brigid: drawing of two women, one whispering to the other (Default)
Dumbing of Age for9/26/2021

If you were wondering if David Willis is still making comics some twenty+ years after he started the answer is yes, yes he is.

I adore everything about this strip of two Good Girls pretending to be Bad.

In the next strip they ask for an edible and Joe gives them a gummy vitamin.

I got nothin' deep to say.
erinptah: A map. (writing)
wordpress layouts

Crossposting a thing I just finished: a useful guide for anyone who's moving off of Tumblr. (Follow-up questions welcome! If you don't have a comic but know someone who does, pass it on.)

( “Help, I want to move my Tumblr webcomic to an independent host using WordPress, how do I start??” )
78nanosieverts: a cute ram with curly horns looking sweetly at the camera (Default)
hey, I recently came over from tumblr-- idk if this is the place to ask, but does anyone know if there are places on dreamwidth that are still homestuck-active?

ty ty!
missfortune1977: (Default)
So I don't know if it's frowned upon to promote yourself as soon as you join a group(I'm still learning how to use this site, be patient with me!) but if it's okay I'd like to plug my own webcomic. It's called Kagamure and it's a sci-fi buddy comedy about two idiots trying to make enough money to get out of town before they get killed.
I am hosting Kagamure on Tumblr right now, and since some people get confused when they see that I just want to clarify that I'm using Tumblr as a web host (which is something you can do on Tumblr btw) and you do not need to start a Tumblr account or interact with Tumblr in any way to read the comic
Anyway! I'd love it if you gave it a read. Peace <3
brigid: drawing of two women, one whispering to the other (Default)



This is a great, fun comic -- check it out, and back the kickstarter if you can!
brigid: (words)
I'm assuming any Homestuck fans have already seen this, but just in case you haven't, check out:

http://www.paradoxspace.com/

From the blurb by Andrew Hussie:

"Paradox Space will feature many short comic stories involving literally any characters and settings from Homestuck. Any point in canon could be visited and elaborated on, whether it's backstory, some scenes that were skipped over or alluded to, funny hypothetical scenarios which have nothing to do with canon events, or exploring things that could have happened in canon through the "doomed timeline" mechanic that is a defining trait of Homestuck's multiverse-continuum known as "paradox space". There is a WHOLE LOT of fun stuff we can do here; and we will!

"The idea is also to get a lot of different artists and writers involved. It's going to be a major team effort. Occasionally I will write some comic scripts, particularly at the onset to help get this off the ground. But I'd like that to be the exception rather than the rule. I think it will be exciting to see how a talented pool of creators can work within the HS universe, and what they will bring to these characters. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see who's contributing so far. I guarantee that list of names will expand considerably in the months ahead."
salad_barbarian: K-ON girl (Fan sparkle)
This used to be a regular comic strip but it has since moved to Web only.

Cow and Boy is a comic I've been following for a while and have really enjoyed. It has both philosophy and running gags so a little something different than the norm.
foxfirefey: A seal making a happy face. (seal of approval)
I bring comic kickstarters to you, each for a comic that I enjoy! Each one is already fully funded, and ready for you getting swag from it, even if it's just a nice digital version of the comic. And even if you don't want to get anything, maybe it will bring you some new reading. Every single one of these comics is Bechdel friendly, containing multiple strong lead female characters interacting with each other, if that is something that floats your boat.

Ava's Demon -- Kickstarter (not quite two days left)

I actually found out about Ava's Demon from its Kickstarter and devoured it as fast as possible. The art is color rich and luminous--simply fantastic. The pace is good, the science fiction setting interesting, the characters distinct.

If it reaches $200k, then updates go to twice a week--and at the time of me writing, it's at $184k.

Digger -- Kickstarter (13 days left)

Digger, by Ursula Vernon, is a fantasy graphic novel posted online and complete. This Kickstarter is for printing an omnibus edition that contains the entire novel. The art is a well executive black and white reminiscent of block cut art. I find the main character quite charming and love the world.

