So I blogged about comics (and webcomics in particular) back in June 2015, which is a shockingly long time ago, so I thought I'd post a handful I've enjoyed lately and tout for more reading references!
These are all webcomics (and there are a bunch of others in the previous blog entry from 2015).
Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics is a fine institution, updated most days with a mixture of snarky irreverent commentary on the human condition and the process of doing science!. A vast improvement on BBC Radio 4's execrable "Thought for the Day" slot as a way to start your morning cogitation.
Questionable Content is essentially a soap opera, updated Monday through Friday. Jeph Jacques has been writing and illustrating it for more than twenty years now, and the style and complexity has evolved significantly over that time. There's a huge recurring cast in this near-future SF series, which starts out following the folks who drink and work around a coffee shop in a nameless North American city, and the robots (okay, embodied AIs) they share their lives with. Mostly gentle humour, but not twee.
Unspeakable Vault of Doom by Goomi — updated erratically (rarely these days) but still going, this is Goomi's comedic take on the Lovecraftian mythos. Loveable derpy Cthulhu finds cultists crunchy with ketchup!
Side Quested by K. B. Spangler, author of the Rachel Peng SF novels and others, is a twice-weekly high fantasy quest with a difference, and a notably cynical heroine who is not about to fall for any of that damn' prince's shit.
Foxes in Love Look, this got me through COVID19 lockdown, okay?
Apocamon The Book of Revelation, in Manga format, as God intended. Clearly Patrick Farley is going to burn in the eternal lake of fire for all eternity, and so am I for enjoying this.
Phobos and Deimos Being the teenage experiences of Maida Kilwa, a displaced person/war refugee from 26th century Mars, transplanted to a post-climate change Antarctica. Absorbing world-building and a very not-western future.
Sarah's Scribbles All life is contained in here. Eventually.
(Stuff I covered previously and didn't want to link to again: OGLAF, Kill Six Billion Demons, Strong Female Protagonist, Decrypting Rita, XKCD.)
So, what webcomics are you reading this year?
EDIT
Please provide links.
(Just naming the webcomics is less than useful in this age of LLM-poisoned search engines that try not to let you find and follow links away from Google, Bing, etc.)
Something*Positive (even longer running that QC), Questionable Content, Oglaf, XKCD and Existential Comics.
(Oh, and I see that Book Eight of Strong Female Protagonist is now on, great)
Ah damn it, SFP is still on hiatus. :-)
Ha! We have the same bookmarks!
The only one i have that you're missing is Schlock Mercenary - it's reached its end now, but the archives are absolutely huge. It starts out as a few Dad jokes about space mercenaries and then suddenly springs into Singulaity Sky-levels of hard SF
If you‘re into long-running webcomics, Girl Genius (https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php) and Order of the Stick (https://www.giantitp.com/) deserve a mention.
Questionable Content is mostly set in an alternate universe Amherst, Massachusetts, or Northampton or Easthampton, all of which are nearly indistinguishable from each other unless you live there.
There are five colleges there, the largest being the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the smallest being Hampshire; Smith College is often referenced in QC under the name Smif.
My elder son toured UMass Amherst and Hampshire (respectively: far too big and far too Lovecraftian).
Please provide links.
(Just naming the webcomics is less than useful in this age of LLM-poisoned search engines that try not to let you find and follow links away from Google, Bing, etc.)
The Devil's Panties: https://thedevilspanties.com/
And of course XKCD: https://xkcd.com/
I also have a feed the recycles old Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County strips.
Minor correction: The "nameless American city" in QC is Northampton MA
O Roved Out by Alexis Flower: https://www.irovedout.com/
Not mentioned so far:
Lore Olympus — Modern take / retelling of some of the greek god mythos, focused mostly on Hades & Persephone romance. I love the way the author separated out the land of the gods (skyscrapers, social media, mobile phones, etc.) and the mortal realm (agrarian ancient Greece).
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures — Batman, but the massive adopted/found family side, rather than the crime fighting side.
False Knees — Animals being weird animals.
Dumbing Of Age — College relationship drama with occasional superheroes.
How to be a werewolf What is says on the tin. The running conflicts are flavours of how much of a problem people cause by substituting personal power for collective conflict resolution.
Sleepless Domain Using magical girl tropes to write horror. It's not clear anyone in the comic realizes it's horror. The art only realizes it's horror sometimes.
The webcomic (and print comic, too) Kill Six Billion Demons is fantastic.
It's basically...this girl kinda gets a key with the names of god in it crammed into her forehead, and she's transported to Throne and meets angels and devils and demiurges and learns shit and gets pretty badass. The artist knows a ton about world religions and philosophy, and they all sort of get mixed together to make the history of this universe. It's one of the best fantasy webcomics I've come across in 20 years of following webcomics.
I particularly like that the artist uses his concept art chops to redesign the look of all the main characters multiple times to show their growth. There's some characters where if I put their beginning design next to their most recent design and showed you, you wouldn't realize they were the same character.
Anyway, I can't rec this comic enough.
One warning...the first page or two made me go kinda "ehh" because it seems super stereotypical, but everything after that is stellar and the beginning is eventually lampshaded later on. So don't run off because of the first few pages.
Oh, and don't visit the bare domain name if you're just starting out, use the one above to start at the beginning, it's going into the final book and the latest pages are sometimes super-spoilery.
Gunnerkrigg court ( https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/ ) is the story of a young girl attending a sort of magic school very much unlike Hogwarts. Running from 2005, updated Mon-Wed-Fri, it has won several awards and the story is being also published on dead woods.
Freefall http://freefall.purrsia.com/ A space opera which is both highly entertaining and rich of philosophical questions. Updated also trice a week. The story proceeds quite slowly, started in 1998, the story has progressed few months.
Both were previously suggested in other comments on this blog.
+1 to Sleepless Domain. The author is fully aware that she's writing about child soldiers, within a culture that makes use of child soldiers.
Gil. A syndicated cartoon, now almost at the end of its run. Fun humour, by the same author as the completed cartoon Retail. (Retail is also slice-of-life horror. About life in the retail sector.)
R.K. Milholland (of Something*Positive) also does some of the cartoons for Popeye. Didn't know before I started following it that Olive Oyl was a character who started about 10 years before Popeye. Became a supporting character in Popeye's strip.
Dame Daffodil is a cartoon with superheroes and child soldiers. Manages to be more upbeat that Sleepless Domain.
It's been four years to the day since the last Wonderella cartoon. Pretty sure that the cartoon is over, but the author is still active and posting (in character) on xTwitter. For however long xTwitter lasts. Still lots of archives. Plus one of the best depictions of Jesus identifying as trans.
Gunnerkrigg Court is past 2800 cartoons and still going strong.
My morning list:
The Farside ( https://www.thefarside.com/ ). Mostly old stuff, but sometimes new things
Sluggy Freelance ( http://www.sluggy.com/ ). This has massively changed since the early days. It's still the same characters, but a lot darker.
Questionable Content you mentioned
Something Positive ( http://www.somethingpositive.net/ ).
