Samurai and pizza without the cats? Genius!

You MUST click on the picture to enjoy the brilliance of No Need For Bushido.

If there's one thing I love about No Need For Bushido, it's the little side projects. Now don't get me wrong, I like NNFB simply by itself, but it's certainly nothing so amaznig that it single-handedly distances itself from the pack. It's just another decent webcomic with a nice blend of action and humor. One reason I picked up NNFB was because it has more action than most; the majority of webcomics these days are highly dialogue driven because in general action plays out too slowly in page-a-day release format for you to keep an audience engaged. When you're doing action sequences you can blow ten or twenty panels for about ten seconds worth of "real time", and this makes for very slow progression in the audiences mind when they only get to see a small chunk of the action at a time.

But I digress. This post is about No Need For Bushido's side projects, most notably their alternate scripts (although I do greatly enjoy No Need For a Player's Guide, especially this strip). I think every serious webcomic (meaning a webcomic with serious themes, not a webcomic in which the creator is serious) needs to publish alternate script pages on the side, because the juxtaposition of humorous text with serious images provides no end of humor. It really makes you look at each page in a whole new way, and allows the author no end of self-parody. And quite frankly, Joe Kovell does a brilliant job with the alternate scripts. Now, since I follow my webcomics using Piperka, and Piperka doesn't always catch updates, sometimes I'm late in finding an alternate script (as I was with this one), but I always make sure to catch myself up and read them all.

When I read the one thumbnailed above, I almost wet my pants. Each panel just adds another layer onto the humor with all the assassins toppings suggestions, and the final line had me rolling: "And may Buddha have mercy on them if they don't have stuffed crust". Oh man, that is so entering my daily lexicon. It sounds especially funny if you say it out loud with a very deep and menacing voice.

Alex Kolesar and Joe Kovell, I owe you a beer.