Matt Johnson's been chronicling the adventures of Terry Cortland and his friends since early 2004--the first strips only have the year on them, but once he moved over to Keenspace in March of 2004, everything became as clearly marked as an anal-retentive sap like me could want.
Now, being an anal-retentive sap, I started with that earliest group of strips, but after 11 or 12 of them, I figured I had Cortland's number: yet another computer/video game comic. The characters all work for some "high tech" company--I'm not even savvy enough to have grasped what exactly it is they do there--and most of the punchlines seemed to be computer-related: jokes about different types of operating systems or programs, things which mean next to nothing to me.
I mean, feel free to mark me down for a Philistine, but every computer I've ever used, no matter if it was IBM or Apple or TRS-80, I've never really noticed any difference: I type, the words appear on the screen, I hit print, and the words come out on paper. And yes, I tend to think of computers as typewriters that you can also make pictures with, so maybe I'm not really using them to their full potential. But still, a large part of Cortland seems dedicated to how some things about computers are evil while others are good--for instance, the first Keenspace strips, titled "The Mac Wars," focus on a consultant hired by the company our characters all work at who decides to replace their Apple computers with PCs.
Now, a good friend of mine does software development--or something--at Apple while my brother-in-law has always been an IBM guy--he enjoys building his own computers from the motherboard up, y'see. So I understand that there's some rivalry between the two brands. But, well, it's not something I've invested anything in myself. In other words, I got about 11 or 12 strips into "The Mac Wars" before I began to feel out of my depth: I mean, the characters were interesting but kinda generic, the same with the setting, and I wasn't getting the jokes.
I figured that might very well be it for me reading Cortland, but I wanted to give it one more chance. A quick click on the URL and some retyping got me to Feb. 28, 2005, the first day of the Daily Grind, and I started reading from there.
And a week into that run, he did something that made me very happy: he not only had one character introduce himself, most of the other characters, and the setting, he then made that introduction into the first act of an actual storyline, a storyline that pulled me in and kept me reading clear though to the end of this week's comics.
Johnson still relies a bit too heavily on computer world in-jokes for me--two of his main "villains" are apparently based on Steve Jobs and one of the guys who co-founded Adobe--but the visit from Cortland's parents, the slow budding of the relationship between Cortland and Angie, the way it's all happening in Nebraska, hardly the place I think of when someone says "high tech," even some of Johnson's "4th wall" stuff, like the week he spent giving summaries of several long-running webcomics, I found that very enjoyable.
And for a computer strip, that's about all I can ask for. This one'll go into my "weekend round up" section, I think.
It's quite a fine grab-bag of comics Joseph Bergin III is doing over at Uncle Comics--or at least, over on his LiveJournal: the actual Uncle Comics site has apparently been broken since the middle of July.
Now, as I've mentioned before in these essays, I'm mostly a story fan when it comes to comics. In fact, if you read over the others in this series, you won't find me talking much at all about the art styles of the various Grind comics. This is mostly because, as I say in the Introductory Essay, I have peculiar tastes in things; I mean, I like my drawings, for crying out loud, both here at Daily Grind and over at Terebinth. And if you take a look at it, I think you'll agree that I have no business commenting on other people's artwork.
Still, with something like Uncle Comics, there's not much more that I can comment on. Yes, Bergin has a few random scatterings of story through the six months of strips he has displayed on his LiveJournal--and fine little stories they are--but it's kinda hard to come up with a reaction since none of 'em, as near as I can tell, are all that close to completion. His most extensive, a wonderfully odd thing called "75 Days Trapped on the Moon," is such an exercise in surrealism, there's no way I'd feel confident saying anything about it till after I'd read the whole thing.
So, all I can say about Bergin's artwork is: I like it. His use of lines, his shading, his colors, even his quick stuff and the couple of images he's done lately with a mouse directly, I guess, into his computer: it's obvious even to someone like me that he just plain knows his stuff artistically speaking.
It's nice to look at, and I'll be checking in at least once a week from now on.
Not only am I a big fan of stories, but the particular thing that I like best about stories is their structure. I've referred to myself on more than one occasion as a structure nut, the way I plot out my own things in five acts with prologue and epilogue usually included, and I enjoy looking for the structural skeletons that lurk underneath the stories other people tell. It's just the way my brain works.
Bela Whigimill's comics, then, are about the furthest away from my approach to comics that I've yet come across here in the Grind. To start with, I'm not even sure which of the comics on the page you'll find when you take the link at the top of this section of the essay--or on any of the pages with his work on them that he has links to down at the bottom of that page--I dunno which of those comics he's done for the Grind. There are no dates, no titles, no organization at all as far as I could tell at first glance.
But then, as I visited that first page of comics this past week, a sort of structure began to emerge. First off, he puts the latest comic on top--so to read his stuff on that page from first to last, you hafta start, like with Ive Sorocuk's comics, at the bottom of the page. And second, comics that were on the page the day before will sometimes disappear, replced by the next day's comic.
So there is an organizing principle at work--even if it's just Whigimill deciding he didn't like a strip and replacing it with another one. Somehow, the ones that remain mean something to the artist, and looking at it from that point of view, I found myself enjoying the collection from bottom to top.
There's no story, really, but a few characters--like the aliens in the first strip at the bottom of the page--show up here and there, now and again, and a few images make multiple appearances. And of course, I had to figuratively send my "left brain" down to the corner bodega for a six-pack of Sprite so I could look at Whigimill's stuff through the jade-colored glasses of my "right brain," but that's a fun thing sometimes.
Still, I'm afraid I might be a little too "tightly-laced" to get into Young Adventure Friends--if that actually is the name of the comic--on a regular basis. I'm glad I stopped in to have a look, though, and I'll recommend other folks do as well just to see what they might make of it.
So all in all, it's been a good week for looking at stuff, and I'm glad to have finally found a comic centered on computers that didn't leave me cold.
Next week, we'll see who's left in the group whose comics I haven't looked at yet.
To see what happened the week after this, check out the Twelfth Essay. And in case you've forgotten what went on the week before this, the Tenth Essay continues sitting there for your perusal as does the Book Reports main page and the Comic's main page, too.