Vattu -- Kickstarter (10 days left)

Vattu is by Evan Dahm, who is also the author of Rice Boy (and in the upcoming Sleep of Reason anthology). The art is expressive, the world complex, the narrative multi-layered.
hatman: HatMan, my alter ego and face on the 'net (Default)
I know, I posted about this already. I hope it's okay to repost. I don't plan on spamming these communities. I just wanted to try asking one more time. There are some updates and stuff.

The Goblins Card Game Kickstarter is going along very nicely. Already triple funded. I hear they're considering adding some new rewards (digital goodies and stuff for even the lower tiers), but we'll have to see how that goes.

Here's the thing: If they can hit 4000 backers, they'll send Thunt, the author of Goblins, to NY ComicCon. Thunt is a very cool guy. I'm lucky to be able to call him a friend. But he lives all the way up near Vancouver, 3000 miles away. I don't get to see him often. (Disabilities + Internet = awesome friends around the globe + very little chance to hang out with any of them in person.) If you can help the project hit 4000 backers (by chipping in even just a dollar or two, and maybe asking friends who can spare it to do the same), you'll be doing me a personal favor.

I should also mention that the game, which looks like a lot of fun, is explained better now. There's a new video on the Kickstarter page, under "description of gameplay." Evertide Games is still fairly new at this Kickstarter thing, but they're listening to the fans and responding. And they've clearly put a lot of love and meticulous care into the game. Not just in keeping it true to the comic, but in striving to create a game that will be so fun to play on its own merits that it will be able to draw in new fans and readers.

So check it out. If you haven't already, give Goblins Comic a look. It's an engaging story with a wide cast of developed characters and a good blend of humor, action, drama, and strong character moments.
hatman: HatMan, my alter ego and face on the 'net (Default)
Girl Genius Kickstarter was incredibly successful, and I'm really happy to see that. But now it's time for another webcomics Kickstarter! (I don't know of any others coming up that I'm really excited about, so I won't be spamming the comms. Don't worry.)

The Goblins Comic card game Kickstarter is live!

The Goblins comic is awesome. Thunt is awesome. Evertide games is awesome. The game looks awesome. They've put in a lot of cool things. It's clear that they love the game more than anyone. They've been very cool in reaching out to fans. And they've been very good to Thunt, which gets big points in my book.

So check it out. If you can, chip in. It should be a lot of fun, and it's cool to support such awesome people.
hatman: HatMan, my alter ego and face on the 'net (Default)
Two of my all-time favorite webcomics are running Kickstarter campaigns.

First up, Girl Genius.

The Girl Genius Kickstarter ends this week. It's blown through two batches of stretch goals and is steaming ahead to the final one. Pledge now, and you'll receive PDFs of the entire run, including plenty of bonus content. If you've never read the comic, I guarantee it's worth it. If you have read the comic, it's a great way to reread, refresh your memory, and relive the awesomeness.

They're at about $284k now. If they can hit $300k, they'll be able to hire someone to help manage the business. Which means expanding into new territory. Which means even more Girl Genius awesomeness making the world more awesome with the power of its awesome. I really want to see that happen. Because it would be awesome.

Meanwhile, Goblins has hit some snags lately. They had to part with their publisher/webhost and it got kind of messy for a while there. But Thunt, being a better man than I (which I do not say often or lightly), has refused to badmouth the other side, has publicly apologized for his part of the stressful and difficult situation, and has called for his fans to stay positive.

The Goblins/Evertide Games Kickstarter, which was delayed due to the whole kerfuffle, starts Monday. It's for a card game based on the comic. And it looks really cool. So keep an eye out for that.

Evil Inc. my other favorite webcomic, is not currently running a Kickstarter, as far as I know. But it's still well worth checking out.

