SUNDAY WEBCOMICS

One of the continuing matters of interest here at SUNDAY WEBCOMICS is the problem of creating an Online Webcomic while lacking the basic skills to do so, the ability to do any kind of artwork at all for example.  The creator of Artless Bart sidesteps that issue entirely, by simply posting storyboards with dialog and a description of what you would see if there was a picture there.

Returning to the pure SUNDAY WEBCOMICS art style, The Corpus Squid is pretty impressive.  Make that very impressive.  You should have heard the sound I made when I saw it.

Also pretty remarkable is the passive-agressive opening panel of Guards of Anarchy, and the way the pages become so gigantic as to be impossible to even see all of.

Because these are mostly pretty brief and I know you like to sit for hours trying to decipher inscrutable scribbly online webcomics here also is the most literally inscrutable Online Webcomic I have seen in some length of time, the brief and abortive Life in the Wild.

Go and do likewise.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

UPDATE!!! - The perpetrator of A Cannonade of Hogwash has generously advised me of its new location.  He continues to accumulate a body of work of a remarkable consistency and I don't feel that my original assessment, "I know this guy is trying to be 'ironic' but I don't think he's quite making it," quite does it justice.  I don't think I was really into full swing with this project at the time.

We start this week's bumper assortment of SUNDAY WEBCOMICS with Blunderclod! by Susan Marie, a superhero parody in which instead of being heroic and good at everything the hero is inept and clumsy.  Instead.  I have selected it primarily because it is an example of the old-timey "ball nose" style of amateur cartooning, which I haven't seen in years.  Nowadays budding cartoonists have so many sources from which to copy that they rarely opt for ball-nose, which to my mind lends an especially untainted quality to this strip.

Bearly There is a diverse collection of gag strips and the one to which I have linked is especially outstanding in its SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy qualities.  Who among us could have come up with this?  Only Rob.

And in conclusion, P.S. is two comic strips in one.  Except for the very last one which is the one I linked to, which strangely does not actually contain the "P.S." which is the conceptual basis of the comic, the idea of which seems to me to have a comic and then another comic as a Post Script, hence the title.  That makes it extra SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy, the final strip betraying its fundamental concept like that.

Whee.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

I have been getting comments from cartoonists whose work I featured in recent editions of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  Their confusion as to my intentions is understandable, as I am not always certain of them myself.  All I will say is that the purpose of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is to present works which are uniquely creative in unexpected ways.  To the artists, I say - you are doing a webcomic and I am not, so that automatically puts you a cut above me.

There are a number of features I look for in a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC which can't be found in any other medium.  I love apology pages, where they write a long explanation for why there is no strip.  I love it when there is an explanation of the strip which takes longer to read than it does to read the actual comic.  When browsing webcomic lists I check out the ones that are discontinued or on hiatus because they often end with an apology, an explanation, or a promise that the strip positively will continue, that they will absolutely be back better than ever before you know it, and then I see it's dated May 2008.

The cartoonist who created Unlimited Evil integrated the abrupt end of the strip in a very pleasing way, and the artistic technique of the entire production is a great combination of scratchy original artwork and flashy digital processing that unites opposite ends of the quality scale.

The perpetrator of Childproof Epsilon also stays "in character" in the final strip, presenting it in exactly the same way as all the preceding work.  This strip is an exceptionally impressive solution to the problem of being unable to draw a comic strip, by having absolutely no artwork at all, ever.  I enjoy the tautological echo effect of having the same text repeated as a list under each strip, and the self-referential beginning strips which are about doing a comic with no artwork.  The only thing it doesn't do is come out and say it is an Online Webcomic in the title.

So there you have it.  Another one done.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

This week, SUNDAY WEBCOMIC proudly presents SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, an online webcomic about SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  I even joined an online webcomic site so as to present it in its appropriate context with the appended apology and explanation requisite for such an endeavor.

Perhaps you, unaccustomed as you are to the total immersion experience of online webcomics necessary for me to bring you such quality selections each week, did not know that Stick Man is an actual genre of online webcomics.  An entire semi-ironic genre of comics consisting of crudely scribbled stick figures, more often than not making jokes appropriate to the college dormitory environment in which they are most frequently created.  Who would have thought of such a thing?  And yet, Sticktown seems to take it another unexpected step beyond mere irony to... something else.

