WEBCOMICSAwful HospitalJonathan “Bogleech” Wojcik's star project, a long-running webfiction experience which is reliant enough on artwork to be best classified as a “webcomic” but has little in common with a classical panel-grid-employing comic book, freely incorporating hyperlinks, video-game-inspired formatting, and a hundred other peculiarities. (Some compare it to
Homestuck, but I haven't read it and, to the Web's ongoing astonishment, neithe rhas Wojcik.) Not for the easily repulsed,
Hospital's tale of a young mother's journey across a dysfunctional interdimensional hospital to recover her infant son goes out to lovers of the strange and the uncomfortably biological, but it's also very, very funny and dizzyingly creative.
The Glass ScientistsAn umpteenth retelling of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde shouldn't possibly work as well as this does, particularly in a somewhat boilerplate fantasy-Victorian setting, with even the twist of explicitly casting Jekyll as a repressed gay man sounding fairly generic. And yet!
And yet! Gorgeous artwork, compellingly complex side-characters, and a great command of pacing combine to make feel
The Glass Scientists surprisingly fresh, and well worth a read.
HoneybeeIn a setting which feels slightly more like genuine Mediaeval Europe than the average Tolkien-descended fantasy, a sheltered village girl falls for a shape-shifting druidess. A simple, slow-burn sapphic romance with no twists or frills, but deeply confident in the material, and able to sustain interest with a pleasant depiction of the unfolding relationship combined with hints of well-thought-out worldbuilding and a quite lovely art-style. From the same author comes
Softymetal, a somewhat more dramatic look at the life of an engineer and her android life-partner in a world where very-much-sentient robots are yet viewed as property; perhaps my favourite of the two, but sadly abandoned without a true resolution, for which reason I must add certain caveats to the recommendation.
The Inexplicable Adventures of BobHaving started in print as a student comic in 1993,
Bob is a rare case of a webcomic now entering its fourth decade and still running. It's also a delight, a Franco-Belgian-tale of an unwilling everyman-hero, his growing family, and the endless collection of extraterrestrial beings who in defiance of probability keep crashing onto the roof of his house specifically. As one looks back over the archive, the artwork takes a while to settle, but the script never puts a foot wrong.
Jolley ComicsThe comics of Sarah Jolley, alias “Modmad”. The star attraction is the long-running, dreamlike allegory
The Property of Hate, which begins one quiet night when a dapper gentleman with a television for a head appears in a child's bedroom, demanding to know if they'd like to be a Hero… But I am also terribly fond of Jolley's unlicensed
Duck Doodle Comics, as dear to my heart as any officially-licensed media in Carl Barks's Duck-verse, and there's more besides — even
some delightful bits of prose.
Kidd CommanderAria Bell's sprawling, yet intensely personal adventure comic follows the odyssey of Phineas Kidd, who carries the fragments of a star-god within her, as she journeys in a flying ship across a fantasy land which is best thought of as the American West a century hence from surviving about three different apocalypses. Often dark but ultimately optimistic, the comic carries a clear sense of passion and drive, and displays finely-honed thematic instincts in addition to obvious proficiency with surface-level writing and artwork. One of a few projects I directly support, helping to keep the perpetually-precarious author afloat, and
perhaps you should too.
LackadaisyA Prohibition-era tale with noir shadings. Starring anthropomorphic cats. The cats are what everyone knows about — and it really is a
lot of people, particularly since the series branched out into a rather impressive animated pilot — but
Lackadaisy is at heart a perfectly down-to-earth yarn of bootleggers and secret thrills in 1920s St Louis, whose all-too-human characters just so happen to be drawn
as cats. A very good yarn it is too, and some extremely effective artwork.
Lackadaisy updates slowly, but its lush, dynamic pages are worth the wait.
The Last AviatrixA gorgeous black-and-white epic,
The Last Aviatrix concerns a post-apocalyptic world in the vein of Miyazaki's
Nausicaä, if perhaps on the drier side; and, within it, the taciturn, world-weary woman who owns and flies the last functioning aeroplane. Atomic wizards also come into it, with our heroine soon being forced to escort a young child who displays similar abilities. Not revolutionary in principle, but as solid an example of its genre as there ever was.
The Last Human (in a Crowded Galaxy)This surprisingly hard-sci-fi, yet cheerfully imagnative comic, now concluded, follows the unlikely pair of a spider-like alien from one of the Galaxy's most feared species, and the human toddler whom she has chosen to adopt as her daughter and defend unto death… in a world where the long-extinct Earthlings are regarded as something like interstellar bogeymen. The same universe and characters, about ten years on from this adventure, are explored at greater length and with a somewhat darker tone in Zack Jordan's excellent sequel novel, titled simply
The Last Human, whose own follow-up is currently in production.
SpacetrawlerI regard Christpher Baldwin's long-running science-fiction saga, spanning multiple sets of protagonists and storylines, as the 21st century's answer to
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — not an ersatz or imitation but a genuine
successor, breaking new ground from familiar starting points; combining nihilistic humour and campy spaciness with a deep well of humanism and a genuine interest in the psychology of its much-mistreated characters,
Spacetrawler is that rare
Hitchhiker's successor which feels like it extends from the later Adams novel, and not the cultural footprint of the original picaresque gag-a-minute radio series. With these already considerable qualities it combines deceptively compelling worldbuilding and an awe-inspiringly steady update schedule encompassing multiple pages a week, and a neat,
ligne-claire-esque art-style whose command of perspective and blocking is without equal.
Val & IsaacIf
Spacetrawler is the
Hitchhiker's that grew up,
Val & Isaac is its eccentric sibling who embraced the bohemian comedian lifestyle — a delightful romp through a genre-mashup Galaxy of aliens and wizards, one gag strip at a time. Even so, it takes the time to build up a tone and aesthetic all its own, and the central characters of self-serious Commander Val, laid-back wizard Isaac, geeky cyborg fish-girl Minnow, and shapeshifting bounty hunter Space Dread all gain genuine layers as years pass, also accruing a broader supporting cast.
When She Was BadAnother long-runner,
When She Was Bad's tale of a small-time modern-day career criminal who is accidentally gifted the magical powers meant for some sort of Chosen One goes back to 2008, and has updated steadily ever since. Less of a superhero deconstruction than a crime drama with a couple of wizards, the comic makes a surprisingly gripping read, with a titular character who threads the needle of genuine moral ambiguity without tipping over into outright brooding antiheroism
or into facile reveling in the unfettered cruelty of a hero-by-fiat devoid of redeeming qualities. As with
Bob, the haphazard artwork of the early volumes belies a script whose focus and command of tone were razor-sharp from Day One.
Yellow Brick RambleAs with
The Glass Scientists — Heaven knows Daisy McGuire is not the first person to write a riff on L. Frank Baum's
Land of Oz books, nor even the first to take Baum's naive depiction of Princess Ozma's magical sex-change and twist it
just so into a modern transgender narrative. Aye, but McGuire is perhaps the first to do so while being one of the best cartoonists working, bringing to the task the talents she honed so finely on the
Asterixesque Ancient Greek saga of
Gastrophobia (also well worth a read, though now on hold).
Yellow Brick Ramble is effortlessly fun and charming, wholesome without being twee — a retelling in the author's characteristic voice, but not a deconstruction that disdains its source material.