Walking Through The Halls Of Justice

Click here to see the full comic that this image is clipped from. You'll be glad you did.

(Hat tip to Johanna; I'll have to check the archives to see if I like it overall as much as she does)

In Case You Missed It: ZUDA WEEK

And if you did miss it, the blame is all mine. I consistently posted these in the dead of the night, so that Tuesday's was most likely read on Wednesday, Wednesday's on Thursday, etc. Forgive my momentarily chaotic posting history.

Zuda Week: High Moon

Zuda Week: Dean Haspiel's STREET CODE

Zuda Week: Work Is Not In Progress

Zuda Week: NIGHT OWLS

Zuda Week: Baby Monsters

Zuda Week: Baby Monsters

OK, I'm cheating on the last one for the week, but only because I'm so sure that I'll be doing this again soon.

BABY MONSTERS (by Steve Broome) only has 8 pages, but it looks like it has potential.

Presumably set in the future, super powers can be given to people. Don't really know exactly how, yet, but it does seem to involve surgery of some sort. Seems to be an attempt to make a better soldier for some kind of use.

Yeah, that's all kind of sketchy, I admit. But the character designs are solid and the coloring really makes the art shine. It isn't that the art is bad on its own, but it is clear that the coloring and shading puts it over-the-top.

The 8th page gives a strong hint that I'm going to like the direction this webcomic is going in. It sets up potential conflict and goals, much the same way that the whole "save the cheerleader, save the world" thing did for HEROES Season One. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Broome has the sense of humor to include a "30 minute pig orgasm" as one of the apparent powers that can be given out (or side effect of one, at least).

No need to rush over to it right away, as I believe it will be a more satisfying read when the pages available double. But I guess Mr. Broome would probably prefer you run over there and vote for it early and often.

Zuda Week: NIGHT OWLS

NIGHT OWLS is another of the Zuda titles you see talked about in the blogosphere. As much as I'm loathe to give attention to something that is already getting plenty of it, Peter & Robert Timony's creation was one of the most attractive options that had a sizable sampling. Who knew it would be this good?

I'm going to start sounding like a broken record here, but the clean, crisp cartooning is what sucked me in and kept me around. It's just so very easy on the eyes and works so well for a supernatural comedy set in the 1920s. You're immediately put in the right frame of mind.

If you're going to have an old man astral projecting, an arch-nemesis without a face and an owl beast that is five stories tall, I'm pretty sure you've thrown out realism from your possible style choices (well, at least with a comedy). Not that there is anything wrong with that.

All things supernatural wind up popping up in this webcomic, but it's never treated as being weird and really isn't the focus of the tales being told. In truth, the supernatural is basically all set-up. Such a huge majority of the funny is rooted in playing upon the culture of 1920s America or other conventional humor.

Mindy Markus, for instance, is a flapper...and probably the most astute practitioner of fisticuffs. This, of course, is to set up all the jokes based around her flying in the face of 1920s standards for behavior by the fairer sex. There are a lot of jokes based around her being thought to need help or protection and her feeling insulted by such behavior. For Pete's sake, they have a small gargoyle on the team and it is much more important that he talks pretty much like the everlovin' Thing before times got so politically correct.

The Timony Bros have put together a highly entertaining, absurd comedy about a supernatural detective agency during the 1920s. In some ways, it feels a bit like ANGEL in the 1920s, minus most of the dramatic moments. That's meant as a compliment. Strongly recommend checking it out.

Zuda Week: Work Is Not In Progress

I feel like I'm cheating by picking a Zuda comic that only has 8 pages up at this point, but damn if the jokes don't remind me of so many tech jobs I've had in the last ten years.

If you've ever worked an IT job, you've probably seen plenty of "fake it 'til you make it" co-workers and people mastering the art of doing no work. Heck, probably any cubicle worker has experienced some level of what WORK IS NOT IN PROGRESS is demonstrating.

So, we've established that I'm pretty keen on the premise. But what about the execution?


Well, it tends to bring the funny (with varying levels of success) in each installment rather than taking several pages to get to the punchline, which is always a welcome approach. The exaggerated (to the point of being occasionally bizarre) cartoon style reminds of a classic newspaper comic strip whose name escapes me at the moment. Which kind of points out the strip's not exactly being a shining beacon of originality. The layout is fairly similar to the Sunday funnies.

