01/25: Hostage
It seems I'm linking Simulated Comic Product just as it ends - and stops having it's own dedicated site. Archives for the completed comic can be found on the portal site Robot and Ghost - I'd give the artist's name, but he apparently doesn't want anyone to know it. Simulated Comic Product has some clever jokes, probably half of them centering on robots. Certainly worth a laugh here and there.
Just had a literal (not really literal) dumptruck of comics dropped on top of me, on top of an already healthy backlog of "to read"'s. I just finished Plan B, over at Goon Patrol. It's not too often you see a sympathetic supervillain protagonist. I also find that is my obligation to inform you that Hanna is not a Boy's Name. For those who like detective comedies or undead or just snappy art and a good sense of humor, the previously named comic is for you. Another treat (and curse) - both of the just mentioned comics are relatively new, and dont' have too much of an archive built up.
01/22: Weather
A fair bit of warning on the next comic: it's most decidedly NSFW. I've also had one person that I linked to complain of viruses, so it would be nice if anyone told me whether this is true or not so I can not spread false rumors. Otherwise, Moon Over June is a hilarious comic about two roomates with a variety of interests and pet peeves, and who really like sex.
Sorry about the late comic, if anyone even noticed :P
01/14: Exaggeration
Some experimentation. I pretty obnoxiously stole the way that Three Panel Soul formats it's text balloons, as it was a dramatic improvement over my terrible, terrible balloons. The ridiculousness of the art was also much easier to do in this flat color layout rather than trying to draw them individually - which would have just failed honestly. I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
More webcomic spelunking (instead of working) recently - Remedial Comics seems to start off with the protagonist being some kind of ninja neighborhood watchman. It quickly makes a 180 degree turn into a slice of life office/nerd comic about an older man, and then starts explaining his past as a US soldier. I might be able to forgive the meandering genre if it was still updating, but it doesn't look it's done so since June of last year.
Boy on a Stick and Slither is one of those >1000 comic archives. It bounces dialogue - often of a bizarre and non-sequiter nature reminiscent of Cat and Girl - between it's two characters, Boy-on-a-Stick and Slither. The strips are simple and short, but there's often little content to them besides a 'huh.' It might be more amusing to drop by and see a dozen or so by hitting their random button, but it's certainly not an archive binge comic.
Brawl in the Family is today's star. There are certainly no shortages of comics the take classic video game console mascots and have fun with them - but each have some unique tastes. Brawl in the Family has a great fondness for Kirby, which manifests various combinations of Kirby with unusual items, or Dedede's interesting plots to defeat him. I do love how he mixes music to his comics to his comics now and then, and one of the things I love in comics is seeing a progression of art.
01/11: Nom Nom
A friend of mine recently showed me "My Immortal: The Comic." I have yet to decide if it's because she hates me now.
Started playing the Warhammer RPG with some friends of mine. You can expect some comics related to that in the future. It's an interesting system - much simpler than Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, but perhaps more complicated than 4e. A major difference is it's reliance on tokens and cards, which makes it more like a hybrid pen-and-paper rpg slash boardgame. Of course, like all RPG's, the success of the game is based on the players, the story and consistency - the last being what has doomed every attempt I've had so far to play or run an extended campaign in anything.
1/07: It's a Rule
Not sure if i was particularly happy with the timing on this one - it might have functioned better at 4 panels. Dah well, I could contemplate this forever.
Been reading more webcomics recently (to the detriment of my productivity at work). One of which I came across by link from Jeph Jaques while re-reading his archive is Animals Have Problems Too - a delicious one-panel webcomic that manages to be both hilarous and occasionally educational.
David Malki! (yet another webcomic author that i have inadvertantly irritated during a meeting with) of Wondermark fame recently made another short comic being displayed through Myspace Dark Horse. It is hilarious.
1/04: Unspoken Invitation
This one is a little bit more "journal comic" and a little bit less "psuedo" than most of the others.
While perusing the most recent MS Paint Adventure, I was introduced to a loveable chunk of Moe, and was immediately enthralled. As is unusually often the case in webcomics, the title character is the least detailed character in the strip - he is a blobby, pathetic, uneducated slob that still has a bit of innocence about him and is often still the voice of reason in a bizarre world: when he's not displaying gross negligence on the part of his younger brother or advocating obscene violence.