C-A-D ( http://www.cad-comic.com/ ). Also massively changed from the early days. Basically rebooted a few years back.
Freefall ( http://freefall.purrsia.com/ ). Quirky scifi with an AI wolf and an alien Sqid.
XKCD, SMBC (you mentioned)
GPF ( http://www.gpf-comics.com/ ). Funny how a lot of these long running comics mutated over time into something more serious!
Dork Tower ( http://www.dorktower.com/ ). OK, this one hasn't changed much :-)
Lots of my regulars already mentioned so far (SMBC, xkcd, Oglaf, QC, etc.) Two that I haven't seen so far:
LLM-poisoned search engines Uh?
This one is still running - though I think it's approaching it's supposed end.
LINK: https://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic+index/
Lots of good ones listed so far, but Dork Tower http://www.dorktower.com/ is worth a read. Similar to QC in a lot of ways - it’s mostly a soap opera now, but with RPG / gaming content as the underlying thing which ties the characters together.
https://dresdencodak.com/
Ton of stuff mentioned here that I also read (QC, Kill 6 Billion Demons, SMBC, Gunnerkrigg Court).
Other ones I read:
Widdershins: delightful alternate-history Victorian England with magic . Well-developed characters and excellently written, comical in places too. More queer in places than you'd expect from a Victorian era.
Skin Deep: Mythological creatures hiding as humans in the modern day. But not just standard creatures--the author dives deep into folklore and mythology, populating the world (and background characters) with tons of well-thought-out details. The worldbuilding itself is excellent and the story, while a little slow at times, is well written.
Usual caveat to any webcomic applies: the art gets better over time.
Also worth noting that in this day and age I would very much not be able to keep up with webcomics were it not for most of them still having an RSS feed. I understand why that technology was seemingly deprecated but lament it nonetheless.
Lots of personal favorites already mentioned, but let me add two from the "obviously, the artist has no fear of vertical scrolling" school of webcomics. Both illustrated in beautiful stylized form, and both IMHO having surprisingly thoughtful moments. As both have very deep archives you can easily get lost in, I've pointed to particular favorite examples rather than their main sites.
SubNormality a.k.a. "the one with the Sphynx" https://viruscomix.com/page598.html
The Secret Knots https://thesecretknots.com/comic/glitches/
After a long hiatus, Chris Onstad has revived his long-dormant Achewood series on Patreon. I dareasy it's retained its sharp and pathos-ridden humor. While I'm happy to support his work (and I do) by subscribing on Patreon, unfortunately it doesn't have support for non-audio RSS so I need to remember to go check his new content now and then.
Longtime fans will recall that some of the best Achewood content was actually the non-comic essays written in the voice of one character or another. These are plentiful on the revival.
Already mentioned are Sluggy Freelance and How To Be A Werewolf, and I keep checking Schlock Mercenary just in case Howard starts something new. Snoopy's Doghouse and Calvin and Hobbes I'm probably looping on after so many years.
Not seen so far are Slack-Wyrm, a dragon who just wants to be left to get on with nothing much, Darths and Droids, the Star Wars films as RPG campaigns, and Scandanavia and the World which is sort of what it says on the tin.
Buttersafe - https://www.buttersafe.com/ If you like SMBC, you will like Buttersafe.
Everblue - https://www.everblue-comic.com/ From the About page: "In a world of endless ocean, a young shipwright named Luna meets an odd and cheerful drifter when he crashes his flying boat on her city's dock. When strange circumstances force Luna to leave her home, her once quiet life quickly takes a turn for the unpredictable. In an instant she is swept up in an adventure that will take her beyond the bounds of the charted world and into the Everblue, following the path of an ancient legend with the potential to change the world forever."
Went on a LONG hiatus, but has been updating again (irregularly) lately.
These seem to have stopped updating, but I keep them around in case they start back up again:
Edison Rex - https://www.edisonrex.net/comic/issue-1-cover
The Meek - https://www.meekcomic.com/
Red Meat seems to have come back to life, if somewhat sporadically ...
https://www.redmeat.com/max-cannon/fire-hose-ablutions/Content?oid=3492449
I read so, so many webcomics. Here are a few I actively look forward (or which are finished and I really enjoyed) to which I didn’t see mentioned above:
Wilde Life https://www.wildelifecomic.com/ Young man moves to rural town and meets various fantastical people and creatures, all of whom have their own anxieties. Not clear whether it’s “going anywhere” but im enjoying the ride.
Crow Time https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/crow-time/list?title_no=693372: The truths of the universe as seen by crows.
Slack Wyrm https://www.joshuawright.net/: Adventures of the world’s laziest dragon.
Val and Isaac https://val-and-isaac.tumblr.com/: Magic, science, mercenaries, hijinks. A vague hint of an ongoing story, but mostly hijinks.
Twistwood Tales https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/twistwood-tales/list?title_no=344740: Stories from a slightly twisted fairy tale like forest.
Stagtown https://www.webtoons.com/en/horror/stagtown/list?title_no=2532: Recently completed and impressively creepy small town horror tale.
Third Shift Society https://www.webtoons.com/en/supernatural/third-shift-society/list?title_no=1703: Paranormal detectives. On hiatus between seasons.
Atomic Robo https://www.atomic-robo.com/: Nikola Tesla’s robot science adventurer.
Lavender Jack https://www.webtoons.com/en/super-hero/lavender-jack/list?title_no=1410: Also recently completed, pulp adventuring in a fictional European nation in the first two decades of the 20th century.
Missing Monday, an inter-universal lesbian romance fantasy quest. Uses different styles/palettes for each world visited. Completed earlier this year; currently in rerun-with-extra-commentary mode (but the original archive is still up). https://www.missingmondaycomic.com/comic/chapter-01-page-01
The Guilded Age - https://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-1-cover/
Is a finished(!) epic fantasy comic starting out with your ragtag adventurer group doing adventurer stuff and gradually extending the scope to more of the world. Like many long-running comics it gets more serious with time.
If you like Order of the Stick, try this! If you don’t like OotS but read fantasy, try this anyway! Schucks, I’m a rotten salesman, I’ll try another pitch; at its best, as good as any book fantasy series.
Scandinavia and the World - https://satwcomic.com/
In addition to some of the others mentioned above:
Two Lumps: The Adventures of Eban and Snooch
Sequential Art
Sinfest
Spacetrawler - www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler is about a group of hapless humans that get dragged into a galactic political mess by a group of equally inept aliens. Each page usually ends with a chuckle, but can get quite serious. Currently nearing the end of its third long story arc with a nice deep archive.
Magellan - magellanverse.com is a sprawling superhero action/soap-opera with tons of characters that's been running for almost twenty years. Weekly-ish.
Basileus - www.basileuscomic.com is about a thief in a fantasy world. The art is unusual and the tone has much of a Dying-Earth vibe. On a long hiatus after the conclusion of the second storyline, but the creator's active elsewhere.
Fairmeadow - www.fairmeadowcomic.com is a self-described "post-epic fantasy drama" about a community of outsiders taking in a stranger and the ensuing cultural conflicts.
