Webcomic thread

[Fabricated]

Broodhollow is back again, but is updating sporadically and infrequently since Straub has a baby now and did a kickstarter.

Also Unsounded is really good and on Patreon now.

[Khaldun]

PA's regular stuff is now 100% unfunny after occasional signs of funny were thoroughly exterminated. I think a few of the occasional 'make no sense' interludes actually show some narrative and artistic promise but I think it's pretty characteristic that neither of them seem able to carry through on the ideas in those one-off things and sustain the effort. It's more like a sketchbook of half-baked ideas and premises and then it's back to the same jokes about video games and penises, recycling shit just like the real comics pages in the newspapers do.

[Fabricated]

They entered "The Dad Zone" like 2-3 years ago and are eternally lost.

Also Tycho is a really fucking horrible writer and needs to be tasked to something else, while a better funnier writer is hired. He has thus-far ruined every single side-project they've ever done with nonsense prose or really, really bad pacing. He seems to like going for "show not tell" while forgetting the show part.

Like this abortion they have going on now is based on an idea that Gabe had where, "What if the monsters that kids claimed to see in their closets and such were real and only parents could see them?". Like actual monsters and not "monster people" like Monsters INC. Somehow that turned into this fucking nonsense where no one talks like actual people if they talk at all and nothing makes sense.

[Merusk]

Tycho's always been up his own ass about what a good writer he thinks he is, despite having the actual command of a late teen writing emo poetry. It's a good portion of why I never liked the comic even at it's peak.

Having a large fan base feeding that ego and telling him it's all wonderful doesn't help.

[Ironwood]

This PA stuff is garbage. Its not even nice looking garbage.

[Fabricated]

what in the holy fuck is this current thing hes doing even mean seriously

Like, he does a one page thing that obviously was mostly inspired/frame/predrawn by Gabe, and turns it into this fucking nonsense

[Ironwood]

Holy fuck, he just had to actually post in the forums to explain what the fuck it was all about.

That's... I mean, that's epic fail right there.

[Khaldun]

I hadn't read Unsounded before. Guess what just happened to the last four hours. Great stuff.

[Fabricated]

I hadn't read Unsounded before. Guess what just happened to the last four hours. Great stuff.

It's really super good. The art and 4th-wall breaking on the borders is amazing. And she puts out 3 pages a week with far more regularity than just about all webcomic authors that make like 5x more on Patreon.

Incidentally, I hope the dude that does Dresden Codak gets hit by a bus. What a worthless shit. Why do people give him money again? Like 1 shitty page almost every other month? And he's a stupid piece of shit on top of it.

[Merusk]

Because he's "deep" in the way pseudo-intellectuals on the web adore. Lots of degrees without applying them, excessive pedantry and the cocksure naive idealism of a late teen.

[HaemishM]

I've only read a few complete "issues" of Dr. McNinja, but holy fuck is it funny.

[Fabricated]

Just a reminder that in the year of our lord 2015, Tim Buckley of CtrlAltDel, the guy who made loss.jpg, puts out more consistent and interesting content now than Penny Arcade and most of the webcomic darlings. Up is down and black is white.

But maybe I have the brain damage since I'm the only person who doesn't find Lacksadaisy Cats very good past the art- which is indeed very very good.

[Fordel]

You have brain damage, Lacksadaisy is delightful.

[Teleku]

I never heard of it till now.  I took one look at the current page that's up, and gagged.  Dear god, Furry's and hipster Victorian fetish combined.  Blaarrrggg.

Maybe I'll give it a go some other time if people insist its actually decent.  But I had a visceral negative reaction to that immediately.


Dr. McNinja, on the other hand, has had me actually laughing out loud like no web comic has in a long time.

[Fordel]

It's set in prohibition St. Louis, the cats are booze runners!

[Fabricated]

It's literally just the author being like, "I want to talk about rumrunners during prohibition but drawing regular people is kinda boring. I'll make them all cats." rather than some furry thing, which the author gets really, really frustrated about.

I just don't find it very interesting despite the exceptionally good art.

