He recently signed a three year syndication for his webcomic, The New Adventures of Queen Victoria. We’re celebrating by revisiting a question he asked right around the time that TNAoQV was just getting started.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What do you get when you fall in love?
- Pab

Dear Pab,
  If you’re very lucky, you get a lifetime of happiness, sprinkled liberally with passionate moments and almost no questions about strange genital growths.

  If you’re not so lucky, you wind up on Maury for an episode called “My Girlfriend Slept With My Best Friend And Also His Dog And By The Way She’s A Man With Three Nuts.”

Ugly Hill

  If you’ve ever perused my links bar, you’ll have noticed that I link to a lot of webcomics. Yes, before you ask, I read every single comic on that list, and more.

  I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite; one of the great things about the medium is how widely it varies in both form and content. Trying to rank a weekly captioned photo (A Softer World) against a daily clip art philosophy lesson (Dinosaur Comics) against a randomly updated, hand drawn visual journal (Malfunction Junction) is an exercise in futility akin to comparing a picture of a kitten with a recording of guitar feedback, and deciding which one smells better.

  Still, one of the strips that currently pleases my sulfurous, corroded soul most is, in Interweb terms, a fairly traditional “comic strip.” Ugly Hill is visually reassuring; its three horizontal panels, clean, polished line work and vivid solid-color palette would be right at home in your Sunday paper. Creator Paul Southworth is a graphic designer, and the result is a strip that’s visually very appealing. The characters are distinctive and interesting, the panel layout is tidy, and the word balloons are logical and readable.

  As much fun as it is to look at Ugly Hill, reading it is an equal pleasure. The strip takes place in a weird mirror-America, where the “people” are a variety of colorful monsters, with all the tentacles, fangs and scales that this implies. This inspired conceit allows Southworth to put life under the microscope in a consistently entertaining and insightful way. Ugly Hill wrassles everything from the mundane (office politics) to the truly thorny (racial tension) with a gently bent, satiric take that’s disarming in its ability to wring laughs out of the monsters in all of us.

  Southworth has recently started experimenting with longer, more intricate storylines. While this seems like a common evolutionary path for webcomics, it’s particularly gratifying here. Ugly Hill’s characters are rich, their relationships are genuine, and their world has lots of curious nooks and crannies that are hinted at, but have yet to be fully explored. Freeing up the characters to get out into the world and stretch their legs (and brains) a bit will be good for them, and great for readers.

  Here comes the book jacket blurb; Ugly Hill is a comic with visual flair, rewarding dialogue, and characters that are monstrously believable. Start reading it, or I’ll email your entire browser history to your mom.

  Talented (and scarily prolific) artist/writer Brad Guigar’s Eisner nominated webcomic Phables is a weekly about living in Philadelphia! It’s funny and thoughtful, and the “wow, he nailed it” moments come fast and furious. If you’ve ever spent any time in or around the City of Barely Concealed Misanthropy, you’ll appreciate Guigar’s take. I’ll race you through the archives. A clue; you’ll lose.

  I stopped wearing t-shirts that were wittier than myself a few years back, but this new design has me pondering a reprieve on the ban.

  Webcomics OG Jeffrey Rowland (When I Grow Up, Wigu, and the semi-true journal comic Overcompensating) has a designers eye and a zeitgeist radar that’s visible from space. His t-shirt designs are consistently among the smartest and most visually appealing product to crawl out of the shameless merchandising whore-factory that is the sole means of revenue generation for most webcomic artists. If you’re a t-shirt guy or gal, and my endorsement means anything at all, you’ll buy a shirt (or twelve) at Topatoco.com. My birthday is in October.

  I’ve added some new comics to my reading schedule as well my links list, and I thought I’d share. Because it’s my blog, damn it.

Bad Gods: Lore Sjöberg is a venerable Internet humorist, inspiring belly laughs as one of the Brunching Shuttlecocks, as the creator of Table of Malcontents, and as the author of the Alt Text blog for Wired. Bad Gods started as a weekly Flash animation, went dormant for awhile, and recently resurfaced as a non-animated meta Internet observational humor sort of thing. I’m not quite sure where this new incarnation is going, but I’ve kept it in my RSS reader despite a year-long dearth of updates. Lore is the kind of funny I aspire to, before I devolve into fart jokes and incessant profanity. Updates M&W.

Gunnerkrigg Court: Gunnerkrigg Court concerns the supernatural goings-on at the spooky titular boarding school. It has a very graphic novel kind of feel, with interesting panel layouts and a rich color palette. Author/artist Tom Siddell writes convincing dialog for children, which is rare. Better yet, he knows when it’s appropriate to drop the “blah blah” and let the visuals tell the story, which is nearly unheard of in a lot of online cartooning. The serialized story isn’t comedy necessarily, but it does observe richly emotional and comic moments between the players (human and otherwise). Updates M,W&F.

Bad Gods presents The Drama Club.

After another not-so-hot night’s sleep, I once again gave in to the sweet siren song of soda. It was a fountain drink, so I loaded up on ice. I feel approximately 34% less guilty than I would have without ice.

This quick sketch sums up my day before that. Beware of impossibly exciting shenanigans.

“I’m praying for you,” or “you and your family are in my prayers.” They’ve become the all-too familiar refrain of people who want to do or say something meaningful to someone in crisis, but don’t have the desire or the knowledge to actually do anything.

Admittedly, when one faces a deadly disease (or sees someone close to them go through it), there isn’t much you can actively do to get well. You can follow doctor’s orders, you can try to enjoy life, you can do any number of things to take your mind off of the impact that the disease is having, and will have on the rest of your life. For those who don’t know how to do anything else, there’s prayer.

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