Broken Frontier

We’ve seen a couple of webcomics which emulate the old school comic book hero, and we’ve seen a couple of webcomics which fall somewhere between the classic and digital age, but up until now, we haven’t see any webcomics which fall right between the junction of the two roots of all comic books – newspaper strips and super-heroes.

Despite the title, Evil Inc. falls closer to Dilbert than it does LexCorp. The head honcho is Evil Atom, an atomic super-villain who has traded the volcano lair for the board room – and found the two to be interchangeable as far as frustration is concerned. This webcomic is actually a spin-off of creator Brad Guigar’s Greystone Inn, and includes several characters from the original strip, including leggy recovering super-villainess Lightning Lady – now secretary at Evil Inc. – and her hardworking comic writer boyfriend Keagan. Like most comic strips, the humor is just as stylized as the artwork, any combination of which will have you clicking through the archives for quite some time.

The strip is classically illustrated to look right in place on the pages of a newspaper – not surprising since Guigar’s previous Greystone Inn apparently made it into a few newspapers during its original run. But this format comes with its fair share of problems – namely the rotating cast forever titling between Atom, Lightning Lady and several others makes it slightly harder to latch onto than other, more singular character-centered, strips. It can be frustrating when the strip jumps from one set of characters to another. However, every one of Guigar’s characters is as interesting as the others, and with plenty of in-jokes to comic continuity, Evil Inc. may just be what the mad doctor ordered to satisfy the comic book fan looking for some familiar settings in the web pages of webcomicdom.