Welcome to the latest instalment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers.
This month, rather than focus on one work, I’m going to go wide. Following up on an aside in an earlier column, I want to do a quick-hits, roundup kind of post that looks at the SFFnal webcomics that I’m currently following, why they’re great, and why I hope you’ll read them too. (These reviews contain spoilers!)
Galaxion, written and drawn by Tara Tallan
Galaxion has existed in multiple incarnations in various print and online formats over more than twenty-five years, and I’ve been following it for much of that time. It’s one of my favourite SFFnal comics ever. It’s also one that I have a pretty significant degree of personal bias regarding – I make a habit of including a disclosure of conflicts, but this case is a bit stronger than some, so see below.
The Galaxion is the oddest ship in the Terran Space Agency’s fleet, a billionaire’s luxury space yacht repurposed into an exploration vessel by Captain Fusella Mierter and her slightly misfit but still extremely competent crew. They tend to get the missions that TerSA doesn’t want to give to ordinary ships with less misfit crews. So of course they got stuck being the third starship to test the experimental hyperdrive that led to one ship coming back on fire, and another disappearing without a trace.
Joining Fusella for the mission are her friend, geologist Aria Schaefer, who’s more or less our protagonist throughout the series. The Galaxion tests the hyperdrive, things go amazingly wrong, the ship gets very, very lost, and things get more complicated from there.
For those who are keeping score, by the way, Galaxion not only pre-dates Star Trek: Voyager, it’s better, too.
The art is excellent, warm and lively and manga-influenced without being derivative. The plot is engaging, and I’ve delighted in following the crew of the Galaxion on their mission over every version of the story since I first started reading it in 1993. But it’s the characters that really make the story sing. Tallan’s tagline for the series is “Life, Love, Hyperspace” and that aptly sums up how relationships drive both Galaxion and the Galaxion. I am deeply invested in not only the romantic subplots, but also the other, vital connections between the characters. In particular, Tallan is amazing at depicting friendships – there just aren’t many science fiction series I can think of, in any medium, that foreground healthy, happy friendships between adults, and make them so vital to the reader’s investment in the characters.
The series is on a bit of a hiatus as the creator deals with various other matters. And, I mean, that’s 2018, right? It’s okay, because there are 445 pages for you to read in the archives. And I’m hopeful that an influx of new readers will help make Tara’s return something that she can look forward to as much as the rest of us do.
This is one to start from the beginning.
Oglaf, created and written by Doug Bayne and Trudy Cooper, drawn by Trudy Cooper (Note: Many strips are NSFW)
I encouraged you all to consider Oglaf as a potential nominee for the Best Graphic Story Hugo in February, 2018. Have another look at my write-up for my thoughts on this hilarious, smart, diverse and often dirty comic. Note that many instalments are Not Safe For Work! The archive indicates which ones are and aren’t.
Order of the Stick, created, written and drawn by Rich Burlew
Order of the Stick is currently seeing the culmination of a long-running story arc, that also very likely marks the lead-up to an even bigger culmination, possibly the finale of the whole series. So, I mean, obviously, this might not be the best point to jump onboard.
But Order of the Stick is worth reading in its entirety.
Another example of an epic fantasy adventure overtly derived from a tabletop fantasy role-playing game, Order of the Stick is unlike some other examples in that it clearly indicates through the functioning of the universe that the characters are living in a game, and indeed, they seem to be aware of it, but we never see the the players, or are entirely clear what game is being played (it’s obviously D&D-ish, of course, but not quite explicitly D&D).
Heroic fighter and party leader Roy, rogue Hayley, bardiest bard that ever barded Elan, arrogant, implicitly genderfluid elven mage Vaarsuvius, murderous halfing ranger Belkar and, usually but not currently because of Complications Ensuing, honourable and plainspoken dwarven cleric Durkon, are on a quest to bring down the evil lich Xykon, who’s currently on course to gain control over a magical gate, which will likely prompt the gods to pre-emptively end the world.
