Webcomic Wonderland discussion

Can't let Mike have all the fun!

First off is Unshelved by Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes. This is a daily comic about life in a public library. Dewey (get it? like the Dewey Decimal System) is the teen services librarian at Mallville Public Library. He deals with a multitude of weird, crazy customers by being irreverent and sarcastic. Most of what goes on seems too weird to be real, but trust the authors. They've been librarians for years and they know how weird it can get. Also at the library are Mel, the beleaguered manager; Tamara, the perky children's librarian; Colleen, the old school librarian, and her adopted daughter Doreen; Buddy the Book Beaver; and more!

I like Unshelved because I've worked at a bunch of libraries and yes, it does get that interesting. This could be categorized as a workcom and the authors are very good at portraying the interpersonal relationships in that setting. A library is the sort of place where the employees can just give each other a look and know what is going on. They deal with the general public and all the craziness that involves.

The archives can be a little intimidating (the comic started in 2002), but an archive crawl is unnecessary. The continuity is not very important so you could start reading today without missing much. Currently, there are new strips M-Th, a book club strip on Friday and "reruns" Saturday and Sunday. The book club strip used to be on Sunday, so it is like a Sunday Funnies sized strip. The authors take a book and summarize it in a full-paged, color comic. I like that, too, because they suggest good books. Sometimes it gives me an idea for what I want to read next.

Overall, I would suggest this to anyone who likes slice-of-life stories with a sarcastic sense of humor. Unshelved would be funny to anyone, not just people familiary with libraries.

Bouletcorp

This is a journal comic done by Boulet, a professional French cartoonist. He writes about his daily life, going to conventions, traveling around the world, and sometimes about his pop culture obsessions. Everything is really funny. Boulet has a self-deprecating, honest sense of humor that permeates every strip.

Here's my favorite strip, which is coincidentally the very first strip I read: Darkness. Boulet wrote it as part of a 24-hour comic challenge. It's a very cute, funny sort-of love story that serves as a very good introduction to the comic.

The journal started off in French, naturally, and the author has been translating some of them into English. There are some translating errors here and there but it does not take away from the overall quality of his writing. I love reading this webcomic because Boulet has great insight into so many things and his voice is clear, strong, and funny.

I just checked out Unshelved, I love it! Thanks!

Katie wrote: "Can't let Mike have all the fun!"

Yay! Really enjoy writing them, but my own reviews don't do much to help me decide on new stuff to check out. ;)

Read Darkness - fantastic stuff. Will definitely read more. Unshelved looks interesting too. Thanks!

I've been reading Unshelved for years--did you know Bill Barnes has another strip? It's called Not Invented Here, about people at a computer company.

http://notinventedhe.re/

Dawn wrote: "I've been reading Unshelved for years--did you know Bill Barnes has another strip? It's called Not Invented Here, about people at a computer company.

http://notinventedhe.re/"

I started reading it once but I didn't like it as much. It's a good webcomic, just not really to my tastes.

And thanks for checking out my recs, Mike and Laura!

Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery by John Allison

I started reading these two recently but they are already favorites. John Allison has a gift for clever and quirky dialogue, characters, and plot. Everything takes place in a British town called Tackleford. Strange things happen in Tackleford.

Scary Go Round was Allison's second webcomic, after Bobbins, and ran from 2002-2009. It's divided into 51 chapters. I actually started with Bad Machinery, because that one is more recent and only a few chapters long. That one was so good that I decided to read SGR and it only took me about a week to finish it. It's that good.

SGR mainly concerns the adventures of Shelley Winters (just a girl, not the actress). Two girls, Rachel and Tessa, were the original main characters, but they were kind of fazed out. SGR was a sequel to Bobbins, in which Shelley was a main character, and she was far more interesting. She dies pretty early on in this one, is brought back to life, dies again later on, is brought back, etc. Perhaps consequently, she has a few screws loose. Shelley is joined by her friends Amy Chilton (no-nonsense best friend), Ryan Beckwith (hapless third wheel), Time Jones (crazy inventor), Gibbous Moon (American marine biologist/affable evil genius), Fallon Young (spy and femme fatale), Shelby Winner (Shelley's American counterpart), and Desmond (fish-boy), among many others. Most of the major characters have at least one chapter devoted to them.

Like I said, a lot of strange things happen in Tackleford, and occasionally elsewhere. Some of the more memorable adventures are: Shelley getting abducted by mad scientists; the devil trying to bring about the end of the world; Shelley's adventures abroad with Shelby; and Amy travelling to a parallel dimension. There's a lot more than that, of course, but it's too much to get in to here.

Shelley's little sister Erin and her school friends are introduced about halfway through the comic and they also have adventures which sometimes overlap with the adults. The Boy (Eustace) and Dark Esther, Erin's romantic rival, are two of the more notable kids. In the final chapter, younger kids are introduced as a sort of back-door pilot for Bad Machinery.