Then, to show exactly what really makes my brain go DOING, please enjoy the noteworthy Old Hickory Blog, whatever it is.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

As I have pointed out in the past there are many solutions to the problem of wanting to do a webcomic while lacking the basic skills necessary to create comics.  The most elegant solution is to use only one picture, and only change the words.  That is what Zarj's Webcomics does.  Not only that, it tells you it is webcomics in the title, plus the extra added bonus of saying right in the banner across the top of the page that they are lame webcomics.  As everyone knows, saying a joke isn't funny makes it funny.

I often find comics which seem to have a lot of potential, but are in early stages of development with only a few strips to read.  Like Oldjokes and Caveman Rock Comic. I don't want to jinx them by bringing undue attention their way, but I hope they keep producing the same quality of work.

Just so you don't feel like I left you hanging with those, here is a classic example of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC inscrutability, Fun With Homeshopping.  Enjoy

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Way back in the middle of the 20th century was when I first learned to cherish the experience of the Sunday Comics.  Lying on the floor with a vast expanse of  colors and words spread before me I puzzled my way through such enigmas as Ferd'nand, The Little King and Henry.  I would come to the breakfast table with my elbows blackened by printer's ink and my brain dulled by the inexplicable antics of those strange silent characters.  I cannot come to your home and daub your elbows with grime once a week but I can do it to your brain.

What makes a really good choice for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC for me is not just the quality of the work itself, but the quality of the apologies and explanations the artists attach to them.  The creator of this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC called Think About It keeps his explanations and apologies short, like what the comics theirselves are.

Another sterling quality that makes a great SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is choice of subject matter.  NaggyNerd seems to be entirely about video game characters.  I have heard of some of them, but I have never seen any of them being played and certainly have never played them myself, so it's kind of interesting to me to see.  I like to think of someone out there thinking this stuff is hilarious because they know what it is about.

As a special added bonus I am adding this special bonus in addition to the preceding two strips, specially, as a bonus.  Ferd'nand is still being created far off in lonely Denmark or somewhere and one may not only enjoy the comic itself, but the special added bonus of seeing people try to figure it out or explain it to each other, just like when I used to ask my Mom and she would as often as not be as puzzled as I was.

Go wash your elbows and come to the table.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

As is often the case, today's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS have something in common. I am not sure what it is. Just a general feeling of somethingness.

The New Sporadic and Erratic Adventures of Pinocchio and Foot appears at first to be mercifully brief at 4 pages, until you go to the bottom or top of the page and click "archives" which gives you the opportunity to see how it all began in 1972 in ballpoint pen on the back of discarded letterhead from the Westgate Adjustments Company Inc.

Webby the Internet (Editorial?) Comic also has a scribbly sort of origin, and too many words on the page. What it does differently is to go in all kinds of crazy directions that make telling what is happening part of the fun.

Enjoy.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Today's Sunday Webcomics are as follows:

Dugan's Air Force is, strictly speaking, not a webcomic at all. It is a comic that happens to be on the web but at the time it was drawn the internet was entirely analog. You don't have to be in the Air Force to appreciate its unique qualities.

Hapless Harold, on the other hand, is a webcomic. It is as educational as it is entertaining.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Dark Days provides everything you have come to expect from a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC in artistic and literary quality, excuse pages instead of comics, and transgendered autobiographical content.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Man, sometimes it seems like all the webcomics are just people trying to do Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, or an episode of Friends but everybody's got animal heads. I'd like to stand behind those jerks with a cattle prod and every time they started to draw a person with fox ears I would yell NO! and give them a jolt.

Well here is Dr. Dragon's House of Hope, a webcomic about space monster rehab.

Here is Public Domain Comics, where a guy just changes the captions on stuff or adds speech balloons to old pictures and says it is a webcomic.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Wow, is it Sunday again? Man, I got some serious partying done last night. You know you're having a good time when you find yourself lying on the floor looking up at people asking if you are okay. Anyway, one of the benefits of modern webcomic technology is the ability to scan sketches and pencilling and work them up in photoshop. I see a lot of that when I am prowling around for SUNDAY WEBCOMIC entries, people who aren't super great at drawing but they really funk the art up in p-shop with all kinda blurs and way too much airbrush and highlighting that doesn't really work, and special effects that don't quite fit the flat scratchy drawings which never fully integrate into the picture. I just haven't seen an example pure enough to select for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC until I found The Redeemers. I was really impressed by how many different photoshop filters and techniques the artist uses without altering the basic character of the drawing.