Also seconding the recommendation of Skin Deep mentioned above. So good and so pretty!
sinfest might be kind of transphobic for some
Yeah, if it's transphobic, include me out.
I am actually surprised nobody tought to mention The Order Of The Stick. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html) Yeah, I know it doesn't update much currently. But it's just one of the best webcomic (and story altogether) around.
Sadly, two of my favorites, Schlock Mercenary, as mentioned, and Skin Horse have finished their runs. Of note, Skin Horse is rerunning the entire strip on the U.S. site Gocomics, but there are MANY ads to endure on that site.
(On a completely different note: will there be a spoiler thread where we can discuss Season Of Skulls?)
Also, Sluggy Freelance is still running, but near the culmination of the story line, and for those who enjoy alien abduction/romance, there's still Trying Human, which updates irregularly.
I rather liked Irregular Webcomic: https://www.irregularwebcomic.net
Also fun is Darths & Droids, which reimagines the Star Wars saga as an RPG game (which explains JarJar as being created by one of the players eight-year-old sister who he brings along because he has to babysit here…). Rather nice as the player characters experience growth and maturation over the years. https://www.darthsanddroids.net
Gunnerkrigg Court is going strong, although IIRC the author is heading towards an ending. https://www.gunnerkrigg.com
Stand Still, Stay Silent is a lovely webcomic set in a post-apocalyptic world. Sadly the promised second expedition to the Silent World won't be happening, as the author converted to Christianity. https://sssscomic.com
The Secret Knots. It would be a disservice to both creators to say it's like if Borges had a webcomic, but the comparison has certainly been made. Mostly disconnected pieces, though a few short arcs.
Forward. Serial comic about the future, philosophy, utopia, and AI.
Selkie. "A long form story comic about a family created through adoption", but that's an understated way of putting it. Not actually about a selkie, that's just the main character's name. Sweet and sharp and (as it turns out) science fiction.
I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love. "A warmly pornographic fantasy saga". No yeah, seriously, this one is about as explicit as it's possible to get. Funny, and stunningly gorgeous art.
Seconding: Bad Space, KSBD, Spacetrawler, and False Knees.
adrian smith @ 32:
sinfest might be kind of transphobic for some
JReynolds @ 33:
Yeah, if it's transphobic, include me out.
It's gotten really weird lately, but I don't think it IS transphobic, seems to me to be parody of everything the reich wingnuts fear and right in their faces too. It's trying to be Ronda Satan's worst nightmare.
Two of my favorites, "Stand Still, Stay Silent" & "Schlock Mercenary" reached the end of their stories and are no longer being updated. Since then I haven't had as much time to keep up with many of the web comics I used to follow closely, and most of the ones I did follow (Sluggy Freelance, Girl Genius, OGLAF, Gunnerkrig Court, Freefall) have already been mentioned by others.
Plus there's one called General Protection Fault that I'm so far behind I don't know if I will EVER catch up. I don't know if that one's been mentioned.
Instead of reading web comics, I spend all my time here and over at Lawyers, Guns & Money Blog and updating Google News.
There are two that haven't been mentioned yet, and deserve it:
Bug martini - http://www.bugmartini.com/ - it's a bit on a hiatus due to spawning, but tends to update from time to time.
Savage chickens - http://www.savagechickens.com/
John Allinsons Tackleford / Bobbinsverse -Start at https://badmachinery.com/
I think its going to be obvious I really like this.
Lots of different comics, spread across the web. All in the same universe with a rotating cast of characters and genres. It's been going since the 90's and is in print as well. The characters age up and mature over the decades with the introduction of younger siblings and kids of the original cast.
Its great to watch the art evolve as well.
Bobbins - The original. 20 something northerners in the fictional town of Tackleford Bobbins Now -Reboot Scarygoround- https://scarygoround.com Things get a bit supernatural Bobbins Now -https://bobbins.horse/ A retcon to reintroduce characters Bad Machinery- https://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery/2016/04/11 Teen detectives and odd goings on Destroy History -https://www.destroyhistory.com/ Time travel, Beetles and an evil Cilla Black Giant Days - https://www.boom-studios.com/series/giant-days/ University setting
Charlotte Grote: Print & Web. Solver - Teen Detective is arrested for a crime she didn't commit and must help the police solve a different crime The great British Bump Off: A now 20 something Co-Detective has to solve a poisoning on a cookery baking competition.
And Finally Steeple https://steeple.church/ A New Curate comes to an isolated cornish Village, Where the Vicar fights Monsters. Theres also an active satanist cult who are more opposition than actively evil. She changes sides but still remains a relentless do gooder.
Spoiler thread for Season of Skulls
Yes, but not yet. Wait 'til it's been out three months?
Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content fame also did a post-Singularity story called Alice Grove. It's complete.
MegaTokyo started out as two US gamers taking a spontaneous trip to Japan and rapidly descended into one of the strangest metagames ever. It's very occasionally updated because of Fred Gallagher's health / family issues, but it's still going on.
Yet Another Fantasy Game Comic is another long running strip that's intermittently published. Rich Morris had me at "Bob the Beholder".
Punderworld is a fun take on the legend of Persephone and Hades, beautifully written and drawn by Linda Sejic. If you like dogs, I dare you not to fall in love with Cerberus.
And finally, Ari North's Always Human is a beautiful tale of two women working out if they love each other. There are body mods (an integral part to the story), off-world colonies, and an Orbital Beanstalk.
It would be redundant for me to also mention SMBC, Questionable Content, xkcd, Freefall, and Girl Genius - but yes, those are on my regular reading too.
It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m enjoying Grrl Power, starring a comic book fan who gets recruited into an actual superhero group. Anyone who’s stopped to think about it has realized there are a lot of logistical problems reconciling superhero stories with the real world, and that’s where the fun is. Punching supervillains doesn’t come up much.
Never mind the hardware in Freefall; I’d point aspiring science fiction authors there to learn about writing alien psychology. None of the robots thinks quite the way a human does; neither do Florence Ambrose or Sam Starfall. At least Florence grew up around humans. When Sam starts waxing philosophical we can see how differently Sqids see the world.
I’m still reading Wapsi Square but it’s a hugely long running story, over twenty years now, and I can’t in good faith suggest anyone jump in right now and expect to follow along. Start at the (crudely drawn) day one and archive binge for as long as interest lasts, sure.
Six Gun Mage is what it says on the tin, a web comic about a mage with a six-gun in a steampunk pseudo-Old-West setting. The story is a finite arc currently drawing close to a conclusion.
Long since ended but worth a look if you’re in the mood is A Miracle of Science, which now that I think of it should go over well with people who read Charlie’s stories.
Jennie Breeden, the artist for The Devil’s Panties, actually moved to my city a few years ago and I still haven’t run into her. I enjoy reading, though.
I really wish the artist for Sinfest hadn’t gone nuts, because early Sinfest was a lot of fun. I can’t tell if the artist is spoofing every silly fear the crank right has or if he has actually fallen into the Q cesspool.
