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Digital Strips Podcast 272 – 2011 Year In Review

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I always love doing this show each year. It’s a chance to look back at the year that was in comics, specifically those that are published on the web (a classification that you can bet Steve and I will be fighting about well into this year). We took a look at some amazing comics this year, spanning all possible genres and even forging a few new ones. Before we jump into the discussions and winners, we first must mention a few new ones because, hey, it’s what we do.

Best Horizons Watch of 2011: Corporate Skull

We have the Horizons Watch around to help us keep track of up-and-coming comics that show tons of promise but which are just too early in their life to call. In 2011, we found some awesome beginnings, many of which could have been chosen as our favorite, but, shockingly (to us and you) we agreed that Corporate Skull showed the most promise right out of the gate and more than lived up to it in the following updates. This comic by well-Internet-travelled creator Jamie Smart depicts a world than represents both zany fun and imminent peril. Throw in one of the strangest, coolest protagonists of any comic currently being published, digitally or in-print, and you’ve got a story we’re proud to call our favorite Horizons Watch pick of the year.

We’ve got two video game-inspired selections to lead us between segments this week, and the first is “The Life and Death of Kirby” by Insert Rupee (16:42).

Best Digital Strips-Reviewed Comic of 2011: Jason’s Pick: Velia, Dear; Steve’s Pick: Ellie on Planet X

Now is more comfortable. Again, we reviewed an incredible pack of comics this year, and many of them will be on my regular reading list until they decide to wrap things up and try something new. But when it came to surprising and engaging, there was none better than the more traditionally-presented comic strip, Velia, Dear by Rina Piccolo. This look at a middle-aged woman and her struggles to keep everybody happy while just trying to keep herself afloat hit all the right notes in terms of a variety of genres. It’s got heart, it’s got humor, it’s got suspense, and it’s got the modern edge that keeps it relevant when many other strips have gone the timeless and forgotten.

Steve’s pick, the adorably-quirky Ellie on Planet X, is one that instantly curls up in your heart and won’t leave, not with the hottest hatred, not with the most tangible of terrorizing terrors. Creator James Anderson rockets us up, up, and away from the worries of our troubled planet and lands us on Planet X, where anything is possible and the craziest creatures from our childhood imaginations come to life. Ellie doesn’t understand what’s going on, but she makes the most of her new life on a kooky, fantastical new world and it’s a blast to tag along with her on her day-to-day adventures.

Our second segment-leader is “Ebbed Tides and Webbed Feet” by Doc Nano and Evory (35:20). I knew I loved DuckTales on the NES/GameBoy when I was a child, and mixes like this just reaffirm that my affections were not unfounded.

Best Digitally-Published Comic of 2011: Jason’s Pick: The Gutters; Steve’s Pick: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

If there’s one thing that 2011 proved to us, it’s that there is no shortage in our modern world of great comics. Go to your local comic shop, go online, check out your digital delivery device of choice, but they are there and just waiting to be discovered. We try to help with that discovery process and the best one that I discovered this year, the one that kept me coming back for more and wanting more when there just wasn’t any more to be had was The Gutters. Least I Could Do and Looking For Group scribe Ryan Sohmer got fed up with the silliness that goes on beyond the panels of your favorite paper-published comic and decided to do something about it. So he regularly collaborates with the biggest and best creators in the industry on comics that perforate and eviserate, all with a darling love that shows abundant care for the very comics he and his comrades tear apart.

Web-wise, Steve picked a comic that had a banner year in 2011 and which shows no signs of slowing down in 2012. Zach Weiner’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is the most crudely drawn comic for MENSA members that you’re likely to come across in comics. If xkcd is for MIT folks, SMBC is for MIT folks who have side jobs working for a dirty comedy on HBO or Showtime. Those same people also write for the porn industry. It’s not that SMBC is filthy (though it certainly has the ability to go raunchier than even the dirtiest SFW entertainment), but if geeky sex jokes are your thing, then look no further. Also, Batman. As Steve notes, “If you don’t know anything about Batman, get off the Internet.”

