The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn introduces us to a paranormal investigator whose very manifestation defies scientific understanding.   Dressing though he might as an Edwardian gentleman, one can’t fail to notice Mr Zahn’s appearance— a jawless skull floating above an invisible skeletal body.  

Oscar seems quite at home in the dark macabre landscape where the story takes place, and we come to understand that he is a kindly and conscientious investigator of metaphysical manifestations in that shadowy domain. Taking cues from his assistant, a gnome-like witch named Agnes, he bravely ventures into foreboding sites of spectral habitation, seeking not merely to vanquish a hobgoblin, but to right a wrong  or heal a broken heart.

Toronto artist Tri Vuong renders the saga in luscious dark strokes resembling the work of Hellboy artist Mike Mignola. Like Hellboy, the series is steeped in a Lovecraftian steampunk paracosm. The writing is subtle, low-key and intriguing. Considering that the main character is incapable of facial expressions, it’s quite an achievement that he is so personable and sympathetic.

Artist/writer Pascalle Lepas began Wilde Life in September 2014, and the serial webcomic has continued to this day.

The main character, Oscar Wilde, is a contemporary writer from Chicago who moves to rural Oklahoma, for reasons that are not immediately clear. What is clear is that things are not normal; his landlady has two hounds that shape-shift into teenagers, and the home he rents is inhabited by a polite and fascinating ghost named Sylvia. After initially being startled by her presence, Oscar befriends Sylvia and goes out of his way to make her life-after-death a bit easier, supplying her with books on tape and a deck of playing cards.

Though there is some mystery about Oscar initially, he comes across as a thoroughly likable guy.  Sylvia as well is a genial and gracious presence. Overall, the series has a comfortable and intriguing feel as it explores what ordinary life might be like for extraordinary creatures.

Lepas depicts the saga with a superb realistic style that settles his supernatural characters in an everyday world with a quiet, low-key macabre atmosphere.  His illustrations have a clarity and a simplicity that make for an easy, pleasurable read, going late into the night, and perhaps interrupted by the sound of a set of car keys hitting the floor… 

Surveying webcomics, one thing you learn rather quickly– it’s not hard to find outstanding artwork. There is excellent work in every style to be found in abundance. But finding a series where quality art is married to a quality story is more rare.

My first impression of House of Stars was, holy crap! The artwork by Spanish artist Edu Marmovi (Lion Illustration) is exquisite. The rendering, the color, the attention to details, everything has a sense of grandeur about it. It manages storytelling extremely well, using color, space, pacing and well-chosen details to move the action forward at a stately pace. The design traverses the infinite canvas format effectively and with uncommon grace.

Fortunately, the story by saltacuentos is worthy of this exceptional treatment. The lead character Lily is a beautiful nineteen year old is at the cusp of her sexual awakening. She lives with her grandmother in a strange, underpopulated village where wreckage and decay abound, and where other girls have gone missing.

One day, Lily sets off for the wilderness and witnesses a green man seemingly drowning a girl. Thus she is launched into an otherworldly adventure where her courage and valor will be tested.

This is a completed series which can be enjoyed in perhaps a single sitting.

In the late 1920s, singer/actress Helen Kane had an act in which she behaved in a childish fashion and used the line “Boop boop-a-doop.” Around the same time, the Flesher animation studio was developing a flirtatious cartoon character for older moviegoers, and decided to base it on Kane. When Betty Boop became a success, Kane sued the Flesher studios and lost. During the trial, Fleshers’ lawyers forwarded a baseless claim that Kane had stolen her act from another singer— a dick move, to be sure.

Fast-forward to the 1960s.  Underground comic Air Pirate Funnies featured Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney characters engaged in sex and drug use.  Defying Disney’s cease and desist orders, creator Dan O’Neill engaged in an epic legal battle, a classic Little Guy vs. The Man conflict which became a cause celebre of the Counterculture.

Advancing to the present day. Alec Robbins’ webcomic Mr. Boop chronicles the author’s fantasy marriage to Betty Boop, and Bugs Bunny’s nefarious intentions of killing Robbins so he can have Betty for his own. Evidently there have been cease and desist notices from the owners of characters Robbins has used, though he is vague about the details.  In any case, we are living in different times, when it is much more difficult for copyright owners to defend their rights. Parts of Mr. Boop are featured at the Webtoons portal, the rest posted elsewhere because it is “too NSFW.” The Ignatz-award-winning print version of the series is orderable on Amazon.  What was once truly “underground” has gone mainstream.

Copyright issues aside, Robbins writes in an artless style with an otherworldly, surreal quality. The title character wears a t-shirt stating “I refuse to divorce my wife Betty Boop.” When confronting our hero, the villainous Bugs simply says “I’m gonna kill you,” without any clever euphemisms. This utter absence of guile and cunning allows Robbins to launch into topics like insecurity and impotence without any foreshadowing or pretext; his writing is truly free.

Milo Neuman is a professional storyboard artist, and it shows in his webcomic Dimitra and The Silver Mask. The shadowy, textured images are cunningly arranged to evoke the quiet and subtle movement of a nighttime raid of a walled fortress. Though he is a talented wordsmith, the artist needs no captions to explicate the action— the scene unfolds in an entirely cinematic fashion. Neuman seems to have absorbed influences from action directors like Akira Kurosawa, Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, and he uses this knowledge well.

The sprawling saga commences at ground level with a bloody battle between soldiers and primitive masked invaders, a spectacle with a cast of thousands. But this earthly combat is in the context of a stellar phenomena, an ominous, vast presence that blots out a patch of the star-field. One of the invaders uses the swipe of a hand to move clouds down to cover the moon, implying levels of supernatural power that are enormous. It plunges the scene into a haunting darkness that strikes terror in the hearts of the soldiers.

