General Webcomics Thread For Liking Webcomics In

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > General Webcomics Thread For Liking Webcomics In

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Hello thread, I am trying to remember the name of a webcomic I encountered in the early 00s. It centered around students in a gifted program at a school, and one of its main features was that it had been running for seemingly ever, and had a very extensive cast of characters. It had a pretty basic side-on perspective, art that was maybe two or three steps up from Foxtrot, and an incredibly consistent, oldschool style.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 23, 2020

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 21:04

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:41

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Gah, it's been forever, but what I can recall is:

This was in a mostly grounded world, and it was a conventional public school gifted program sort of setting- no magickal destinies. Vaguely pop-sci references were a mainstay.
One of the main characters was african-american and had dreads, which the artist depicted as a sort of palm tree look. His friend and other main perspective character was white and had an unstated but widely known crush on some other student.
The cast was generally ethnically diverse, though the whole series was purely lighthearted so that never came up as a relevant subject.
The school guard was also african-american, though he appeared infrequently.
One of the other major characters (I swear the cast page had like 50 people on it) wore lab safety glasses at all times.
iirc there was a nerd/paranormal activities club that had characters who were frequently the butt of jokes- iirc one of them was always wearing elf ears and another spoke klingon at all times, or something like that.

The comic was mostly black and white and there was basically no character development, but extended plotlines would occur around, say, a science fair project in a sort of gag-a-day format that could last for months. It's bugging the hell out of me because I remember reading a bunch of it way back when, but can't recall anything else. The title might have been something about the fact that it was a gifted student program- "gifted and talented", or something like that.

No, it's not paranatural or dangan ronpa.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Feb 23, 2020

# ¿ Feb 23, 2020 21:14

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Howdy, two things:

1. The OP needs some updating badly, a lot of those webcomics are regrettably lost to time, or at least relocated

2. I found a webcomic I like. How should I introduce it to folks here?

# ¿ Apr 17, 2020 04:53

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'd like to introduce a webcomic I'm fond of. It's not an incredible work of art like some in this thread, but it's decent and underappreciated and I'm partial to it. I thought I'd share it here(and rapidly learn from y'all how wrong I am to enjoy it).

Webcomic Site
Color; Adventure; Weekly

Example pages:

(These are in order of production from the beginning, near the middle, and a very recent page, so you can see how the art develops.)

From the About page:

quote:

Cloudscratcher is the story of a group of freedom fighters in their struggles against the Margoth Empire. Squaring off in a world high above the clouds, where people build their civilizations atop craggy mountains and lifeless plateaus, the crew of the Cloudscratcher--a motley crew of various heroes of great skill, all united by lives torn apart by the Empire's machinations--fight the seemingly endless fight for the future. It won't be an easy fight, however, as the Margoth Empire boasts superior numbers, advanced technology, and leaders that are as skilled as they are ruthless. And making matters worse, a terrifying new Emperor has taken control, and under his rule, the Empire has grown even stronger, and their goal of complete global domination seems to creep ever-closer...

Their struggles will take the Cloudscratcher crew all over the world, to places beyond the imagination! From towering mountaintop metropolises, to ancient ruins, to the dens of sky pirates, and even the harsh world below the clouds...! The deck may be stacked against them, but with their combined skills, a little luck, and a surprise ace in the hole, this small group of rebels may very well turn the tide in the world's favor! Of course, the crew's problems go beyond just the Empire; sky pirates, crime syndicates, mercenaries, thieves, you name it! No one said being the good guys was easy...!

So strap yourself in and get ready for a sky-high adventure aboard the Cloudscratcher!

From the FAQs:

quote:

Q: What was the inspiration for this comic?

A: Cloudscratcher was primarily inspired by the animated movies and TV shows of the 1990's, as well as the Crimson Skies game series. The overall style and feel of the comic is a love-letter to 90's animation, particularly Disney's animated TV shows, and the early animated films of Don Bluth. Also, I have a thing for high-flying dieselpunk settings...

Q: So when're we gonna see some blood and cussin'!?

A: The content of the comic is staying in the realm of the aforementioned animated programs. Language stays G-rated, blood gets shed only when necessary, and any harsh content will be kept to a minimum.

Q: Is this a furry comic?

A: No. Neither I, nor anyone associated with the comic have anything to do with the furry fandom. The anthropomorphic aesthetic is a stylistic choice, and nothing more.

Why do I like Cloudscratcher?

It's competently written and drawn in a clean (very amateur) way, and does some novel things with its setting, wearing its cartoon influences on its sleeve - TaleSpin meets One Piece meets Gundam. I find it captures the early 90s Saturday morning cartoon feel pretty perfectly. It raises unpleasant subjects of prejudice and war without ever going truly grimdark, and best of all for a talking cartoon animal webcomic, its horny level approaches zero. I personally am enjoying a mental popcorn comic that isn't self-aware genre snark or young adults going through Heavy Life Moments. The comic gets very little attention because the creator seems either completely disinterested in or completely unable to promote it and, well, horny level approaching zero.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Apr 19, 2020

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 07:47

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

God drat it, this should teach me to like things. I had no idea, I never thought to check the author's social media at all. And the comic subverts gender roles, and talks about racial and religious tolerance, and...sigh. Well, I'll leave the post up as a monument to my foolishness. Cripes, how embarrassing.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 19, 2020

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 17:27

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mikl posted:

Friends, I need your help in tracking down a webcomic I read... Probably like a decade and a half ago, if not more.

It was called As If! and it detailed the daily lives of several friends in high school. The website that had hosted the comic, asifcomic.com, is currently occupied by... Some Japanese company, apparently? I don't even know.