Those kids are Shauna Wickle, Charlotte Grote (little sister of an SGR character), Mildred Haversham, Jack Finch, Linton Baxter, and Sonny Craven. BM takes place three years after SGR and they are all 13 years old. The stories are a little more innocent but still well-written and amusing. The six of them compete to solve "mysteries" (since Tackleford attracts so many odd occurrences), the girls on one side and the boys on the other. Amy and Ryan from SGR are also in this comic. They are married by the time BM starts and Ryan is a teacher at the kids' school. Shelley also makes some appearances, though she's mostly kept to stand-alone stories that take place in-between BM updates.

A Shelly Winter-centric story just finished up; "That," which is about a stop on her book tour in America in which some giant moths make an unwelcome appearance. Shelley became a successful children's book author. Another one of her stories involved her taking Charlotte as her assistant on a writer's retreat (Murder She Writes).

Esther de Groot also got her own, completed, spin-off called "Giant Days." SGR finished with the teenagers, including The Boy, graduating, so GD concerns Esther in college. I have not read this one because it is only available in e- or real book format, and I haven't decided whether or not I want to pay for it yet. It might be worth it.

Whew. Sorry this was so long. I really like these two, if you can't tell by now. I am an Anglophile and these two are very, very British. I recommend these to anyone who likes clever, strange, and funny stuff.

Menage a 3 by Giz and Dave Zero1

I've found that this one is really hit or miss with people. You either like it or you don't. I want to warn everyone that it can be NSFW but this normally involves fanservice - topless women, shirtless men, and suggested sexual situations. It doesn't get too risque, it's mostly like a PG-13, Canadian version of Friends. The tagline is "An HBO-style RomCom." It's much sillier than anything you'd find on HBO, but you get the idea.

The title refers to three housemates living in Montreal - Zii, Gary, and Didi. Zii is a hyper, somewhat crazy girl who has just recently started trying to act like an adult. She didn't really care about other people's feelings before but now she is trying to behave and also wants to help Gary. He moved in with Zii and Didi at the start of the comic. He's a nerd and completely hopeless with girls (until recently, but that's a different story). Didi is a voluptuous, innocent French Canadian girl. She speaks in a mix of French and English and is a lovable airhead.

The plots can get incredibly silly - think Three's Company on crack. A lot of the situations hinge on the relationships between characters. Gary moved out of his old apartment because he found out his roommates were gay and dating each other. I don't think Gary's homophobic, he just didn't like the fact that they had sex in the living room. One of those guys has a crush on Gary, the other one is bisexual and sleeps with much of the rest of the cast. Didi has been..."frustrated"...by men and is just looking for someone who cares. Zii is also bisexual and has a tumultuous friendship with a former girlfriend, Yuki, whom Gary has a crush on. Gary's love life is just a mess, especially recently. Zii swore that she would help him find a girlfriend and, after a while, she has been too successful.

Menage a 3 is drawn in the style of old Archie Comics and Giz has actually illustrated for that company. It's a good fit for the writing style. The writing is not spectacular, in my opinion, it is pretty silly and uncomplicated. The characters aren't always very good people, especially Zii, but it doesn't matter. Comedy is the most important thing in this webcomic, so it just matters if it's funny.

I said earlier that this can be hit or miss. Some people don't like it because of how the characters act; they think Zii can be somewhat psychopathic, Gary is a doormat, or Yuki is crazy. I don't judge the writing too harshly just because I read it for fun. It's not for everyone, especially if you like only PG stuff. I like it well enough to recommend it.

Loading Artist

This comic is hilarious. It's gag a week-ish and every comic is great. It is relatively short because it only started January 2011 and it's updated about once a week. The author, Gregor Czaykowski, has a quirky and off-beat sense of humor that is captured in every update.

I would try to compare it to another webcomic but that's hard. It is kind of like XKCD because of a stick figure protagonist but the art is more complex; the humor is similar too but not as nerdy. It's lighthearted and there's virtually no continuity. It is like a journal so some of the comics reflect what is happening in his life. For instance, he went through some rough stuff recently and made a comic about it. The most recent update is clever and pretty funny, too, it's about an intense spider. That sounds weird out of context (it's still weird in context), but check it out.

This is really funny stuff. I'm already up to Everyone Can Be Beautiful, which is horribly wrong and hilarious at the same time.

Thanks for the review/recommendation!

Yeah, there's something off about Gregor but I don't care at all. I think he's built up a good following in a somewhat short amount of time and it's because he's so good.

And Unshelved will now be in color, every single day, from now on! I don't know how I feel about this, I'll have to see what it looks like (learned this from a blog post and the comic's not been updated yet so...)

Katie wrote: "And Unshelved will now be in color, every single day, from now on! I don't know how I feel about this, I'll have to see what it looks like (learned this from a blog post and the comic's not been u..."

Saw it. I rather like it--but them I'm a fan of coloration in comics (so long as it's done right). In a year, we'll forget what the B&W ones looked like, I imagine. (cartoonist of Evil Inc said something similar recently and that strip went color a few years ago)

Agreed. Girls with Slingshots is an interesting case. It was color, then black and white, and now it's color again. I like the current iteration best - the art is simpler but the color adds more to it.

The change for Unshelved isn't that jarring since their Sunday strips are in color.