Avram's journal

I’m finally getting around to reading Digger, and not really enjoying it much, to tell you the truth. But I’m still fairly near the beginning (just started Chapter 2), and maybe it gets better later on. Anyway, I’m trying to figure something out. Could someone tell me what’s going on in this panel here?

Here’s the whole page. I get what’s going on before and after that panel, the action of the page in general. But I can’t figure that one panel out. Here are the possible readings I’ve come up with:

1. Digger is moving her left hand (the one not holding the pickaxe) horizontally for some reason. For a moment I thought maybe she was pulling a cover off of the pickaxe head, but the thing I thought might’ve been the cover I now think is just part of her vest. I can’t think of any other reason for her to be swinging her arm like that; she winds up with her hand behind her, which makes it less effective for the move she makes in the next panel.
2. Digger is swinging her pickaxe back and forth. (The speed lines continue past the pickaxe on either side, so it would have to be a back-and-forth motion.) Seems plausible, but her right arm doesn’t seem positioned plausibly for the full extension that would be necessary for the head of the pickaxe to follow that arc. And this still doesn’t explain why her left arm is behind her.
3. Digger just threw the pickaxe from her left hand (where we see it in the first panel) to her right. This connects the first and fourth panels, and accounts for the pickaxe moving from one hand to the other, but again, it’s weak as a prelude to the action in panel five (she’s using both hands for the pickaxe anyway; why waste time and risk dropping it to switch hands?). Also, the speedlines depict an arc of horizontal movement; a thrown pickaxe would have to arc vertically. And this reading doesn’t explain why the speedlines are continuing past the head of the pickaxe.

Also, when does the actual story start? Like I said, just started Chapter 2, maybe 70 or 80 pages in, and the characters are still just wandering around chatting. I’m thinking Ursula Vernon would have benefited from the discipline of publishing in pamphlet form. Cerebus started out crude, but that first 22-page issue contained a full story.

Everyone who plays RPGs oughta go read Dylan Horrocks’s short comics story, “The Physics Engine”. I’m especially thinking of jimhenley and bruceb here.

I followed a link to a Something Positive strip, and suddenly flashed on why I’ve never been able to follow this webcomic. It’s because I can’t read the thing. Literally.

Maybe this is just me. Something Positive has a large and devoted following, so obviously many people must be able to see words in those cramped, blurry masses of text. I can even do it, if I work at it. But it’s enough work to cancel out any enjoyment I might have gotten out of the strip.

For comparison, here are some word balloons from some webcomics I do follow. In each case, I grabbed the largest word balloon I could find from a recent strip.

Sordid City Blues by Charles Schneeflock Snow

Notice how readable this is, despite the small type size. That’s because Snow uses generous linespacing and a good font, and breaks his dialog up into small pieces. This was the biggest single word balloon I could find in a recent strip, and it’s only got 13 words. Snow makes his living as a graphic designer, so he knows how this stuff works.

Scary-Go-Round by John Allison

Large, clear type. Dialog broken up into small pieces. Again, 13 words.

Questionable Content by J Jacques

At 36 words, this clocks in as the largest balloon so far, and the type is pretty small, but mixed case makes it readable, as well as allowing Jacques to use all-caps for emphasis. The whitespace above lower-case letters means you can get away with less linespacing. It would be even better if he used a taller, narrower word balloon. And it suffers a bit for being placed against an open white background; I probably should have included the balloon borders in these images.

Templar, Arizona by Spike

I’m not actually sure that Spike uses computer lettering. Possibly she uses a font based on her handwriting for most of the dialog, and then hand-letters special stuff, like the “God” in this balloon. In any case, the large lettering, extensive use of italics and boldface and underlining and occasional other effects, and the breaking up of long speeches into smaller balloons (this one is 20 words, but it’s one of five balloons in that one panel, in which only that character is speaking), not only makes the text very readable, it conveys the rhythm of actual speech. (Update: Spike commented below; all the text’s hand-lettered.)

