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.
4 comments:
Wow, I have to say this IS a bumper crop.
The rambly New Zealand kid is pretty good because he also publishes an exegesis on how he made each strip and the specific challenges he overcame with each one of them. Often this material is longer than the strip itself by vast degrees.
"U-FORCE" lists and inker, and yet all the pages are done in pencil. Somehow that, and the first page featuring a drooling superhero, fits the bill.
And thirdly, the "captcha" for this comment is the word "TEDLY," which sounds as if it is the name of one of these comics, or at least a character in one of the,m.
Actually, if you can force yourself to plow through about 40 pages of U-FORCE it does start being rather ferociously inked, or at least markered. Or save time and go straight to the last page. Another part of its AWESOMENESS is that you can only go through it in sequence, which is daunting.
I just want to see more comics by you, because they are well-drawn and funny.
Thankyou, Bill. That will probably never happen.
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