As I've mentioned in previous reviews, I normally look for the webcomics I peruse to do something that doesn't fit the mold of the newspaper strips. I expect them to try to take advantage of being free and online. Misery Loves Sherman received a pass on that, because Chris Eliopoulos is looking to land his strip with a syndicate. But a strip that is entered at Zuda? Doesn't seem likely that it would be the case.


One of the weakest points of the art is the way that the protagonist is drawn. That face is about the most difficult of all the characters to look at. It just skews a little to far towards bizarre for my liking, made all the more difficult to ignore by how relatively normal all of the other characters look. Generally, most of the strips I've encountered in the past will pick one approach and stay in the same ballpark with all of the characters. Straying this far just distracts the reader, IMO.

The final verdict? It isn't a bad read. It can be funny. But it comes off like the creator isn't putting their all into it and it shows. WORK IS NOT IN PROGRESS would have to improve quite a bit for me to suggest it as something being worthy of adding to your regular webcomic reading schedule.

Brian Andersen's NOT SO Super Duper Prop 8

Cheer up, Brian...they're still counting absentee ballots, I believe...and challenging the idea of a constitutional change going straight to the polls without going through the legislature.

Zuda Week: Dean Haspiel's STREET CODE

Dean Haspiel is a pretty damn successful webcomic creator. He's the guy behind ACT-I-VATE, so you know he was webcomic before webcomic was cool. So even though he's probably one of the creators with the least need for attention over on Zuda, I couldn't help but gravitate towards STREET CODE to check it out.



Haspiel appears to be telling a semi-autobiographical tale, which makes it all the more interesting in many ways. For some reason, there being a strong degree of reality to the tales being told helps, both because it takes guts to tell the world about your life (warts and all) and adds a level of oomph to the seemingly absurd (like the broomsticks in the trees bit).

Haspiel acquits himself excellently in both phases of his creation here. I'm a sucker for his particular style of art. Clean, crisp and cartoony is just very asthetically pleasing and, to my mind, can effectively tell tales in any genre. It definitely allows Haspiel the Artist the chance to give some real personality to every character present. The style lends itself to exaggerated facial expressions that are very efficient at informing the reader.

Haspiel the Writer does a great job at pacing and knowing when to allow the art to tell the tale. There is so little use of exposition and so much reliance on the image to convey the story beats. There's a four page sequence where maybe three words are used, but a really strong feeling is conveyed to the reader. It's his ability to nail both the writing and art aspects of his property that makes Dean Haspiel's STREET CODE such a great humorous, dramatic, slice-of-life webcomic that everyone should really check out.

(Note: I'd really like to go into more detail (and may revisit at a later date), but it's been a rough day and more detailed commentary is escaping me at the moment)

Zuda Week: High Moon

(Note: It's still Tuesday somewhere. I underestimated the impact of this historic Election Night, so the Two-Fer will, instead, become a TGIF doubling)


Let me get one thing out in the open before I actually review HIGH MOON: I really dislike the interface that Zuda uses to display the webcomics for readers.

This doesn't change my opinion of HIGH MOON considerably. I do imagine that a less frustrating interface would have made me more comfortable and able to just absorb the work, but I tried to keep it from being held against the work.

HIGH MOON is one of the many Zuda offerings to have received high praise all over the internet in the past. After having read it from start to finish, I can see why and really regret letting the interface keep me away for this long.

David Gallaher and Steve Ellis put together two rarely fused genres: horror & westerns (or, as Zuda classifies it, a "historical period" piece). Think "The Good, The Bad & The Monsters". The first protagonist, MacGregor, definitely draws comparisons to "The Man With No Name", just mutton chops & supernatural ties.

MacGregor claims to be a former lawman, but it is made quite obvious from the start that very little going on in this story is as it seems or as the characters want us to think. We can be fairly certain, however, that MacGregor doesn't bother to track your average fugitive.

I'm struck by the artwork here, especially upon further review. As mentioned, I believe the interface has drawbacks. I was readying to speak of how moody much of the artwork was. When going back to check and zooming in more, whether the text required it or not, I noticed that the artwork is much more often sharply detailed. Sure, there are appropriately employed moments of harsh lines or sketchier images to get a feeling across, but when it isn't required to be so, the artist delivers really crisp and sometimes intricate panels and pages.


