Broken Frontier

Just like everybody else, I joined ComicSpace last December, and had dozens of new friends in no time.  It’s a fantastic resource.  With a single click, I was able to find other columnists and journalists.  In seconds, I found all the members who tagged themselves as interested in religion.  I quickly generated a list of members located in Wales, and just as quickly, invited them to join my friends list. 

Within a day, I was invited to the monthly meetings of SquidWorks, the local comic creator cooperative.  Best of all, I can now go to one place and easily find hundreds of webcomics.  I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of my computer reading comics.  Once I start clicking, I forget to stop!  Here are a few that I’ve found particularly notable.

REVVVelations

Written and colored by Stan Yan, and illustrated by Jolyon Yates, this futuristic action-adventure comic puts you inside a high-speed race.  What if broadcast journalism were heavily restricted, regulations enforced by armed FCC agents? 

In that world, certain very competitive and edgy people would practice guerrilla journalism, obtaining and illegally broadcasting the story with little thought to the cost.  This gives REVVVelations its dramatic edge, and keeps you clicking “Next.”  Yan and Yates provide plenty of thrills, but they never forget to be hilarious.

Jonny Crossbones

Written and illustrated by Les McClaine, Jonny Crossbones was nominated for the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic.  The current adventure, “Dead Man at Devil’s Cove,” features buried pirate treasure, ruthless thieves, and young love with the smart, talented, and spunky Gretchen Fiveash, a fantastically wealthy Nancy Drew. 

McClaine is an excellent artist, and the panels are clean, simple, perfect in detail, and alive with motion, strongly reminiscent of Tintin.  There is an innocence to this strip that is charming, and injects a sense of realism into a fantastic mystery.  Jonny’s odd appearance only serves to make him sweeter, and his blushes over Gretchen guarantee that you will root for these two kids.  Jonny Crossbones will be published by Dark Horse this month.

Lonely Fetus

A quirky strip done in simple, stripped-down pen-and-ink style, Lonely Fetus seems to flow from the depression, resignation, and plain old weirdness characteristic of the generations growing up in the shadows of Baby Boomer idealism.  The familiar sounds of the despair in this strip work like a kind of restorative balm on my own bouts of disappointment and hopelessness. 

In an interview, artist Mike Jensen describes how he created the characters of Lonely Fetus.  He used “ambiguous childhood drawings and by ties, day jobs, and debt, I forced them into the lie-truth that is our adult lives.”  Click “Indicia” on the homepage to read the full interview. 

SB77

Stephan Brusche has built animation features into his weekly strips to deliver surprising and delightful results.  He is an accomplished artist with a unique vision, and his strips are often twisted, and sometimes beautiful. Brusche demands playfulness from the reader, as you must move your mouse over the panels to see the complete creation.  You won’t always know if you’ve reached the end, and readers willing to experiment beyond the obvious boundaries of the strips will often be rewarded.  Brusche does not often leave out a punch line.

Brusche turns normal strip conventions into fields of experimentation, as in the remarkable “Circle,” which builds click by click into a whirling wheel.  The whirling motion is accomplished by moving the contents of the panels, rather than moving the panels themselves.  He also experiments with light and dark, as in the eerie and disturbing “Under Cover.”  In this one, the reader can barely peer through the shadows to see the shocking act being perpetrated, but a pass of the mouse lights up a face, a weapon, a body, in sharp white relief. 

Another one, untitled, shows a gnome standing on a wheel.  The reader has a “next” button just below.  As the reader clicks the “next” button, the wheel begins turning, throwing the gnome off balance and heartlessly tossing him about.  Until, that is, the gnome falls near the “next” button, reaches down, and smashes it.  Then he gives the reader a friendly wave.  I haven’t seen many web comics that play with web technology with such freedom and intelligence.  If web comics have a chance to be something different than their print counterparts, then Stephan Brusche is one of those who are pointing the way.

ComicSpace is still in the building phase, and will soon be adding functions to allow comics artists to host their comics on their ComicSpace page, along with storing links to their favorite comics.  When those functions are available, I’ll be lost in an endless cyberworld of comics.  I will probably start showing up late to work, missing meals, forgetting to go to bed, losing track of my husband, and finally, making comics of my own.