The Living Comic

Been frantically busy with last-minute concert preparations, but I did want to share this with you:

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I know I just wrote about Tailsteak last week.

I know.

I don’t want this site to become a Tailsteak love-fest. But god dammit, if he’s going to produce the most exceedingly awesome material in my entire webcrawl for a second week in a row, then I’m going to point it out to all of you again:

(Click thumbnail for full strip)

What we’ve got here is a bunch of webcomic characters finishing the classic “I like my women like I like my coffee…” phrase. And aside from the fact that there is some damn fine artistic mimicry here, this strip is gleefully delicious and funny.

Why?

Because Tailsteak isn’t forcing the humor into the situation. He took a bunch of comics, exactly as they all presented themselves, and found the humor inherent in them. I talked about this exact same thing once before, when discussing the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, and the principle continues through here.

We’re not being assaulted with a THE CARTOONIST IS FUNNY gun. As far as the humor is concerned, the strip could easily have been drawn by the various artists whose work is being parodied. It would be just as funny that way. But of course it’s not, and the knowledge that this is a solo endeavor just adds extra spice to the humor.

I may be overanalyzing this, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is, for my money, as clever as anything Kristopher Straub has produced in the same vein. Go and enjoy, and for god’s sake: if you don’t have Tailsteak’s site bookmarked yet, do that already!

Achewood.

God damn.

I don’t even know where to start with this.

For the longest time — and really, it was a significantly long period — I knew about Achewood, and maintained for it a casual dislike. I first found it when Lore Sjöberg mentioned it in his blog, back in January of 2003, and attempted to read through the archives. And frankly, I couldn’t stand it. This was, I’m fairly sure, after I had been introduced to Dinosaur Comics, and I enjoyed Achewood even less than that: while Dino Comics just seemed to be after a different sense of humor than my own, Achewood seemed to be actively, agressively unfunny. It would have been antihumor, except it wasn’t even. It simply lacked humor and punch, and I had no interest whatsoever in reading it.

Achewood fell, however, much like Dinosaur Comics, into the list of “webcomics that so many intelligent and discerning people love that I must be missing something.” Especially when Websnark started, over a year ago now, I felt very out in the cold, but the failure of my repeated attempts to get into Dino Comics kept me away from attempting Achewood again.

What changed matters, as I said last week, was that on the comic book forum I frequent over at Something Awful, an enormous Achewood Appreciation Thread sprung up. Dozens of people were chiming in about how amazing and awesome and hilarious the comic was, and posting their favorite strips. And you know, some of those strips worked for me a bit. My resistance finally wore down about when the thread hit its fifth page, and I rebooted the Achewood archives.

And you know what? The early strips still kind of sucked. The first two or three months were still largely unfunny, with only a few bright spots. The tremendous weight of peer pressure kept me reading, however, and this time I perservered through to the Party storyline. At that point, I started getting slightly more interested in the strip, as all the disparate characters were being brought together and contrasted interestingly. Shortly after completing that story, however, I put the archives aside for a while.

At least, I meant to. What actually happened is that Achewood set up camp in my brain and refused to leave. Specifically, one strip absolutely refused to get out of my head:

(Click thumbnail for full strip)

For days afterwards I kept hearing that, running over and over in my head. I would be walking to class and be muttering “Until you are nudest you are ever being. Until you are so nude” in a heavy Russian accent to myself. Fortunately, nobody was within earshot, so I didn’t get any weird looks, but I sure felt odd myself. And I knew I would have to read more.

Next: the storyline in which Ray makes a deal with the devil and gets amazing skill on the piano. And he records the hit single “Ass In Your Pants”:

(Click thumbnail for full strip)

For the next few days, when one of my friends would do something physically flamboyant or remarkable, I would break out with “everybody dance like there’s ASS in your pants!”

The reaction, of course, was a collective chorus of “WTF?” and I was flabbergasted that they did not understand the awesomeness that was that phrase.

It was more or less at this point that I began to realize that Achewood really was something special. Not coincidentally, it was also at about this point that I began to find it very, very funny. Jumping off from Ray’s success as a pianist come two simultaneous storylines, about Ray and Roast Beef driving east into America, and about a multitude of Subway franchises which several of the characters open up.

The former storyline really fleshes out the relationship between the two cats, which is an absolutely wonderful thing and really, I think, the best thing Achewood has going for it. It is also, however, a large enough topic that it really deserves its own essay, so I’ll leave it alone for now. The other storyline, though, plays with all the other characters, and is both revealing and utterly hilarious. The strip, I think, that finally and utterly sold me on the comic’s humor, was this one, where the 5-year-old Phillipe encounters Vlad’s hard-sell tactics:

(Click thumbnail for full strip)

There is just so much wonderful about that strip that I don’t know where to start. First of all, there’s Vlad, who I think I have an unhealthy affection for. The charmingly blunt, completely fabricated but wholly earnest way in which he presents the “Wall of Tough Guys” in vaguely broken English is funny in and of itself. Phillipe’s little reactions to his patently fake stories, and his inability to see through them, is funny in a heartbreaking way (which, really, describes Phillipe’s entire function within the comic). The parenthetical cut to Lie Bot on the other end of the phone conversation is hysterical. And finally, Phillipe flexing his arms at the end, combined with the expression on his face, is just perfectly executed. From beginning to end, the strip never stops delivering really high-quality comedy.

