Caffcomics is another of the Daily Grind strips that I didn't follow for reasons I went into back in my Fifth Essay. Todd Sullivan, the strip's writer/artist, is apparently located in Alaska, but whether this was a contributing factor in his being late with his strip on Monday, January 9th, I don't know at this point.
Sullivan was one of those who'd been doing his comic before the Grind came along--three times a week, I think, was his schedule then--so I hope he at least returns to that. His dropping from the contest shows every sign of being more a miscalculation than a profound weariness with all things webcomical, though, so I'm pretty sure he'll keep on doing.
One other item of note: this marks the 26th of our original 52 contestants to drop out. Which means we've reached the halway point here a couple weeks before the contest's first anniversary. Whether this means the rate of dropping will increase or not--a couple other Grinders have been making stressful noises in their comics of late--only time will tell.
In the meantime, since I've decided to write reports about non-Grind comics in these updates, here are three of my favorites that I don't recall seeing anyone else write about.
I've been trying to remember when and how I first stumbled across Tails of the Mynarski Forest by Richard Matheson, and as near as I can recall, I got there through a link from Mark Stanley's Freefall when I first discovered that comic's online version back in 1997. I remember having to read through a bit of Matheson's archives, though, so I'm guessing I didn't find Mynarski Forest that year--he started the thing May 20, 1997, according to his archives. So I probably found it in 1998 or 1999: I'm pretty sure I was reading when he moved from his old "telusplanet" server over to "purrsia.com," and that seems to have happened in October of 1999...
Anyway, Mynarski Forest tells the story of Liska and Skippy, a vixen and a rabbit, as they wander about a fictitious stretch of Canadian woodlands. Liska is, of course, the name of the main character in Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen, one of only two talking animal operas that I know of, but while Matheson's acknowledges the inspiration, his Liska is more psychotic than cunning, and Skippy, well, he's every bit as nervous as a rabbit who's best friend is a fox should be.
Now, I don't know if this is a common phenomenon, but I've been reading this comic for so long that the question of why I'm reading it made me pause for a moment and think. I enjoy it, sure, but what was it exactly about it that I enjoyed? And the more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of what is essentially my favorite T.V. program, another Canadian comedy, a thing called The Red Green Show.
Like Red Green, Mynarski Forest combines funny individual set pieces with an overall storyarc that weaves through each episode and gives the gags a sort of structure they otherwise wouldn't have. The comic, then, combines the best aspects of the "gag a day" strip--or in this case, a gag a week since Matheson puts up a new page every Monday--and a story strip in the way that Matheson's jokes advance the story, much like the songs in a musical should. Of course, the jokes can get pretty corny, but that's actually a plus for me...
If you've got some time, I'll direct your attention to the most recent storyline starting on June 13, 2005 and continuing on to the current strips as I write this. It's one of Matheson's longest stories and pretty much his most serious, but again, that's all for the good in my book, especially since he doesn't stint on the puns and the cornball jokes even with the somewhat serious subject matter.
Over the years, his art style has gotten more...I don't know. Frenetic? Jumpy? Cartoony? Whatever it is, I like it, and I like how he colors the words of each character's dialogue to match that character's overall color scheme.
I guess I just plain like the strip when you get right down to it. Matheson's been giving me a weekly grin for going on 7 or 8 years now, and that's no small feat right there...
I first found Jonathan Sario's Fuzzy Things from a link on the aforementioned Tails of the Mynarski Forest website, and in fact when I started reading Fuzzy Things back in '97 or '98, the influence of Mynarski Forest was unmistakable: not only did the stories take place in a forested setting with only slightly anthropomorphized characters--a fox and a rabbit, their genders reversed from the other strip, a dog and a cat, a bat and a beaver--but I have a distinct recollection of Sario more or less saying that it was Matheson's strip that got him into doing webcomics.
At the time I started reading Fuzzy Things, Sario was in high school--or whatever the local equivalent is--in his native Philippines, and it's been absolutely fascinating to watch the comic develop as he graduated, went into college, moved to Japan to work for a year or two, then came back to the Philippines, each stage of his life reflected in the sometimes dramatic changes in the comic.
For instance, if you go to his site now and click back into his Archives, you won't find any of the strips I was reading 7 or 8 years ago. He's rebooted his entire universe at least twice, moving from the "animals in the forest" comics to something inspired more by manga in which the six characters were going to school to learn how to use their various superpowers to his current series inspired by the more realistic cartoons Sario has come to enjoy, most notably Rugrats and its sequel All Growed Up.
Through it all, though, he's kept the same six characters--Fox and Maegan, the fox and the rabbit, Hero and Maxi, the dog and the cat, and Blue and Rex, the bat and the beaver--and their basic relationships while adding new characters to the mix: the black fox Ixiah, who started out as a villain in the manga version, is now Fox's older brother and has a circle of friends all his own who have been getting more story time of late than Sario's original characters.
But that's the main thing that's kept me coming back pretty much every Monday over the years: the wonderful way Sario has with the relationships between his characters. He's got a real handle on the way kids of junior high and high school age think and act and talk, and even though his English can still be a little tricky sometimes, it never gets in the way of the story. His style of artwork, too, is consistantly very nice to look at: I like his older stuff as well as the way it's grown into his present style.
I'm tempted to go through and pick out 4 or 5 of my favorite Fuzzy Things stories, but instead, I'll recommend you just go to the site, go into the Archives, scroll down to the bottom, and start there. There's humor, drama, adventure, and the sheer terror of not being prepared for that day's test. It continues to be one of my favorite webcomics.
Well, this thing's getting so late, I think I'd better just end it and put it up with just the two comics here. More reports the next time someone drops from the Grind!
A Sixteenth Essay comes right before this one, chronologically speaking, and in fact, there's a whole buncha Essays in this series; they're all connected to the Book Reports main page. I do comics on the web as well: Daily Grind, and Terebinth.