Webcomic Review #10 - Fantasy Comics Part 2: Monsters, Elves, and Sorcery

FANTASY - PART 2

Monster's Garden

 

I was going to say that, like Glam Rock Gorilla, I had written about this comic before in an earlier submission.
As it turns out, I never published that post. It's just been sitting as a draft for a few years now.
I didn't even write so much as a summary, let alone a review.

Anyway, like GRG, Monster's Garden is pretty damn fun to read. I almost listed it among my re-read comics, but I never actually made it past the first few pages before losing interest. Like others that I've mentioned, I gave it another chance, and it didn't disappoint. The tragic thing is how slowly it updates, and there hasn't been a new page in almost two months now. And it was getting really interesting, too.

Daughter Of The Lilies

I didn't expect to like any of the countless adventure-fantasy webcomics that feature a band of cliche' role-playing
characters on a quest for enchanted artifacts. Daughter of the Lilies neither embodies nor eschews these tropes, rather it acknowledges and has fun with them, as it tells a slightly different story than other sword-and-sorcery works have replicated for decades. And it's nice to follow characters that have adult conversations and aren't ripped right out of a dungeon-master's prized campaign. Regardless, don't judge this tome by its dusty cover, and you might be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

Updates twice a week.

Spindrift

I would say that reading Spindrift was a similar scenario to D.O.T.L., wherein I was cautiously optimistic about consuming a comic about elves with wings engaged in war with horned barbarians, but it also won me over with its more mature and subdued approach to the "epic" high fantasy genre. But, like others in the online comic medium, it suffers from a decline in its update schedule, having receded from new pages being posted every week down to once a month on average. I can at least compliment the professional-level illustrations and its exceptionally astute narrative, though it may be a while before anyone finds out what happens next.

The Hunters Of Salamanstra

The Hunters of Salamanstra is a creation of none other than John Joseco, MLP fan-artist for those in the know, and also responsible for more infamous deviant works for those really in the know. Aside from animals tails and ears here and there, Hunters has little to do with either ponies or furries, and focuses instead on an unlikely young hero taking up the mantle of her more famous older sister, a legendary member of a monster-hunting guild. The problem this time? Not lack of updates; rather, lack of a working RSS Feed for which to follow said updates. As compelling as it is, I have to remind myself from time to time that it still exists.

Steve Lichman

I first discovered Steve Lichman through a random Imgur link on Reddit...or maybe it was somewhere else. Anyway, it was during the time where my webcomic appetite was at an all-time low, and it was a rare occasion for one to put a smile on my face. I would warn that it's a little more low-brow and "Internet humor" than most fantasy-comic fans are accustomed to, but it was right up my alley.

I have no idea if this comic finished a while ago, or if the author means to continue what you might call a "story."
There are archives in multiple locations, and he is currently running a KickStarter to sell prints of the first volume.
Read it anyway, it's worth it.



THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

GO READ SOME COMICS!

Webcomic Review #9 - Fantasy Comics Part 1: The Spiritual, Occult, and Mythological

FANTASY - PART 1

The Firelight Isle

 

 The Firelight Isle presents an ancient civilization akin to a Meso-American empire, where boys and girls alike are expected
to undertake harrowing trials of religious devotion as part of their grand and hallowed coming-of-age ceremony.
Two childhood friends find themselves torn apart, as one decides to join the highest order of spiritual warriors.

Hosted on Tapastic and updates roughly every two weeks.
 

Castoff 

 

 In Castoff, a magically-inclined bounty hunter comes across a quaint bookstore, wherein dwells an unusual creature with
pointed ears and glowing, yellow eyes. He is immediately detained for charges unknown and dragged away to meet an
uncertain fate. The aesthetic overall is adequate enough, but I'm a sucker for demons and satyr-like character designs.

 Updates twice a week.

Godslave

 

 Godslave follows Edith on a visit to a history museum, who unintentionally frees an ancient Egyptian deity from its slumber inside a canopic jar. She is immediately accosted by an otherworldly henchmen on the hunt for the unassuming animal,
and through her new friend's help she is granted the power necessary to dish out her own proverbial can of whoop-ass.

 Updates anywhere between once and three times a week.

Ilse

 

 Ilse stars a princess seemingly afflicted with a terrifying deformity, only for it to appear to be the sign of a witch slain by the town's local hero. Desperately seeking to return to her tower before her royal sires discover her sneaking and spying,
she comes across the offspring of said hero, and its unclear just what she has in store for him.

