Sorry, life stuff getting in the way. Be back next week.

Elephant Town is a graphic novel in webcomics form about residents in the same house in a small town who, at least at first, don’t know each other.  In leisurely, eliptical fashion, the narrative exposes the characters and reveals their secret passions and fears.

Presented in a realistic, moment-by-moment fashion, the story nurtures a sense of mystery surrounding these individuals. Though the setting is ordinary, the vigorous rendering of it is expansive and fascinating.  The title image shows a character hanging out a window and looking off into the distance of a small town that feels credible and real.

Our attention is directed inward, as well into the lives of these characters; Kris, who has just moved in to her apartment. She feels at first invigorated by the new space, but then exposed by the possibility that strangers may be able to see in through the blinds, so she sends her boyfriend away so she can cope with the dilemma alone. Next door is Paul, who has lived there for ten years, and who still has not learned to cope with the loneliness of a life without a girlfriend. In a wordless sequence of an early chapter, Paul accidentally knocks a fortune cookie to the floor and steps on it, unveiling a fortune that will change his entire trajectory.

Artist/writer Danielle Corset is best known for the long-running webcomic Girls With Slingshots. Her talent for subtle, character-driven narrative is given full rein in her new series, which benefits enormously from her confident linework and lush coloring, as she artfully explores an expanded canvas.

A unique phenomenon is 4 Panel Horror Comics. It is exactly as the title describes, a weekly four-panel comic delivering a nightmare to your desktop or phone. This is not a continuing narrative carried over from week to week (at least not at first). Each episode begins with a precise setting-up of the situation, and concludes with a shocking surprise.

And these brief vignettes are actually quite good. Most of them are funny and surprising, and some of them, like episode 32 “The Thing in the Attic”, evoke feelings of dread that will stay with you.

The horror category (at least in film) has developed a growing subgenre of situational horror; unlike Gothic horror, these stories require no haunted house or graveyard; terror arises from commonplace things, like a hitchhiker or a video tape or a light switch. Shadowhouse Films would do well to check this series out when scouting ideas for their next franchise.

Brisbane, Australia artist Karl Kwasny is a book illustrator best known for Nightmares! and The Year of Shadows.  His macabre B&W art is a perfect fit for the comics series, employing minimal details to maximum effect, balancing humor with palpable horror. His attention to detail is admirable– often the surprise ending of a story is foreshadowed in a tiny detail in the first panel, a drop of blood or a foreboding shadow.

The Matt Bors edited anthology The Nib has been banging around in various forms since 2015.  Along the way it has features a stunning array of superstar cartoonists like Pat Ollphant, Nate Powell and Tom Tomorrow, and collected a variety of nominations from the Eisner, Ignatz, and Reuben awards.  In 2019, The Nib won the Ringo award for best webcomic.

In its current manifestation, the Nib is delivered on a daily basis to your email inbox.  It is collected into books and magazines for purchase.  And it exists on a website where you can read endless hundreds of comics, going back years.

The comics feature a wide variety of styles, and range from sharp political satire to informative documentaries to chronicles of personal journeys. Even as its editorial focus is deliberately narrowed to the non-fiction genre, the results in the hands of these artists is an incredible showcase of styles, moods and subject matter.  What all these comics have in common is a powerful sense of discovery that expands the reader’s worldview.

Self-contained short fiction is a rarity in webcomics, and with good reason. It requires a special kind of talent to devise a new concept for each episode and, wasting not a word or gesture, to realize complete characters and situations in the confines of a brief scenario.

Add writer Imre Mehesz and artist Ruby M. Uazo to the list of creators brave enough to take on the challenge.

Their new series Shorts is a bracing, dark-hearted take on short fiction.  Mehesz’s stories are often distopian, forecasting future societies where one self-inflicted disaster or another threatens to destroy humanity.  Some of the stories are about ordinary people who are revealed to have demonic motives, and some are strange mysteries where reality falls suddenly out of kilter.  All of the stories have a stinging edge to them, and all of them are fantastically brief.

Uazo’s vivid realistic art adds enormously to the gravitas of the series.  The renderings are imbued with an unsettling, enigmatic atmosphere.  The artist’s intense coloring resembles high-dynamic-range photography with a psychedelic slant.

Under the moniker BizzBuzzComics, the creators list earlier projects which are also in the short fiction category. Interestingly, these pieces are much more humorous and casual. Clearly these aren’t intended as showpieces, but it’s a fascinating contrast to see what happens when the team lightens up a bit.

When I listed Blind Alley in my Best Webcomics of 2022 article, I wrote “Adam de Souza’s low key humor is reminiscent of Charles Schulz with a touch of Charles Adams in this Ignatz Award-nominated series.”

Blind Alley is certainly one of the best webcomics out there, and no doubt Schulz or Adams would have been fans.  In its casual, meandering way, the twice-weekly strip serves up so many remarkable pleasures— comedy, mystery, fantasy, philosophy, enigma and visual beauty.

The large cast of children who populate Blind Alley each have their own ongoing stories that the author picks up and drops at random. There is a true-to-life context for much of the action, with tedium, sadness, death, divorce and loss shaping the children’s lives.  There are also supernatural elements that present themselves in novel and fascinating ways, such as a dark presence calling on a tin-can telephone, or a sewer-dwelling creature who loves chocolate.

