From Pictures to Prose

Webcomic authors are creative people – who can’t always be constrained by the number of words one can fit into a comic panel.

Although Lord knows the constraints haven’t stopped a creator or two from time to time (Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick #282)

As they grate to narrate, more than one webcomic artist has dabbled in the time-honoured practice of the novel – not only for collections of their comics, but for fully-fleshed works of fiction or non-fiction that either tie into their webcomics worlds, or even stand fully apart. Today, we’re going to look at a few webcomic writers who’ve crossed the comic page’s gutters and tested the idiom that a picture is worth… well, you get it!

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DS Podcast 531: They’re Gonna Swashbuckle!

Baby in swashbuckler bib

Aristocracy! Pirates! Anime eyes! Crossdressing! If you want all of those things and more in your webcomics, you can’t miss Tiger, Tiger, a Gilbert and Sullivan-like romp in the confines of your browser, written and drawn by Petra Nordlund.

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DS 530: Of The Woods, Which Are Odd

After Steve teases Jason with The Automan’s Daughter, a great webcomic that is also on hiatus, it’s time to venture back into Oddity Woods, to discover what other fun and sinister creatures await us in this cheerfully tragic story. Don’t miss this one!

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Hourly Comic Day 2019

Bringing you only the hottest of hot takes, today we’re talking about “Hourly Comic Day”, the yearly event which happens on… Feb 1?! Aw, man.

Missed the boat again! (Photo credit, Kai Schreiber, used under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Hourly Comic Day is a tradition that first began in 2005, when John Campbell (of Pictures for Sad Children fame—or, perhaps, notoriety). This first outing for the event occurred when Campbell posted a journal page with a series of doodles he had taken every hour throughout the course of the day. Over the following few years, more webcomic artists picked up on the trend, until it finally became An Event To Look Forward To on Feb 1st every year, from 2008 onwards.

1 Feb 2019 was no exception, and many webcomic artists jumped on the wagon to journal their days in comic form: here are a few to whet your appetite if you missed seeing the event unfold this year (like, apparently, some webcomic columnists out there…)

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DS 529: Honey, You’re Scaring The Kids

This week, we begin our look at Oddity Woods, a cute, creepy comic that harkens back to the best parts of comics like Broodhollow and The Last Halloween in giving us quirky, fun characters and pants-wettingly scary creatures with a story that you’re sure to root for. The second part of our review will post next week. Enjoy!

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Life After the End

We’ve all had that one – the webcomic we absorbed through our very skin, lit by the glow of the computer monitor deep into the night. And we’ve all felt that little piece of our soul detach on the day our webcomic went away. It might have been time, it might have been hosting costs, or it might have simply been life. Nevertheless, it’s a sadness we’ve all felt when that dreaded word, ‘hiatus’ (or even worse, ‘The End’) appears on the site.

Why’d you go and leave the internet such a cold and lonely place without you?! (The Abominable Charles Christopher, strip for 23 Jan 2019)

Which is why, I think, Steve and Jason’s excitement at the apparent return of Karl Kerschl’s The Abominable Charles Christopher in this week’s podcast struck such a real chord. But this story of a child-like yeti and the forest creatures that live nearby is not the only webcomic to have come back from the long sleep. Here are three other Webcomics that have also returned to prove that, on the internet at least, there is an afterlife…

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