I've been rereading the archives of Questionable Content - just for the joy of it. Some recent barriers broken by one of the main characters prompted me to go back through the emotional rollercoaster of the strip to see where she came from and where she is now. Plus there's the progression of art. I can only hope that by continually working on OoC and other strips I'll be able to display the same progress.
One of the interesting things about archive binging a webcomic with over 1500 comics, each with an accompanying news post, is that you find some webcomics you hadn't heard of before, or even just get pushed to check out a comic you've overlooked in the past. I've only really started looking at the archive yet again, this time starting from the most recent posts, rather than trying to skip to the beginning. I'd been linked to Real Life Comics several times, and even met the artist at least once at SD Comic Con (I'll tell that story, along with all the other times I've annoyed various webcomic authors I idolize, another time), but had never really found the strip amusing.
As of reading the more recent archives, I have dubbed it... amusing. Like any webcomic, it brings the funny only occasionally - and like many webcomics, particularly of it's size, it over-relies on the two-dimensional aspects of it's characters for jokes. The art, while fairly impressive, is the definition of cut and paste - the character art has not evolved since the very first strip over ten years ago, although the addition of color is a marked improvement. Backgrounds are judiciously recycled, and there's no such thing as a face perspective besides 3/4ths view. But this is hardly a strike against it - other highly acclaimed webcomics commit such 'crimes.' I'm forced to compare it to PvP, as they are both minimalist strips which focus on generic, broadly targetted humor.
I haven't read much of it yet, and I'm not sure how far back into the archives I'll binge before heading for other pastures. I've found myself falling behind in other fantastic strips, so I'm not sure how long I can justify spending time reading self-described mediocre comics.
12/28: Timing
This is actually a very old script - i just barely got around to finally drawing it. Those who play World of Warcraft will probably note that Monica's advice to her friend is months old, and I'm not really playing enough to fill it with up to date info.
I think that I will be largely forgoing shading with OoC in the future - it honestly makes the strip better with my honestly lackluster coloring techniques, and it makes it much faster to produce. I'm also currently in the middle of researching more wordpress technology. Comicpress has not been helpful thus far.
12/27: Resolution
Came out less well than i thought. I was originally going with 2-3 panels, but then felt the the joke would be simpler in 1. I don't think it quite translates well enough without the implied time lapse.
Hilarity Ensues - (Characters and Situation created by Matthew Robert Bowers)
12/18: Sort of Regular
Another HE update for y'all.
Found a neat journal comic named Today Nothing Happened, written by the (i assume) self-named artist Shazzbaa. It's pretty sad that despite the fact that a comic is named specifically because the life of the artist is uninteresting, I find that her life is astoundingly more interesting than my own.
Or maybe I need to update Out of Context more often to at least give the impression that there's more to my life than I think.
I've also been catching back up on Submormality, because there's been quite a backlog since I last checked it. They are wordy enough that I almost hesitate to call most of them comics, because at least a few of the comics have almost no visual component whatsoever, but it's certainly extremely intelligent and liberal (and decidedly anti-Nickelback).
12/09: Robotic Updates
Haven't done any drawings (except for a brief thumbnail sketch) so this is the last of my buffer. I might start posting random sketches from my deviantart in here in the future though.
11/29: More Undead Things
It's been awhile since i did a The Revenant Seal, and it's one of the most fun comics for me to draw, so I decided to finish up the one that had been in the works for a couple of months.
So I just recently realized that it had been ages since I last talked about webcomics. I haven't been reading them nearly as often as I had before, but I most definately have been exposed to new ones. The first and foremost comic that comes to mind is Oglaf. I hope you finished reading what I said in this paragraph before you clicked that link, because it's most definately Not Save for Work. Luckily, the comic prefaces with a nice warning about it's more erotic nature. Oglaf, you see, is not a pornographic comic, per say... but it includes large amounts of nudity, sex, and honor - all used to spectacular comedic effect. Read this comic - just don't do it where someone with silly things like "morals" might see it.
Another comic i just stumbled onto today from the Twitter of Hijinks Ensue (a gamer comic that stole the title of the doomed-to-fail webcomic that I started. Don't worry, i'm not ruthlessly bitter about it or anything) is Sequential Art, a humble little author surrogate webcomic about a man, a catgirl and a penguin living together. The jokes are amusing, and the catgirl is adorable.
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