HIGH NOON has a decent size cast that it manages to familiarize the readers with naturally, not via clunky exposition. You get a sense of the personalities, motivations and histories for these characters more from their interaction with others and their body language than anything else. I think it really establishes the trust between writer and artist and is the mark of an excellent collaborative work.

The pacing helps to establish tension and suspense at the right moments in the story. The writer's execution sets up several very good twists in the first chapter alone. Without giving detail about the second chapter, there is definitely a sense of a connected story here. Each chapter can stand on its own, while it seems that they're building a much farther reaching story.

At this point, anything and everything is on the table for the creative team. I can honestly say I don't know what to expect next and I wouldn't be surprised if they wound up taking a turn that wasn't in the long list of possibilities that I could imagine.

Phew...Might Have To Modify This Zuda Thing

Oh, I'm still going to be putting up a Two-Fer-Tuesday and filling out the rest of the week, but I might not be able to commit to reading every single installment existing for all of the entries in the festivities.

Who knew 105 pages of a Zuda comic would read as so much more dense than your average webcomic found through the tubes that connect this interwebz?

And, in the name of Allah, I swear I picked the first comic for review before you posted a comment, David. ;)

Coming Soon: Zuda Week

Starting tomorrow (complete with a TWO-FER-TUESDAY offering), I'll be reviewing 5 different Zuda offerings. It would have began today, but life got in the way and I wouldn't want any of the comics to suffer from my rushing to get the review done.

In the meantime, if you haven't already checked them out, here's a list of the reviews from WEB COMICS WEEK:

Calamities of Nature
The Wang
Circle Vs. Square
Multiplex
Misery Loves Sherman

The review line-up for the week isn't set in stone, so feel free to post any suggestions of Zuda offerings you'd like to see on the blog.

Web Comics Week: Misery Loves Sherman

We end the week with the Chris Eliopoulos webcomic: MISERY LOVES SHERMAN.

Known to most comic book fans as one of the hardest working letterers in the business, he's also great cartoonist/artist that does really well at bringing the funny. While many readers know him for his work on Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius, but I'll always associate him with DESPERATE TIMES.


But we're talking about Misery Loves Sherman.

The archive of the strip only goes back to 12/31/07. The strip kind of hits the ground running as if all of the characters are well known to the readers already. There might be strips that just aren't up on the site where people got to know the characters previously, but MLS provides a NEW READER section that introduces the entire cast fairly well.

(obviously from before the Wall Street hijinx)

On the surface, you might be tempted to compare the strip to Calvin & Hobbes (with two aliens replacing the stuffed tiger), but it would be a pretty unfair & inaccurate comparison. In Misery Loves Sherman, the title character isn't really the star. Sherman seems to serve more as our window into his world for our entertainment, rather than amusing the reader directly. All of the interesting quirks and personality traits belong to the other members of the cast. Sherman is just a fairly normal kid that we get to see the flaws and obsessions of other characters bounce off of.


Eliopoulos has expressed a goal to get this picked up by a syndicate, so you can fully expect the strip to be newspaper-safe and -formatted. I do tend to like webcomics that take fuller advantage of self-publishing on the internet by not falling into the old mold, but holding that against MLS would be like being mad that Boondocks strips on the 'net aren't reformatted and scripted (don't know whether or not that's the case, just using an example).

It's a comic that basically any member of the family could read and enjoy. For a family strip, it does push things to the edge a little bit (at least for how I remember strips used to be). I don't recall any strips ever making a weeklong gag out of a kid being "a mistake" or "an accident".


Miserly Loves Sherman is a winner. Friends I've linked to MLS have wound up going back to read the entire archive. It's like the Brian Regan of webcomics: you hardly notice the lack of shock value/foul language because you're having too much fun. As someone who has seen Regan live as many times as he's seen George Carlin, that's meant as a strong compliment.

Web Comics Week: Multiplex

Once again, here we are with a webcomic that has advertised on SCHWAPP!!!

Gordon McAlpin's MULTIPLEX has been around since 2005. I'm embarrassed to say it took me a long time to notice him plugging the strip in his old Newsarama signature before the remodeling over there. But I checked it out from time to time and enjoyed it. Ironic as it is, I'm not great at checking sites daily or multiple times a week (God bless the RSS feeds, I say). But it was a lock for being featured this week just because it's about time I took a more in-depth look at MULTIPLEX.