Yeah, this is an Epic Fantasy.
Building from its origins as a trope-heavy, deconstructiony homage to dungeon crawls, Order of the Stick has become a genuinely epic fantasy adventure, and it really works for me (this sort of transition doesn’t always – see my thoughts below on Table Titans).
The stick-figure-derived art that gives the series its name works very well; it allows Burlew to create engaging, cartoony characters and minimize extraneous detail. The deliberately simplified – but never simplistic – style gives plenty of range for emotion, including some genuinely profound and moving character moments that I’m going to decline to describe because spoilers are one thing, but those would be Spoilers.
Suffice it to say, Order of the Stick remains the only webcomic ever to inspire me to gasp, and say aloud to my screen, “Oh my God, [character]. What have you done?!”
I suggest you read it, and learn why.
PvP, created, co-written and drawn by Scott Kurtz, co-written by Dylan Meconis
I fall into and out of following PvP, one of the longest-running webcomics still extant. Scott Kurtz’s workplace sitcom about the staff of a gaming website (I assume it’s a website now, anyway; it used to be a magazine, but are there even magazines anymore?) isn’t precisely SFF. I mean, it has SF, and it has F, but it’s more a comedy that strip-mines genre for plot devices and gags than anything else.
The comic has always had fantastical elements, like Skull the Troll, and supergenius cat Scratch Fury’s annual battles with Santa Claus – but they’ve never really been the point. This is not a series to read for a thoughtful examination of a particular speculative idea. PvP is an office comedy first, and all those other things are just part of the weird mix.
Yes, there’s time travel, and fairies, and a butler who’s secretly an internet-meme-themed superhero called the LOLbat, but with rare exceptions they only matter to the extent that they serve a joke. It’s like back in the ’80s, when a Christmas-themed episode of a sitcom would strongly imply that Santa was real – but the series was otherwise as grounded in the real world as an ’80s sitcom ever was.
This is an odd sort of subgenre mix-and-matching that we only occasionally see in other media, but that seems to be widespread and common in webcomics, where the comedic genre-blender is a mainstay.
Kurtz can lean a little too hard on his running gags and his scatological jokes, but at its best, PvP is very funny, and the cast is endearing. It’s like any other long-running sitcom, really. Even if every episode isn’t great, I’m attached to the ensemble, and I want to keep visiting them.
PvP’s storylines are short, and its continuity is loose. You can jump in at virtually any point. If you don’t like a storyline, check the extensive archives for another, focusing on other characters.
Questionable Content, created, written and drawn by Jeph Jacques
I did a deep dive into Questionable Content in May, 2018, so please see that column for my thoughts on this great, long-running series.
Skin Horse, created and written by Jeffrey Channing Wells and Shaenon Garrity, drawn by Shaenon Garrity, colors by Pancha Diaz
Like Order of the Stick, this is a terrible time to be jumping on board Skin Horse, the sequel series to Shaenon Garrity’s acclaimed Narbonic. I don’t know how close we are to The End, but long-running plot points have definitely starting busting loose, Big Reveals are being Big Revealed, and events are building to some kind of payoff.
Skin Horse is the story of an under-funded and under-staffed Secret Government Organization, the titular Project Skin Horse, which focuses on helping non-human sentients navigate a world of humans. The core team members are Sweetheart, a Canadian uplifted dog who loves filing paperwork, Unity, a Frankensteinian zombie supersoldier who loves violence, and Tip, a combat veteran psychologist with the superpower of seduction, who loves using puppets to solve interpersonal crises.
It only gets weirder from there.
Garrity’s art serves the story delightfully, particularly in her core cast, who are all charming and deeply lovable. It’s hard to know in any collaboration where one creator’s contributions bleed into another’s but Channing Wells certainly seems to have a knack for characters and dialogue that pop on their own, but still integrate effortlessly into Garrity’s expanded universe of Narbonic and its related narratives. Where the writing isn’t quite as strong is in the plotting; individual strips are all well-crafted but I can’t recall a single Skin Horse storyline that I don’t think went on just a little too long. I’m hopeful that the narrative compression that the upcoming finale dictates will work against the impulse to overwrite, and give us a satisfying conclusion.