Through googling I found out that the comic archive was apparently moved like 14 years ago to a new website (as detailed a forum I found through the search), but the details of the new site are apparently lost to time. Those forums seem to be dead, too, since the last post in the As If! section is nearly a decade old, and the last post overall is more than a year old. So that's a dead end, too.

Any help?

ah, as if!

Writer's here:
http://blog.jetwolf.com/

Artist, Amy Mebberson, is here:
https://amymebberson.com/index.html

Last I checked she's working for Disney now! She also made "pocket princesses", which was basically chibi disney princesses (I think related to how she got her job) and Thorn, a sisters in the 70s strip concept.

# ¿ May 23, 2020 02:22

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Rand Brittain posted:

I was trying to avoid making a joke about the fact that Clinton basically just got talked off by his own sister.

Yeah that aspect was disconcerting

# ¿ Aug 19, 2020 17:47

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Joe England, skilled ink webcartoonist of Olde Webcomic Zebra Girl, has recently launched his new project, Witch Warp. He is also apparently in a fairly dire financial situation, so if you have ever enjoyed his work it's likely worth chipping in to support him.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Apr 5, 2024

# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 07:58

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Discendo Vox posted:

Hello thread, I am trying to remember the name of a webcomic I encountered in the early 00s. It centered around students in a gifted program at a school, and one of its main features was that it had been running for seemingly ever, and had a very extensive cast of characters. It had a pretty basic side-on perspective, art that was maybe two or three steps up from Foxtrot, and an incredibly consistent, oldschool style.

From four years ago, I am cleaning up the thousands of old bookmarks I have lying around and and identified this as CrebHeads, a.k.a. Ban the Basics, a comic which apparently just vanished as so many such things do. It did at least apparently produce a weird meta feedback loop of comic searching at one point.

edit: whoops, doublepostin'. My bad.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Apr 5, 2024

# ¿ Apr 5, 2024 08:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The existence of a social space (thread, forum, whatever) which is organized around opposition to some particular entity pretty much inevitably intensifies that opposition over time, often pretty fast, without major outside intervention to disrupt the process. Individuals are basically incentivized to one-up each other in their opposition and discover new bases for stating that opposition- with opprobrium for any counterpressure. That said...

Rand Brittain posted:

The problem with dedicated threads for comics people don't like is that people feel like they need to post in them every time the comic updates, and no comic is really so dedicated to being bad that it gives you something new and interesting to say on every page.

There needs to be a sinfest thread, if only so we can stop covering it in the politoons thread in dnd.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 19:33

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

SlothfulCobra posted:

Sinfest is the kind of bad that's kinda scary to me because I don't really know how somebody goes that far off the deep end, and I don't want to really contemplate the whole chain of reasoning for fear that it could somehow be contagious. There've certainly been other people who've gone down similar paths.

Ishida is objectively talented as an artist even if he chooses to do bad things and has lost whatever sense of humor he used to have, and Sinfest a decade or so back was actually pretty nice and cute, so it's sad for it to be so bad. Although it's not the most unheard of thing for someone in their older age to reject and resent the things they loved as an adolescent.

We don't and can't have full access to Ishida other than the content of his work...and bear in mind the discussion of the danger of reading too much into a hated comic artist's work in this very page of the thread!

That said, three things to bear in mind when considering a crazy conservative trajectory generally and Ishida specifically:

1. Ishida in specific held to the use of what we'd then have considered dumbly edgy racial stereotypes from the beginning of his work, as well as the sort of attitude toward groups that generally suggested detachment if not alienation, an at best arms-length understanding of their common humanity that made him only look to represent those groups in their stereotyped form. This alienation gets worse when you remember that Slick, the protagonist he used as his authorial standin since high school, is white, and when someone dug up those illustrations they were very much in the same vein of defensive distancing; mockery to reflect alienation.

2. One axis that was strongest with Ishida throughout the entire course of his work is that the assumption of the gender binary was always a thing- and it's also the angle that ran through the whole desire, horniness and weird self-castigating morality play of the comic. Other smarter folks have written way more on this than I could, but the way that people build and lean upon the gender binary in the construction of their own identities, desires and insecurities seems to make attacking it an extremely effective method of breaking their brains.

3. With all that said, I'm sorry, but no one is immune- at a minimum, neurotrauma of various kinds from drug abuse to direct physical trauma to dementia can cause a dramatic shift in this direction. Intellectual closure, where you let a narrowing stream of media sources, social media self-selection, or absolutist ideology radicalize you, can take you down a similar path (and not just the one with red caps and mens' rights). The check to deal with this latter route is to have a really wide range of sources of information and a hipstery enough set of beliefs and influences, coupled with a capacity for changing your views when you get new information. Critical rationalism's great for that.

Conversely, you can be abby normal in a lot of ways, mentally or ideologically, without being a raging bigot or right-to-player of any kind. If you're not building your identity on a similar unipolar set of assumptions, or undergoing the sort of single-stream radicalizing, you've got relatively little to worry about in this direction.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Apr 21, 2024

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 06:32

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

DbD was as much because it had straight porn content. Stonetoss et al was partly out of concern about spreading discussion and decoding of an insurgent cryptofascism- in line with the creators� intentions

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 19:27

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:41

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Jedit posted:

DBD was blatantly traced from porn long before it was banned. The ban happened because Muir had his self-insert (TW) practice corrective rape on his wife. I haven't been in Politoons since last year at least so I don't know exactly what Sinfest is up to - not that I would have read it if I had been - but I'd put sexualised images of children at least on that level if not higher.

I stand corrected, it was before my time.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 00:56

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > General Webcomics Thread For Liking Webcomics In