Achewood

Achewood, by Chris Onstad, is essentially my all-time favorite comic series. Beginning its life as a webcomic, it has been published online since 2001, with most of its updates tapering off (yet not quite stopping!) sometime last year.

Initially coming off as an absurdist fantasy comic featuring talking animals that live their lives just beneath the cities of humans, it has slowly morphed into an absurdist fantasy comic featuring talking animals that live their lives in a reality almost, but not quite, entirely like our own.

The strip's 'main characters', Roast Beef and Ray, form an incomparable duo whose talents and frailties drive obscenely deep and gripping characterizations that shine through powerfully despite the insanity of the world around them. As I recall one commenter adding: "One of the deepest reflections on life has been brought me by a cartoon cat. What the hell."

I initially fell in love with Achewood specifically because of its absurdist humor, and Onstad's flair for creating a vibrantly realistic world through a comic which, I believe, was constructed mostly in Microsoft Powerpoint. The character's incredible adventures all echo something deep and resonant with the reality of life - their triumphs, their failures, their frustrations, and their blind, dumb luck.

I feel it also taught me two very important things about narrative and art - that being, a powerful narrative obscures all flaws in the art, and art that has exactly enough is all you need. Onstad's incredible talent for conveying the emotions of his characters with subtle expressions and movements between panels gives Achewood's humor a power that it would not otherwise have.

Achewood has not received the sort of attention that I feel it really needs to - though from what I understand, it did provide Onstad with a source of income for nearly a decade, so that's probably Good Enough.

XKCD

XKCD is one of my regularly-read webcomics. It combines a unique blend of, as the tagline states, "Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language."

Written and drawn by physics graduate Randall Munroe, it's probably one of the brainiest - and nerdiest - comics on the web, deftly combining obscure math and science humor into a unique blend of comical goodness. Sitting somewhere between "Family Circus" and "Calvin & Hobbes" in terms of its format, it utilizes the very finest in stick-figure and diagram techniques to pull together a style unique unto itself if only because nobody else is lazy enough to try it.

XKCD is one of the more popular webcomics, probably driven mostly by its appeal to the internet audience, as many comics address 'uniquely internet things', such as the dominance of social networks or the nature of memes.

Randall's unceasing wit and keen, nerdy insight into life's various spectra come through quite clearly in his work, which after a while becomes an encyclopedia of intriguing musings in addition to a body of minimalist artwork.

It's hard to say exactly why I personally like XKCD as much as I do, other than to say that somewhere between its bar graphs and faceless stick-figures, it grips me in a gentle, slightly sarcastic way that no other comic quite does.

The Dark Knight Returns

The Dark Knight Returns is one of those "classics" I was always told to read, and after doing so, I can see why. Written by Frank Miller, it has a strange sort of...je ne sais quoi about it that only Miller can do.

Building itself up as sort of a "what if" story about a retired Batman who returns to the street with the intention of tying up all of his loose ends, from the Joker to Superman, Dark Knight is a very gripping tale, with plenty of satisfying twists and turns.

In true Frank Miller fashion, it features a cast of take-no-shit men and overtly masculine women, with a few good psychopaths thrown in to have something for them to focus on.

I have to say that while I am not really a fan of superhero comics, this is one that I can certainly get behind. Like Kingdom Come and Watchmen, it weaves a narrative about painfully human characters who attempt to make sense of the world's inherent disorder through the use (and abuse) of their powers - either supernatural or scientific in origin.

The final battle between Superman and Batman crafts an analogy stronger than the personal grievances between these two men - it tells us something about the inherent struggle between the human who attempts to solve social ills through technology and force (Batman) and the supernatural ideal that attempts to save all of mankind from itself (Superman).

Interesting that something that began as a way of getting kids to give up their nickels serves us so many years later as an artistically-adroit platform for exploring moral theory - and brought to us by Frank Miller, of all people.

Transmetropolitan

Transmetropolitan is a wonderful series, a real sort of 'classic' in my eyes (I'd read the series before this class, but seeing it on the resource list made me jump back onto it) about a Hunter S. Thompson kind of figure in the future, who breathlessly pursues truth and dogs corruption at the turn of every page. One of Warren Ellis's more prominent works, the energy just jumps right off the page.

The art is fantastic enough, but Ellis's writing is really what sells it as a story - the character of Spider Jerusalem being its own little microcosm of humor and sometimes not-so-subtle political commentary. Spider's 'Thompson' sheen extends so far as to have his own Nixon to battle with, as well as indulging in every other vice (as well as some that don't even exist yet) that Thompson did.

But merely framing Transmet's main dude as a caricature of Thompson is disingenuous, as Spider can clearly stand on his own two feet as an individual and as a harbinger of critical political commentary. Throughout the series, Spider comes across as not just a fabulously and hilariously-written bundle of explosive energy, but as a kind and fair intellectual, truly devoted to his self-described cause - even if it means shooting a few people with a bowel disruptor.