Missing in action are Dumnestor’s Heroes and Get Medieval, both by an artist working under the name Irony-chan, and both lost to site recycling. I still hope to find an archive on the net somewhere because I only have a few saved examples of the stories. If anyone spots those in the wild, please let me know.
Definitely second (third/fourth) the recommendation of Questionable Comment. Jeph Jaques is doing some really interesting stuff with AI and how AI beings (mostly but not exclusively in human form) interact with humans. Most notably, his AI characters are as interesting and diverse as his humans -- possibly more so.
I'd recommend starting at the beginning; it's a fairly quick read. It starts off feeling a bit like that TV show "Friends", but quickly develops its own vibe, and is in no way derivative.
Forgot to mention Tom Gauld (https://www.tomgauld.com/), who publishes in many places, including republication of stuff that appeared elsewhere on Twitter (https://twitter.com/tomgauld). He combines scientific stuff with literary stuff in amusing and sometimes really insightful ways.
Ironically these days I’ve mostly moved to actual comics/graphic novels over webcomics, particularly the independents rather than the Marvel/DC stuff. Greg Rucka and the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips combo have been a delight. I’m also really liking the ongoing Rivers of London series.
About the only webcomics I regularly follow are the previously mentioned Oglaf, xkcd and Order of the Stick, all of whom are serious long runners nowadays. OOtS is still good, but very irregularly updated over the past couple of years. xkcd still manages to do particularly creative things with the form - the Gravity game was exceptional.
The only new ones I’ve picked up on at all have been poorly drawn lines and The Oatmeal, and they are mostly linked in social media as single panels like SMBC rather than followed.
〚 fixed links that got broken by "smart" quotes - mod 〛
Out Of Placers -- https://www.valsalia.com/
A crapsack world with humans (possibly from a failed colony ship, no explicit history is given in the comics) and aliens and possibly some kind of magic. The humans are very human, the aliens very much not human but there's a lot of getting along going on as well as not-getting-along. The main storyline concerns gender and belonging, as in what happens when you are suddenly magically transgendered and also change species?
Kass is a grunt who deserted from the army with his best bud Elim and ended up working for House Ivenmoth, a trading company run by Viracroix Salia, someone who could give the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork a run for their money.
After a run-in with an artifact of unknown origin Kass is now a female yinglet, an alien race which is very much on the lower rungs of the social order. He is still Kass inside though which makes for some interesting interactions with both humans and yinglets. Mistakes are being made by all sides. It's also quite funny.
Scott Sanford @ 45:
I really wish the artist for Sinfest hadn’t gone nuts, because early Sinfest was a lot of fun. I can’t tell if the artist is spoofing every silly fear the crank right has or if he has actually fallen into the Q cesspool.
Based on the earlier strips I still think it's the former, but every once in a while I'm like WTF dude?
Questionable Contents. The first time I saw that was over 15 years ago. Then I went back a couple of years ago and read all the strips thru one month. Somehow lost me since robots arch got introduced. I preferred it being a bit more small-scale.
I've got a complete saved archive of Get Medieval and also as-complete-as-they-could-be archives of Irony-chan's incomplete/unfinished comics (Dumnestor's Heroes, Knowledge Is Power, The Lonely Booth Babes, The Prince and the Pauper, The Interstellar Tea House). What are the ethical issues of distributing the works of somebody who abandoned the webcomics world without saying good-bye ten years ago?
Thank you for this thread-- many of my favorites are mentioned (OotS, Girl Genius, Wilde Life, Stand Still Stay Silent and more), and I am excited about the many suggestions!
Two more suggestions: The Glass Scientists, a wonderful take on Jekyll and Hyde and more at theglassscientists.com/
Narbonic, Shaenon Gerrity's corporate mad science comic which ran 2002-2006 at narbonic.com
So much great stuff! My current reads are QC (Jeph has moved to Halifax and I've just returned, so hope to
stalkmeet him one of these days!), XKCD, and OOTS.Looks like Daughter of the Lilies ( https://www.daughterofthelilies.com/ ) might actually be restarting. Interesting post-civilization/magic-comes-back webcomic, interrupted after ten chapters some time ago by life and stuff.
Also, if we're recommending finished webcomics...Digger ( https://diggercomic.com/ ). It very deservedly won a Hugo, and if you like fantasy, you'll like this. Sorry Moz, wombats don't get cooler than Digger, full stop.
Back in the unfinished aisle, Dan Pirarro, creator of Bizarro, is trying his hand at a web comic: Peyote Cowboy ( https://peyotecowboy.net/ ). It's a surreal western. Definitely surreal.
On the syndicated side, I enjoy Harry Bliss' Bliss ( https://store.harrybliss.com/bliss-cartoons/ ). Wry single-panel cartoons from a guy who admits he regularly microdoses (which is why he says he ended up doing the art for Steve Martin's cartoon autobiography).
Based on the earlier strips I still think it's the former, but every once in a while I'm like WTF dude?
I'd like to think he's sending up the cranks, but Poe's Law applies.
What artist's intent, if any, should we ascribe to strips such as TransGenders! or My Gender is Complicated?
I've got a complete saved archive of Get Medieval and also as-complete-as-they-could-be archives of Irony-chan's incomplete/unfinished comics (Dumnestor's Heroes, Knowledge Is Power, The Lonely Booth Babes, The Prince and the Pauper, The Interstellar Tea House). What are the ethical issues of distributing the works of somebody who abandoned the webcomics world without saying good-bye ten years ago?
Bless you! ...and I don't know. I'd ask her if I had a contact address. That's a good question.
Looks like Daughter of the Lilies ( https://www.daughterofthelilies.com/ ) might actually be restarting...
Also, if we're recommending finished webcomics...Digger ( https://diggercomic.com/ ).
I thought of Daughter of the Lilies later too; I've enjoyed it and I'm willing to accept the author's irregular schedule. Some readers might not.
My quick list of recommended finished web comics, in no particular order, most of which are already mentioned:
Alice Grove from Jeph Jacques,
Schlock Mercenary,
A Miracle of Science,
Digger, and
Nukees - this last one may be the only one not already mentioned. It starts as a slice-of-life tale in the nuclear engineering program at Berkeley and gets progressively stranger. Highly recommended, if that's your thing. Readers of Schlock Mercenary will already know Gav.
Honorable mention for Keychain of Creation, which scratches much the same itch as Daughter of the Lilies. It's probably even more rewarding for a reader who's familiar with the RPG Exalted, which I'm not, but the story doesn't suffer for it; everything is sufficiently explained by context or footnotes. Unfortunately it had to end early due to medical issues with the artist's hand.
Today's is absolutely GREAT!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/
Maybe from a very dark webcomic, except it's true ... eeuuwww.
Insane fascist front in Ireland - really nasty stuff, here, I'm afraid.
Most of the webcomics I like have already appeared, so I will focus on those that have not.
