I Hear He's Up To That Evil Stuff

(From 8-Bit Theater. Click for full sized No One Wants To See That.)

I have a theory.

This theory has rather disturbing connotations, but I believe that it holds up under scrutiny.

This theory is that the longer a strip goes on (especially if this strip is related, however tangetially, to geek culture or gaming) the possibility of a reference to Chocobos or Pokemon (or some other cute critters from a video game) having sex becomes more and more likely. (Can't lay my hands on the individual strip, but if Penny Arcade didn't already do something like this I'll be very surprised.)

But anyway!

Today's 8-Bit Theater strip is funny, in the giggle-out-loud way that the old school 8-Bit archives are, which makes me happy. Because 8-Bit has gone downhill a little of late, and it hasn't been as consistently funny as it once was. But then Clevinger comes out with a strip like this one and I know why I'm reading again.

Because, for the record? Chocobo sex? Is funny.

Who upgraded nerd-boy?

(From Comedity. Click for full sized... er... not touching that one.)
I'm a simple man, after it's all over, I suppose.

Right now I could be soliloquizing eloquently about brilliant plot twists, touching moments, or mysterious goings-on in goats, Zebra Girl, Something Positive, GPF, or the like. (In fact, I wanted to talk about today's Sluggy Freelance, and the significance that the line "Who upgraded nerd-boy?" has to the evolution of the strip as a whole, but then... oh, wait, Websnark beat me to it. Never mind.)

I could be.

But I'm not. I'm talking about Comedity... basically because today's strip features a passle of hot girls holding a penguin.

And you just can't compete with that. 'Cuz... y'know... the penguin is like the Sinatra of birds.

(Comedity is a pretty good strip, in case you were wondering. It's got very solid, clean art, and a really good concept. And it's funny a good portion of the time. So I read it.)

Anyway, there's just something about today's strip. It has Garth sighing that the girls all flock to the penguin ("AWWW! He's so cute!"), and Garth's cool side going out of his head (because... dude, there are girls out here, and the only chick in Garth's head is that muse, and she's a little weird) and you just know that he's gonna get more attention than Garth himself.

I dunno. It just makes me giggle. I'm hopeless, aren't I?

There isn't a wound / that she can't heal / and I can tell her everything / except for how I feel.

(From Tailsteak. Click for full sized Wide Smiles and Bright Eyes in the full beginning-to-end version, because the strip is really big.)

This isn't really a recent-events type of snark, really. I just wanted to mention that I was working my way through the Band storyline of Tailsteak.com (if you've never read anything by Tailsteak, by the way, you are cold missing out on some hardcore awesomeness), and I came across the strip where they sing the song "Nathan's Girlfriend" and... well... I was completely floored.

And I knew I had to talk about it, even though its from way back who-knows-when. Because it's just simply awesome.

In the first place, the lyrics are phenomenal. I can totally see enormous crowds of preteen girls swooning as a band sings this onstage, even though I don't know what the music sounds like. I thought it was famous song for a minute, but as far as I can ascertain the a lyrics to this is all Tailsteak. (By the way, let me know in a comment if this actually is a professional song and I'm just stupid and uninformed, eh?)

Secondly is the way the music is drawn on the page. It's very difficult for someone, as a comic artist, to give a sense of music in a comic strip and not have it come across falsey. The reasons for this are simple: you listen to music, you don't read it. Because of this, there are simply so many things that need to be conveyed for you to actually hear a song that having it be represented with only pictures and words is rather difficult.

Just in case you were wondering? Tailsteak nails it in this strip. It's perfect, honestly.

Tailsteak is generally great with whatever he gets in his mind to do, and if you're not catching this daily, then you're missing out, big time. Go. Read. Now.

Life is like a sandwich. Sometimes you eat the sandwich, and some times the sandwich eats you.

(From Sluggy Freelance. Click for full sized SMOOCHIES!)


Every time somebody complains about Oceans Unmoving, I find myself perplexed.

Of course, I see many of the problems that people have with it. I agree with some of them. It was an entirely new cast suddenly tossed at us when what we wanted to see was Torg dealing with his newfound depression and retractedness coming off of That Which Redeems, (a storyarc which OU simply pales in comparison to). We wanted to see Oasis and Hereti-Corp. We wanted to see Aylee.

But we were given... Bun-Bun, a character that many Sluggites were growing tired of. By himself, with the new characters. Which left many people feeling detatched. They came looking for their Sluggish goodness every morning, and found something that simply didn't feel like Sluggy.

So people complained. They're still complaining, in fact. Which usually causes me to sigh and think "It's not that bad, guys." Because I liked OU. It's still funny. The story is interesting. And the concept is phenomenal.

And it still has Pete Abram's signature on the bottom, which is one of the most important things, to me. So I'm going to echo something that Occultatio said a while back, over at The Living Comic.

Don’t you freaking dare give up on this comic.

Occultatio was of the opinion that Sluggy should be given some major slack. He said "Pete Abrams as an author has won my faith on a level nearly on par with Bujold or even Gaiman. No, I don’t much like this current stuff, but dammit, I know it will get better."

I know it will get better.

Sluggy Freelance is one of my personal favorites. I was more impressed and enthralled with TWR than I have been with any comic storyarc, ever. So I put the work into OU. I went back over it and read it in chunks of a month at a time to get a better sense of the story as a whole. I combed the forums. And as a consequence, I know what's going on. And I'm enjoying the ending of OU immensely. And it just keeps getting better. It's not as good as Sluggy has been at times in the past, of course, but heck, this is Sluggy. At its worst, it still beats out a good seventy-five percent of the other comics on my list.

And something about today's strip just clicked for me. The subject matter, the way that it's put together, the art, the timing, the expressions, the dialogue... they all work together just right again, and today's strip, for some reason, just made me smile.