by Another year and another Comic Con International not attended. Don’t get me wrong I would have fun going — it’s just the opposite coast from me and a major amount of money and time I can’t justify or even carve out of my schedule. Mostly it’s the time; I might be able to convince Ms. X to go although it’s not really her thing, but the X girls are probably still too young for the whole thing. Dunno, maybe next year.
In the meantime I’m still really pleased with Comic Rocket. I’ve used it as an excuse to reread a whole bunch of comics I like — sometimes the experience of reading books worth of material in one gulp is so revelatory it’s like reading something completely brand new (or maybe that’s just my memory beginning to flail.)
I caught up again on my archive binge of Dresen Codak. It’s both more and less of an archive than I’d imagined. On the one hand, the amazing level of detail and just sheer big-ness of many of Aaron Diaz’s individual comics is actually BIGGER than I’d remembered. His ambition for his comics is really impressive. But the archive as a whole is less than a 100 entries — yes there’s a lot there but it’s a smaller number than I would have expected, especially because Diaz has built a pretty interesting world for his webcomic to exist in.
It was also fun to reread some of the oddball entries in the archives that don’t fully fit the Hob/Dark Science universe. This one is almost xkcdish in its approach:
I’ve also gotten about 1/2 way through the archives of Matriculated. From Joe Dunn and Phil Chan, it’s another college webcomic, but one that does a pretty good job with its cast of characters. I really like Dunn’s artwork to start off with and although this comic is not always hilarious, it rings true a lot of times. Painfully, awkwardly true…
It’s also – like a lot of things in our fast paced Interwebs era – already dated. Jokes about college text books! How Victorian a notion! Nowadays you’d have to rewrite this joke to be about your iPad app update not working or something. I dunno – do college students even read anymore or is it just jacked up into their brain ports like the Matrix.
