Broken Frontier

I like it because it is home to Gun Street Girl, which satisfies my desires to see urban and occult dangers tackled by a brash streetwise girl and her cranky British employer.

I like it because it has Glych's Experiment, a rare source of insight into the mind of an artist.

I like it, in general, for being a hub of comics culture and community.

But most of all, I like it because it is home to Amber "Glych" Greenlee's No Stereotypes - and that I know it will remain home to that strip for a long time to come.

No Stereotypes is not an easy comic to describe; as the name might imply, it has a unique cast of characters caught up in an incredibly original story. Our primary cast includes Atom, a friendly immortal from the dawn of time; Spontaneous, a Cheshire-esque cat with a hint of diety on the side; and Jody, the apparently ordinary girl who is more connected to them than she can begin to imagine.

Jody is caught up in a battle between the other two - from there, the adventure moves across space and time, from modern day California to Ancient Mesopotamia to Victorian France. Along the way, we learn more about the mystery that connects Jody to the other two. We learn that she and Atom were lovers (or are yet to be lovers, depending on how one views it) - but they find themselves torn apart by thousands of years of time. Even as the questions about the character's connections are answered, a new question appears - will they have a happy ending?

It is one that I've been eagerly awaiting the answer to for many years - not the least because No Stereotypes has been one of the most challenging webcomics to keep track of.

I first encountered it on Keenspace, but from there it moved to Drunk Duck, and then the Modern Tales collective, before finally finding its current home. More than that - many of those moves were spurred by server crashes that wiped out its older sites, leaving no record of where it had gone. After one of those crashes and migrations, the strip itself started over from the beginning. It was only through chance and circumstance that I managed to keep finding the strip. This meant I had the chance to discover it anew time after time. But it also made the resolution of the story feel forever out of sight.

Finally No Stereotypes moved to its current home, and seems like it will stay there till all is done. In the nearly two years at that site, the story has started to pick up speed at last, and I find myself anticipating a conclusion to all the mysteries and stories the strip has raised...

...and I realized that my outlook was completely flawed.

It's good that the strip has made me want to know how it all pans out. But letting that desire become my primary one was no way to appreciate such a good story - it was like saying I could walk away from the comic, and let someone recount the ending to me years later, and that would be just as fulfilling.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and the last few chapters of No Stereotypes have helped me realize that.

In them, Jody has fallen back to the early days of civilization - where she encounters Atom, a young man, not yet immortal. She recognizes him - but is unable to communicate, or speak his language. And therein Glych manages to produce some of the finest interaction I've ever seen - between two characters who aren't even able to directly communicate.

The last few chapters have shown an entirely believable view on how someone might act - and change, and learn - when dropped back into a civilization so far removed from their own. Even more than that, it shows how the people there react to her, and manages to capture them both as recognizable and distinct all at the same time. The art is as moving in this as it has been through the rest of the story, with characters cast in stark black and white in a style that manages to convey both a sense of seriousness and whimsy at the same time.

Reading back through that recent work and how engaging it is made me realize I had forgotten one of the most important things about any story - that it is about the journey, not the ending.

The journey is a spectacular one for Jody, and Atom, and the myriad other characters in No Stereotypes. It is a tale of magic, and love, and time, and change, and it manages to deal with all those well-worn topics while still seeming fresh and new and fun.

It is one with a definite ending in mind, and one it is steadily moving towards - but I now find myself content to let that ending stay in the distance as long as it can, and simply enjoy the journey along the way.