Sister Clare. A queer webcomic, very much oriented to gender alternative people. The first years were crazy and fluffy about a weird nunnery, but a new writer made it deep and with a strong message. So strong that it needs a ton of short stories as support material. So do not neglect the missing moments. Big time sink if going from the beginning. https://www.sisterclaire.com/comic/
God Slave. The Egyptian gods are real and Set is trying to get free. A young girl becomes his slave/priest and has problems adapting. Great artistic style. https://www.godslavecomic.com/
PhD. The ultimate in-joke for academics. It probably helped me not to go there after my post-doc. https://phdcomics.com/
The only webcomics I have bought the paper books are Girl Genius (I even bought the novels) and Kill Six Billion Demons. So those are the only ones I have actually paid money for.
You're scott_sanford at Dreamwidth, right? Get Medieval happens to have a not-really-infringing option I can tell you about.
As for contact information, the cartoonist is still blogging at ironychan.tumblr.com, just not about comics. (I don't know how much help that might be.)
Rice boy !
https://rice-boy.com/
The author has 4 webcomics on his site, one ongoing, the other three done.
I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love.
well that's my ahegao needs dealt with for the next couple of decades, thanks
Sadly, Sinfest has gone off the deep end. Bitter Karella of the Midnight Pals did a deep dive into the archives to try and understand how this nonsense came about, but at this point Tats has all but gone mask-off. I was following the drama via thewebcomicsreview.com for a time, but even they got tired of it after his Patreon was banned for being too transphobic.
In the meantime, I'm still reading:
Dresden Codak
Dumbing of Age
FoxTrot (still kicking!)
Gunnerkrigg Court (may be wrapping up soon?)
Kill Six Billion Demons (also wrapping up soon!)
Oglaf
Penny Arcade (out of pure habit)
SMBC (of course!)
xkcd
I've got dozens more that I mean to catch up on, someday.
The Perry Bible Fellowship https://pbfcomics.com/comics/ might appeal if you like SMBC. It doesn't update very regularly but good when it does. I think this one is still my favourite.
Love this SMBC toon showing that God is also subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
"We cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy at the same time"
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/focus-3
God can be all knowing and all powerful - just not at the same time.
Tiger Tiger is a very good low-fantasy age-of-sail story about an heiress who impersonates her brother to steal his merchant ship so that she can study sea sponges in a far off land. It's fun, it's stylish, it's queer, get it here.
Pia and the Little Tiny Things has lovely drawings and although it is quite new I'm sure it's going to go to some interesting places.
Subnormality tells lovely short stories.
Evan Dahm's comics are great.
Blake @ 65:
Sadly, Sinfest has gone off the deep end. Bitter Karella of the Midnight Pals did a deep dive into the archives to try and understand how this nonsense came about, but at this point Tats has all but gone mask-off. I was following the drama via thewebcomicsreview.com for a time, but even they got tired of it after his Patreon was banned for being too transphobic.
That link only goes to a single Twitter post. There doesn't seem to be a thread ... but I'm not a twitter user, so it might be there & I just don't know how to find it.
I can't follow Bitter Karella's deep dive, so I'll just leave Sinfest with WTF dude? !!
Okay, all the ones I follow have been recommended - Girl Genius (why, yes, Phil is a personal friend, so I've been following it since Phil and Dixie), QC (thanks, btw - here I'd been under the impression it was a collegiate town in Canada), Gunnerkrieg Court, XKCD, Oglaf.
Also, thanks for several that look interesting. I have a problem with some where the cartooning is, well, amateur (in the bad sense of the word), and "edgy" (as in drawing people who have sharp physical edges)... and in cartoons where the women all have each boob larger than their head. Oh, and are superheroes who wear spike heels.
One thing - https://peyotecowboy.net/, the way it starts? I'm waiting for them to find themselves naked, on the planet Mars, looking for four-armed green Barsoomians....
With the decline of local newspapers in recent decades syndicated and political cartoonists have been struggling. I subscribe to: https://www.cagle.com/cartoons/
Not a Web comic, but I hope I'll be forgiven for presenting it here rather than in an older blog entry where nobody will see it. (It relates to Charlie's discussion of travel times in "Season of Skulls".)
With that caveat, let me link you to a geospatial model of the Roman empire, supported by decent scholarship, that lets you figure out travel times and itineraries:
https://orbis.stanford.edu/
Lots of other good stuff there if you want to write a Roman historical story, but if you account for differences in cultures and technologies, this can help you estimate travel times for writing set in other periods.
Empowered by Adam Warren, a NSFW story about a superheroine with a very fickle supersuit, who lives in a fucked up kinda lovecraftian kinda apocalyptic version of the real world. It is being serialized in a webcomic format, and has just reached the last of the published volumes.
Devil's Candy, which takes place in a school in an underworld (hades? hell? I'm not sure) populated with various types of demons, who inexplicably live in a more or less functioning society with more or less modern technology. It's also really damn cute.
Out-of-Placers. An interesting fantasy/sci-fi story.
SubNormality. The one with more text bubbles than art, and it has a lot of art. Look, it's SubNormality. Read it.
I’ve been reading QC for the past month or so. As noted above, there’s a huge cast of characters, but you can use the Google- thing when it gets confusing. The humans seem all oddly similar to me, but the AIs are more interesting— very diverse in size, disposition, and color. Takes some effort to get oriented in the QC world, but worth it, IMO.
I'm not reading Second Empire right now because it's been complete for a while - a huge (714 installments plus appendixes) and very pretty epic story of the first Dalek civil war, created with 3D modelling software and a lot of care. The Doctor does not make an appearance, but there are occasional references to unidentified blue box sightings. The look and feel is reminiscent of the long Dalek serial in TV21 back in the sixties, and there are a lot of fun little jokes, especially if you keep an eye on what's going on in the background of scenes. A lot of it can also be seen on line animated.
http://www.mechmaster.co.uk/cg-lair/daleks/secemphome.htm
Another one I like is Flaky Pastry, a story of flatmates in a "fantasy plus SF" world. It went on hold at the end of last year due to other commitments, but I hope it'll be back eventually.
http://flakypastry.runningwithpencils.com/
I've been enjoying Rhapsodies for a number of years: https://rhapsodies.wpmorse.com/
The humans seem all oddly similar to me
They do seem to have converged in looks a bit from a few years ago.
You're scott_sanford at Dreamwidth, right?
I am! Feel free to drop me a message.
That link only goes to a single Twitter post. There doesn't seem to be a thread ... but I'm not a twitter user, so it might be there & I just don't know how to find it. I can't follow Bitter Karella's deep dive, so I'll just leave Sinfest with WTF dude? !!
I only got one Twit too so I went looking for the article I remembered reading long ago. It turns out that "Sinfest what happened" is so common it's Google's default fill-in...
There's a Reddit thread. Also a page on the Bad Webcomics Wiki (self explanatory, I guess) which goes into detail about the eras. Over on TVTropes there's even a page discussing which particular strip was the "no, that's too much" moment for various users.
I've barely scratched the surface; Sinfest was a good comic for the first 4000 or so strips and had lots of readers who enjoyed it, including me.