Now, there are 295 installments up on the site, so I wasn't able to read them all for this review. I caught up on about the first 40 and then skipped to the last 30 or so.

What I've found in those groups is both expected and surprising. It's natural that the strip would need to make observations and jokes independent of actual movies or theater chains, because it can't rely on the strength or weakness of the Hollywood release schedule. But what is surprising is how some of the non-movie-focused arcs are quite often the strongest riffs in the life of the strip.


After running for 295 installments, you'd expect the characters to have been fleshed out and evolved before your eyes...and you wouldn't be disappointed. You likely know people that match all of the personalities on display in the stories and, like in real life, they grow and change due to their interactions with each other.


McAlpin doesn't shy away from some controversial topics. It isn't all political correctness over on Multiplex and that's often a very good thing for the strip (tho' your mileage may vary).

Multiplex is a strip that finds equal parts of its humor in its world, our world & the movies. I think it's worth checking out.

Web Comics Week: Circle Vs. Square

A reader e-mailed in to suggest CIRCLE VERSUS SQUARE be included in Web Comics Week. After I recovered from the shock of having a reader that would actually e-mail in with something constructive ;), I checked it out.

It obviously not an artsy web comic, but what it lacks in stunning graphics it makes up for with wit and inventive situations to place the characters in.

The main thrust of the comic is, as the title would suggest, pitting Circle & Square against each other. There's no real basis for the animosity, which the creator kind of admits in the way it is introduced in the first installment. But you quickly forget about that (as you should for a nonsensical humor strip) and sit back to enjoy the ride.

As I've stressed in the last two reviews, delivering the funny in each strip is important. Circle Vs. Square consistently follows the rule. Even during the Election (for lack of a better term) plotline, there are jokes delivered in each installment (and good for a chuckle 9 times out of 10).


The one drawback with the current Election arc is that it's a little unfriendly to new readers. Some of the jokes are more reliant on continuity and many characters are mentioned without appearing on panel or being given any bit of background. But I guess that's one of the benefits of being a free webcomic: that "FIRST" link is always there to take you back to a new reader friendly place in its history.

If you dismiss this comic based on the often basic drawings, you're making a big mistake.

Web Comics Week: The Wang

Yesterday, I started off Web Comics Week with a look at Calamities of Nature. That strip came to my attention due to having advertised in the past. So, why abandon that method of picking strips to take a look at already?

THE WANG is quite a funny comic. It has a diverse cast, as well as subject matter. Unlike the turn that Calamities took with changing to the old standard layout, WANG has at least kept to giving you something more akin to the double-sized Sunday newspaper version. And why not, since it is delivered weekly rather than 2-3 times a week?


But where it really breaks from standards is in the subjects and language used. Our protagonist, Eugene Wang, constantly has the short term romantic hook up between his mother and his ex-girlfriend thrown in his face. They have his friend, George L. Gedaladapus, tricks a dimwitted friend of Eugene's into bed and into handing him a check for a bogus pyramid scheme (that might be a redundant phrase, come to think of it). The language used tends to be a little blue from time to time and has no qualms about employing sexual humor.


In addition to going politically incorrect or with shock humor, they tackle the more "middle of the road stuff" (like what a dog on a walk is thinking) and politics (like addressing some of the voter suppression tactics used).


Unfortunately, since the online version only goes back to February 2008, I can't really compare and contrast how the strip started versus how it is today. It existed in some form before that date and, I'm gathering, previous strips were pulled down once they were printed in a collection. From the start of this iteration, though, Stan Yan (the creator) was in full stride.


Every strip has a laugh, even when it is really meant to set up for a larger joke. Maybe Yan is more keen on this due to his weekly schedule. Readers are probably even more concerned with having a payoff in each strip when they only get it on Mondays. But whatever the reason, it consistently works.


The cast is extremely well-balanced. While Eugene's ex-girlfriend might not be able to carry the strip with cutesy observations about a dog being walked, there is rarely a case of feeling the strip is lacking by the absence of a particular character. Quite the opposite, it works when it's Eugene & George, George & Sueann, Eugene Jr & Eugene Sr or any other combo that graced Yan's WebComicNation page. That page apparently does contain some old work with the character, but not the beginning of the version you'll see under THE WANG.

I'd head on over and catch up on the last year of strips. I don't think you'll regret the time spent.