Comic Stuff

Well, you should already have worked out them I'm at least a little into comics, from the section titled "The Slag-Blah Church of The Winslow". In there you'll find a heap of stuff about the work of Phil Foglio. But there are other comics I'm interested in!

Real World Comics

Well, let's start with the great Dork Tower. John Kovalic is an excellent cartoonist and also an excellent fellow, at least he is judging on my one meeting with him at Dragon*Con in London. I also enjoy John's earlier Wild Life comic series.

Next, let me mention Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows; Half-comic, half-soap opera, but all fun. And her draws gorgeous looking women too.

PvP by Scott Kurtz is next into the ring. I'm proud to say I've been a fan of Scott's since his early onlined publishing days, back when the characters were all drawn quite differently and Jade wasn't a "babe".

For real

I generally enjoy the work of Sergio Aragonés, including his Groo series, though sometimes his humour can be a bit childish. (I know, I know, these are comic books we're talking about. Not to mention that I first knew of his work through MAD Magazine, and how childish is that?) Like Phil, he has a distinctive style, and there's often some incidental humour hidden in his drawings.

Clerks, Jay & Silent Bob, and the whole Kevin Smith/View Askew merchandising behemoth is sometimes worth a look, though the Oni Double Features can really vary in quality.

The comics of Mark Sexton & John Petropoulos are definitely worth a look, but good luck tracking them down! They're Australian cartoonists, publishing under the name of Aaargh! Comics. They did 9 issues of a comic called Bug and Stump and two issues of T.I.S.M., a comic based on the Aussie band of the same name (and whose music I really like.) I've no idea what they're doing these days though.

And for all the latest on the American political scene (when it's not involved in some other soap-style sub-plot), I always enjoy reading Doonesbury, by G.B. Treaudau. Go to the Doonesbury Electronic Town Hall to get the on-line version of his comics.

On-line Comics

Isn't the 'net a wonderful place? All these independent comic artists producing humour, sometimes on a daily basis, and charging us absolutely nothing for the privilege! Here are links to some of my favourites (in alphabetical order):

	(Archive only)
	(Archive only)

I've written a handy little script in a programming language called Rebol which grabs all these comics for me automatically each day, and can even grab them all for the previous week, month, whatever. Thing is, I'm sure doing this means fewer hits on the ad banners which is the primary source of income for a lot of these artists, so I find myself in a moral quandary, and I don't think I should release it for general Internet consumption! I'm currently rewriting the program in Visual Basic and if I can work in a way around this then I'll release the software.