better than you can do right now, in the present, but keep at your art for eight years and I guarantee you'll see far greater improvement than what Terracciano has shown. the only real change in the artwork that I've seen is that the shapes become a little more confident and the quality of the scans improves.

Terracciano's humour is limited to bad puns and generic slapstick. when it isn't dull, it's tasteless. when it isn't tasteless, it's overdone. when it isn't overdone, he isn't trying to be funny at all and is just driving home his blatantly telegraphed aesop for the arc. he has no ear for subtlety; all his arcs read liike a saturday morning cartoon episode. his protagonists are flawless and morally upright, simply because he writes a world where everything works out for them in the end. no one questions themselves or does something morally ambiguous. they are Right because they are Good, and That is That.

it's the RPG Maker fangame of webcomics. it might not be the worst thing out there, but you can do much better.

whoops I've become an Internet Expert on dominic deegan overnight. you'd almost think I was roughly parroting things that had been said in some other place!

I'm not super adept at finding cool things on the internet, so the first post pretty much covers everything I know in the world of good webcomics, but I'd suggest that anyone who hasn't already read A Lesson is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible. the creators have since stopped writing it, but they left behind a handful of very cool things. the art is stylish and dynamic, and the writing is... honestly a little tough to describe. it's often melancholy, but manages this without becoming trite, and it's always quite entertaining in sort of an absurdist way. apparently the artist went on to draw the graphics for Braid?

for ones that are still alive, I'm quite fond of Hark! A Vagrant. the art is loose but charming, the writing is entertaining, and it uses people from History! what's not to like?

 

[Venetia]

ooh neat i havent heard of several of these.

it comes as no surprise that im into MSPA

I started getting into webcomics with xkcd. most are pretentiously bad but that also kind of makes them amusing.
i've read most of the dinosaur comics though idk if they even count!
sometimes a softer world has some funny ones but mostly i enjoy the photography
pictures for sad children actually has some very funny arcs if you absorb them over the whole and your humor can range into the very droll.

Nedroid
Gunshow
Achewood
H!AV

all amazing

i've been wanting so so bad to make a (semi-serious) webcomic of my own but god i have so little time

there are a number of others I'll remember at some point.

Oh the Adventures of Mr. McMittens has some cute ones esp the ones involving the newspaper journalist

 

[moxie]

C'mon Daxis, I thought you had better taste than that. Dominic Deegan? The Wotch? With all the amazing webcomics out there, there is literally no reason to read shit like that. (I can get down with Questionable Content because it has some rare moments of funny and the dude who does them is pretty cool, even if his comic isn't) Check out The Meek; it's a well-written, dark story set in a crazy unique fantasy world with absolutely fantastic art. It's everything Dominic Deegan wants to be so badly.

As for Dominic Deegan and Mookie's "improvement", he's been drawing that strip for almost a decade and his biggest improvement comes from getting a better scanner. I don't care what anyone says, he had to actively go out of his way to NOT improve for something like that to happen.

 

[Daxis]

hey like i said it captured and held my attention. Art is superfluous; improvement would be nice, and understandable if people are put off for that reason, but if it can hold my attention, it's better than nothing.
Honestly I really don't care about art in webcomics and manga or any artistic story medium at all as long as i have something i can read. Fuck, for most of something positive I gave a glance at the art and read all the text; i don't read webcomics and manga/comics for the art, i read them for the story. Art is only a bonus. Well except berserk. reread that to pause at every page.
That's the reason that I rarely read non-story webcomics. The only couple that could really hold my attention and were non story were xczd or whatever it was, cause it was intriguing reading the pop ups, saturday morning breakfast cereal because it was just that funny, and a softer world because... well the writing was awesome AND funny sometimes.
additionally i like reading complete things or at least something that TAKES UP MY TIME (ie hundreds to thousands of strips long). if it's not long, then the experience is extremely forgettable (with the all entertainment and media available).