And that’s our look back at the best year thus far in comics on the web! We look forward to bringing you even more amazing recommendations in the year to come! Thanks for listening!

Our Rambletron goes South immediately and never really rises again. Listen if you dare (especially applicable to men 30+ years of age).

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Digital Strips Podcast 271 – Review – Mohagen

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So, Steve notes that the theme of this episode, the first recorded in 2012, is “True Facts” (I think it should be “Rear of the Dragon”, but you’ll understand why at about the 5:00 mark). While I didn’t even bother to correct his repetitive title, I can throw out some statements that I certainly believe to be true.

Antagonizing Steve over the airwaves week in and week out is a true joy that lights me up when the day comes. Appreciating and building up has long been part of our mission statement at Digital Strips and I can guarantee we’ll be checking out at least one of the “next big things” in 2012. As we mention early on in this episode, it’s our job to find the good stuff for you, the diamonds in the really, really rough. Also, for those of our listeners who also like to play video games, either casually or with a more invested interest, we’ll be putting something up later this week on this very front page that we hope you’ll enjoy.

But why waste time right now, gazing into crystal balls and guessing at the future when you can be sure that we’ve got an amazing review for you right now! But first, some news items:

Other comics mentioned, either in reference or as part of what we’re reading, in the first segment:

Mixed in with some Rambletron silliness is our music break, provided, appropriately enough, by another tale of underwater fish tank hijinx, Pixar’s Knick Knack (14:50).

There are lots of comics that attempt the cut-and-paste method of creating comics, but few pull it off to as impressive a degree as Mohagen (15:50), a gag-a-day story-ish comic about a foul-mouthed fish and his decorative skull buddy, Grady. There are other characters who make appearances here and there, but if these two buddies don’t keep putting food in the tank, this comic goes belly up. Luckily, creators Kennon James and John Kipling are more than up to the task of making sure the writing is sharp enough to slice and the art is expressive enough to make watching this fish anything but boring.

Some other comics mentioned in our discussion:

Various other bits to toss in the Rambletron at show’s end include being terrible role models, bus stop warnings, horrible haiku and limerick-esque rhyming schemes, and the fact that, for some reason, we once wanted to be known as the “Dark Windowless Van of the Internet”.

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Digital Strips Podcast 269 – Review – Monster Pulse

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The anklyosaurusIt’s (likely) the final episode of Digital Strips of 2011 and we’re going out with a bang! Or… at the very least, another episode, one that isn’t bad. Or even terrible. Sadly, it’s been a while since we’ve podcasted, so we’re spending a good amount of our time working on getting back to a plateau of consistency. Our news topics this time around certainly help us in that regard.

  • (6:25) Gareb Shamus can’t laugh at himself, gets canned
  • (8:23) Paul Southworth leaving Not Invented Here, Jeff Zugale in as artist
  • (10:23) Scott Kurtz, Brad Guigar offer services to assist struggling syndicates (EDITORIAL)

Comics mentioned in our news discussion:

Now that Steve has guided me in the ways of the fancy tool that allows for dynamic changes in the audio, you can enjoy some outtakes while rocking out to Turbopop’s “Adeste fideles” (15:58). It’s a Christmas miracle!

Our final review of the year is a comic that Herman Cain would gladly steal ideas from. Monster Pulse (by Magnolia Porter, 19:20) borrows bits from collect-them-all franchises like Pokémon and Digimon and tosses in dashes of properties like Pan’s Labrinyth and Where The Wild Things Are. Steve’s got some strong opinions about the comic, and all-in-all we turn in a lively discussion, involving these comics as well…

Other random topics to toss in the ol’ Rambletron: Law and Order: The Entity, the funerals that we hope to someday (no time soon) have, selling our services for money (in Steve’s words, “Call us up, bro. We’re not expensive mofos”), and the hilarity that is a urinary tract infection. Enjoy and thanks for listening in 2011! Here’s hoping we can do something to make 2012 the best year of Digital Strips ever!