Particularly striking is the scene of the slaying of a young soldier who was earlier shown to be rather foolish and talkative.  A masked attacker plunges a sword in him, and as the man dies, he seems to perceive and merge with the vast presence in the stars. The reader is left gasping, and confounded as to what it all portends.

Neuman’s storytelling is as excellent as his visual art. The soldiers behave like credible human beings, led by a vainglorious general in an elaborate mock-worthy helmet. The prologue sets a grim philosophical tone— “And so, far away, across the endless sea of stars, a tiny blue world continued to spin on in its ignorance, its kings blinded by the shine of their vestments, its wisemen deafened by profound revelation, and the rest, the masses, occupied by their lot, the sure and constant distraction of Living and Dying.”

LiarCat recently premiered a new series, and since there are only a few episodes so far, I looked back at earlier work for further enlightenment.

In the new series Justice and Heresy, a young woman named Xeri is actually a powerful hellspawn creature doomed to live in a desolate region called the Severed Lands. The story follows a young female knight named Palladin Priscilla whose mission is to slay Xeri. For her part, Xeri thinks Priscilla has cute freckles and consequently she declines to incinerate her as she has earlier antagonists. We wait to see what will become of this relationship.

An earlier saga, Flowers for the Arsonist, follows a naive young woman named Lucia who is banished to Wheskering Hills because she has been marked as demonspawn; indeed, her left hand has transformed into a claw. The other residents of the town resemble insects, except for a punky blonde counterpart named Paige who wants nothing to do with her. The series is filled with funny, ironic episodes, such as showing the girls go trick-or-treating in Wheskering Hills, or Lucia visiting a hair stylist who is a giant spider; but the central focus is the evolving relationship between Lucia and Paige.

Both stories involve the tender attraction between two women who are opposites; our interest is enlivened by the barriers they must cross to come together. Flowers for the Arsonist is further deepened by the alienation both women feel from the society that has shunned them.

LiarCat has a real flair for minimalist compositions that are well-composed and atmospheric. The writing is also slimmed-down, clever and subtle. There is a striking evolution between the two series– in the most recent series, the art and writing have become more simplified and elemental, the tone less serious. I can’t decide which I like better, but LiarCat is a creator to watch, no question about it.

The Hotel is an entry in the Brain Anthology on Webtoons.  The Heart and Brain anthologies are outstanding collections of works taken from Webtoons’ 2020 short story contest.  The site has moved on from its previous creator rewards program, but these anthologies are treasure-troves of passionate experimentation and new ideas.

Frank Calico’s four-episode story is a masterful exercise in style that evokes unease when a professor takes an after-dark taxi ride with a talkative driver.  The unsparing exaggeration of Calico’s drawing style and the Cheshire-cat grin of the driver carry unacknowledged menace as the two discuss the weather. The lanky professor relates everything to the local legends he has respectfully studied, foreshadowing supernatural developments to come. When he arrives at the hotel, events take a turn for the bizarre and spectral.

After reading so many webcomics that attempt to evoke horror with carnage and disfigurement, it is refreshing to encounter an artist who understands the quiet terror of a nocturnal taxi ride and the foreboding of a hospitable country inn.

The series Extraordinary Attorney Woo is new to Webtoons, and is something of an oddity.  We often hear about television series based on comics and webcomics, but this is a webcomic based on a phenomenally-successful Korean TV show which recently premiered on Netflix. Screen-to-comics used to be published all the time, but for years they’ve been a rarity; seeing them again is a hopeful sign for the medium.

The premise from screenwriter Moon Jiwon is that Woo Young-woo, an autistic young woman with an aptitude for legal analysis, graduates with honors from law school.  We follow her on her first job as an attorney, where she faces discrimination and the unique challenges of her condition, such as difficulty walking through a revolving door. A portrait of brilliance and vulnerability, Woo Young-woo captures our sympathy and attention from the very beginning.

I have not yet watched the Netflix series, but the webcomic adaptation by Yuil, with art by HwaUmJo and LeeYeJi, made me sit up and take notice.  It has a beautiful simplicity about it, and is adept at conveying the story and the underlying emotions.  The creators have a firm grasp of the expressive potential of Manhwa and infinite canvas. The series is rendered in the Seinen style, but often switches to Chibi style to show Woo Young-woo under stress.  The character’s internal monolog is shrewdly merged with live dialog that reads easily and is never confusing. The creators bring Woo Young-woo fully and vividly to life.

The takeaway is, in the right hands, when you have raw material as excellent as Jiwon’s original character, a webcomic can really sing!

Self-described model and wannabe actress Arianna Arras’s autobiographical series A Life Through Selfies is designed to mimic selfies posted on a social media website. The concept is fascinating and mysterious.  Is the author/artist actually the character she’s portraying? Are the events, including a stalker and at least one murder, true or made up? If it is not Arras’s actual life then it is even more remarkable, since the artwork appears to be created from photographs. 

It’s a bit confusing to match the dates on the episodes with when they actually posted; the series appears to have started in November 2017 and ended in December of this year. The series ends abruptly on an episode dated December 31st, 2017, with no indication of the character’s or the artist’s future plans, other than the message “Cheers to my followers,” in the second to the last episode. This sudden conclusion may have dark implications foreshadowed earlier.

Daily autobiographical webcomics are not uncommon, with James Kolchalka’s poetic American Elf being a classic example.  A Life Through Selfies is at the other end of the expressive spectrum, the writing flat and superficial, the artwork somewhat harsh. One can take it as a companion piece to Mike Birchall’s Everything is Fine, where bland, inhibited conversation is the result of a brutal authoritarian society; but in A Life Through Selfies, the society is our own, and the wearisome commentary arise from the character herself.

Included in Best Webcomics of 2022.