 Updated on a one-per-week schedule, but currently on hiatus.

Suihira

 

 Another comic set in a deeply religious society, Suihira is named for the mythical paradise created by a goddess long
forgotten by the denizens of Iona. Princess Wahida is jeered and shamed for her devotion to said legend, and sets out
on a pilgrimage to meet her maker and escape the confines built by the blasphemers surrounding her.

 Updates twice a week.



BUT WAIT, I'M JUST ABOUT FINISHED!

WEBCOMIC REVIEW #10

Webcomic Review #8 - Furries (For The Most Part)

ANTHROPOMORPHIC

Kappa

 Goddamn near everything.

 Kappa stars a far-from-home clownfish taken hostage by a tiny kingdom of tentacular merfolk, who
recruit him to their cause of liberating their ancient home from the clutches of giant enemy crabs.
The character designs are simple enough, but the landscapes are gorgeously illustrated, and
it's rare to find a webcomic, furry or otherwise, with such a refreshing and unique setting.

 Updates once a week.

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth

 A curiously Christian webcomic, or at least derived from religious mythology, B.I.B.L.E. as it's cleverly titled showcases a war between the forces of Heaven and Hell, fought by animalistic angels and more traditionally-designed demons, the latter
of which exploit a middle-race of elves for their arcane rituals. The angelic protagonists are far from perfect, however,
and it's unclear if this battle between good and evil is as black-and-white as it seems.

 Updates have been sporadic at best, and seemed to have stopped indefinitely over a month ago.

Prequel

 This is pretty much my new favorite thing.

 Out of all the bookmarked comics that I've binged on in the last few weeks, it's safe to say that Prequel secured itself as one of my new all-time favorites. It was a chore to read to be sure, considering that it's a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game composed on the MS Paint Adventures forum and punctuated by gif animations, as seen above. That, and it regularly updated for years by the time that I got around to it, but it was absolutely worth my time. The mini-games alone, let alone the layout-breaking animated segments, are a labor of commitment that put other established authors to shame.
It's damned funny to boot, and when it's not, it ranges from heart-breaking to awe-inspiring. I never thought that I
would be this enthralled by what is essentially Elder Scrolls fanfiction drafted by a long-time Homestuck fan.
It's certainly one of the rare comics that I've considered spending real money on.

 Updates infrequently, as it's currently undergoing a crowdfunding campaign.

Beyond The Western Deep

 A more traditional "furry" comic than those listed above, Beyond The Western Deep stands out for
its genuinely intriguing backstory and characters that don't feel straight out of a histrionic soap opera.
All swords and no sorcery, it features a world divided up among varying races of personified
woodland creatures, where our heroes race to prevent a potential genocide of one of these domains.
However, their version of current events might not be as accurate as it seems, when it comes to
light that the militaristic nation they are allies with may have altered history for their own ends.

Updates once a week, but the main story arc has been on hiatus for a few months now.



BUT WAIT, YOU WON'T BELIEVE THERE'S MORE!

WEBCOMIC REVIEW #9

Webcomic Review #7 - The End Of The World

POST-APOCALYPSE / DYSTOPIAN

Tethered

Tethered takes place in a war-torn Britain of the future, where exposure to free-roaming green vapors can induce
paranoia and hallucinations. Survivors scavenge badly-needed power sources from the last remaining robots in the
scorched wastelands. The protagonist Cara finds herself in a precarious situation, when she needs to rely on one
such android for his life-support system as they travel to newer, more hostile destinations.

 Updates once a week.

Soul To Call

Soul To Call starts after a uncertain calamity wipes out most of Earth's population, and demons from an alternate dimensions wreak havoc among those left alive. Out of some desperate yet unknown purpose, the young Avril attempts
to summon one of these creatures in order to make use of his precious fluids. Tormented and pursued by a cult and
the occult alike, it remains to be seen if both her and her captive new companion will make it out alive.

Updates twice a week.

Bicycle Boy

 Bicycle Boy features yet another cyborg, who this time wakes up in the
middle of the desert, struck with amnesia and surrounded by fresh cadavers.
Wayfaring on a salvaged bicycle, he searches for answers about
his very identity, assisted by a curiously helpful travel guide.
Along the way, they contend with savage foragers who are keen
on retrieving certain items that he has stowed away in his chassis.

 Updates once a week.