 

[mawk]

Art is superfluous

I guess this is a personal thing, but amateur perspective and his aversion to dynamic angles really bug me.

i don't read webcomics and manga/comics for the art, i read them for the story

alright, let's talk about the story then. when has Terracciano last written something that couldn't be anticipated in its entirety after reading the first few strips? when was the last original arc, not plucked from a comic book or a high school drama?

for those who aren't following it, we've just come off a story arc where the titular character's brother starts a rock band (in a medieval fantasy setting.) it follows a pretty standard formula about "being true to your artistic vision," although as Terracciano writes it the moral seems to be that you should just ignore criticism in all its forms. I could predict virtually everything that would happen (makes artistic compromises in his first band, they ditch him because they're jerks, he starts a new band that's "truer" to his visions and doesn't give a fuck what anyone things) after reading the third strip.

the current story arc takes place in the WILD EDGE, a theoretically exciting land where logic doesn't quite apply, although in practice it's just populated by poorly-drawn fantasy animals and races ripped from D&D. some cartoonishly evil poachers are out to persecute some "mindless animals" (who fashion clothes and are capable of language and art, since Terracciano doesn't understand subtlety,) and die ironic karmic deaths one by one as the survivors display greater and ever more illogical degrees of asshole. the one morally-immaculate good guy saves the life of the one female, who it is speculated will do an about-face and become yet another one-dimensional love interest solely defined by her boyfriend.

bottom line, Terracciano's plotlines are heavily recycled and executed without any finesse. he writes for his own wish fulfillment; caricatures of jocks and women who dumped him in high school are made into villains more typical than Snidely Whiplash. the titular character (and half the other protagonists) are ego-projections of Terracciano himself, and are never in the wrong with anything they do.

if you just want to read something, anything at all, pick up a book or something. read Achewood, it's been around since 2001 and has better arcs and characters than Terracciano could dream of.

 

[moxie]

Not to mention having protagonists that are the epitome of mary sues. If you disagree with them or their course of action, you are a badguy. The writing is as hilariously black and white as Axe Cop, and that's a humor comic written by a 5 year old. The most offensive and hilarious example of this is when Dominic forgives the glorified rapist character, and the only one who disagrees with this course of action turns out to literally be a demon.

I don't want to get too far off on a tangent though, no matter how badly Dominic Deegan sucks. Let's talk good webcomics. What are some of your favorite arcs/strips, and why do you think they were affective?

tl;dr

i like gunshow

For the, the newest arc in Boxer Hockey is absolutely amazing. Most of you probably know about Tim Buckley's miscarriage of an attempt to inject drama into his gaming webcomic, but Boxer Hockey's done it seamlessly and effectively. The first couple of strips with Little Ritz are absolutely heartbreaking.

Spoiler: lots o comics ahead

this is just the very beginning of it, for reference

note: this guy is also starting a steampunky comic soon, which sounds amazing!

 

[moog]

tl;dr

i like gunshow

 

[Star]

OH wow! I'm gonna have to look up Gunshow now :D

I have been reading a webcomic that's not really comical but more story oriented. Not sure how I came about wanting to read it so much. I was looking for examples of how to do a good webcomic and I ended up wanting to read all of this one.

Flipside

 

[Daxis]

all the criticism of dominic deegan is pretty true; i'm not gonna deny it. However, I will say i had enjoyment reading the entirety of it, despite any flaws.

And flipside was pretty good, although I felt hints of awkwardness here and there. Like, the main male guy we're introduced to seemed to start off as the weak protagonist with some growth to go, but the story switches a bit and he's just there, never really growing into the character i'm expecting him to be. All the action in the story is other people, and he feels sorta false protagonistic without actually being a false protagonist (as far as I could tell). The author even made fun of it here or there too. There was some pretty intriguing dialogue here and there, I'm pretty sure, with some comedy at oddish places.
Sucks the guy waits till a set amount of donations are in to post a new comic (I'm quite sure I read that somewhere)

For a pretty decent, and better yet completed comic, check out inverloch. Good fantasy that was a bit thought out, okay enough ending, intrigue, and mostly lacking in action scenes. Pretty decent. The whole thing was also thought out ahead of time. the author's doing another webcomic, but the first couple pages didn't really work for me.

 

[moog]

gunshow is pretty much LOL HEH PARODY humor but its quirky and has fun art

 

[moxie]

For those of you unfamiliar with KC Green, this is probably his most well-known creation.

If this amuses you in any way, check out Gunshow (and the Anime Club mini he did) and prepare to have your mind blown.

 

[Daxis]

omg i almost forgot about the clarissa comics
those are some of the most morbid things you've ever seen
and honestly you'd think they be the worst topic to add humour to
but what's really awesome is that they are actually comedic

here's the quick notes on the clarissa comics:

Spoiler: mature stuff. funny tho

it's made by the guy who does deep fried, and notably weapon brown.

 

[Necrile]

is that where dickbutt came from?