Since I have trained you to expect more than one SUNDAY WEBCOMIC per WEBCOMIC SUNDAY, you may also want to enjoy JJComics, A brief gag strip.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

"I don't have any ideas for a webcomic" is now officially a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC recognized webcomic genre. The creator of Books dont work here addresses the problem of not having any ideas for a webcomic by making the webcomic be about not having any ideas for a webcomic and nothing else.

[As of Sept 28 2011, the comics have been removed. :( ]

In contrast, The Phantoms Pyre: The Servant of Cerberus may be loaded with ideas, enough to make an extended multi-part space adventure epic. May be - it is hard to tell.

Last, but in no particular order of quality, Basement Show Girls differs from the others in not lacking an apostrophe.

I don't even have enough ideas for a vague rambling paragraph on how I don't have any ideas today so read 'em and weep. For humanity.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Helpful readers have kindly pointed out that some of my choices for SUNDAY WEBCOMIC are not as totally mindblowing as the most totally mindblowing SUNDAY WEBCOMICs ever. I am glad they noticed that. It means they are paying attention. I welcome all comments, contributions, analysis and suggestions for webcomics to look at. It's hard to believe, I know, but I don't actually know everything and I am counting on you, dear readers, to aid in my education.

Not every SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is going to be so amazingly great and unique that you can't believe it even exists. Sometimes they are just going to be an incredibly bad idea, of the sort that seems hilarious when slumped stoned on a couch and you think it would be great if somebody actually did it, but then if someone really does it, it seems like not such a good idea after all. Like Hipster Hitler. The funny thing about Hipster Hitler is that it is mocking hipsters but you have to BE a hipster to even get why it is a mockery. The only reason I can recognize that some of those references are intended as jokes is because I know people who are somewhat hipper than me.

It wasn't too many years ago that people who got the cartooning bug had to draw their comics on paper and carry them around physically to show their friends, or haunt the copy shop and post office to distribute their works to the world. Some people would realize after a few pages they just didn't have it in them to be cartoonists, and their notebook mouldered away in a corner and was eventually discarded. Some kept cranking out volumes of marginally readable work documenting their cryptic obsessions, until their archive comprised a three inch section in some other nut's filing cabinet. I have seen and known both kinds in person. The great thing about the World Wide Web is that the former type, who would otherwise have languished unknown, have their works temporarily viewable by all the world if anyone cares to seek them out. Take a look at this one - a guy who decided he should do a webcomic, but he didn't have any ideas for a webcomic so the first strip is about how he doesn't have any ideas for a webcomic. What I think is great about this is that he never does get any ideas, but his comments on each strip get longer and more detailed, explaining every joke and reference and detailing his artistic technique, before the strip finally peters out. Contrast its ignominious conclusion with the final page of Different Kind of Mustard. In a rare moment of clarity and self-realization the cartoonist ends his strip with an apology to the world. Bravo!

Taking all that into consideration, what does CODE NAME: U-FORCE have to do with anything? I don't know. It's an old fashioned 80's indy comic style costumed hero comic drawn in pencil 1991 and stuck into the web now in the 21st century. I just wanted you to see it.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Readers of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC have begun sharing with me the unusual webcomics they encounter, and I am grateful for this tribute to my consciousness-raising efforts. They are starting to seek that mysterious quality that makes for an outstanding SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.