No End

It seems that nowadays you can't have a post-apocalypse story without at least a zombies roaming around somewhere.
That's more or less the setting of No End, where the undead serve either as a foreboding yet off-screen threat, or as disturbingly sentient bounty hunters. This may delight those who have already grown tired of the continuing zombie trend
in popular fiction, or disappoint those who are accustomed to works where the corpses are nothing more than
background decoration.

However, this might just be one of the best zombie webcomics that I have yet read, and I've read quite a few
(well, there's literally only a few of them). The art is appealing and the characters are endearing, and the more
mature themes and dialogue are much appreciated in the ongoing Age of Robert Kirkman.

 Updates in batches once a week.



BUT WAIT, THERE'S STILL MORE!

WEBCOMIC REVIEW #8

Webcomic Review #6 - Laughs, Fights, and Magical Girls

COMEDY

Camp Weedonwantcha

Camp Weedonwantcha was the first on the list to read on my mission to expand my webcomic
horizons, and it excelled with flying colors in making me appreciate the medium again.
There likely isn't a single page in the archive that didn't leave me with a smile on my face,
and also a few that moved the blackened husk that is my shriveled heart.
Katie J. Rice is probably most well known for her work on the venerable Skadi,
as well as being a contestant on Penny Arcade's Strip Search, during which
she laid the groundwork for this truly irresistibly amusing comic.

Updates Tuesdays and Fridays. Read now, if you haven't already!

ACTION / SUPERHERO / SHONEN  

Phantomland

 It looks like a manga, and reads like one too, but it would disingenuous to disregard it as such.
Phantomland follows the life and adventures of Chie, a amnesiac girl who is somewhat forcibly
recruited into the city's crime-fighting organization, where she will get a chance to prove her
capability - or lack thereof. It doesn't pull any punches when it comes to action sequences,
and it's fairly funny as well.

Updates once a week.

Chaos In The Tropics

 Chaos In The Tropics is an absolute beast of a webcomic.
It's got superpowers, it's got walking talking sharks, it's got chaos, and it's got tropics.
The art alone is enough to sell me, let alone its premise.

 The problem, sadly, lies in the format in which the author chooses to tell his story.
Rather than aim for weekly or every-other-day updates, as most online comics typically do,
he attempts to finish entire "beats" at a time, each one taking months to produce.
This inevitably leads to forgetting that it existed in the first place, yet craving more
once one reaches the end of the installment. He insists that it's for the best, but I digress.

StarHammer

 StarHammer is named for the weapon inherited by high-school girl Evey one fateful day,
and which used to belong to an infamous superheroine. This comic literally just started,
so it's too early exactly how events will turn out, but it looks promising enough to me for now.

Updates three times a week.

The Inheritors

Tragedy strikes the city of St. James not just because of a nuclear explosion, but from the plague that followed.
Survivors are discovered to have enhanced abilities, only to be horribly disfigured over time.
In order to stave off further infection, a vaccine was distributed to contain the monsters
to the irradiated wasteland and subdue the burgeoning powers of the town's youth.
The Inheritors is named after the mythical band of heroes granted gifts by the disaster but
who never succumbed to the so-called "Id Fever," and follows a group of high school students
who may be similar cases themselves.

MAHOU SHOUJO

Sleepless Domain

 Sleepless Domain is a remarkably well-drawn comic that postulates what might happen to a cliche'
troupe of magical girls once they're past their peak and shed themselves of their overbearing leadership.
Unfortunately, the artist behind the first arc retired from the comic a month ago,
leaving illustration duties to the writer, and it hasn't updated since.

Metacarpolis

I vaguely remember attempting to read through this once before, but got bored and gave up before
it got a chance to get interesting. Admittedly, I regret that, but I'm glad for giving it another shot.
Though I hate to use the term, Metacarpolis is more of a "deconstruction" than loving tribute to the genre,
but it handles that part of the backstory well and provides plenty of laughs and antics along the way.
Also features sentient robot assistants, a supervillain megacorporation, suspiciously-shadowy bureaucrats,
Japanese-style maids, and a kooky archaeologist.

In fact, it would be easier to think of what the comic is missing instead.
Updates whenever the author isn't taking an extended hiatus.



BUT WAIT, THERE'S EVEN MORE!

WEBCOMIC REVIEW #7

Webcomic Review #5 - (Re)Introduction

Hey, everybody.

Long time no see, huh?