This is a long-running series – over ten years, almost always hitting six strips a week! But it’s worth reading from the beginning. You’ll be glad you did.
Table Titans, created, written and drawn by Scott Kurtz, colors by Steve Hamaker
Table Titans, part of Scott Kurtz’s burgeoning empire, is an example of a now increasingly widespread subgenre, the slice-of-life tabletop role-playing-gamer comedy/epic fantasy depiction of their adventures mashup. This isn’t a new idea – it’s been extant in webcomics about gamers for some time, to one degree or another – but it’s one that’s becoming ubiquitous with the newfound popularity of RPG-based narratives. And Table Titans benefits from being part of Kurtz’s relationship with Wizards of the Coast, the actual, for reals publishers of D&D.
I’m not entirely absorbed by the ongoing story of the in-game characters and their adventures; it’s fine, and it’s cool seeing Kurtz, whose art is usually confined by PvP’s comedic mandate, cutting loose with some real swords-and-sorcery action scenes. But so many comics artists seem to have this itching yen to get their inner Tolkien on, and it just… I’ve read a lot of epic fantasy, you know? It takes truly exemplary chops for another journey down the well-trodden Road That Goes Ever On And On to impress me. I didn’t even like it when Bone went epic. I wanted more cow races and quiche jokes.
What I do love, and want a lot more of, is the players, their relationships and interactions. Those scenes, and those characters, are sharp, funny, and very real.
There have been four extended storylines to date, focusing on different but overlapping groups of players and characters. There’s no reason not to start at the beginning, although I prefer the most recent storyline, Road to Embers, wherein a group of players has recently gelled in entertaining ways.
That’s what I’m reading, at least currently. These series are all somewhere between fun and fantastic, and I encourage you to check all of them out. But with so many seemingly moving towards their conclusions, it might also be time for me to start finding new stories to follow. So let me also ask you: What SFFnal webcomics am I missing out on? What are you following, and couldn’t stand to miss an update?
Let me know in the comments!
Acknowledgements and Disclosures: I would like to acknowledge that Toronto, and the land it now occupies, where I live and work, has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. This territory is also covered by the Upper Canada Treaties. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. I am grateful to have the opportunity to live and work in the community of Toronto, on this territory.
I have no professional or personal relationships that I’m aware of with Doug Bayne, Rich Burlew, Jeffrey Channing Wells, Trudy Cooper, Pancha Diaz, Steve Hamaker, Jeph Jacques, or Dylan Meconis.
Scott Kurtz was a jerk to a friend of mine online once. To be fair, he has calmed down a lot since those days. Nobody seems to have a grudge about that particular incident anymore. It’s fine. I was also once involved in what I thought was an online community devoted to critical discussion of PvP, but which in retrospect some people clearly thought was a hatedom. That community is long defunct. I don’t think these events unduly biased my views of Kurtz or his creative work.
I have a professional and personal connection with Shaenon Garrity. She was the Modern Tales editor who published Cold Iron Badge and re-published Xeno’s Arrow on that platform. This was an important opportunity for my work to be seen, although it involved no payment. Shaenon no longer holds those roles, and I’m no longer publishing webcomics on Modern Tales, which is defunct. I’ve never met Shaenon in person but we’re connected online and I certainly consider her a friend.
I have a significant and long-standing personal and professional connection with Tara Tallan. We’ve known one another for some twenty-five years and I consider her a personal friend. When I was involved in publishing comics, we often travelled together and co-promoted our comics extensively, at conventions and other venues. We’ve been to one another’s parties, role-played together, and I was at her wedding. So, yes, biased.
All these webcomics are available to read for free in their entirety online.
