Phil Foglio

March 24, 2007 11:45 AM

Phil Foglio, old school RPG comic artist, is publishing online his classic What's New (D&D nerd humor from the pages of Dragon Magazine), Buck Godot (Zap Gun For Hire), and Girl Genius (as discussed earlier).
posted by CrunchyFrog (27 comments total)

Fuck. Yeah.

This brings me WAY back. I didn't even play RPGs but all my friends did, and they had these things lying around. I'd read them while they played, and they always cracked me up, not even getting many of the inside jokes.

I saw Phil run an art auction once about, um, prolly ten years ago at an SF con. He was fantastic, hysterically funny and energetic. Good on him.
posted by wolftrouble at 12:08 PM on March 24, 2007

I wonder if he'll post Buck Godot: PSmith and Buck Godot:Gallimaufrey, too? Excellent stories, both of them.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:17 PM on March 24, 2007

I like Girl Genius. But I like to read web comics all at once, rather than at a slow drip.

It turns out they put a bunch of comics on their server at once -- a few months at a time -- and rinse and repeat a few months later. The URLs aren't particularly obscure, so you can access everything they've put up there.

Hence: Girl Genius from the future!
posted by gurple at 12:28 PM on March 24, 2007

Oh, and they seem to follow a 2-day, 2-day, 3-day pattern, so, 3 comics a week.

I guess maybe I'm evil for figuring that out and for passing it on.
posted by gurple at 12:30 PM on March 24, 2007

A friend of mine works for the Foglios. Really cool people who do good work.
posted by SaintCynr at 12:30 PM on March 24, 2007

Dixie was hot.

The top right panel from this strip seared itself into my feverish adolescent mind so completely that I instantly recognized it today, a quarter century later.
posted by Flunkie at 12:31 PM on March 24, 2007

Is cool, in a hyper-geeky kind of way. Doesn't seem to be a lot up yet though.
posted by JHarris at 12:34 PM on March 24, 2007

To make myself feel better about exposing the secrets of Girl Genius image hosting, I'll plug their game, Girl Genius: The Works, which is pretty fun. Steve Jackson Games does good stuff.
posted by gurple at 12:35 PM on March 24, 2007

I have a book of Sci-Fi cartoons with a bunch of Foglio stuff in it from 1979, it's called Startoons. My parents bought it for me in a supermarket when I was 8, and I found it on eBaby about twenty-five years later.
posted by jonson at 12:42 PM on March 24, 2007

SCDB - Issue seven of the Gallimaufrey is available here, and I've heard rumors that the whole series will be made available later. Mr Foglio also told me that he's got another Buck Godot series in the works. I have no idea where he finds the time.

I've been a drooling Foglio fanboy for two decades. The man can do no wrong in my eyes.
posted by lekvar at 1:32 PM on March 24, 2007

No comments thread on Foligo is complete without mentioning Xxxenophile (NSFW), his remarkably (considering the general state of the genre) good-natured sex comic.

In an interview at Pop Thought, he stated:
[...] XXXenophile started because while I am fond of the IDEA of adult comics, there were very few that I could stomach. Most creators seem unable to keep "taboo" subjects properly compartmentalized, so when they try to do a sexually explicit story, they feel they can throw in some excessive violence, or dismal "real life" consequenses or some political satire or whatever, and seem to be unable to understand why this can make it unappetizing. I was bitching about this and said bitching ran along these lines; "Why the hell can't people just write nice happy stories about people having happy sex? That's what I want, and I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too. There's a real market for this. Why doesn't some fool realize this? Hey..wait a minute...I could be that fool!" The rest is history.
posted by JHarris at 1:59 PM on March 24, 2007

It turns out they put a bunch of comics on their server at once -- a few months at a time -- and rinse and repeat a few months later. The URLs aren't particularly obscure, so you can access everything they've put up there.

That's because the ones you're linking to are already written (and published). They have two tracks - backissue and new.
posted by Karmakaze at 2:05 PM on March 24, 2007

"Steve Jackson Games does good stuff.
posted by gurple"

Shouldn't that be GURPSle?
posted by klangklangston at 2:18 PM on March 24, 2007

And, man, in middle school, I loved his Myth series (though I think that was more because of Aspirin). That stuff was great fun, and I waited eagerly for my library to get each new book.
posted by klangklangston at 2:20 PM on March 24, 2007

I've been a Girl Genius fan since I first stumbled across it, and now I'm waiting eagerly for the Girl Genius GURPS supplement.
posted by sotonohito at 2:33 PM on March 24, 2007

Looking through the Buck Godot stuff... it appears that all the material currently on the site appeared in the Buck Godot: Zap Gun For Hire graphic novel/TBP compilation. So, like, if you want to buy some Godot comics, you may want to concentrate on the other volumes and what not.

But I'm wondering... were these the earliest Godot stories? Reading them back in the late eighties, i got the impression that there was considerable back story there to which I wasn't privy.