The Dada art movement of the early 20th century, inspired by genuine lunatics, strove to attain a type of conscious unconsciousness which disconnects the mind from normal thought patterns in such a way that it is possible to create things, events and ideas so novel as to be purely meaningless. In the middle and later 20th century the elevated level of both lunacy and access to creative media made it possible for people who were not "crazy" enough to be locked up and not "artistic" enough to be acclaimed, to release upon the world their own unique creations, the greatest of which partake of a quality which, in my religion, has been called Bulldada. This ineffable and ethereal quality can only be attained when the best efforts of a dedicated person, whose talents are unsuited to their field of endeavor, fail so cataclysmically as to constitute a new category of success. I seem to be the first person to apply bulldadanalysis to the field of webcomics.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Cloe shared with me a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic. It is badly drawn and not funny. The problem lies in the fact that the cartoonist knows it and says so in the title. The most basic principle of Bulldada is that it cannot be created by anyone who is aware of the concept of Bulldada. The application of that principle in this case is that knowing your webcomic is lousy does not make it great. It makes it lousier. Except when the lousiness is meant ironically, but fails. "a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic" is a success at being bad, and thus falls beyond the purview of this exercise. Purview.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Diana shared OF NOOBS AND MEN, a strip of notable qualities. It is very well drawn and its jokes are recognizable as such. Its transcendent quality comes from the fact that the content of those jokes is so obscure to the normal or average reader as to be incomprehensible. I can read dozens of them and see exactly why they are supposed to be funny, and if I knew what the in-jokes and references meant I know they would be very funny indeed. The local community radio station has a Dutch Hour program on Sunday mornings, and the host sometimes plays standup comedy - in Dutch. You can tell that stuff is funny as hell just by the pacing, the cadence, and the audience reaction - you just can't tell what the joke actually is. Another vital principle of Bulldada is that it is fully comprehensible to no-one, not even the one who created it. Somebody is reading OF NOOBS AND MEN right now and totally cracking up because that is their life it is talking about.

This leads us to today's SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, The Simple Life.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

It took me half the day to finally find a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC for my SUNDAY WEBCOMIC fans. Fortunately CANINE COPROTHRUSTIVE CONUNDRUM is "on hiatus," i.e. the guy finally ran out of ideas or steam, or had exams, or left school and got a job. This has many of the top features for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC; especially interesting in the earlier episodes are the injokes about things I know nothing about, and the paragraphs under the strips detailing his struggles with the muse and how he views his advancement as an artist. Have you ever noticed how careful I am about not saying outright negative things about these strips? It is hard.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Good news! There seems to be no limit to the possibilities of the SUNDAY WEBCOMIC concept. Even though last week's choice was brainmeltingly transcendent, there are still people out there who think they are so darn funny they should draw a comic and put it on the World Wide Web for everyone to enjoy. Just to show you how true that is, try these THREE grand choices:

• Can't draw or write jokes? No problem, as Energy Brain Comics proves!
• Even if you can draw in a highly acceptable "funny cartoon" style, jokes are still kind of hard to write so just get a concept and repeat it indefinitely. Tony Destructo is a guy who encounters things that are popular and that people know or talk about, and he DESTROYS them! That's the humor of it, the destroying.
• Providing more evidence that jokes and humor can be replaced by having a character say "a line," or simply becoming angry and violent, Taco Tails also helps out by providing an explanation of the action at the bottom. That's so you know what is going on.

SUNDAY WEBCOMICS may occasionally slow down but it will never run out.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Can this be the end of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC? Just last week I thought SUNDAY WEBCOMIC was entering a bold new phase of life - then I found the best of 25 years of miss j and the am. Go look at it right now. I looked at the drawing of Bretea the Yukon Chicken and said wow. I started clicking PREVIOUS and kept saying wow. I went back to FIRST and said oh my god, then went to the top of the page and started clicking RANDOM, and gave up trying to express the maelstrom of emotion crushing my brain. Go on, go and look at it. Finally I came upon the page entitled "me," and said what the hell???? There is quite a story here, and "the best of 25 years of miss j and the am" is just the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg composed of over a quarter century of relentless production and self-publication by the greatest transgender cartoonist of the Yukon.

If the best of 25 years of miss j and the am isn't enough for you, take a look at the women I draw. Or the artist's newer digitally sourced comic series, jennfer's show. Or this vast scanned archive of Miss J and the Am, an impossibly clunky interface and an impossibly vast body of work and I do mean that both ways. Or watch the video, 27 years of miss j and catch astonishing glimpses of the artist Jennfer A Jay herself.

I don't know how I can ever follow this, the greatest SUNDAY WEBCOMIC ever, probably the greatest there will ever be.

ADDENDUM: Here is yet another archive of work - jenffersshow 5. You can also join the Facebook group i love jenffer's show and miss j and the am by jenffer a jay.