Of course, it’s comedy which appeals only to a certain, somewhat offbeat sensibility. To enjoy this strip, you have to find the idea of a squat, mustachioed, smooth-talking Russian robot inherently amusing. To enjoy Achewood in general, you need to be able to laugh at depicitions of childhood trauma that will simultaneously make you cringe in horror. To even begin tapping the bottomless well of humor that is Roast Beef, you have to be able to hear in your head what someone speaking entirely in small, lowercase letters without punctuation would sound like, because half of the stuff he says wouldn’t be funny without his idiosyncratic method of delivery.

Achewood may not be for everyone, and I would say that most of the first two months probably shouldn’t be for anyone. But, though it’s been a very long journey to get to this point, I can say wholeheartedly that I love Achewood. It’s not at the top of my Daily List, but I now harbor an affection for it deeper than almost anything else I read online. Give it a try: I think it’ll grow on you, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll never be able to get it back off.

I wasn’t going to write today, really I wasn’t. I still have writing for class left to do.

But god damn, Tailsteak deserves some mad props for this:

(Click thumbnail for full strip)

You can do wonders without words. You can tell us all about a character by his body language, or have your readers jumping up and down simply by the right pair of eyes seen poking around a corner.

Tailsteak says, screw nonverbal cues, he’s going to make us laugh and cheer at an event we don’t even see. The last three panels of Saturday’s “Band” strip are nothing but Paul and the science student watching Tyler, who is off the bottom of the frame. I mean, this student gets utterly DESTROYED. “Burned” doesn’t even come close to how absolutely kickass the victory is here.

And not only do we not see any of the actual action? The actual action is an alien solving an algebra problem.

Take a close look at this strip. This, I guarantee you, is the most excitement and joy you will ever, ever associate with variables.

I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. I don’t give out Biscuits™ or anything like that, but if I did, Tailsteak would clean me out, if for no other reason than that he successfully made this phrase into the climax of a comic strip:

I am in fucking awe.

This isn’t a NaDruWriNi post. I kind of wish it were, but I don’t drink. I can’t stand the taste of alcohol, or the smell — I lift a glass of wine to sip and the scent of it knocks my head back violently, like whiffing ammonia. And on top of that, it only takes maybe half a glass, or one or two shots of whatever liquor, to get me tipsy. I seriously have the lowest tolerance for the stuff of anybody I know.

This is not to say that I don’t creatively abuse my body in other ways, of course. For instance, it’s now 2:45 in the morning and I have a metric fuckton of work to do tomorrow, and yet I’m here. Writing, if I may use a very liberal sense of the word.

I haven’t, of course, written in a very long time now, which is part of the problem. At the end of June, I wrote a 60-page booklet in Word — single-spaced — in literally a week. Somewhere on the order of 25,000 words, in about six days. And it seriously burned me out, to a far greater degree than I initially realized. A few days afterwards, I realized I could hardly stand to sit at the computer any more — it was giving me a headache.

I dropped off the web for about a week before coming back, and even then I couldn’t really pick myself up enough to write. I was so utterly sick of forcing the words to flow. That revulsion faded over time, but then I realized that I just didn’t have anything to say about webcomics. I would flip through my lists, and nothing would inspire me to comment.

What got me back and active on the internet, in the end, was Something Awful. Yeah, that place. I spent about a week or two idly browsing through their forums, and finally decided to shell out for an account. And then, I discovered the comics forum, and found my way back into the world of print.

Which is where I’ve been for the past two months. I’ve caught up on Lucifer. I’ve discovered Y: The Last Man and Bone, I’ve found Alan Moore’s run on Supreme and Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man. I’ve found scans online, and then I’ve found myself buying the books. I’ve spent close to $200 on trade paperbacks, from the paycheck for that booklet I wrote over the summer. I’ve spent hours in the basement of local bookstores, browsing the used comic shelves and finding gems like Girl Genius and Kingdom Come.

It has been amazing. It’s reminded me why I love comics, why they have such power as a medium. The arrival of my copy of the one-volume Bone was one of the most purely joyous moments of the past year. I’ve been reaquainting myself with the cream of the crop, and it’s been astounding.

And periodically, I’ve glanced back at webcomics. And tried to remember what I thought was so amazing about them. For a while, I forgot. While “Casey and Andy” continued to make me giggle, while “Order of the Stick” and “The Last Days of FOXHOUND” continued to employ outstanding artistic design and storytelling, I would look at them, and then look at a page by Carey or Vaughn or Ellis, and think, “huh.”