(Crossposted to my journal and [community profile] crowdfunding.)
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
Let's put together a list of super hero comics featuring women who are actual characters, not just cheese cake. I'll start the ball rolling, and you can add any you think of, ok? I'll go through the list later and review the ones I especially like, and anyone who has a comic they love/create can do the same.

No Longer Updating
The Green Avenger by Abby Lehrk.
The Adventures Of Super Hero Girl by Faith Erin Hicks.
Pancakes (short story, completed) by Kat Leyh.

Active
Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag.
The Nonadventures Of Wonderella by Justin Pierce.
The Adventures Of Gyno-Star by Rebecca Cohen.

I purposely excluded a few super-hero comics featuring female cast members because they're included entirely for T&A. However, this list looks pretty paltry. What have you got?
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, by Prudence Shen and Faith Erin Hicks, is a YA comic about high school and friendships. As the about page says:

"You wouldn’t expect Nate and Charlie to be friends. Charlie’s the laid-back captain of the basketball team, and Nate is the neurotic, scheming president of the robotics club. But they are friends, however unlikely — until Nate declares war on the cheerleaders, and the cheerleaders retaliate by making Charlie their figure-head in the ugliest class election campaign the school as ever seen. At stake? Student group funding that will either cover a robotics competition or new cheerleading uniforms — but not both.

"Bad sportsmanship? Sure. Chainsaws? Why not! Nothing can possibly go wrong."

"Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong" updates pretty frequently and has great clean stylish line art by Hicks. The dialogue is snappy and the writing fast paced, characters are very well designed. The two main characters are white males, but the supporting cast is fairly diverse with POC and women given speaking roles. The comic touches a bit on bullying, and Charlie's got some issues with his parents in the background, and one of the members of the Robotics Club is a young woman which is always nice to see.

I'm a fan of Hicks' work, and this project really showcases her strengths well. This is Shen's first book, but the writing and dialogue feel very tight and polished with none of that "new author" feel.
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
I know I originally started this promising to review YOUNG ADULT webcomics and then listed a bunch that were more middle-school level. Sorry about that. However, What Birds Know, by Emelie Friberg & Mattias Thorelli, is more YA-ish.

When I say it's more Young Adult-ish, what I mean is the POV character(s) is what I'd consider Young Adult (12-18 years old), it's targeted more towards teens than adults, and it deals with the internal struggles and rites of passage that happen in that age range. A friend of mine who's a YA librarian compares YA and adult literature to "The Hobbit" versus "Lord Of The Rings." They're both great books about people going on an adventure. However, "The Hobbit" is a very personal story about one person growing up and leaving home for the first time, then returning safely. There's a lot of world building and action and adventure and singing Dwarves, but ultimately it's about one guy growing up. "Lord Of The Rings," on the other hand, has a whole fate of the world hanging in the balance thing, ultimate evil, sweeping epic, tons of characters, etc. POV characters grow and change and have rites of passage, but The Story is more important than their personal issues.

"What Birds Know" is a long-form comic that's published a few pages at a time. Like most long form comics it's best consumed in chunks and the wait between updates is deliciously difficult. The story follows a small group of girls who travel into the local forest as part of a school assignment and find something very unexpected.

The art is really pretty, the characters are well fleshed out, and there's a lot of really great world building and mythology. The comic is not a horror comic per se, but it has some incredibly creepy moments in it, some really disturbing and unsettling scenes. Much of the comic is set in a small town near the ruins of an older civilization. Interactions between various townspeople are handled really well, and a lot of information is conveyed through casual dialogue and attitude. There's also some really great foreshadowing about the ruins and former civilizations, mostly delivered by a delightfully nerdy dad.
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
Paranatural, by Zack Morrison, is a kids' comic about a group of twelve year olds who live in a town thick with monsters, ghosts, and other creatures. Some of the kids, and adults, can see ghosts and have special abilities and tools which they can use to fight the ghosts.

