When Victor Frankenstein created life, he was unprepared for the consequences of it. The monster he created needed a parent, a teacher, a caregiver, but instead he abandoned it. The monster, learning to fear and hate through the necessities of survival, dedicates its life to vengeance upon its creator. But what if the doctor hadn’t left his creation to fend for itself? Would it have been better? Or would it have brought up a host of other uncomfortable issues and power dynamics?
In the webcomics graveyard, most of the headstones say “Rest in Pieces”, marking comics that no one misses, not even their creators. But some of the graves are still tended, decorated with fresh flowers, visited often by old friends. Some dead comics made such an impact on the culture of making and reading webcomics that their absence is felt to this day. But I don’t give a shit about all that.
I briefly worked at a Subway as a teenager, before the inept manager’s choices got the place shut down by the board of health. It was a hellish job, plagued by horrible customers, inane store policies, an absentee boss, and incessant top-40s radio that couldn’t be turned off. My only solace was the people who were suffering with me: my coworkers. Too bad the boss made us work completely alone most of the time.
I’ve never been a fan of Kris Straub’s work, to be totally honest. I always found his jokes not so funny, his characters, not so interesting, his plots, not so original. As a cartoonist, he seemed kind of mediocre. Perhaps my opinion was colored by the fact that my first exposure to him was the dreadful, clown-protagonisted Checkerboard Nightmare, back when it was still updating. But those were dark times, and all webcomics were bad back then, so it hardly seems fair to hold that against him. Even if he does strike me as an insufferable nerd-bro.
Not many people know this, but I used to have a webcomic of my own. It probably goes without saying that it was awful. One of the things I tried, and miserably failed, to do with this never-to-be-named comic was shade with brush pens, a technique I had seen other, better artists pull off with gorgeous results.