01/29: Arts and Crafts

Updated the Webcomic Compendium with a few more strips. Notably Malfunction Junction and Return to Sender.

Malfunction Junction linked a neat strip named Gin and the Devil, which is a fantastic strip, although its a bit long winded (i know, case of the pot calling the kettle black).

I've also read a bunch of Goats. It's in the compendium now, even though I've only read maybe a third of it (if that), and the reason is, most of it sucks. Okay, it doesn't suck. But it is nearly as long as Sluggy Freelance is (ten years of often-updating archives), and it is not nearly as good (in my opinion).

If your going to read Goats, I would suggest going into the archives and selecting from one of the post 2000 story archs. Going further back than that is asking for it. Before 2000, you're looking at bad jokes, bad art, and all around a bad strip. In fact, I'd so far as to say that you should probably start the strip on the most recent arc, Infinitie Typewriters, where the characters (particularly Fish) has gotten some moderately good character development. The art is actually pretty good at that advanced stage in the strip as well.

Goats' storyline is not bad. Its not great, but I was reading it quite adamantly. Not so much for the storylines before that. Well, the complete lack of storylines. Reading the strip from the beginning became an excercise in tolerance, and the 2000+ strips was just watching Goats add more characters that served no purpose. Now, I'm sure there's some really entertaining gems in those archives, but I'm afraid you have to trudge through alot of mediocre crap to get to them.

So yeah. Goats is good, but If your going to be spending the time to trudge through ten years of archives, I'd suggest Sluggy Freelance or It's Walky.

 

By the way, unless you're color blind, you may have noticed the little author text in today's comic. I changed the font that Gray uses to speak. I've been using Dan's Hand font from 1001 Free Fonts.com to represent Gray, and its been a hassle to use. The font is very light, so I've been having to use Photoshop's Faux Bold in order to make it legible. That limits my choices for emphasis to underlining the text or simply making it bigger. Underlining doesn't work super well for comics.

So I've changed Gray's font to Greg's Hand, which is much more legible, and I can add emphasis to certain words much easier. Most likely its going to stay as Greg's Hand until I go and author a font based on my own handwriting.