I'd just like to nitpick and point out that the search engine providers poisoned themselves before LLMs showed up.
And don't overlook Jesus and Mo, the Eric and Ernie of theological debate, not to mention the Barmaid.
I've been reading Kill Six Billion Demons, Gunnerkrigg Court, Girl Genius and Skin Deep, all noted and linked above. Also Mansion of E, which is a 20-year adventure story morphed into an exercise in extreme world-building; I'm now following it not to find out it ends, but to understand the context of how it started.
KSBD is interesting, apart from its innate brilliance, as a contrast between prose and graphic stories. KSBD is dialogue rich but simply doesn't have enough space to explain all that happens, even when it's plot-relevant. Things that a prose story would clear up in a few paragraphs remain implied or unrevealed, and the metaphysics vary enough from RL that almost anything could have happened. A generation from now, when the KSBD web-sites with all the reader discussion and author Q&A have gone, the printed books will be even more mysterious and debatable. That probably positions them as academic literature.
Gynoid AI thriller https://www.androidblues.com/
Thank you. I'm really enjoying Godslave (though, come on, ancient Egyptians all had bare breasts...)
Shlock Mercenary - it starts out your fairly standard space mercenary comic with Dad jokes, but very rapidly plunges into hard sci-fi and some really original ideas. It's no longer updating but the archives run for about 20 years.
And one that I haven't seen mentioned here, which I really liked for its heart and wonderful monster design, is Abby Howard's The Last Halloween. Small child finds herself lost out in the world on a Halloween night when everyone's personal monsters are hunting them down for the prize of immortality. It too has not updated in a while, but apparently she plans to return to Book 2 once she's finished making her game, Scarlet Hollow. Book 1 is complete, though, and it absolutely won my heart.
Another dead one, sadly with only a short archive is The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: a cynical alcoholic version of Wonder Woman, it sounds like it's going to be a mess of cliches, but the author has a streak of sizzlingly wicked humour mixed up with the kind of puns banned by the Geneva Convention. And while the archives aren't vast, they do lead you on the only thing better, which are the author's Tweets (which I hope they remember to take with them to another platform, as they are not someone who will take much of Musk's inceltastic crap)
Awful hospital: seriously the worst ever is pretty good. Has interesting world building, though the author seems to be neglecting it currently. https://bogleech.com/awfulhospital/archive
For everyone enjoying Questionable Content I suggest a look at the recommendations for John Allison's work @ comments 16 and 42; John Allison's Scary Go Round webcomic was a very big influence on Questionable Content early on.
Awful hospital: seriously the worst ever is pretty good.
I got pointed to that by someone who'd included a lawyer-avoiding cameo of the Awful Hospital in one of his stories.
It's not really my thing. I can see that some people like it, but it doesn't speak to me.
Alas, The Nib is shutting down but it's provided top-shelf (admittedly US-centric) satirical webcomics for ten years now. Most people would be familiar with Mister Gotcha, but there are plenty of gems to be found there.
If you like four-panel comedy with occasional heinous puns, try Inky Rickshaw.
I follow Freefall, Grrl Power, PS238 (when it updates!), Questionable Content, and Scandinavia and the World. Every few weeks I glance at Dresden Codak or XKCD.
You evil person.
Now I'm addicted.
https://inkyrickshaw.com/comic/bad-roommate/ you mean?
Yes, indeed. Within an hour or so of the post, I read the archive and bookmarked it.
Behind the Gifs takes animated images found on the internet and improves them with hand-drawn framing stories. Currently hiatusing, but has a hefty archive.
Seconding or thirding Darths & Droids, taking screenshots from the Star Wars films and reimagining them as an RPG campaign. And not following the original script.
"Apocamon The Book of Revelation, in Manga format, as God intended. Clearly Patrick Farley is going to burn in the eternal lake of fire for all eternity, and so am I for enjoying this."
This is a great comic. Unfortunately the artist abandoned the effort 8? years ago. It's only half done.
Are we allowed one-off panels?
"Edmund Finney's Quest to Find the Meaning of Life" has long stopped updating. And a lot of it wasn't my cup of tea. But I love this one on characters with meaningful nicknames:
http://eqcomics.com/2011/07/08/the-patrons/
"KSBD is interesting, apart from its innate brilliance, as a contrast between prose and graphic stories" :
I have downloaded all the images, and I am trying to download the relevant attached texts, with the idea of trying to do a (personal use) e-book of it.
"Stand Still, Stay Silent is a lovely webcomic set in a post-apocalyptic world. Sadly the promised second expedition to the Silent World won't be happening, as the author converted to Christianity. https://sssscomic.com "
I'm not quite sure of your meaning : there are 2 expeditions (even if the site is not very clear about it)
first expedition : http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1
second expedition : http://sssscomic.com/comic2.php?page=1
My apologies. I brain farted — thought one number, wrote another.
For any who might have missed it, Charlie exists in the QC-verse.
How has nobody mentioned Seed yet?
https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/seed/list?title_no=1480
It is a cyberpunk story about a teenage girl who is shocked to discover that the chatbot she was wasting time with is actually a seed AGI traumatising her class mates based on her idle gossip. Then she meets some of the engineers who built the thing, and decides to get involved and learn more and do better. But her role in the big picture is not what she thinks.
Gorgeous art.
Accurate depictions of how AI is completely unlike anything biological, and a unique take on a futile attempt to solve the alignment problem.
I am definitely reading Seed!
Ryan North still doing good things at Dinosaur Comics, within his self-imposed visual framework. - https://www.qwantz.com/index.php
And the site that gave us Sealioning - https://wondermark.com/
So, I bookmarked "Questionable Content", and a thought occurred to me ...
Do any of y'all organize your bookmarks alphabetically?
It varies. Those webcomics that are posted automatically on a regular schedule get sorted by update time of day; the rest, alphabetically.
I put the comics I read into my RSS reader if they have a feed.
Otherwise (Freefall, Forward) I sometimes remember to check, sometimes remember a while later that I haven’t checked recently.
I may have missed them, or they may have been covered in earlier posts, but
A Girl and her Fed https://www.agirlandherfed.com/1.1.html
Narbonic (someone mentioned Skin Horse, also by Shaenon Garrity) http://narbonic.com/
For any who might have missed it, Charlie exists in the QC-verse.
I do remember that comic, though I didn't think to mention it earlier. I'm glad someone did.
QC-verse Charlie must know a lot of interesting AIs. I wonder what he's writing.
QC-verse Charlie must know a lot of interesting AIs. I wonder what he's writing.
Paranormal romance, obviously. (Werewolf porn, to be precise.)
seed is great
neuromancer vibe
Can recommend three items on here that haven't been mentioned: 1. Cat and Girl - one of the oldest running webcomics (started in 1999) and consistent in quality. Political, but hasn't gone off the deep end. https://catandgirl.com/
Chaos Life - a long running queer comic about a gay and asexual couple. Heartwarming. It's been around since 2011!
