FreakAngels: Picking your battles

The Children of the Corn had to grow up sometime.

What would you do if every day was spent in a struggle for survival against the very people who should be keeping you safe?  What would be going through your mind if your own government was relentlessly pursuing you simply because of what you were, of what you might do.  And what would you do if the government had every right to logically be hunting you, especially when you consider that you’re not alone, and that all of you together have the ability to knock some people down for good?

Freakangels, by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, has a pretty simple concept and plot, but has a tendency to present at least three sides to any argument to you and then leave the difficult choice of which answer is right to you.  The premise of Freakangels is simple, and Duffield and Ellis remind us exactly how simple it is at the beginning of every chapter:  “23 years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at the exact same moment.  Six years ago, the world ended.  This is the story of what happens next.”

Dead Winter: Apocalyptic table waiting

Aw yeah

Zombies.  What is even up with those guys?  From mutated viruses diabolically engineered by pointlessly evil companies to space radiation from space, it seems like the dead are just looking for any excuse to rise out of their shallow graves to gnaw on the living.  Sometimes their journey is given a reason, other times not so much.  Sometimes its just enough to know that the man who is trying to bite you isn’t just a hobo with rabies, its a friggin’ ZOMBIE and you should have no qualms about lodging a pipe into its head with extreme prejudice.

A formula for zombie survival has emerged in the past several years:  Travel in groups of four.  The Left 4 Dead games embrace this fun mechanic like an old friend, and even movies like Zombieland get in on the fun.  If you really want to see the formula done right, however, you should be reading Dead Winter, by S. Dave Shabat.  This comic follows the journey of four very different companions as they attempt to survive the apocalypse, though when it comes right down to it, zombies are the least of their worries.

Fetch the Bee: Eric’s half-brother, probably

There are juvenile comics that make crude jokes about occurrences in the bathroom and things that should only occur in the bathroom but are apparently funnier when they occur elsewhere. Then there are juvenile comics whose squeaky clean humor is generally funniest to children under the age of 10.

Fetch the Bee falls into the later category.

Erfworld is all about the little things

Hail to the king, baby

There are two very different worlds of popular culture out there, and most everyone seems to subscribe to one or the other.  The first is the regular pop culture, filled with information about which celebrity is banging what, popular music, movie quotes and trivia.  The second is internet pop culture, filled with horrific images from 4Chan, hilarious videos of stupid people getting hurt in stupid ways, and mighty gems, like the majestic keyboard cat.  Erfworld draws heavily from both worlds to create a deep and involved, self-referential world that doubles as the ultimate gamer’s paradise.  If you’ve got a finger on the pulse of either world, or have spent a few days involved in table top or console gaming, Erfworld might be right up your alley.

Hark! a vagrant: History without the dust

Now I’m sure there were a lot of history buffs who read my XKCD review and said “Physics and math and linguistics are all well and good but what about history?” Good news! There’s this super lady in Canada. She draws a history comic called Hark! A Vagrant.

Of course being a comic, it’s not your dry 1789 this and Magna Carta that. There’s a lot of liberty taken with the characters that make up the history of the world. Like XKCD there are many instances I find my self curled up reading Kate Beaton’s comics with a copy of Wikipedia close at hand. A dying fire keeping me company and revealing the mysteries of the text.

Rooster Teeth comics: Diversification isn’t always good

Are you a halo fanboy? Do you own every Halo game from Combat Evolved to a pre-order of REACH? Then you’ve heard of Red Versus Blue. You’ve probably played griffball. Have you read the Rooster Teeth comic from the creators of RVB? Oh, well then you can skip a couple of paragraphs. For the fortunate ones, let me just say, lay off this one. It’s just awful. You remember when you were a kid and your dad would give you the paper when he was finished with it? You’d quick flip to the comics section and read all your favorites like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. Then after you had you perused all your favorites you dwindle down to the likes of Marmaduke and Dennis the Menace. The Rooster Teeth comics fall squarely in the latter category. There are some occasional one liners but you read it because it’s Tuesday or Thursday and you’ve read all your favorite comics for the day.

Post-Nuke: Proof that radiation poisioning is a slow killer

One of the first webcomics with a storyline that I began reading with any kind of consistency was a little comic called Post-Nuke. As the title implies its one of the many post-apocalyptic stories about a man and his dog fighting a losing battle against the final destruction of civilization. It’s a very grim comic  done in pencil and pen.  The storyline is presented in issues like a traditional paperback, and author and artist Andreas Duller did originally plan to publish each issue individually. Now the plan is to publish the first 10 issues in a single book.

Duller has said that the online edition of Post-Nuke is more of a first draft for this final book than an actual publication, and it shows. Duller is not a native English speaker, which honestly doesn’t affect the comic a whole lot, but it’s something to keep in mind when the dialogue begins to degrade. And believe me, it will degrade. The fact is the whole comic begins a vicious tale spin in issue 7, but we’ll come to that later.

Order of the Stick: look it up in the monster manual

There are a lot of comics out there that use Dungeons and Dragons as a basis for their jokes.  I think we can safely say at this point that the internet is used largely for either porn or extremely nerdy jokes, so it should come as no surprise that there are quite a few comics inspired by the classic pencil and paper game.

I’ll admit it- I was a casual Dungeons and Dragons player.  A…  social DnDer, if you will, but some of my favorite experiences with the game were when me and my friends would deviate from the standard rules a bit and make something hilarious.  When, for example, one of my friends created a morbidly obese kilt wearing man who failed an agility check in the first thirty seconds of the game and had a massive heart attack, prompting my mage to attempt a sloppy open heart surgery procedure on him, well, those are memories that really stick with you over the years.

I can almost hear our dungeon master now.  “Do you have a proficiency in open heart surgery?”

Sluggy Freelance, free time required

Anyone who has been reading web comics for any length of time has at least heard  of Sluggy Freelance.  And why wouldn’t they?  Written and drawn by Pete Abrams and created in August of 1997, Sluggy Freelance is one of the oldest comics available on the internet.  It’s long, looping stories may not be for everyone, however, and it’s definitely not the kind of comic that you should pick up if you don’t intend to read the entire archives.
And don’t get me wrong on this:  reading the entire archives is a commitment.

Sluggy Freelance is a daily comic, and has been for it’s entire 10+ year run.  Of course, once you start reading, you’re not going to be able to stop.  You’ve been warned.