According to my admittedly flimsy calculations--I went over to the Daily Grind Main Page and tried to figure out which pictures I hadn't clicked on yet--I've got 4 Grind comics left to look at for these reports.
So rather than do 3 this week and 1 next week, I'll split it up and do 2 in each of the next essays. I may throw in a bit more to pad things out, but we'll see how that goes as the week progresses.
Ali Graham started HOUSD back in March of 2003, and while I've only read the first 200 or so of the more than 800 strips he's done since then, I'll give it a thumbs-up based just on those.
Not that I can just let it go at that, of course.
See, 'cause the thing about these rambling personal essays--in case you haven't noticed over the past couple months--is that I usually feel like I hafta give a reason for liking or disliking a comic. Some of these explanations have been rather lengthy, delving into possibly imaginary sections of my psyche as I go on and on about why comics that use a lot of video game and computer humor usually don't work for me, or why I usually enjoy stories that have certain sorts of discernable structure to them. Stuff like that.
So when I found myself chuckling at the first HOUSD strips and continued chuckling as I clicked my way up into three digits on them during the course of this past week, I began trying to analyze why. And the conclusion I've come to is one I'd really like to think about more, but, well, I'm already late in getting this thing posted. So I'll just put my reasoning out here and see if I can convince myself that it's a valid argument.
It's just that HOUSD might very well be the nearly-perfect 3 or 4 panel webcomic.
What do I mean by that? Well, reading it, I find that it has most of the things I like about 3 or 4 panel webcomics and very few of the things I don't like. I mean, yes, Graham does some video game humor, but it's not so integral to what he's doing that it puts me off. He's got a bit of an attitude, a bit of that "indy edge," but the strip isn't so drenched with either that I get the feeling that I'm just plain not cool enough to be reading it. Even his Star Wars parody from the summer of 2003 came off fairly well. And one of the characters is an amoral talking penguin: who could ask for anything more?
In short, HOUSD has a lot of the elements that I've seen in other comics that I don't follow regularly for various reasons--PvP, Yirmumah!, Greystone Inn, S.S.D.D., and Questionable Content are the ones that come to mind just as I'm typing this--but Graham takes those elements, does his own spin on them, and makes them over into a strip that most definitely works for me. I plan to keep clicking through the archives on this one.
I guess Phil McAndrew's been part of the team doing the webcomic Bean over at serializer.net for a while now, but I don't remember the strip from my time as a subscriber there--I let my subscription lapse a year and a half ago when Drew Weing stopped doing Pup...
I only mention that here because McAndrew seems to have incorporated Bean into his Daily Grind work as his Tuesday strip each week. Which means that, going through his archives now, I didn't read those strips. The stuff available on his Phil In The Blanks website, though--several stories and a bunch of one-shot comics--and the pages of his LiveJournal I enjoyed to one degree or another, but...
Again, trying to come up with reasons why McAndrew's stuff just didn't click with me, I find myself turning to other web cartoonists I've looked at lately. And while the random comics and occasional stories of Joseph Bergen or Edward J. Grug III immediately appealed to me, I want to give McAndrew another chance here in a week when I'm not trying to reconstitute two-and-a-half years of webcomics due to the collapse of the little collective I used to belong to.
Still, it's odd how I keep meeting accidental symmetry during these essays. Here, I see elements in the work of both Graham and McAndrew that make me think of things I've seen in other webcomics, but Graham turns it around for me, makes those elements his own, and comes up with a comic that keeps the stuff I like and discards the stuff I don't like--more or less.
But like I said, I'm gonna finish reading through McAndrew's LiveJournal this week and see if I can't nail down my reaction in what I guess will be the final Essay of this series next week.
Before closing off Lucky Essay Number Thirteen, though, I did want to mention the passing of two more strips from the annals of the Daily Grind. Greg Dean's Real Life--I wrote about it in the Fifth Essay--bowed out on Labor Day when the scehdule of the comic book convention Dean was attending made it impossible for him to get a comic up. And Robin Bougie took last Friday off from his Daily Comic--I wrote about it in the Tenth Essay--with a heart-felt essay about what the Grind had meant to him and how much he'd enjoyed it.
And while I'd not found either of these comics particularly to my taste, they each exemplified the Grind in various ways: Dean for doing his comic on a pretty much daily basis since 1999, and Bougie for doing exactly what he wanted to do in his comic and making it work for him.
Next week, the Fourteenth and Final Essay. Unless I decide to do some more or something...
How 'bout a link to the Twelfth Essay? One to the Fourteenth? Perhaps one to the Book Reports Main Page? Or maybe to my Daily Grind Comic's Main Page? Choices, choices, choices...