Edit: Another thing I just thought of that makes the PA stuff even worse is that if you look at Unsounded- 99% of the stuff from it is pulled from nearly a decade of the artist's open RP game she played with friends. Like- open RP with no game system, just a GM who makes decisions and counts on players actually roleplaying. So basically it has this ridiculously huge body of apocrypha to pull from but she -never- puts anything in the comic that itself is not explained by the comic at some point. You do not need to go to a wiki or have some autistic weirdo who somehow intuited everything to explain it to you.

I read Gabe's explanation of the comic just now and it sorta makes sense. Like it's still terrible, but I have no idea how you were supposed to figure out what the fuck any of that meant.

[NowhereMan]

Fabricated explained it well, he's clearly taken 'show don't tell' to heart but is using it in a format that requires pretty explicit depiction (with only 3 or 4 frames to work with) and obviously hasn't actually communicated this to Gabe. Like, maybe you could get that understanding after reading the whole series but they make no attempt to link 'spiders' with the monster depicted later. They don't make it very clear that the young girl depicted is the same as the older girl shown later and they never connect the monster to either parent. Why is the mother dying in hospital? Well that would be boring narrative and is clearly beneath him.

Perry Bible Fellowship is still publishing too and it's the one webcomic that's actually gotten me to buy something.

[lamaros]

I bought some Hark! a Vagrant t-shirts back in the day.

[Khaldun]

Man, I hate Ctl+Alt+Del even more than PA.

[Fabricated]

His side story stuff can at least be followed.

[Fabricated]

Also mega update for unsounded today. It rules.

[Thrawn]

Also mega update for unsounded today. It rules.

I'd never heard of it before this post.

[Fabricated]

Also mega update for unsounded today. It rules.

I'd never heard of it before this post.

It's good.

[Khaldun]

It's really compelling. Visually fantastic as well.

[Viin]

It is pretty good - I read it for about an hour last night. Love the art work.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Can the lazy get a link up in this thread?

In an effort to not be completely useless - have a link to Death Vigil.  It's sort of a webcomic, mostly because you can read all 8 chapters online at his dA account, but it's also been published offline, too.  I really like his art and he has a few other series he's done but I haven't read them yet, for whatever reason.

[Viin]

Sure why not
http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch01/ch01_01.html

[RhyssaFireheart]

Well damn.  That is an awesome comic.  Only made it up to chapter 8 tonight; I'll have to finish the rest tomorrow night.

[Quinton]

Wow, how had I never heard of Unsounded before.  Just hit chapter four and am really enjoying it.  Some interesting world building going on, often very funny, sometimes very dark, overall well done.


Love little sight gags like the tip jar there...


I am extremely fond of Even Dahm's Vattu, which is epic stuff but updates between 1-3 pages a week, and slow to unfold.  It is seriously long-form (almost 700 pages and I think nearing the halfway mark).  Highly recommended, but might be good to check in with quarterly and read in chunks if you find slowly-unfolding-grand-scale-storytelling to be frustrating in serial form.  http://www.rice-boy.com/vattu/


It's sad to me to see how little some fantastic artists make on Patreon compared to how much certain talentless hacks rake in.  Guess in all things it's about finding your audience and selling to them.  It is cool to see some folks making great art and being able to be supported by something other than crappy banner ads.

[Shannow]

And there goes the last two hours. Vattu is good, though for some reason the first part reminded me of playing Spore..
Thanks for the link!

[Thrawn]

Read the first chapter of Unsounded and all I could think at the end was how much I didn't like Sette and had hoped he would just let her die.

[Quinton]

Just wrapped up chapter seven and wow, it does get very dark at times.

[Fabricated]

Read the first chapter of Unsounded and all I could think at the end was how much I didn't like Sette and had hoped he would just let her die.

The author kinda has deep regrets about that chapter because of how much a shit Sette is in it. She softens up pretty steadily, and gets the shit knocked out of her a lot later. Also her homelife is really not good.

[Thrawn]

Read the first chapter of Unsounded and all I could think at the end was how much I didn't like Sette and had hoped he would just let her die.

The author kinda has deep regrets about that chapter because of how much a shit Sette is in it. She softens up pretty steadily, and gets the shit knocked out of her a lot later. Also her homelife is really not good.

I read a few more chapters today already and it's certainly improved and I'm well into 7 now.  Glad people here were praising it or I probably wouldn't have pushed on.

[Fabricated]

I dig all of the fun 4th wall breaking stuff the artist does with the webpage and frames off and on.