My coffee!
Chrishallbeckstore.Com
By Aaron Coulter
As we move into the second installment of our weekly webcomic round-ups, I want to thank everyone for their suggestions, and to keep things as transparent as possible, mention a few things about how comics are included in each week’s list.
To start, the comic has to be updated within each specific week, or relatively close. If a comic is no longer updating, I probably won’t cover it in the weekly list. If something’s especially great, but nonetheless finished, feel free to mention it in the comments section, and it might be covered for a longer piece someday. Part of the goal of this column is to showcase the variety of webcomic talent publishing on the Internet, but also to provide a quick recommendation of the best recent updates.
Woo, I placed! I’d like to thank my mommy, Chick-Fil-A, and Jesus.
But I repeat myself.
Sal as Amazi-Girl! Billie’s reality haha.
Sketch by David Willis at Webcomics Rampage 2012!
‘Gastrophobia’ Pits My Little Ponies Against Care Bears in Ancient Greece
By Lauren Davis
Set in an offbeat version of Ancient Greece (in the little known region of Inconsequentia), David Maguire’s webcomic Gastrophobia mixes up fractured Greek myths with goofy time travel adventures, dark takes on classic cartoons and even an Iron Chef competition. In the most recently completed storyline, McGuire’s exiled Amazon warrior and her plucky son come face to face with two of the most malevolent warring powers of the 1980s: Care Bears and My Little Ponies.
Gastrophobia stars Phobia, a boastful exiled Amazon huntress, and Gastro, her aspiring musician son. Appropriately, many of the plotlines in Gastrophobia revolve around Greek myths, especially the labors of Hercules. Phobia battles the Nemean Lion, the Hydra and the Minotaur; Gastro completes his chores by diverting a river through his house. One running gag centers around the notion that everyone knows the riddle of the Sphinx (much to her frustration).
Read more at ComicsAlliance.
5. ”we learn from our mistakes” – this probably applies to you as much as the rest of us, but can you tell me what mistakes you’ve had to learn from while working in comics?
I spent the first few years of my comics career trying to be accepted to the “cool kids club.” After much heartbreak I learned two very important lessons. 1) There is no “cool kids club.” There is no secret meeting of the powerful individuals in your chosen creative field. There isn’t actually any power at all. There are cliques and groups of friends and there is some overlap, but there is no one unifying body that can welcome you into the fold. Be nice, be honest, do good work, make friends and eventually you will be the center of your own cool club. And 2) You do not need permission from anyone to be the thing you want to be. You have to give someone that power over you, and no one actually deserves it.
This interview might contain every piece of good advice that I know. I guess Im done forever.
The real question is, do you want to start a webcomic because you love making comics, or are you in it for the babes and piles of money?
You have to be in it for the babes and piles of money. That is the only reason to do it. “Liking comics” is not a good reason to start a webcomic.

GPOY
Pages 237-238
This is it, everyone! THE LAST CHAPTER.
Marty finds himself in darkness at the end of a “journey into the black tunnel”, and I’m going to give Gipe the benefit of the doubt and say he’s trying to say “The car crashed into a building” and not “time travel suddenly is like going through a tunnel when it wasn’t before, tee hee”. Marty’s not sure what’s going on:
Marty thought of the scene in a movie he had seen about a time travel machine where the vehicle is enclosed in a mountain.
Haha, the hilariously awkward “time travel machine” makes a return! YES.
So he realizes he’s crashed into the movie theater, reverses out, and sees that it’s 1985 again. “All right!” he shouts. Then he turns on the radio, and Gipe describes it as only a grandparent could:
A contemporary rock tune was playing.
“All right!” Marty shouts. But then he remembers he has to save “his friend from a bloody and violent death” (oh yeah! I can see how you’d forget that!) but then the car dies again. ”Shit!” Marty shouts. And oh man, Gipe, we got another “time travel machine” callback, can we get another shoutout to The Terrorists?
After grinding for a minute, Marty was unable to generate the slightest hint renewed power. And as he continued to grind, he looked up and saw the familiar terrorist van cruising down the street and around the corner.
Horrified, he leaped from the car.
“The terrorists!” he yelled.
PERFECT. Thank you, Gipe, and thank you Marty McFly for jumping out of the car to shout “The terrorists!” after The Terrorists. You are too perfect. Also, now is the point where you should re-read that above quote while using “grinding” in the “at a club all up on someone” sense. I’ll wait.
Marty runs down to the mall, and Gipe makes sure we notice something has changed:
Arriving at the entrance, he noticed that it was called Lone Pine Mall and was decorated with the image of a single pine tree instead of two. Otherwise everything was the same.