It’s been a slow climb back, but I’ve been figuring it out again. My perspective, I suspect, has been dramatically altered by the past few months, but I’ve started picking out the unique qualities webcomics have to offer again. “Schlock Mercenary” had another run of its “Schlocktoberfest,” and got me actually excited to see each new update. “Funny Farm” completely redeemed Clifford Mayers as a villain, and got me actively disliking and enjoying him for the first time in a while.

And then, there was “Achewood,” which is a whole entry in itself. I’ve had a long and lukewarm history with that strip, having had it recommended to me by lots and lots of people whose opinions on comics I respect, but I had never warmed to it. Recently, though, there was an enormous thread on the Something Awful comics forum, heralding Achewood as the best thing ever to happen to webcomics, and so I gave it another shot.

And, despite all my expectations, it got to me. It got into my head. It got under my skin. I found myself, for no apparent reason, hearing Vlad’s voice at random intervals. I caught myself talking like Roast Beef. I actually, at one point, said out loud to a friend, “Man, why you got to do a thing?”

I got Cartilage Head.

And actually, for the first time in months, I found myself really wanting to see each new strip. I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly, but I needed more Achewood. And now I’m hooked. And it’s pulling me back into the world of webcomics.

I’m back, in some sense of the word. I can’t promise I’ll be writing on any kind of consistent schedule, especially until I get my classwork under control, but I’m reading again. I’m reading, and I’m starting to enjoy again, and that means that, sooner or later, I’ll have something to say about what I’m reading.

Hi.

…and that is,

KICKASS!

So, I went with a few friends to see Gabe and Tycho “lecture” at MIT last night — you may have seen their comic about this. They didn’t actually lecture, of course, but spent the evening taking questions from the audience. Because I am retarded, I didn’t think to bring either my microcassette recorder or even a pen and paper, so I had no way to write down any quotes.

I did, however, have my camera:

Partway through the evening, I suddenly discovered that one of my other friends had come to the talk, and was sitting in the front row. The way I discovered this was that Heather, who draws the webcomic The Naked Elf, had drawn some fanart for the Penny Arcade guys… which they immediately displayed on the gigantic overhead projector:

(I post these in part for Heather’s benefit, since she was trying to hide underneath her jacket for most of the next hour.)

Immediately after the fanart, however, came the real highlight of the evening: Gabe drawing sketches on requests from the audience.

The coolest part was that, after Gabe finished each sketch, Tycho would take it and give it to a random member of the audience. This is, of course, how I obtained the sketch of Mr. Period and the Punctuation Pals at the top of this post, although Gabe actually did a special request for Heather, who thus landed a [EDIT: Not that I suspect anyone important will see this site, but I don’t want to get them in trouble, so I won’t mention what they drew. Save to say that they got in a bit of legal trouble the last time they drew it.]

Following the sketch session, they took a few more questions, but then had to run immediately for a plane to Maryland or some such. So all in all, it was an extremely awesome evening, the only downside being that, given the speed of Cambridge traffic, attending the MIT event meant that I missed Terry Pratchett reading from and signing his new book at Harvard. But ah well. I’ve got a signed sketch. I’m doing a happy dance.

Not really alive, either. But not dead, promise. Long story short is, I have a bit of an obsessive personality, and I got so wrapped up in making “good” posts for this website that I had difficulty enjoying writing about and even reading webcomics. So, basically, I’m taking a break and trying to mentally depressurize myself until it doesn’t feel like a chore. I feel really bad about it, and I wish I could just power through, but I don’t think that’s a viable possibility.

In any case, in the hopefully near future I’ll get off my ass about the contest solutions (thanks to much poking from Tiamat), so at least there will be something new up here. And I’ll get back to writing stuff as soon as I can — I want to do a little bit that’s not about webcomics, first, to get the juice flowing, but we’ll get there sooner or later.

Oh, and Thok: I’m literally in the middle of reading Captain SNES, and your write-up will be one of the first new bits I do. Sorry it’s taken so damn long.

The Living Comic is not dead, merely tired following a prolonged squawk. Normal service will resume shortly, as soon as the author gets himself sorted out.

(There’s a longer story than that, of course, but it’s fairly uninteresting and largely personal. Let it suffice to say that this site is still extremely important to me, but it’s been getting harder and harder to fulfill my goals for it, and I need to sit back down and work out a way I can continue writing this stuff that won’t end up with me hating either webcomics or myself. More details on the plan for the future as they are resolved.)

Hi there!

I am a total moron and completely forgot that today was Tuesday and thus I was supposed to update this here website of mine. There is absolutely no possible better excuse for this than pure mental retardation.

Check back tomorrow evening if you want, or just get a double dose on Thursday. And feel free to slap me across the face in effigy, if it makes you happy.

This one, I freely admit, is a doozy. Two hints, however:

1. All clips are from the month of July.

2. Links to all comics used are within a mouse-click of here.

Email me your answer within 48 72 hours. Good luck!