Now, here’s Something Positive by RK Milholland

That’s 60 damn words crammed into one big balloon, all caps, with practically no space between the lines, and a font that has almost no space between the letter I and adjacent letters. (Look how the I almost blurs into the N in “insane” and “screamin’”.) This is a strip where much of the humor is conveyed through dialog, but the dialog is presented with almost no care. Look over that word balloon again, then look at the middle panel in that Templar, Arizona strip, and imagine how Spike would have presented it.

It may not be fair to compare these strips, since all of the first four are larger than Something Positive. Sordid City Blues is 900 pixels wide, and Questionable Content is a massive 1418 pixels tall! But Milholland is the one who chooses how to lay out his strip, and how much dialog to put in it. He can make it bigger, or write less, if he wants to. An advantage of webcomics as a medium is that they come with very few artistic constraints.

At the after-presentation dinner mission the other week, Gary Tyrrell of Fleen asked me the obvious question — what webcomics do I read? Me being the sad, silicon-dependent sod that I am, I was only able to recall four or five out of what I figured were a couple dozen webcomics. A few days back I got fed up with how badly Safari was performing and switched over to Firefox, and as part of that migration exported my Safari bookmarks, giving me an opportunity to pull the webcomics section out into a list. Turns out I read about 40 webcomics, though a few have stopped updating.

For those of you who are going to gloss over the whole list, let me just strongly recommend two comics right here: Templar, Arizona and Scary Go Round. These are the two that you’re most likely not to be already reading, but should be. Descriptions below.

OK, on to the list:

• A Softer World — A photo, cropped into three panels, with captions added. Been thinking of dropping this; it’s been a while since it made me laugh, or wince.
• Alien Loves Predator — Amazing comic built out of photos of posed action figures, NYC scenery, and Photoshop skill. Funny, too.
• Bang Barstal — Post-apocalyptic ass-kicking. It’s in the middle of its third story arc, “The Dead”, which is being posted in big chunks rather than one page at a time. I’d start with the second arc, “Racing Towards Home”.
• Bolt City — Kazu Kibuishi’s website, where he keeps a blog and posts updates to his various comics, like Copper, a beautifully drawn and colored comic where each story is a single page long.
• Bruno — Adventures of a depressed twenty-something woman, done as a (usually) single-panel strip. The cross-hatching can get pretty amazing when the artist gets ambitious, which he doesn’t often nowadays since he’s got several other comics going too.
• Bugsport — This comic set in a small New England town where space aliens have settled doesn’t update often, but it’s got gorgeous art. Check out the flying saucers that look like big-fin retro cars!
• Butterfly A superhero and his sidekick. How long since this thing’s updated?
• Cat and Girl — It was the “villanelle sandwich” strip that got me hooked.
• Desert Rocks — Um, actually I haven’t looked at this one in over a year. But I keep meaning to.
• Diesel Sweeties — Funny daily strip starring robots and hipsters. Distinctive pixel art.
• Dresden Codak — I found this one pretty recently, but I’m glad I did. Lovely artwork paired with weird intellectual humor. Check out the philosopher’s role-playing game.
• Flaky Pastry — Weekly extended-story humor strip set in a D&D-like fantasy world; pretty art.
• Girl Genius — Extended story comedy adventure from longtime comics pro Phil Foglio and his wife Kaja. You all read it already.
• Girls with Slingshots — Joke strip. Hazel is a cynical beanpole, Jamie is cheerful and zaftig, McPedro is a talking cactus. There’s lots of drinking.
• I am a rocket builder: An Old House — Actually a bunch of interlocking webcomics. Doesn’t update often.
• Mac Hall — Started as a college strip, currently on hiatus as the creators work on a new direction. Nice art, especially the use of color and blurred backgrounds.
• Miracle of Science — Extended-story SF comic about mad scientists and the cops who hunt them. Oh, and Martians.
• Naut-Cotic — Might delete this from my menu, since it hasn’t updated in forever. Long-form SF story with attractive art in a manga-derived, yet distinctive, style.
• Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life — Irregulary-updating philosophical humor strip about robots.
• No Pink Ponies — Joke strip about a woman who runs a comic store. Good art, but I’m starting to tire of the writing.
• No Rest For The Wicked — Long-form fantasy story using classic fairy-tale characters.
• Normal Life — Natasha Allegri’s LJ comic. Mostly exaggerated autobio humor.
• Ojingogo — Beautiful but surreal. I really wish this updated more often.
• Orneryboy — Sharp-looking, funny Flash comic. I don’t know why, but the main character reminds me of nihilistic_kid.
• Overcompensating — Autobio comic based on the daily life of a billionaire cowboy poet and webcomics magnate.
• Perry Bible Fellowship — Strange conceptual humor with a flexible, adept art style.
• Pibgorn — Another one I may drop. The adventures of a fairy, a succubus, and a pianist. Nice art, but the stories move very very slowly. He’s currently been doing an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s been going on for months.
• PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi — You’d be surprised how many characters from Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon cartoons can be squeezed into a single storyline. Well-drawn, too; the cartoonist does a great job redesigning the characters for an anime look. The second storyline started up a few months back, then stopped after just a few pages.
• PvP — Long-running popular joke strip set at a gaming magazine. Lots of geeky humor. Origin of the “Joss Whedon is my Master” line.
• Questionable Content — Romance, sarcasm, coffee, indie music, and little robots.
• Raymondo Person — Weird humor. Just updated this week, for the first time in months, as I was thinking of dropping it.
• Savage Chickens — Daily single-panel joke strip, starring talking chickens, drawn on Post-It notes.
• Scary Go Round — One of my favorite webcomics. Nice art, and consistently funny dialog. John Allison totally nails the difficult task of giving each daily page a joke so it’s satisfying on its own, while also building long story-lines out of them.
• Skullcano Island — Is that a great name or what? I think this is just whatever the artist feels like putting up, whenever he gets around to it. If you go back to the beginning of the archives there are a bunch of repeating Bizarro-like strips, and then eventually this island-based storyline shows up. I love this drawing style.
• Sordid City Blues — Wide-hipped women compete for the heart of a skinny cartoonist, while a rock musician wrestles with his faith. Currently on hiatus while mister_wolf works on a comic based around St John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul”.
• Space Pirate Apocalypse — Actually the home for whatever comics Ben Bittner makes. “Cooking with Anne” is about scraping together a meal after a nuclear war, “Pirate” is a pirates comic that petered out after a few strips, and “Apocalypse” is his latest, that hasn’t gotten past the first panel.
• Templar, Arizona — I rave about this one a lot. It’s set in a fictional Arizona town, I think maybe in a slightly alternate history, and shows a shy would-be writer trying to cope with overbearing neighbors and a strange neighborhood full of odd little counter-cultures. Spike’s dialog and art are just fantastic, and she’s got a real gift for both characterization and world-building.
• The Tenth Life of Pishio the Cat — Picked up a minicomic at MoCCA this year that started this story, and I was glad to see it continuing, but it hasn’t gotten very much farther. It’s a fantasy about a cat who’s used up his nine lives, and been given a tenth by the divine (and infernal) powers to perform a mission for them. Unlike most talking-animals strip, this one doesn’t gloss over what carnivore behavior is like; Pishio is an utterly believable vicious little brute.
• Wapsi Square — A slice-of-life comic that’s being swallowed by a supernatural storyline. At this point I’m just reading it for the drawings of sexy girls.
• Wigu — The hilarious adventures of a small boy, his family, a pastel space pony, and an talking potato made of poison.
• Zip and Li’L Bit — Well-drawn story about a boy who swaps places with an upside-down version of himself he finds walking around on his ceiling.