Marty watches, “frozen, horrified and amazed” as he watches the terrorist van chasing Doc Brown around the parking lot. This is kinda weird, watching yourself and your friend from what seems to be a week ago doing the same thing, right? Wouldn’t that, oh, I don’t know… BLOW YOUR MIND??
“Oh, no!” he gasped. ”I’m too late!”
The scene blew his mind.
CALLED IT.
Akismet, my spamcatcher, went into fits this afternoon and stopped flagging spam. So, hey, let’s take a look at which pages of mine this spam is flocking to.
Yesterday, the nominations for the Eisner Awards, often considered the Oscars of Comics, came out, honoring five comics in the digital comics category. But there are dozens of amazing webcomics out there that the Eisners have completely ignored.
Eisner noms aside, this is a great list of #webcomics - I’ve read a few! As long as AG is on your lists- I’m happy :)
In the Eisners’ partial defense, I’m pretty sure a lot of these comics aren’t submitted to them with any regularity— and they need to be submitted to qualify. You can argue that’s a flaw in the system, but it does mean that not all the comics on this list were exactly snubbed. Still, it’s a great list.
1) There is, of course, mine.
2) There’s the one about a horse-person that no longer exists, but I remember back when it did.
3) There’s the one about a guy in a banana costume i guess i’m not sure?
4) There’s the other one about animal-people, though this time it’s cats, not horses.
5) And then there’s this other thing I dug up and I’m not sure why it’s called this.
6) And there’s apparently one called Roommates (close enough) that updates on DeviantArt. (thanks to whydontihatemarrymyself)]
This list exists outside the comics that have “Roomies” as part of a longer title, like Go Get a Roomie or Zombie Roomie or College Roomies from Hell!!!. These titles are way too creative. I’d be interested in seeing which other “Roomies” webcomics out there can be dug up. I’ve probably just uncovered the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been asked a lot of webcomic-y questions since Jump Leads launched back in ‘07, and with Deadlong having launched this month I’ve been asked more or less all of those questions again. One of those questions is, invariably, “What’s your favourite webcomic?”
Previously, I’ve abstained from answering this question. There are, truthfully, dozens of webcomics that I read every single week, and I’ve never really sat down and thought about which webcomic was at the top of my totem pole.
It’s one thing for a webcomic to keep me hooked. It’s another thing entirely for me to want to go back and re-read a webcomic I’ve already read from the beginning to the most recent strip. I’ve done this with Penny Arcade and Starslip a number of times, the former because videogames are in my blood, and the latter because I devour well-written scifi-comedy like monkeys eat bananas.
But I can count on one hand the number of other webcomics I’ve actually read from start to finish multiple times. In fact I can count it on one finger - Shortpacked!.
I first read Shortpacked! in, I think, 2006. Friend and soon to be fellow Jump Leads writer Euan Mumford sent me the link for Shortpacked!. He read it because he was a fan of previous webcomics by the same cartoonist, David Willis. I read it because it spoke to me on a number of levels. First, it was clever. Secondly, it was funny as Hell. Thirdly, it spoke to a part of my brain that had only recently been switched on - the collector.
Doctor Who had relaunched the previous year, and the first wave of Character Options’ Doctor Who action figures had been released. I didn’t have as much disposable income as I would have liked, but I craved those figures above all things. I was able to buy a few, including the first-wave coat variant of the Tenth Doctor and the Regeneration pack featuring the Ninth Doctor in a very, very stiff pose and the Tenth Doctor in the Ninth’s outfit. I wanted to own as many figures from the range as possible.
Even beyond the collector stuff, though, Shortpacked! entertains. The characters have distinct voices, the scenarios walk the line between grounded in reality and skirting on the manic, and it’s quite wonderfully funny - funnier than most narrative-driven webcomics out there, I’d say.
Perhaps the most astounding thing is that while the quality of many webcomics has dipped and wobbled over the years, Shortpacked! remains consistently brilliant. Willis’ art has evolved over the years, and so has his comic timing, not to mention his flare for drama.
I don’t feel like there are many other webcomics I can really compare it to. It’s best compared with television sitcoms like Scrubs, or Community. I can’t help but feel that Willis is deliberately aiming for a similar tone - he’s referenced both shows a few times throughout the comic - but whether intentional or not it comes across as effortless.
So, yeah, whenever anybody asks me “What your favourite webcomic?” these days, my answer is always the same: Shortpacked!. There’s nothing else quite like it.
squee
Who is your dad, now?
I WILL reblog this video every damn time I see it because this kids is A GENIUS