Max is the POV character, a new comer to the town and school. As an outsider, everything is as new to him as it is to the readers, and explanations are less info-dump-y than they might otherwise be. It's a gripping comic mixing adventure/fighting and mystery. The art is pretty slick and the color is well done. The character design is good with different characters having different silhouettes and their personalities coming across through their clothing/hair styles. The ghost/monster design is also excellent and very creepy. The dialogue is snappy. Morrison is doing a great job of setting up big whacks of mystery and hidden worlds and revealing little bits and pieces of them, leaving the reader wanting more. Heck, the characters want to know more, too, but the child protagonists have a hard time getting the truth out of the knowledgeable adults around them. And, of course, they're still dealing with school work and teachers and other students (including bullies) and finding their place in the social order.

It's a good comic and a fast read. If you haven't read it before you'll get up to speed pretty quickly.
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
"Monster Pulse" is a kids' comic by the very talented Magnolia Porter, who you might know from or The Good Crook (the latter two aren't really kids comics, though). It follows the adventures of a group of kids, aged 12-14, who have had their body parts transformed into monsters that can fight/defend them. I say "have had their body parts transformed" because it's not something the kids chose. It was something that happened to them by accident or design. Why yes, there IS a shadowy agency lurking in the shadowy shadows orchestrating a bunch of stuff, and yes it IS pretty scary. But it's also not the focus of the comic.

"Monster Pulse" follows the adventures of Bina, Julie, Abel, and West (and their monsters) as they navigate family and personal relationships, cope with the changes their monsters have created in their lives, and try to protect other kids from what happened to them. Porter recently introduced a kid-and-monster antagonist into the groups' lives, and I'm interested in seeing where she goes with that. Her story telling is really top notch, her art is very solid, and her character design of both humans and monsters is creative and distinctive. Porter is a dedicated craftsman who has spent years so far honing her art and writing and it shows. "Monster Pulse" feels very real, the world and science feel very solid and well founded. Her dialogue, her characters' voices, are also very well done. There's a lot going on with the comic (interpersonal relationships among the group (including crushes both romantic and platonic), family relationships, health concerns, the threat of ARMA which created the monsters, social pressures, etc) and Porter weaves it all together, handling it well. It'd be easy for the comic to be entirely angst, or slapstick, or goofy fighting monster Pokemon ripoff but it's none of that. It's nuanced and rich and enjoyable.

Frankly, Porter is a comic creator who I trust implicitly. Whatever she comes out with, I'll read it knowing that I am very likely to enjoy it. So I'm incredibly biased toward her work. But if you like adventure stories and interesting monster design, give Monster Pulse a try.
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
"Shauna. Charlotte. Mildred. Three schoolgirl sleuths. Jack. Linton. Sonny. Three schoolboy investigators. Tackleford. One mid-sized city with a history of countless mysteries. Is there enough room at Griswalds Grammar School for two groups of kid detectives? There better be, because once these kids have set their sights on solving a mystery there's nothing that can derail them. Nothing, except maybe gossip, classwork, new football player cards, torment from siblings, or any number of childhood distractions." (from the first collection's description)

"Bad Machinery," by John Allison, is a long-form webcomic about a group of school children in Tackleford, West Yorkshire, England who solve mysteries. Allison has been creating webcomics since 1998. His previous efforts, "Bobbins" and "Scary Go Round" featured adults doing adult things, sometimes involving current events and real world situations and other times venturing far afield into some truly off-beat paths.

In some ways, "Bad Machinery" is a big departure from his earlier works. The target audience isn't adults, but children. The characters aren't adults in the work place, they're kids in school. The stories are still quirky, but they are much more focused and tightly scripted. And, of course, they all center around various mysteries... most of them supernatural in origin. Allison, of course, is no stranger to the supernatural world. He's dealt with Ghost Trains, Leprechauns and Fairies, Zombies, Devils, Hell, Warlocks, Ghosts, Witches, Grim Reapers, Parallel Dimensions, Time Travel, Elves and Goblins, and more in his previous runs. And his current stories are set in a very established world, one that he's spent years fleshing out and making real. However, one needn't go back and re-read the years and years of previous comics if one doesn't want to. Don't let that be a barrier to picking up "Bad Machinery."

