Month: April 2023

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.