Never Not A Nerd

It’s still November technically.  Okay, last special WotW for this month.  It’s a big one for me, so bear with me.

The first webcomic I got seriously into was Everything Jake by Mike Rosenzweig.  I read it all throughout high school, and in a lot of ways it prepared me for college because that’s what it was: a comic about a guy named Jake that goes to college.  At least that’s how it started.  From the beginning it seemed like this was just a little story about what it’s like to be clueless and trying to make your way through school, and what was most interesting is that this was a concept that flipped off and on.  It wasn’t always just a story about trying to get laid, or trying not to fail classes, or to strengthen friendships.  Jesus, sometimes it isn’t even a comic.  There was so much going on with this story that I was amazed by it, and it played a part in my understanding that you don’t need to stay cemented to one particular genre or means of storytelling.

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Shut up, loyal readers, I’m not late this week.

Okay, so I was a young lad when I began reading Exploitation Now by Michael Poe.  In fact, this was the first webcomic of which I bought the collected edition.  And boy, was that a good decision.  I remember having to wait a long time to get it though.  Weak.  Anyhow, this is a webcomic that gives you all the fun sexiness that comes along with failure, rejection, and settling for what you can get.  It was some of my earliest exposure to manga, and it was just an American drawing on many Japanese themes.  Everything that comes to me needs to go through some sort of American filter first.  This is why I can appreciate all the alcohol and the boobies that have become a staple of this great country.  But this comic was about much more than just being an American webcomic based on many manga tropes.  It was funny.  It was exciting.  It was an exploration of what could be done with the art form and I still really enjoy it, especially given what it meant to me when I was at that age, whatever age I was at.

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So, to kick off my month of covering webcomics from my youthier-youth, I figured a good place to start would be the one that introduced me to true disappointment.  Not for quality, because I always loved RPG World by Ian Jones-Quartey.  No, this disappointment came from its all too sudden demise, timed at just about the ending to the story.  That’s right – RPG World is a webcomic that went on throughout most of its story, and just as we were about to see the final battle take place between the heroes and the villains, Ian stopped.  He just lost all interest in RPG World as a whole and never ended it.  He announced that it was over for good a few years later, and here I am, a broken shell of a man.  Or perhaps that’s too extreme?

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I’m back!  Again!  To do Webcomic of the Week.  Again!  Happy Halloween, let’s see what’s cooking this week.

Because The Walking Dead is premiering tonight, I figured a good topic for this week would be zombies.  The Zombie Hunters is a comic by Jenny Romanchuk, on a website managed by her husband Greg.  Always cool to see couples working together to get comics out to the masses.  Anyway, The Zombie Hunters is a very intriguing examination of the zombie apocalypse and how people manage to come together to try to fight off the evil, reanimated corpses that are all around.  The cast manages to stay semi-secluded on an artificial island.  While some details might seem appealing to the average zombie fan that wants to see the end days come in just this fashion, here’s a problem: the characters are infected with a dormant version of the zombie infection, meaning that as soon as they die, whenever that may be, they’ll become a zombie.

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I’m back, folks, after what I thought would never happen – a missed Webcomic of the Week – only now returning because the city of New York drained from my soul last weekend.  Not a comment on the city, just how easy it is for my soul to be drained.  I should really patch that leak.

So catching up, I was at NYCC last weekend.  I got the chance to meet a lot of cool people, not the least of which was a man by the name of Jonathan Rosenberg.  Being the nice guy he is, he talked to me for a lot longer than he had to (dude was friendly, what can I say?)  I bought volume one of his webcomic Goats, he signed it, sketched in it, and it was pretty awesome.  Currently, his webcomic Goats is on hiatus.  Therefore, while I totally recommend you read Goats, I’ll be getting back to Goats later in my WotW recommendations.  This week I’ll be covering the webcomic he’s working on currently, Scenes From A Multiverse.

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I just got my copy of Johnny Wander Volume 1 in the mail, and I just read it, and it’s incredibly awesomely amazing.  Even though I’ve read it all before it was pretty much like reading it for the first time, meaning lots of me laughing and enjoying the hell out of it.  But you know what’s better than volume 1?  Volume 1 with a signed foil on the first page, a top hat drawn onto the Maw on the inside cover (that I specifically asked for, thank you) AND a sticker AND a Johnny Wander card.  I had actually been waiting a long time for the first collection to come out, and I can safely say it was even better than I expected it to be.

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Hold up for a sec, I need to put up the NSFW sign: NSFW.  Okay, you’re good, you can come in now.

Lin R. Visel’s comic Effort Comics! is a great story with not only some good laughs but some sex and some nudity.  And some sexy nudity.  Only this time, it’s between people and cartoons.  Well, they’re all cartoons, from where we’re standing, but in their world there are humans and there are cartoons and they live together in some semblance of harmony.  Sort of.  You ever see the movie Cool World?  Or, more likely, have you ever seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  Look, humans live with cartoons and society is set up as such.  Stop asking me questions.

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If you’ve ever wanted to mix your world with the fantastic and the mythical, with swords and sorcery and monsters, then you’d be wanting something very similar to what Lars Brown has done with North World.  In said comic, we follow groups of people who, for all intense porpoises, very normal people, very similar to you and I.  They rag on things.  They bag on their friends.  They bitch, they moan, and it really is like watching a Kevin Smith movie take place within a game of Dungeons & Dragons.  You just got to struggle to survive in a world where you have grown-up expectations and bears to fight.

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Katie Tiedrich does a webcomic about video games, primarily Pokémon.  That sounds pretty common and straightforward, right?  Wrong, bitch.  Awkward Zombie is a triumph of hilarity.  Remember how much you used to like physical comedy and the dynamics of character design and all that?  Whatever your answer is is wrong, because when I said “used to” it was a trap.  You still do love those things.  Which is why you should certainly love Awkward Zombie.

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In A Lesson is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible, writer Dale Beran and artist David Hellman struggle like crazy to create a webcomic.  Not that it really shows throughout the series, that just seems to be the topic of their adventures as they proceed through the art.  This is the problem with making comics, you see.  You struggle and agonize over what to do a comic about, and all the while magic spells and failed video game creations distract the hell out of you.  It seems like there’s a pretty common theme of distraction, which is something I can relate to pretty easily.  Man, it’s hard to get yourself to do stuff sometimes.

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