ADDENDUM 2: Here are reviews and reactions by other webcomic creators.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC archive

Early in 2011 I had the genius idea of beginning a weekly Facebook feature on the most remarkable webcomic I could find. I will be continuing the tradition here, beginning with this archive post.

The daddy of 'em all - STRIPY SIX. The most important quality Stripy Six has is sincerity. This is what drives a person to create, and to transcend their limitations.

Feb. 13, Haien Heights.

"My webcomic pick for the day. I like how the pages are so gigantic it takes forever to load. In later episodes a lot of the creative burden is eased by having panels of nothing but dialog balloons in different colors to indicate different speakers."

Feb. 20, the first inkling of an official WEBCOMIC SUNDAY - Buck the Comic.

"Sunday is webcomic day. This is my pick for the week. What I like is how it has this big disclaimer page about how potentially offensive it is, and the comics are just gags that mostly rely on you recognizing the name of a celebrity, or having seen some commercial on TV."

Feb. 27, Carpe Diem. I admit I hadn't really hit the pure formula for the SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.

"I usually share webcomics which are just horrifically executed. I am sharing this one because it is so well drawn - and it is about gay musclemen with animal heads. I don't mind seeing musclemen making out (in fact I kind of like that) or weeping over their mother's graves, but when they have animal heads it just creeps me the hell out."

March 6, WEBCOMIC SUNDAY truly begins with Butt Flap Comics.

"It's webcomic Sunday. This doesn't seem so bad at first but if you keep reading they really start to get to you. Look for the 'vintage guest comics' by another artist."

March 13 - a watershed moment, the first full capitalization of the words SUNDAY and WEBCOMICS, immortalized along with A Cannonade of Hogwash.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS TIME! You have to read all 260 of these. I know this guy is trying to be 'ironic' but I don't think he's quite making it."

March 20 - Effy.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS time! Today's comic puts the Eff in WTF. The good news is... there are only three pages of it!" As of this writing there are considerably more than three pages, but they have not lost their power to amaze.

March 27 - The Adventures of Kanira Baxter.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS TIME!!! What makes this 3DCG scifi comic a real standout is not how sorta weird it looks, or how many many pages there are and there really are a lot, but how difficult it is to find a page on which anything is happening other than people talking and talking and talking and talking."

April 3 - Chronic Misadventures.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMIC TIME!!! Produced up to three times a week for over four years, resulting in hundreds of pages, this comic developed a stylistic formality which reached perfection as it petered out in one last strip. Gaze upon it in wonder, then start tracking back toward the beginning."

April 10 - The Tales of a Gay Asian.

"It's the low point of anyone's week - SUNDAY WEBCOMIC TIME!!! Sometimes I have to choose comics that transcend their basic non-good-ness and become strangely great in some way. NOT TODAY. This is the Murphy's Law of comics." This continues to be produced, and has become even less readable. Most recent pages don't even seem to have any lettering, just insanely huge scans of scribbly penciling.

April 17 - Cyber Dark Infection.

"You wouldn't believe how much mediocre drivel I had to sift through before I grudgingly settled on this unique solution to the problem of wanting to be a cartoonist without knowing how to draw. Over 150 pages of this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC to choose from."

April 24 - Okay! Fish.

"Guess what! Another SUNDAY WEBCOMIC!! I often see things that make me say, 'Yes, I can see why that is supposed to be funny.' Like this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC. You can see why it is supposed to be funny. Be sure to look for the secondary supporting punchline below each cartoon, which you can also see is supposed to be funny."

May 1 - NO SUNDAY WEBCOMIC. I must have spent three hours searching for something truly amazing and that was way too much.

May 8 - Just One Hat.

"Heavens be praised, a new SUNDAY WEBCOMIC! Just One Hat. Get it?"

May 15 - A Magical Roommate.

"Presenting the winner of the SUNDAY WEBCOMICS Lifetime Achievement Award! Nine years in the drawing, 2080 strips - each with accompanying descriptive paragraph giving deep insight into the creative process. This is the War and Peace meets Gravity's Rainbow of comics. See how many you can read before your brain chokes up or try changing the page number in the URL for a random selection."

And now I am up to date.