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Digital Strips Podcast 253 – Review – Shadowbinders (Just Don’t Go Near The Large Barnyard Animals)

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Barnyard AnimalsWe’re making up for a shorter episode last week with a podcast chock full of webcomicky goodness. First up, a segment where, as mentioned earlier, we put two comics head-to-head in a “we swear this isn’t a review” contest to see who pulls off the “this title could only exist in webcomics”. The competitors:

Who emerges as the winner? The fans and readers, that’s who! These are two amazing comics that we are lucky to have received and which, without the magical medium of the Internet, we might never have seen otherwise. While Ratfist actually wrapped up this past week, Battlepug rages on, and as mentioned in a previous news post, a Ratfist collection, complete with bonus content, is coming later this year courtesy of Image Comics. Do us all a favor and pick it up while you keep reading Battlepug to help ensure we keep seeing awesome experimental stories like this on the Web.

Leading us into the second segment is an audio ad, the first we’ve received in at least a year! This one points us towards Gene Gardens (9:45), a comic that is hard to find online but whose Kickstarter you can readily assist with. Help creator Shawn Granger raise the funds to produce the Gene Gardens graphic novel by clicking any of the previous links.

And the second segment is full of Digital Strips News Minuteness, so much so that there is nothing Minute-y about it. You can find all of those stories on the site (save the one about Daniel Lieske’s app for The Wormworld Saga), some of which even have conversations already ongoing. Jump in and let your voice be known!

Our review is brought to us by the coolest of subterranean adolescent crimefighters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, more specifically a remix of the title screen tune of the NES video game of the same name, titled, “Go Ninja, Go” (16:40). Bringing that same sense of adolescent wonder is a fun tale of steampunks and real world teenage angst.

Three other comics are mentioned while we suss out the review.

While uneven, Steve and I agree that this comic packs promise and personality. Check it out and let us know what you think!

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Digital Strips Podcast 245 – Book Club – Order of the Stick – 2nd Edition – No One Remembers The News, Only Huey Lewis

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Everyone ready to talk about Back to the Future? How about Halo? Maybe Order of the Stick? Good, because all of these things, and more, are on the menu for this week’s just-under-an-hour edition of the Digital Strips Book Club!

If you hadn’t guessed, the BttF/Halo stuff comes in our first segment, now home to a mix of anything and everything. And leading us from quite a bit of video game chatter is, fittingly, a video game tune, courtesy of Benjamin Briggs titled, “Climb My Mountain, This High” (7:53). His remix of a classic Link’s Awakening tune (out now, on the Nintendo 3DS eShop!) is a wonderful example of how masterful some video game music truly is (if you missed the first ten minutes or so of this year’s Nintendo press event at E3, do yourself a favor and track that down soon).

After this interlude, it’s all business.  Or as business-y as the Digital Strips News Minute can get!

That all pretty much speaks for itself, so why not groove on into our third, slam-bang segment with Stray Dogg’s “Break” (15:54).

It’s hard to say much about this, the 2nd of our 86 part series of Book Clubs on the archivally-engorged Order of the Stick. Possibly because there is still going to be plenty of time to talk about it throughout the remainder of this calendar year. Possibly because things get ugly when the topic of comic strip vs. comic book is broached. Regardless, you should listen and then let us know what your thoughts on this divisive, but incredibly popular series are.

Also mentioned on our ride to insanity:

Finally, after the credits have rolled and the music has sounded, tune in to the after show, where I regale Steve with thoughts about my lunch with a former Digital Stripper (hint: His name rhymes with Brandon J. Carr). Burgers topped with fried egg for everyone!

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Digital Strips Podcast 244 – Weiner’s Weenies (Horizons Watch feat. Cucumber Quest and The Abaddon)

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When it comes to finding new, exciting, promising webcomics, Digital Strips has always been right in the thick of it, reviewing the big ones before they got big, and skimming the shallowest of archives in search of the best and brightest that the world of digital comics has to offer. Horizons Watch carries on that grand tradition and we’ve got two great contenders on tap for this show.