Pixie Trix universe of comics, mostly drawn by Gisèle Lagacé, frequently naughty comix drawn in an Archie style (she has done some actual Archie comics as well. There are multiple series on here - most are complete. I recommend starting with Menage a 3 https://pixietrixcomix.com/pixie-trix-comix
Side note: before she was a cartoonist Lagacé was in a band. One album is on youtube: https://youtu.be/ZD6hb3fkpOk
Paranormal romance, obviously. (Werewolf porn, to be precise.)
You and Carrie Vaughn will do great panels together. :-)
I didn't mention it; no fantasy or paranormal stuff, though lots of cats. I'll second Chaos Life and even link to it.
Topic picked specifically because I haven't yet been able to figure out how to cram a reasonable explanation for lycanthropy into the Laundry universe.
Vampires kinda-sorta work logically (following on from Krantzberg Syndrome, aka Metahuman-Associated Dementia). So do unicorns (in a gross and icky ain't-parasitology-cool kind of way). Zombies are a given (hello, Residual Human Resources! Later on, hello Harry[1]!) But lycanthropy is just plain weird. I mean, there's the conservation of mass problem for starters, not to mention the bone-breakage, and the whole lunar cycle thing? About the only part I can reasonably see working is the profound silver allergy. And do not get me started on the bullshit-and-thoroughly-debunked 1950s alpha/beta/omega wolf pack dynamics and the incredibly sexist/racist biological determinism. Never mind the bonkers omegaverse subgenre (which is sufficiently out there that TVTropes of all places banned it).
As it happens I have lately begun thinking my way into a possible fourth New Management novel which might approach the subject of lycanthropy asymptotically, but as it's a William Burroughs/Narnia crossover ...
[1] You met Harry -- briefly -- in "The Labyrinth Index". There will be more Harry. Lots more Harry. (Harry = "Harryhausen", after the famous animator's animated skeletons.)
The conservation of mass isn't a huge problem. A few modern male wolves weigh up to 80 Kg, and some dogs weigh over 100 Kg, so even a 100 Kg wolf wouldn't be physiologically implausible. Also, there are plenty of modern humans lighter than 60 Kg, and it was the norm in many societies until recently. I agree about the rest of the issues.
I have only once seen a wolf in the wild, but I doubt it was much over 30 Kg. If I had seen a 100 Kg one, I definitely would have thought "werewolf!" :-)
A William Burroghs/Narnia crossover. Um, er, I suppose it could have been worse, a Charles Bukowski/Narnia crossover...
Ummmmm....Lycanthropy.
What's so hard?
The skin-turn is a variant on a glamour. The body stays human, just looks inhuman.
As for what else could go on under said glamour...
You might find some non-fiction inspiration in Neil Whitehead's Dark Shamans. What he found could cover a host of sins, from the (real) kanaima he studied to the (legendary) Navajo wolves and the bear doctors of the California Indians. The kaniama or something like them belong in the Laundryverse anyway, IMHO.
Or you could have yet another human parasite, this one with a loony activity or reproductive cycle. The parasites generate the glamour when active.
Or you could have a Laundryverse parasite that works on canids, instead of on humans, and the humans are killed for blood magic reasons. You've got all those London foxes to work with, after all. A bit of Korean fox magic slides in, and Bobbies are their lunchables. You and Aaronovitch could have a throw down over talking foxes.
Or you could have a xenosophont that really is shape shifter-ish and living as a commensal in cities. They snuck in via the shadow roads. The Mimic movie franchise might help with this.
Hopefully what you're thinking has nothing to do with any of the above. Feel free to swipe any of this, of course.
Full Moon trigger:
At the time of the full moon:
The Earth is (almost) directly between the Moon and the Sun.
If there were a deep pit on the Moon, in the middle of the side that faces us, during a full moon might be the only time the bottom is illuminated (yes, I know the Moon's orbit isn't perfect, so incorporate that fact...)
During a full Moon is the only time the "east" and "west" (Earth facing) sides are illuminated at the same time.
We "know" that there were ancient visitors to Earth in the past (in the LV), so why couldn't they have left something on the Moon that triggers something on Earth during a full moon.
Maybe some sort of phased-array antenna.
Though that would beg the question of why it's only humans. Probably the same thing which allows them to do magic.
Hm. BLUE HADES were-squid?
If there were a deep pit on the Moon, in the middle of the side that faces us, during a full moon might be the only time the bottom is illuminated (yes, I know the Moon's orbit isn't perfect, so incorporate that fact...)
That's alarmingly plausible as an explanation for the timing, and I shall make a note of it! I don't think it'll fit the novel I've got planned, but it would make sense in another context ...
Yeah, the orbit will mess you up. Lunar libration for a start- the nodding backwards and forward motion which means that, even from the Earth, more than 50% of the Moon can be mapped.
Nice idea though.
Charlie Stross @ 115:
[1] You met Harry -- briefly -- in "The Labyrinth Index". There will be more Harry. Lots more Harry. (Harry = "Harryhausen", after the famous animator's animated skeletons.)
Did I miss something in the texts that should have alerted me to Harry being a skeleton?
As it happens I have lately begun thinking my way into a possible fourth New Management novel which might approach the subject of lycanthropy asymptotically, but as it's a William Burroughs/Narnia crossover ...
Better than what I thought of, the Arthur Conan Doyle/Robert Anton Wilson crossover: Schlock Homes and his Were-Dachshund (say it out loud), in a play on The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Irene Adler as the Prima Illuminata. Magically foxy foxes in a subplot as a nod to RAW's career at Playboy.
Ayup.
Orbiting mind control devices put up by members of some minority obsessed with world domination? I don't think that's ever been done...(/sarcasm)
Topic picked specifically because I haven't yet been able to figure out how to cram a reasonable explanation for lycanthropy into the Laundry universe.
And that's an omission that someone like young Bob could pick up on, if young Bob lifted his head out of the computer systems for a few hours.
Pretty much every culture around the world has people-turning-into-animals stories, frequently involving a local apex predator. It sure sounds as if something is going on.
Physical transformations do sound challenging. But glamours are very common in the Laundry-verse. Also, we've seen plenty of entanglement gimmicks; it seems plausible that there would be a whole family of generally similar arrangements for a human mind and an animal mind to influence each other.
Some of those arrangements, for a long term lycanthropic lifestyle, might also need some way for the inactive body to go dormant. It's important for a were-puma in Cambridge, where a large cat would attract attention; not so important for a were-shark in Micronesia, where any available shark body will do.
The Laundry must have someone in Northern Ireland anyway, right? Quoth the Kongs Skuggjo (c. 1250CE) on Irish history: "[Saint Patrick] became very wroth, and prayed God that he might avenge it on them by some judgment, that their descendants might forever remember their disobedience. And great punishment and fit and very wonderful has since befallen their descendants; for it is said that all men who come from that race are always wolves at a certain time, and run into the woods and take food like wolves; and they are worse in this that they have human reason, for all their cunning, and such desire and greed for men as for other creatures. And it is said that some become so every seventh year, and are men during the interval. And some have it so long that they have seven years at once, and are never so afterwards."