I met Foglio at a comic book convention back in that era. He was, as was mentioned previously, quite the smart ass and very entertaining. I don't remember exactly how it came up in conversation, but somehow we ended up talking about his departure from the Myth Adventures comic, an adaptation of Robert Asprin's Myth novels, then published by WARP. I remember him saying, (with considerable sarcasm), "What? Me leave the happy little WARP family?" WARP Graphics was a comic company founded by Richard and Wendy Pini, originally to publish their independent comic Elfquest. Richard was, I would learn at the same convention, when I tried to get some copies of Elfquest autographed, a bit of a dick. Not too long after that, I read an editorial written by Richard and Wendy in which they responded to complaints from fans that one or both of them had been rude during public appearances. It wasn't until very recently that I discovered the problems Colleen Doran had with the company over her series A Distant Soil.

I was in my teens and it was quite amazing to me to be given a look behind that particular curtain. Also, Phil's one hell of a storyteller. So, you know, if you're reading, Phil: thanks.
posted by Clay201 at 3:35 PM on March 24, 2007

My additions to this Foglio lovefest: his rendition of Angel and the Ape (which cleverly explained the origins of Angel O'Day [obsessive overachiever], Sam Simeon [Grodd's nephew], and, of all things, the Green Glob [most obscure DC "character" ever]). And Stanley and His Monster (which not only explained the origin of Spot, but gleefully mocked DC's Vertigo books).
posted by SPrintF at 4:03 PM on March 24, 2007

Sure, I cried when the last What's New was published. But what I really wanted was to live in Wormy's underground city lit by fireflies.
posted by fleacircus at 4:24 PM on March 24, 2007

Ugh. I remember reading A Distant Soil recently (turns out it was Immigrant Song), after checking it out from the library. I can see why it would fit in with ElfQuest— it had the same sort of inability to see how silly it was. Overwraught dialogue, terrible late '80s art, lots of David Bowie-style androgyny... I didn't realize that it was so lauded.
The story isn't bad (honestly, I think the story is pretty good), but the dialogue and the art both smacked way too much of the type of author I associate with the pretentiousness of fantasy writing, and the kind of art who is better suited to the backs of spiral-bound notebooks.
(Which, of course, doesn't mean she's not a nice person who got dicked on the rights to her work twice, just that maybe having to essentially scrap and redo the series is more of a blessing than a curse).
posted by klangklangston at 5:33 PM on March 24, 2007

I always thought Dixie was hot. I remember being a young nerd in the early '80s, and getting my "What's New" t-shirt in the mail. Wow, I thought I was cool.

Luckally, the only people who knew what it was were just as nerdy as me.
posted by MythMaker at 6:53 PM on March 24, 2007

Oh, hey! I've been reading Girl Genius, but I hadn't heard of Buck Godot or What's New before... thanks!

And of course I didn't read ahead with the url trick, what are you talking about!
posted by Many bubbles at 9:37 PM on March 24, 2007

Thanks for posting this, CrunchyFrog. I've been reading Girl Genius recently, but I never realized Phil had put "What's New?" up on the web. I own most of the Dragon magazines with "What's New?" in them, but they're not... accessible. I didn't realize that the series had started just two issues before the first issue I owned.

The one thing I'd really like to see Phil (and Freff) do is a restart of D'arc Tangent. I've never seen a first issue so tantalizing and beautiful. Freff told me once that he and Phil were thinking of restarting it, but who knows when that'll happen.
posted by jiawen at 1:03 AM on March 25, 2007

Here I am thinking I was the only guy not only opening Dragon each month to read What's New first, but how much Dixie influenced my taste in women (sassy geeky redheads..where have you gone?).

and yeah Flunkie, that pic seared into my brain as a kid too.
posted by Dantien at 7:16 AM on March 26, 2007

I'll have to look to find it, but the defining moment of my nerd-youth was a panel in What's New explaining how D&D players were better equipped in times of crisis. The image showed a large alien getting out of a ship, and every human in the area running away, except for one guy, asking the alien: "Wow, how many hit die are you?"

I agree with the previous posters: Dixie was damn hot.

Interestingly enough, I picked up the Myth series compilation books recently (massive volumes in trade-paperback size) so my kids could have the same fun with Asprin's writing that I did when I was their age. I almost didn't buy them, but I read the inside cover reviews, and I laughed right out loud. To get the joke, you have to remember that the original Myth series was a lot of small paperbacks. The new books number a total of 3, and are decently sized. The reviews on the inside cover? All from librarians.
posted by thanotopsis at 7:23 AM on March 26, 2007

Ah, yes. Dragon magazine. The New Yorker of my misspent elementary school allowance. Thanks bunches, CF.
posted by steef at 9:10 AM on March 26, 2007

Nifty!
posted by Smedleyman at 11:47 AM on March 26, 2007

Ah, yes. Dragon magazine. The New Yorker of my misspent elementary school allowance.

Such a perfect description.
posted by tingley at 1:03 PM on March 26, 2007