But first, the silliness we like to bottle up and deliver via our first segment! Hope you like movies and/or movie clips, because we’ve got a plethora of them. And yes, I can say we have a plethora, because I know what a plethora is (bonus film reference!).


If you recognize the first music break (10:02), then you’ve obviously played one of the best games of 2011: Portal 2. And the best news of all, this song, and all the others on the Portal 2 Official Soundtrack Vol. 1, can be yours for free. Valve (creator of Portal and other fine video games) is cool like that.

Our second segment contains our first bit of actual webcomics talk with the Digital Strips News Minute! On the docket this go ’round:

Not a great deal of news to talk about, but what’s there is juicy. Does anyone who follows webcomics in the more focused sense even care about either Comics.com or GoComics.com (which Steve freely admits to thinking were one and the same)? How about another go at it for the Least I Could Do animated show? And PC Weenies is undoubtedly worth pouring one out for, if not two or even three, given its twelve year run. Here’s hoping we hear more from Krishna in the future.

We also mentioned (12:16) David Malki ! of Wondermark in our discussions, an incredibly hilarious and wonderfully old-fashioned romp of a comic in its own right.

Before we launch into our 20th Horizons Watch, take a listen to (16:58) Rocketship Park’s “Swan”, a perfect companion piece to our latest episode of Put Up or Shut Up.

Our two comics speak for themselves in terms of their quality and content:

Cucumber Quest, in particular, begs a brief mention of (22:16) Tiny Kitten Teeth, and The Abaddon… well, lets just say that LOST is mentioned and the rest is just a furious haze. I’m pretty sure I may have done something to Steve’s outro, though. Might take a listen to that.

All in all a great discussion, a spirited bout, a perfect way to cap off the 20th Horizons Watch. Here’s to twenty or so more!

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Digital Strips Podcast 243 – Say Man One More Time And I Will Gut You (Review – Manly Guys Doing Manly Things)

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Listening to this, the manliest episode of Digital Strips ever, is guaranteed to put hair on your palms. Or is it, if you listen to this while… you know what, just trust that this episode has more testosterone that fifty of Tim Allen’s grunts and we’ll be good.

For the foreseeable future, consider the first segment to be a a free-for-all session, not unlike… well, not unlike another mini-podcast we’re doing weekly on the Audioboo network called Put Up or Shut Up. Our topic this time around, if you can call it that, is the so-called Rapture that was scheduled for Saturday the 21st. We also delve a bit into the joys of CSI memes and random sound effects that Steve has always pined for.

We’ve also got recommendations for a couple other podcasts we think you’d like:

And we can’t talk movies and webcomics without mentioning my favorite movie-centered comic:

Taking us into the second segment is an Overclocked Remix courtesy of Sixto Sounds from the butchest of video game series, Double Dragon, titled, “The Streets of Sosetsuken” (8:38). And in that second segment, as always, is the Digital Strips News Minute!

In particular, I must speak to the shortest of short clips that we used to represent the new Scott and Kris show. I mentioned in the show that their brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me, but after seeing the entire clip they have posted at the Kickstarter site (basically a pilot for the coming series), I can safely say that this is something I’m greatly looking forward to.

Marching with manliness, we join Kill Me Tomorrow with their rhythmic groove, “Attendance” (17:20) as they carry us into the third segment, where we are pumped and primed to review the macho video game comic…

I admit upfront my bias towards video game webcomics, but with at least a few criticisms about this one, I think I found enough different tweaks to the formula to call this one worthy of our attention. Steve would certainly agree with that theory. Plus, a dude beats Pokemon to death with another Pokemon, thus leveling it up. After all the gaming comics I’ve read, that is one joke I’ve not seen before.

As always, this comic made us think of several others:

Not tired of us yet? Stick around after the close for some outtakes, featuring, among other things, eye boogers, Batman vs. The Sore Throat, and The Race Of The Centurrryyyyyyyyyyyy!