"Bad Machinery" features an ensemble cast of 3 boys and 3 girls from varied socio-economic backgrounds and very different personalities. Shaunna, Lottie, Mildred, Linton, Jack, and Sonny are initially at odds in a girls vs boys dynamic. Who is better at solving mysteries? Who will solve the most mysteries? Who will emerge triumphant? Over the course of the stories, the two groups learn to work together and form a network of friendships and relationships. Behind the mystery solving, we learn more about the individual characters and their histories and personalities, and watch them grow and mature as well. Allison isn't afraid of shaking things up, and change is a constant but quiet theme in his work.

Allison has a fairly diverse cast with an equal gender split and female characters who are as fleshed out as male characters. While he only has one POC protagonist, his characters have different economic backgrounds and family situations (although all are heteronormative). He is fantastic at showing the different threads of friendship and shifting relationships of middle school, and spot-on at portraying sibling relationships. His characters have unique designs/body shapes and differing body language, and have unique voices as well. In a script without the speaker noted, you'd be able to tell who's saying what.

Oni Press has published the preamble and first story, and you can buy it through Topatoco: The Case Of The Team Spirit. In addition to the already-published story there's some reworked art and a bunch of extras. In Allison's words: "Running to about 140 pages, it features many new pages of story and loads of extra material, including an in-depth guide to the fake history of English football that I can only describe as "dense", "nutty" and "extremely time-consuming to write"." Or you could just read the original story online, starting with the preamble. You can find a list of all the chapters here, but my favorite is The Case Of The Fire Inside for so so SO many reasons.

"Bad Machinery" is currently between storylines, but there's a bit of filler in the form of another "Giant Days" feature, a short about a previous character's college experience.
brigid: A fat faced baby in a cap is stuffed into a mail sack worn by a postal carrier. (what.)
Selkie, by Dave Warren, is a slice of life comic about families set in an AU world that has human-like aquatic creatures. One of them, named Selkie, is in an orphanage at the start of the story, waiting to be adopted. A man named Todd Smith, who was himself adopted, winds up adopting her. Initially unprepared for her special needs, he gets a crash course in caring for her... and is surprised to find that the CIA is interested in her as well.

Warren has a pretty good eye for dialogue and is handy at showing and not telling, two valuable skills many writers lack. Like many long form comics that update a page at a time, the story is compelling but slow moving and works best when read in chunks. He captures inter-kid and kid-adult dynamics really well. His characters have distinct designs, personalities, and voices. He's also made what looks like a conscious effort to show a wide variety of ethnicities and body types, and represent gender pretty evenly, without it feeling forced.

What's most appealing about Selkie is the amount of work he's done into fleshing out Selkie's character design. Her body is the way it is for a reason. He's worked out a lot of her biology. What does she need to breathe? To eat? What kind of culture does she have? What kind of clothing suits her body? How does her race influence her personality? The mystery of who, and where, her people are is also intriguing and something he's alluding to slowly.

The art is rough but improving, and gets an A+ for effort. I really look forward to what Warren puts out, artistically, in a few years. Selkie's speech, however, really bothers me. She sounds a bit like a parody of Skwisgar Skwigelf from "Metalocalypse." I don't know if the extraneous ending S-es are supposed to indicate sibilance or what. That's a pretty minor complaint, though.

Check out the comic and tell me what you think! Can you think of any other comics like this? Can you think of any other kid-oriented webcomics that need some loving attention and reviews? Post suggestions!

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webcomics: Reagan, from Templar AZ by Spike (Default)
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