Ratcheting up

Ok, let's get things rolling here again. First of all, you'll probably notice that the big list of links to webcomics I read is gone, replaced with a link to the actual list of webcomics I read on Piperka. I did this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I doubt anyone is really seeing any increased traffic to their site from people clicking down the links on my blog. Secondly, that list was becoming way too big and fluid for me to update manually. Thirdly, this gives me yet another chance to plug Piperka, which is a fabulously useful site for keeping track of your comics that everyone should use. Seriously.

Now, I still plan to make periodic posts updating everyone on new stuff I've picked up, so don't worry about getting blindly added to my reading list and never discussed here. If I start reading your comic, you'll at least get one link from me. Speaking of which...

Here's the new stuff I've picked up in my absence. Now, I haven't actually gotten around to reading all of the comics I got interested in at Comicon, so some of them may yet make the list. But as it stands right now:

• Bug Bash - A new comic by the creator of Where the Buffalo Roam, which is a tome in the world of webcomics. Bug Bash is about geeks when they grow up and get jobs at huge software corporations. It's like Dilbert if Dilbert actually had real technical knowledge and then characters acted like real people instead of overblown stereotypes. Not that Dilbert and its overblown stereotypes are bad, mind you. Just different.
• Dresdan Codak - Dresden Codak reminds me a lot of Copper in tone, except with a lot more experimentation in the art style. It's a very beautiful strip to look at, and each strip often takes quite a few twists and turns and ends up in a different place than you expected. I especially liked this one.
• Evil Inc. - Yet another Blank Label comic drags me in. Evil Inc is just good, plain and simple. It's got a clever premise, colorful characters, and it manages to never take itself too seriously. But I'm not going to go back and read the Greystone Inn archive. Not een if it provides useful context for the current comic. Not gonna do it. Nope. *hand drifts toward mouse*
• Joyce and Walky - I talked about this more extensively in the post immediately preceding this one. Soul ownage.
• Multiplex - A webcomic about people who work in a movie theater. I'm pretty sure that's been done before, but Multiplex never gets over-the-top with crazy situations and unbelievable circumstances. It's content to simply poke fun at the foibles of movies and the people who watch them, and the people who dispense the tickets for that allow the people who watch movies to watch their movies. Yeah. It's kind of like the "Dave Barry" of movie humor strips.
• Rob and Elliot - The classis roommate strip. Both Rob and Elliot are a little wacky and a little psycho in their own ways, and it plays off well against each other. Sure the "wacky roommates" strip has been done a million times before, but it's more of a "tried-and-true" mechanism than it is a cliche, not unlike the workplace comic. As long as the jokes are fresh, it's cool.
• Terror Island - It's the photocomic that's not a photocomic. Somewhat reminiscent of Irregular Webcomic, the photos seem like more of a means to an end than the end themselves. It's not like A Softer World, where the photos focus you in and the text provides poetic juxtaposition, where it had to be done using photos. It's just like using photos is the chosen art style for the comic, much like using sprites or using black and white lineart. Terror Island is still pretty early on, but already we can see that the humor is very much of the "obsessive compulsive characters who obsess far too much over simple things" variety. I'm going to write a full review of this at some point.
  
• The Order of the Stick - Somehow I managed to read the entire archives, follow the comic strip for a couple months, buy all three of the collected volumes, and reread the entire strip in the collected volumes without ever mentioning it once here. Weird. So, uh, yeah. I like Order of the Stick. I like it alot. Heavily D&D themed humor without requiring you to have a Players Handbook handy to get all the jokes. And characters whose colrfulness is only accentuated by their simple designs. Sometimes it's better to leave things to the audience's imaginations.

Ok, there's also some neat webcomic related sites that need plugging, but I'll get to that in another post.