Webcomics. We love em. We know them.
One deranged soul with a heart full of passion pours everything into a self-published one-person visual storytelling project. It is posted in some bizarre corner of the internet on a free hosting site called Duck Butler. It is only found via RSS or by going directly there on some interval. The artist freely inserts their fetishes consciously or unconsciously every few panels. They are ultimately destroyed by their own raving fans, they disappear, the project simply ends, and in time, hopefully, they emerge from the darkness more wizened (or with a weird AI grift).
I’ve been enjoying @AutomaticTiger’s amazing webcomics podcast and it got me wanting to start a thread specifically for chatting about webcomics, webtoons, and the relatively recent and unique world they’ve ushered in.
There’s a million I have backlogged, but a few I’m currently following:
Very cute, very charming comic themed after tokusatsu series. It follows a similar storyline to a lot of the Gamera rebuild movies, where a little boy finds a proto-kaiju and raises it. Antics ensue!
This ultimately got aquired by Top Sheld Comics and is supposedly coming out in a graphic novel in “the next few years”. The artist, Lisa Naffziger, published this lat year, so, that might be all she wrote for TBT unfortche…
Very fun world, kind of Jim Henson-y, much better thought-out than one might expect. Humans are the “elder” species presumably on the way out, and younger races like the rat-bird yinglets and the zerg-like baxxid now have established cultures and societies.
OoPs is one of those webcomics where the artist, Valsalia, clearly has a transformation kink and the comic is about a human being transformed into a furry creature against their will, but also, the artist can’t help but flesh out every single aspect of this universe. As a result, it managed to hold together nicely where a lot of similar projects would’ve handwaved the details away to get to the meat. Valsalia loves the details! They ain’t hand-waving shit!
I would say that it suffers from being so obsessed with the world-building that the characterwork has fallen by the wayside recently, which is a shame, because as uninterested in Kassen as I was at the start, her grappling with the horrors of her situation, from the way her mind is overwhelmed by her body, is real juicy drama. Even the concept of being “devolved” forces her to confront her assumptions about these weird little clam-obsesses beasts. Hoping to see them return to that!
As you might expect, this one came at Astrea and Jade’s recommendation, and holy moly is it excellent. Gorgeous, expressive artwork brings to life a wonderful and varied cast. Poppy’s both genuinely funny and enormously entertaining.
I think this is one of my favorite styles of fantasy, where the universe operates under storybook rules and the series treats this as scripture. Any series where the foundational forces are significantly different than ours is going to have my full attention - it’s why I love Avatar and Full Metal Alchemist, to name two.
This is one I’m sort of savoring, pecking away at here and there, since I know it eventually slows to a stop further down the line. I’m kind of stunned at a single artist got it as far as they did, it must have been a brutal project. One of those situations where I’m glad it ultimately fell apart, for the sanity of the artist. Don’t go insane making your passion project!
I’m very much just impressed this exists, and love seeing the artist putting out pages every couple of weeks. Talk about a passion project.
This sort of touches of a fanfictiony part of making a webcomic that I find extremely enjoyable. It’s an indulgent thing, there’s no company or publisher telling you to reign it in. You just make the thing and post it, and your only keeper is your audience (should you decide to make the insane decision to listen to them).
It drives my friend insane but I am now only reading this as the physical books come out. It’s absolutely gorgeous and a very cool read. The forth book came out in 2021, four years ago, so it’s not looking too good that another will get published! I should probably just finish it on the website!!
This was one of my faves as a teen. I caught up to it back in the day, dropped off, and never ended up picking it back up for whatever reason. I recently caught the artist, Chu, on a Twitch stream of For Frog The Bell Tolls, and they were as charming and lively as ever. Got SD back on my mind, so I’m giving it a re-read.
It has absolutely everything from the DeviantArt era: Demons and Angels locked in a celestial battle, like four characters that use scythes as weapons, mysterious artifacts and amnesic heroes, a mascot :3-face bunny rabbit, a bidoofish lug of a male lead, battles where everyone gets bloody gouges taken out but they’re fine. The thing is, they’re done with the right amount of levity that this continues to be an extremely fun read, and is refreshingly not paralyzingly self-aware, as later comics would become.
I really am not sure what to expect as I’ve passed the threshhold into material I never got to as a teen. Will it collapse on itself in constant loredumps? Will the characters slowly morph into flanderized versions of themselves, halting all character development? Will some completely inexplicable and unrelated villain show up, be defeated, and that be considered the end? Or will it keep growing with the artist? A lot of fates befell the fanfics I’d follow, and webcomics have a way of falling into those same pitfalls, so who knows! Still enjoying it immensely.
Also worth mentioning that with all the stress with the company I’m at collapsing, it’s kinda nice to just have a pleasant little adventure like this to thumb through while I’m waiting for a bot cycle to resolve. Webcomics are one of those wonderful little things on the internet that I can bring up and read without needing an app or a paid service. It’s a place you go to, it doesn’t get copied onto your device or streamed. It’s a place!
