Webcomics Round-Up: Unadulterated

A subject that’s been on my mind a lot is the notion of self-loathing in genre.

Bear with me.  If you were once young with siblings, you probably went through this phenomenon: your sibling commits some minor nuisance that–due to the politics of being a kid–becomes an atrocity.  You spend a great deal of time agonizing over the egregiousness of said offense, you openly denounce the injustice of your parents’ reaction to the crime and, at some point, you openly express your scorn to a close friend who, trying to express sympathy, says something along the lines of: “Yeah, your brother’s kind of a shit.”

And you say: “Hey, that’s my brother you’re talking about, you shit.”

We in fantasy kind of do the same thing, don’t we?  We are quick to get pissed off when mainstream literature takes a shit on us.  We are swift to rail against their snobbery and elitism, because damn it, this is our genre.

But likewise, we spend an awful lot of time getting mad at ourselves.  We sneer at subjects once considered integral to our genre that are now considered canon.  If emotions run high, we get uncomfortable.  If someone utters a word like “prophecy,” “Demon War” or “crystal,” we sigh inwardly.  And if someone has a complex or convoluted backstory, we instantly disengage.  These things are childish.  These things are too “D&D,” a word we throw around constantly to distance ourselves from that tragic, treacherous past when we were ruled by numbers and alignments.

Well, the three webcomics I’m showing you today are all rejections of that idea.  These are stories that are unapologetic in their fun.  These are stories that are devout in their energy.  These are stories that don’t take themselves seriously and, as a result, allow the readers to invest in it more freely.

Or I think so, anyway.

Anyway, let me show you what I’ve been reading…

 

Fey Winds by Nicole Chartrand is a gem of a strip.  God help me, I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for a story that can use a phrase like “Golem Wars” unironically.

The set-up is pretty simple: Kit was a fox, who was afflicted by a spell, and then she turned into a young woman with ears and a tail and started adventuring with her friends Nigel, who is a rough and tumble warrior, and Larina, an elf with a stone in her forehead that allows her to channel other personalities, and they go out and they fight a bunch of golems that spit darkness and they make best friends with a bard that turns into a dragon and Nigel’s actually a golem oh no! and there’s a crazy golem gal and they come from the remains of ancient worlds and there’s magic and curses and portals and they fight magic zombies and ambiguously sexual vampires and holy crap.

As you can see, Fey Winds is a very high energy comic and you’ll either get taken along that energy for the ride or you won’t.  The history and set-up is a tad convoluted, the characters are extremely emotional, there are moments of unrepentant cheesiness but it does it in such a way that I guarantee nearly anyone has had the exact same thoughts of “wouldn’t this be so awesome” and discarded them to become bitter, jaded cynics like you and I later down the road.

Fey Winds treats the subject matter with unapologetic exuberance.  It’s all about a love of everything that makes fantasy fantastic and it’s awesome.  Go read it.

 

What do superheroes do without supervillains?  What does an identity mean if it’s not a secret?  What’s the most important thing in the world when the world isn’t in desperate need of saving?

JL8 by Yale Stewart is a quiet meditation on this subject.  Superheroes, in possession of their power without any of the responsibility to go along with it, are in constant search for an identity.  Without a desperate public, a world in crisis or a vengeful villain to dictate who they are, superheroes begin to define themselves any way they can.  They turn inward to find the answers, they turn to their parents and loved ones or the empty spaces where those might be, and above all else, they turn to each other.  Without responsibility being built-in, they find it in their love and desire to protect and nurture each other.

And if that’s too long a description, it’s the Justice League in kindergarten.

This comic strip is deceitful in its cuteness.  Seriously.  Maybe I’ve just been left so jaded by comics preaching their morality to me that I’ve been left starving for the opportunity to find it myself, but there’s something profoundly special in the way JL8 handles the subject.  What starts off as cute and hilarious quickly becomes deep as everything important to superheroes–love, fairness, identity, power–becomes boiled down, streamlined and honestly addressed.

Or maybe Yale Stewart just wanted it to be cute?  Read it and find out for yourself!

 

Rusty & Co. by Mike R. is the epitome of ideas you thought would be awesome but were too chicken to actually follow up and see how they’d work.  A D&D adventuring party composed of a wise-cracking mimic, adorable rust monster and silent gelatinous cube?  Magic Missiles that are actually arcane surface-to-air rockets?  A vaguely mafioso sect of mind flayers?  Fuckin’ bring it on.

My first instinct was to call this Order of the Stick with less complex writing and more complex art, but that’s not entirely fair.  Granted, the strips are mainly gags and chuckles and the art is emotive, expressive and super fun, but I think that’s just one aspect of it.  This is a strip that has a sheer love of what it’s doing and has absolutely no qualms about sharing it with you.  The humor that revolves around strips born out of gaming is often dense by design, strictly for those in the know.  Rusty & Co. is all about bringing you into the joke, showing you that this set-up is funny as hell and you can be a part of it.

Like Fey Winds, it is extremely high energy.  Like JL8, it’s pretty darn cute.  But it never strives to be either.  Its stories are based around simple, interesting premises, its characters and their interactions are all really charming to watch, its art design is pleasingly expressive and uncomplicated and the humor is more or less free of in-jokes, largely being either slapstick gags or absurd premises played totally straight.

I found it just this morning in fact and ate it alive.  It’s fantastic and you should give it a go.