I'll get into a more proper "What the hell have I been doing in the past year" type post at 

some point in the near future, as well as the inevitable "music I've been listening to" and 

"movies I'm looking forward to" posts. For now, I wanted to take the time to resurrect a 

previously periodic installment on this blog: the Webcomic Review.

To be honest, I had a major falling-out with webcomics as a medium of entertainment in the last few years. 
I stopped writing about them here, quite a few of my favorites came to sudden conclusions, and I was starting to 
unsubscribe from various RSS feeds one by one. Little over a month ago, the number of comics that I followed had 
dwindled down to a mere dozen or so. I had come to an impasse; do I give up on webcomics entirely,
a branch of literature I had adored since I started using the Internet regularly more than a decade ago? 
Or do I actually make an effort to care about them again?

It wasn't easy. I had no idea where to start. Thankfully, I had the free time that could allow me the proper amount of research into which comics had decently-sized followings, which ones were still updating, and which ones most closely resembled the sort of fare I was already accustomed to. I probably skimmed and previewed hundreds of comics across varying genres and formats, until I had a shortlist of works whose archives I would binge. Now, I have a whole new set of comics added to those that I already follow, which I will deliberate about here. 

Thanks for sticking with me so far, those of you who stumbled in here unintentionally.

And without further ado, I'll begin...

Cherenkov Blues

 First order of business: shameless promotion of my friends' comic.

Cherenkov Blues is a weird sorta' adventure/drama that features mutated humanoids residing in the
blown-out radioactive wasteland that is - I mean, once was Nashville, Tennessee.
A handful of these creatures endeavor to start a band, one of whom is a mouthless cyclops who seems to
always have the worst of luck. It's too early to tell where the story may be heading at this point, 

but it absolutely has my seal of approval on both the writing and the artwork. 

Check it out (and kindly add it to your feed or bookmarks) today!

For the following section, I'll be listing comics that I have started reading *again*,

after I previously stopped keeping track of their updates, usually due a lack of said updates.

Sakana

Best character.

Sakana takes place in a Japanese fish market, and follows the antics and misfortunes of a particular shop's employees.
Illustrated by fellow SCAD-grad Madeline Rupert, who I met briefly at a convention,
but she drew me a cheap anime sketch so she is both cool and legit.

Updates weekly-ish, but has been known to take extended holidays.

The Fancy Adventures Of Jack Cannon

I once read Jack Cannon religiously in the peak of my webcomic consumption, to stave off my
hunger for more Fanboys, and as a less convoluted alternative to the popular Paranatural.  

It fell to the wayside as major story arcs wrapped up and updates slowed to a crawl, 

but my nostalgia has led me to give it another chance.

With that said, it has updated only once in the last three months, and the latest chapter 

has been without color in order to save time on production. Oh well.

Fishbones

 What I once had left for dead years ago once it went on indefinite hiatus, had turned out to be resurrected some time ago and picked back up where it left off. Fishbones is the story of two high-school students, one the son of a mafia don and the other his hapless companion, as they deal with being social pariahs among their peers and the intricate web of crime and deceit that follows their privileged yet subversive lifestyle.

Updates resumed a few months ago, albeit very gradually.

Wilde Life

Wilde Life begins when a man named Oscar (hence the clever title) foolishly buys a house in the middle of nowhere,
Oklahoma, only to discover that the former tenant hasn't vacated the residence long after her demise, hence the cheap offer.
Eventually he encounters teenage werewolves, giant spirit bears, and vengeful child poltergeists.

Not an outright hilarious webcomic, but it does provide a decent chuckle every now and then.

Updates three times a week!

The Lonely Vincent Bellingham

The namesake of The Lonely Vincent Bellingham decides to visit the abode of his professor's old friend, presumed
to be old herself if not dead already. What he discovers is that not only is she still looking good for a centenarian,
but that her entire small family exhibits traits of the strange and paranormal.

Updates every two weeks or so. It's hard to tell.

Glam Rock Gorilla 

 I've already written up the best possible summary I could come up with for this entry in a previous post, but to be perfectly
honest, I couldn't accurately describe Glam Rock Gorilla even if I wanted to. All I know is that it looks good, and its fun
to read. Alas, updates seem to have taken a backseat to one of the artist's other pet project, Kill Six Billion Demons.
I keep tabs on it just in case it gets its time in the spotlight again, but that seems unlikely at this point.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

WEBCOMIC REVIEW #6