SS
Did you intend to put a link in with your "Saint Patrick" quote there - & it broke?
⟦ That appears to be a standard use of square brackets to indicate the text wasn't in the original quote - mod ⟧
To paraphrase Scarfolk Council, "for further information, please re-read."
Only because Dilbert Musk doesn't have a working mind-control system.
Turning into animals. Glamour. Y'know, what would work in the LV is for something to take over/trigger something in the victim's mind, and they exude a glamour so that they look like (creature), and act to some degree like one... while remaining in human physical form.
Other ingredients: something to do with one of those dodgy bioweapon labs like the ones on englishrussia that were "closed down" by everyone going home one night and just not coming in the next day, only in south-eastern Europe (of course), which had been working on combining the characteristics of things like lyssavirus, Plasmodium falciparum, and Toxoplasma gondii (dog version). And human wetware already supports monthly cron jobs. Quite likely it's a similar kind of thing to making equoids, something you're Not Supposed To Do that people have been trying off and on to slip an instance of past observation for centuries.
Charlie Stross @ 128:
To paraphrase Scarfolk Council, "for further information, please re-read."
Well, I've read all of them multiple times, and I remember Harry being mentioned in several of them ... every time Bob has to sign out a weapon from the armory?
Right now they're all packed up in different boxes from my move, so it will be a while before I get back to it. Gotta' get my book shelves out of storage.
Different Harry.
There's Harry the armourer, and there's a thing that is introduced as "Harry" in (i think) The Labyrinth Index.
A scene where a quick visit to see Brain is almost fatally interrupted by a new undead robot security guard iirc. It's been a couple of years.
Turning into animals. Glamour. Y'know, what would work in the LV is for something to take over/trigger something in the victim's mind, and they exude a glamour so that they look like (creature), and act to some degree like one... while remaining in human physical form.
Since no one's taken the bait on Kanaima...
Imagine, if you will, a ritual, in fantasy form enabled by an LV parasite or not, in which the victim is killed in a terrorizing, violating, dehumanizing way, robbed of their humanity and left to die. This is done to "gain mana" for the perpetrator in the LV vernacular. This is the sanitized version of kanaima. See link at bottom for a less sanitized quote.
In a SFF setting, whether a LV parasite drives them to do it or they're psychopathic sorcerer terrorists, they present as werewolves, and use this to terrorize their victim.
What's with the full moon thing? Well, it's part of the werewolf mythos now, thanks to the movies. So it can be part of the ritual. And it's easier to see things in moonlight than on a dark night. One human may find this setting useful for ritually hunting and destroying another. In other words, there's no need for it to be a physical trigger.
https://sitareist.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/an-archaic-form-of-biopower-of-the-shamanism-in-guyana-dark-shamans-kanaima-and-the-poetics-of-violent-death-by-neil-l-whitehead/
If we are covering naughty comics how about the Tales of Gnosis College (a chronically depressed gentleman with a mad science fetish starts writing comics about a little Midwestern college in the days of the Universal Vaccine, negotiable research ethics, and a surprising number of unexplained disappearances) https://eroticmadscience.com/tales-of-gnosis-college-comix/
I finished "Seed". Utterly amazing.
Harry the armourer in the first few books is emphatically not a Ray Harryhausen animated skeleton (viz. an eater-possessed Residual Human Resource that has been de-fleshed but is held together using electric motors and armatures, and has been miked up/given a PA system so it can shriek dalek-style imprecations at people who don't get out of the way). Used as guards on military bases under the New Management, because it's kind of difficult to kill a guard who's already dead.
Am currently toying with the idea of the NM deploying autogibbets, i.e. gibbeted felons who have been reanimated and shamble around shopping centres in their cages, while a recorded voice-over recounts their dreadful crimes and their final moments.
Toys "R" Us was still in business as late as 2018, so there could plausibly be a gibbeted junior shoplifter outside the main entrance of a toyshop in one scene (possibly a response to the Lost Boys' repeated raids on Hamleys).
In other news, interminable discussions about an (eventual) Laundry Files comic/graphic novel continue, although don't expect to be able to buy it this year.
dpb @ 133:
Different Harry.
There's Harry the armourer, and there's a thing that is introduced as "Harry" in (i think) The Labyrinth Index.
A scene where a quick visit to see Brain is almost fatally interrupted by a new undead robot security guard iirc. It's been a couple of years.
Ok, sounds like there IS something in the text I missed. Not uncommon; one of the reasons I do read them again (and again ...) beyond them being quite entertaining.
Charlie Stross @ 137:
Harry the armourer in the first few books is emphatically not a Ray Harryhausen animated skeleton (viz. an eater-possessed Residual Human Resource that has been de-fleshed but is held together using electric motors and armatures, and has been miked up/given a PA system so it can shriek dalek-style imprecations at people who don't get out of the way). Used as guards on military bases under the New Management, because it's kind of difficult to kill a guard who's already dead.
Sounds like I missed a HUGE clue somewhere in the text 🙃
And (@ 138) I look forward to an "(eventual) Laundry Files comic/graphic novel". I'm assuming YOU will have final say in the characters appearance. It'll be great fun to see how the way I imagine the characters stacks up against ...
I kind of visualize "Pinky & Brain" looking like the two guys from "Myth Busters", although I haven't figured out in my own mind which is which?
PS:
Toys "R" Us was still in business as late as 2018, so there could plausibly be a gibbeted junior shoplifter outside the main entrance of a toyshop in one scene (possibly a response to the Lost Boys' repeated raids on Hamleys).
I need an item & searching online found a "local" store has it & their "see locations" widget brings up a Google Map of the regional big shopping mall complex.
I noticed there's a Toys "R" Us shown on the map. It's apparently a department inside of a Macy's Department Store ... still serving as a Residual CORPORATE Resource!
So maybe Corporations ARE people too ??? 🙃
Throwing this in here in case you haven't seen it, because I'm curious what the NM would do with this technology. Apparently researchers have been able to reconstruct an play a song based on neural brain recordings. (Pink Floyd, if you're wondering.)
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002176
I missed the clue in Labyrinth Index too. Fortunately, Kindle has a search function. Check out Chapter 3 when you get it unpacked...
It was not, in fact, a room temperature superconductor - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7 Not entirely surprising.
Did my message about Get Medieval get through?
Did my message about Get Medieval get through?
It did! Bless you! It gives me hope the rest of her webcomics still exist too.
Perennial Aurora Award winner It Never Rains features an unintended time traveller whose future self seems no less confused about what is going on.
Say, one last webcomic question. I read Doonesbury every day, but a while back the flashback page stopped loading the retro comics. It doesn't seem to matter what browser I use. Does anyone know a way to see the 'Nx5 years ago today' comics?
What happens if you go via the Gocomics site? https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury
waldo @ 148:
What happens if you go via the Gocomics site? https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury
Added to my web comics list. I didn't realize it was back.
What happens if you go via the Gocomics site? https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury
As far as I see, the Gocomics site doesn't link to the Flashbacks page at all.
Although I recently did notice they had the Luann Againn reruns.