Episodes vary from Sunday-style three-tiered strips to single-panel full-color illustrations, but the majority are a single row of panels resembling a daily newspaper strip.  This short format is the sweet spot of Blind Alley’s narrative strength, often soaring to extraordinary heights of dramatic expression—

• Exploring the forest, “hippies” Sweetie and Pod are shocked to discover their favorite tree chopped down.  The two drape themselves over the stump, trembling with grief. 
• The neighborhood bully Ten begins to realize the dislike he has engendered in his playmates. He wanders into the woods, and leans his forehead against a tree.
• Oliver arrives home to a dark and disheveled house.  He calls in vain for his mother, and then settles down to eat supper alone.

Vancouver artist de Souza has vast experience as an illustrator and cartoonist; his portfolio is a magnificent Odyssey of shapes and ideas. One could hardly find a better tutor for a child or adult in understanding our vast and strange universe.

In Reika, a young orphan whose parents recently died in a car crash is having trouble making friends in her new school, and finds herself being picked on by the class bully.  The child withdraws and turns her thoughts inwards. Soon she begins seeing strange and frightening supernatural beings.

The creatures turn out to be Yokai, spirits in a variety of shapes who wander between hell and our world.  Reika comes to lose her fear of these entities, and begins to feel more confident and loved because of their friendship.

This story is from the Heart Anthology, a collection of works taken from Webtoons’ 2020 short story contest. I’m a big fan of these self-contained narratives, because the story arcs are well-defined like a good movie or novel.  For example, Reika’s story structurally begins in the present day, with the rest being told in flashback, leading up to a touching epilog.

Creators Marvin.W and caw-chan have composed a fast-paced, exciting, and visually impressive fantasy.  Their collaboration is a feather-light balance of drama, comedy, and young romance. The story situates itself in an interesting space between reality and the supernatural world.  It is a thrilling exploration of the the unseen and the unknown, but for its young protagonist, the consequences are personal and very real.

The Harvey and Eisner-nominated The Eyes investigates the power of eyesight in a series of paradoxical, tension-filled scenarios. The stories reside in a universe next door where seeing is not believing, invisibility and blindness are roommates, eye injury may be a necessary step to combat evil, and we must sometimes be shielded from what may be revealed about ourselves.

Spanish artist/writer Javi De Castro is intoxicated with the notion of using visual storytelling to explore paradoxes of vision itself. He has created metafictional narratives that turn back upon themselves, challenging the reader to distinguish what they see from what they know.  Even as the characters undertake an ontological escapade, the reader undergoes an adventure in understanding and enlightening confusion.

It is especially notable that Castro employs replacement animation to introduce mysterious, paradoxical effects into his comics. As his portfolio shows, he has devoted many years to perfecting this technique and exploring its potential. In The Eyes, invisibility, blindness, hallucination and demonic possession are all made tangible by panels that flash suddenly from one image to another.

Considering that this animation cannot be transferred from the internet to print medium, Castro takes pains to distinguish his work from the ephemeral blog format of most webcomics.  Each story is presented as an episode with its own cover (and variants of the covers by other artists).  It’s as if he’s preparing for the day when webcomics will be archived for posterity, just like other legitimate art forms.

In The Secrets of the Willson Family, Anna is a bright and trusting teenager who’s dropped off by her father at the country villa she inherited from her grandfather, whose death is cloaked in mystery. As she settles in at her temporary home, questions lurk in the background.

What business is her father attending to that requires him to place his daughter in the care of strangers?

What do Leo, the estate manager, and Emily the maid know that they aren’t revealing?

What is the strange affliction that affects Catherine the cook, impairing her speech?

And most of all, what is the secret that Anna’s late grandfather has concealed in books, a music box, and a bizaare fairy tale he left for her?

Author/illustrator Mill2’s colorful art has the range to portray reassuring daylight scenes that show off the beauty of the villa setting, and then segway to quiet, twilight tableaus that build to suspenseful outcomes.

Tillie Walden is quite the phenomena in the graphic novel field.  Having created eight professionally published works, she’s won the Ignatz and Eisner awards multiple times, and snagged an LA Times Book Prize along the way.   This line of achievements is all the more astounding considering that Walden was born in 1996 and created her first award-winning graphic novel at the age of 18.

I first heard about On a Sunbeam a few years ago, and it was one of the series that inspired in me a renewed interest in the webcomics medium. I found myself impressed by the sheer scale and ambition of the project, and how subtle and well executed it is.

Walden has confessed that she is not a science fiction fan, and hence her version of space travel is a radical departure.  The spaceships in this saga resemble fishes; their interiors have a stylish, elaborate decor like a Mediterranean resort.  

Only a skeleton crew of five young travelers is required to pilot the expedition ship where the story takes place. The leisurely, elliptical narrative follows them as they set out to restore old buildings which are apparently floating… somehow …in space. The focus is on the crew’s interpersonal dynamic, with three of them, Alma, Elliot and Charlotte having worked together a long time, and the newcomers Jules and Mia being treated as outsiders.

Walden’s art style is very loose and casual, but she has a knack for setting her realistic-seeming characters in three-dimensional space. It gives the story enormous scale that evokes a sense of wonder, sliding past any rational objections the reader might have.  Her tranquil color scheme gradually shifts from a beige duotone to blue and then to a multicolored pallet, new colors being introduced when there is a new phenomena to be witnessed, such as moonlight reflected from nearby planets, or secret chambers in an abandoned church.

The overall effect of the series, both the writing and the art, is to project a sense of an alternate time and space that cannot be fully comprehended, and to populate it with characters whose behavior is familiar but also mysterious. Walden’s artistry is like a closure diagram, where the mind intuitively completes the picture in a way that’s more compelling and real than a straightforward presentation could ever be.