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Digital Strips Podcast 242 – Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I’ll Maim You Tomorrow (Review – Spacetrawler)

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If there is one thing that makes for good broadcasting, it’s heated debate. Disagreements, hotly-contested opinions, fact vs. fiction, this kind of stuff is what we, as primal beings, crave in our entertainment. How else could the reality TV genre survive, nay, flourish, for all these years? Well, we’ve got just that for you in our third (that’s right, third) segment when we review Spacetrawler by Christopher Baldwin.

But first up, there’s news in the second segment!

Ok, so there really is no news to speak of, but we chat briefly about Mortal Kombat (if it’s not spelled with a kapital K, you’re just doing it wrong) in the first segment and then use one news morsel to springboard into a possible topic after the first break, provided by the fine folks at Overclocked Remix.

Are regular, planned breaks in an online-distributed comic cool so long as they come at a natural, bookended stopping point? Or should the online work continue flowing, never ceasing? Let your voices be known, via email, the comments (below), Twitter, or Facebook! We value all thoughts, social media-driven or no. During this discussion, we mention some key players with this thought in mind:

Leading us into the middle of the fracas is a delightful, inappropriately mellow tune from yet another talented artist found at FreeMusicArchive.org.

Alright, here it is, the brawl-to-end-it-all, the knockdown-dragout fight that ensues when two men don’t quite see eye-to-eye on a matter. That matter is the awesomeness that is Spacetrawler. Are its characters underdeveloped and suffering from a lack of investment, as Steve claims? Or are they the best ensemble put together since Danny Ocean first said, “Hey, guys, lets steal something huge to piss off a rich douche who’s doing my wife”, as Jason posits? Regardless, the end result proves we’re both lovers, not fighters (not like that).

Helping us out are a few comics that inspire and influence Spacetrawler, as well as a variety of other works, in various ways:

Join in the conversation and let us know where your allegiance lies! Is Spacetrawler a great comic? Or, is Spacetrawler the greatest comic?

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Digital Strips Presents “Put Up or Shut Up: The Random Digital Strips Podcast” (A Digital Strips/Audioboo Production)

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Steve and I decided that enough people have told us they love the podcast that we’re taking our interests and broadening things by introducing a new show! It’s called Put Up or Shut Up and it’s hosted exclusively on Audioboo. That service is perfect for mini-podcasts, so we’re tossing up our random thoughts, webcomics-related or otherwise, for your listening pleasure.

We’re not gumming up the works for our main podcast feed with this (or any other) new show(s), but Audioboo is so awesome that the basic feed options are already included right out of the box!

Have a listen to the first episode, “Mexican Food”, and stay tuned for more geeky goodness from this humble two-man wrecking crew!

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Digital Strips 234 – Horizons Watch: Corporate Skull and Kick Girl

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UPDATED: Midnight here, filling in for Steve, who once again darted off to points unknown with nary a word beforehand. I’ll fill in the blanks for this episode via his hastily scrawled notes. Also, I promise not to sound so off-in-a-cave-somewhere-ish next time.

It’s only right to start this Horizons Watch episode with a comic that shows tremendous promise, despite only having one page posted thus far:

Next up, a mention of the perfect “WTF But This Is Awesome” comic on the web trifecta comprised of:

What is indie? What does this term mean for the various mediums it inhabits? Listen up in the first segment for our thoughts on the matter…

Definitely not in the WTF camp but certainly worth mentioning whenever possible:

This week’s Webcomics News Minute (10:45) has some great mentions, all in a neat, compact case you can carry in your pocket!

Other comics mentioned in our wake:

The music in the Music Break comes to us from the land of goodness that is Overclocked Remix. This particular remix is titled “Mega Man 2: QuickDraw” (17:36). I miss my arm cannon already…

Our Horizons picks this week are varied and awesome, as (nearly) always.

In our discussions we also bring up:

Finally, check the outtakes for that engaging conversation about the previously mentioned Messed Up Amish Guy.

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