New England Webcomics Weekend was this past weekend in Easthampton, MA. It brought together many top names in the art of webcomics -- a form that may have at last grown distinct from its print-comics progenitor. A fine excuse to introduce you to (or remind you about) the sites of these hilarious, daring and innovative artists. Hyperlink omnibus enclosed...
The weekend con fit about a thousand attendees per day and featured sixty artist exhibitors. Small cheese compared to San Diego, but still more than I can walk you through in a single post. I'll just show off the strips I know best -- each of these is indispensable if you love comics and want to keep track of where the form is headed.
Meredith Gran makes
Octopus Pie, an character-driven longform sunday-style about a stickler and her stoner roomie in Brooklyn. It is touching, funny, beautifully rendered and always strangely familiar. Find the
start of
any chapter to get hooked.
Jeffrey Rowland is the creator of
Overcompensating, a diary comic detailing the real-life happenings of a fantasy world that he very nearly actually inhabits. He also wrote and drew the long-running
WIGU (the moment-by-moment adventures of the Tinkle family, in which each action-packed day takes many months to unfold), and is the proprietor of
Topatoco, a thriving web-based publisher/clothier.
r stevens uses his
Diesel Sweeties strip to spread life-affirming pixelated cuteness with a fleeting bottom note of misanthropic cynicism. He is top brass at
Dumbrella, a carefully branded loose association of these webcomics makers. You may have seen one of r stevens's
skull tees in the Scott Pilgrim movie.
Gran, Rowland, Stevens, and Holly Post (aka
Tallahassee Econolodge) put the NEWW weekend together at
Eastworks, a mall/warehouse/factory/artists' lofts complex that houses both Dumbrella's and Topatoco's offices. I will list the rest of these NEWW exhibitors in no particular order:
John Allison creates the elegant and twee
Bad Machinery. His beloved
Scary Go Round ran its course from 2002-2009 and remains available in full.
Kate Beaton explores history and literature in
Hark! A Vagrant, often as a series of gag strips on a single topic (eg
presidents,
paperbacks. High and low brows furrow together to hilarious effect.
KC Green's
Gunshow is kind of intense. I always feel like the chuckles are squirting out of some sort of shrapnel wound. Topics range from
slander in furry animal land, to
snorting dad ashes, to the adventures of
the anime club. His now-defunct
Horribleville was also a treat for lovers of paranoia, loathing, and comedy.
Chirs Hastings has taken his
Doctor McNinja from a one-man B&W line-art page into a book-form full-color extravaganza (with the help of cover illustrator
Carly Monardo and colorist
Anthony Clark). The story arcs are long, briskly paced, accessible, silly, and grand. Begin at the
beginning,
middle, or with the
latest issue.
Anthony Clark's
Nedroid charts the uneasy friendship of potato-shaped bear Beartato and humanoid bird Reginald. It is a gag strip, and you can poke your head in anytime, but I found myself getting weirdly attached to the duo and paging through the archive for hours. Start
near the beginning, or in
2007 (by which point Beartato and Reginald had pretty much taken over the comic), or bang on the
random strip dispenser.
Andrew Hussie creates
MS Paint Adventures with our help, developing each panel as a direct response to reader input. Ostensibly, we are all playing an illustrated adventure game, cutting each other in line to type the next command for the characters in the strip. Updates come to a story up to thirty times in a day. Wildly funny, deeply interactive, and possibly the best example of what separates webcomics from other sequential art forms. Hussie
explains his process and links you to the various completed and in-progress adventures.
Sam Brown draws, several times a day, an
Exploding Dog image based on a phrase or fragment of text (or explicitly suggested title, though that's less fun) taken from readers' emails and twitter posts. The results are rough-hewn, dreamy, and evocative.
Jon Rosenberg's new
Scenes From A Multiverse is bite-sized amusement refracted through unknown planes of existence. Plotlines in each revisited universe have started to emerge, but any day's four-panel strip is rewarding on its own. Rosenberg's
Goats was a
sprawling, ridiculous sci-fi epic that wound down this past April and is now getting an
anthology treatment from Random House.
Ryan North drew one
Dinosaur Comics comic in 2003 and has been re-publishing it with new dialog text each day, ever since. It becomes a meditation on static action, on comics, on itself. It somehow never wears thin.
Joey Comeau and Emily Horne whittle down the weight of being alive into one
A Softer World strip daily. It looks like it is made with scissors, a typewriter, and a darkroom, and it reads like a haiku. It inhabits that space between smirking and shuddering. Be careful with it.
Dorothy Gambrell draws
Cat And Girl about an overeducated young lady and her gigantic feline companion who
eats paint. The strips protagonists grapple endlessly in their search for a satisfying way to hold onto meaning, and stumble into a pun more often than an epiphany. Gambrell also
illustrates her spending of all reader donations.
...and there's plenty more. Check the
NEWW guest list for gems I've neglected.
And, of course, more eyeballs on Kate Beaton's work is always a good thing.
On the other hand I just read a few strips of Diesel Sweeties for the first time, having been linked from this post, and it appears to be more or less garbage.
On the whole I think webcomics are only just finding their feet as a medium and I'm excited to see what direction some of the creators of the present and future head off into. I remember being a younger MONSTER and finding out there were weekly strips on the internet, back in the day, and how exciting that was as an idea but in execution you got things like Sluggy Freelance. Now we have things like Nedroid and Kate Beaton and that Oglaf comic which is not safe for work but just fantastic from a creative standpoint. These are exciting times.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 1:34 PM on November 9, 2010