utilitymonstergirl

Quick n’ dirty samplers from the ever-churning gumbo of the ComicFury front page. Interesting enough to talk about, not really suitable for an entire essay on their own. Let’s get right to it.

Normalsville – Florence FreonCat

If you’d asked me to name the Next Big Webcomic Thing, I don’t think I could have guessed that it would be a hyperbolic loser comedy about a bunch of furry hoosiers idly fucking about. Onstad might be back in the business but I think this is what Achewood actually got reincarnated as. It doesn’t have the sheer poetic command of language, but periodically Normalsville hits me with the same kind of comedically perfect self-contained moment. Updates like clockwork, and the huge ensemble cast and shotgun-blast approach to plot means that even if one strip is a miss for you the next still has a decent shot. Fundamentals-wise, it makes a ton of sense that it’s accumulated such an avid readership and so many imitators; there are like seven different comics that have mushroomed up in the past two years explicitly aping its style and riffing on its cast and sensibilities. Imagine now that I have used the gif of the guy from Pacific Rim talking about an imminent Double Event.

Many Moons / Gigi – John Peters

This Peters fella is one of those rare individuals with a pretty firm grasp of how to do Whimsy without becoming overly grating. There’s a lot of Dahlian wordplay and sideways thinking at play, and I quite enjoy the disorientingly drip-fed sense of setting in both comics—Gigi especially. If Jacqueline Lesnick’s Girly did something for you, Peters might scratch a similar itch, albeit with less eggy sapphic yearning underpinning the thing (as far as anyone knows).

Summer Vacation – fishdagger

Commendations are due to fishdagger for writing a longform webcomic with a beginning, middle, and end. That doesn’t make the comic very good, sadly. The mystery resolves itself handily long before the plot is over with, which wouldn’t be an issue if it could sustain real tension, which would require characters remotely as compellingly conceived or conveyed as anyone gray folie & company ever came up with (a comparison I wouldn’t feel quite so inclined to make if the author wasn’t making such a valiant effort to bite folie’s style) or a plot that didn’t seem nearly so po-faced and hackneyed. The climax goes some daring places—the big reveal about what’s become of the missing lad is the sort of mindfuck hard swerve I’d expect from a more memorable A24 flick—but it doesn’t really land because it doesn’t actually feel like a huge departure from the arch teen melodrama logic.

NIL: Canticum Bellum – Zarzaliel

Reading NIL update by update is a great way to permanently confuse yourself, but it hangs together beautifully when you read each storyline as a finished product. New pages roll out pretty slowly, which would be frustrating given the pace/intelligibility troubles if it weren’t fucking gorgeous. Up there with Superpose for pure visual splendor. Even if the story never concludes within my lifetime, the visuals alone will have been worth it. Assessing its actual narrative is kind of challenging; sometimes the plot feels charmingly oblique the way any high-concept, geopolitically-driven premise ought to be (there are places where it’s kind of like if I liked Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy a bit better), and sometimes the whole thing melts into a puddle of dream logic (fitting for a story about reality coming a bit unseamed), and the connective tissue holding it together is… meathead battle manga logic. It Should Not Work, but I’m super bought in.

All That’s Been Done / In The Name of Freedom – Charlie D. Curmudgeon

Very much a post-What Happens Next text, with many of the same thematic hangups—queer NEET fuckups, dismayingly familiar online subculture, true crime, the spiritual desolation of the American small town—but at the margins there’s something weird and heightened and genre-y going on here that could make or break the whole exercise. Very curious to see how the plot of In The Name of Freedom is going to end up ramifying further on the developing story of All That’s Been Done. This could be another Summer Vacation, but it could also be something altogether new and compelling, and I’m fond of the art—admirable cartooning squared with smart moments of carefully studied realism.

Ennui Go! - Doc Glasgow

A significant chunk of Part 1 from the beginning onward is frankly kind of unbearable—a relic of an altogether shittier era of webcomics. Sadly it is also fairly essential reading to understand anything that happens in the rest of it, which works its way up to Quite Good Actually. Maybe not patient zero for the Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordist movement (see also: Please Forgive Me!!!, the following double entry in today’s list, and friend of the show utilitymonstergirl’s Replaceable Parts, which I suspect I’ll have to yammer about in longer form another day once The Return wraps up) but definitely an early adopter. The latter end of Part 1 is somewhat hampered by the sheer volume of accumulated page space that is mosaic-blurred for non-patrons, but it does have more honest sleaze to it than, say, Nortverse.

Between these, Normalsville, and All That’s Been Done, I can’t help but notice there’s a very strong connecting thread in this batch where the condition of big gay loserdom is an essential thematic component. The youth crave queer fuckup stories! To my considerable joy, these are quite good ones. Dennydreadful is an excellent character writer; I am not usually grabbed by Pathetic Boys as a concept but damn if I don’t fall for it over and over again when it’s them doing it, and harem comedy parody wears pretty thin on me pretty fast, but My Dick Will Explode keeps my attention by actually making an effort to characterize its signature pack of fucking loons. It’s obvious that it’s studied what it’s poking fun at closely enough to reproduce its highest virtues while remaining totally farcical. If you want something that scratches the itch for genuinely good edgy goofs, it hits a lot of the same high notes as Ennui Go! in a smaller, more efficient package, though there’s not nearly so much of it or quite so much Plot.

Meanwhile, if you want something deathly fucking serious and frightfully hot on occasion, Idyllic Island does a remarkable job. I am tremendously grateful that the windows of time in which I was dating my ex-boyfriend and reading this comic update by update did not ever overlap.

Persimmon – pretend.erin

Very ambitious. Hardly the first thing of its kind—“superheroes as showbiz with all the ugly behind-closed-doors business” is well-trodden ground. Bringing mahou shoujo under that umbrella is a pretty intuitive move, and frankly one I wish we saw more, given that a lot of anglophone authors don’t seem to grok that magical girl stuff is, at least from a Japanese perspective, very much a sibling to cape stuff if not just another flavor of superhero fiction that can very handily rub shoulders with the toku heroes and American-style underwear-on-the-outside types. It’s pleasingly earnest and comfortable with its own premise, though in the places where it’s making overt political commentary that attitude makes me grit my teeth a little; there’s a faint stink of the warmed-over Trump Dunk model of thematic messaging hanging over it at times. I shouldn’t complain, though; clumsy as it occasionally gets, I can’t hold a comic planting itself firmly in something resembling my political corner against it, even if the execution’s a wee bit tin-eared.

Blessedly, the comic snaps into focus whenever the relationships of the main cast are put front and center. I’m a sucker for a lesbian romance arc with this much regret and bad blood in it, and I can’t resist a good “getting the band back together” plot. I’m hoping we get some more time examining the self-styled Alpha Bitch of the old group’s interiority, both because I enjoy when a story takes the inner lives of horrible women seriously and because what glimpses we have gotten of what she’s like when she doesn’t have the protective aura of her fame, money, power, and status to hide behind suggest that there are interesting depths to her still to plumb.