The sheer length of the series, as well, allows a great deal of stories and ideas to be imparted to the patient reader, making Transmetropolitan a pretty ace thing to endeavor soaking up. I certainly feel like a better person for making the leap and eventually devouring the whole thing.

  

Now the only thing I need to do is find the entire series again in a format that'll load onto my iPad.

Sin City

Frank Miller's 'Sin City' is a pretty neat series, as far as neo-noir storytelling goes. Interestingly, its author is sort of a dick, and the stories in it are not very feel-good or even politically correct, and yet it has enjoyed enormous success. Being adapted into the 2005 film, as well as simply distributed and read in comic form, Sin City is a pretty iconic series.

I personally felt as if I was 'slogging' through certain parts, and just sort of going through the motions of reading the panels (especially the bits in A Dame To Kill For where Dwight would just not shut up), but some parts were genuinely rewarding in terms of their pacing and art - one of the most haunting take-aways from the whole series is the vision of a bandaged Dwight on the phone with Ava, promising his revenge. Absolutely chilling stuff.

The later (restrained) use of red, blue, and yellow in some of the stories is really effective, and sort of shocks the up-'til-then complacent reader to full attention for those bits. the entire Yellow Bastard storyline is pure sadistic insanity, rivaled only by the cellar scenes in The Hard Goodbye.

One of the things about Sin City that's really excellent is the way the storylines neatly dovetail into one another, picking up threads and themes from previous or future storylines at will. They connect to one another with a seeming prescience that makes me wonder how much Frank Miller planned it, and how much just sort of happened.

The last point of note I want to address here is the characterization - I personally wonder how much of the characters is Frank Miller talking, and how much of them is just…them. The reason I wonder this is because I have unfortunately been exposed to some of Miller's personal politics through the internet, and his characters in Sin City from twenty years ago tend to echo his words a bit here and there.

Regardless of that, one of my favorite characters in the series is Marv, if only for the fact that his politics are fairly tame and his principles are sterling silver. Dwight comes in at a close second, if only for the fact that he is one canny motherfucker.

From Hell

Alan Moore's "From Hell" is a strange, epic work. I was originally drawn into it due to its writer, who is one of my favorites, but was then gripped wholly by its artful dance between fiction and reality (indeed, Moore has some 50 pages in the rear of the work detailing his research!), as well as its uncompromising characterizations of its men and women.

Moore's approach to narrative generation here is exquisite - summoning up the long-dead ghosts of a whole cast of real individuals, he weaves a new history for their lives that they never led, imbuing them quite handily with Masonic credentials and theophanic visions.

A strange undercurrent runs beneath the work for its main character, which is both profoundly paranoid and uniquely misogynistic - believing that the future of the world, for it to happen, must see the dominance of men over women - and not just in a literal sense, but in a mystical one. This undercurrent provides much of his drive when he assumes the work and identity of "Saucy Jack", with all of his Masonic rambling and "double events".

The art in it is pretty gruesome, which is oddly fitting, given the nature of the narrative - something I observed early on was that "everyone in this is ugly". Even the prostitute victims, some of whom were historically beautiful women, are drawn in a scratchy and brutal style. There was only one panel amongst the whole work that I could say was legitimately optimistic in its portrayal of an individual.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this work, as it was something very different and very dark. Some of the murders, being quite horrific, made me squirm while I was 'reading' through them, so - bravo. Mission accomplished.

The whole thing ties up very neatly in an ending that I can say is uncommonly satisfying, and the various 'visions' that show up throughout the work, hinting at an inevitable future yet to come, weave themselves into that ending and somehow give it even more power - by hinting that, perhaps, Jack was not quite as insane as we all thought.

Calvin & Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes is a classic, something that hardly needs to be mentioned - delighting generations of readers in the past and hopefully generations in the future. Straining at the edges of its fairly insular medium of newspaper comics, C&H combines gorgeously simple drawings with an incendiary wit, delivered by the comic's unstoppable Calvin. With Hobbes serving as the softer foil to Calvin's industrious mayhem, the two form a narrative duo that can simultaneous perceive and question all sides of the events that life throws out to them, while reserving their judgement just enough to allow the reader reflection rather than argument.

   

The purely fantasy elements of C&H's world are wonderful escapes from the typically mundane world the characters are trapped within - Watterson excellently portrays the fanciful ness of childhood imagination and escape with a deft and welcoming sense of style.

   

The few examples of recurring storylines are counterpoint to the strip's normally random and independent structure wherein the characters are free to act as insane and unbound by the conventions of society as they like. C&H was an essential part of my childhood, allowing me a place to explore strange and wonderful ideas typically barred from a child's daily life - strangely enough.