Olaf's comics blog

“We also discussed, very briefly, the ambient barometric pressure.”
“You’re telling me you guys talked about the weather.”
“Yes. Very briefly.”

When the Penny Arcade guys launched pages two to five of Lookouts, I was struck with awe. This was a great concept. However, I was looking forward to their other new concept — Automata — even more.

Now, Automata page 2 is out.

Seriously, everybody should read this. Make sure you start on page 1, if you haven’t seen it already.

And what I like perhaps best about this is, surprisingly enough, not the comic itself, but a comment Jerry Holkins makes in the blog post accompanying the comic:

“I get five pages of this thing, to assert a few more facts about the world these characters live in. That’s not enough to tell a full story, not at the full resolution of this world, and I’m aware of it – so my aim is, instead, to tantalize the shit out of you, and get us in position to tell a wider story in the future.”

Seriously, am I the only one that’s paralyzed with awe from this?

With the exception of one night aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean eight years ago with nothing better to do, I’ve never played tabletop role-playing games. While I vaguely recall some aspects of my character — a halfling paladin (or is the proper term “paladin halfling”?) — I don’t really remember anything from the experience, except that it somehow involved a dungeon.

So why is it that I like webcomics about tabletop role-playing games so much? There’s something about them which appeals to my nerdy genes, I guess.

I’ve been a fan of The Order of the Stick since Rich Burlew made a guest strip for PVP in April 2006. Go back to strip one and read it. The story is sheer awesomeness. The art… Well, you read xkcd, don’t you? The art is better than in xkcd. Basically, the concept is a fantasy world where the characters are characters in a game — or, they’re humans and halflings and dwarves and elves and so on, but they’re aware of things such as skill points and level updates. Strongly recommended.

The reason I write this is that yesterday, I stumbled across a link to Darths & Droids. by Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick and Steven Irrgang. Perhaps I should be ashamed to never have seen it before, but now I’ve skimmed through the archives (they’re not that big, it can be done in a matter of hours), and I’m awed by the brilliance of this story. I’ve bookmarked it and added it to the “Webcomics I read” list. The concept is basically that a group of players is making up the entire plot of all six Star Wars movies through a campaign — illustrated by screenshots from the movies. This could have been a really bad idea — however, the cartoonists really make it work. Check it out! (That’s where the title of this blog post is taken from. I’m gonna scream “Summon Bigger Fish” whenever I find a difficult problem the next week.)

So I now have two webcomics I really like that focus on tabletop games. Of course, there are also comics on tabletop gaming which I don’t like that much. Darths and Droids is inspired by a comic which does the exact same thing, except that instead of Star Wars it uses Lord of the Rings as a source for inspiration. I’ve looked at that too, and didn’t really like it that much. And there’s, of course, Erfworld — which, while not necessarily bad, never quite captured my interest.

Clearly, tabletop games are huge in the world of webcomics (not as huge as videogames, but hey).

Every day I read tons of great webcomics which I really want to recommend to everybody I know. I rarely can, as most of the webcomics I read are written in Norwegian. It’s not really a difficult language, but I don’t expect anyone to learn a language just to read webcomics.

Fortunately, most Norwegians (at least in the generation which is active online) are multilingual, and many cartoonists have decided to share their comics with the world by publishing them somewhere in English. So, here’s four recommended comics and cartoonists for your pleasure (in a completely random order):

First, there’s Tomte. I’ve known Tomte for six years or something now, and when it comes to dark stories, he’s perhaps the best artist we have in Norway, mainly known for his album series Tomtes sorte sider (it’s a play on words — “sorte sider” can mean both black sides / dark sides and black pages). Unfortunately he recently announced that he’s retiring from comics due to low sales numbers on his latest album “Lys over Jessej” — I think that’s sad, but hey, it’s his choice. I didn’t discover until yesterday that he has a website in English (his main blog is in Norwegian only) and that he’s even published a couple of his stories there, so if you like horror, noir and whodunit stories, check it out. I particularly recommend “The babysitter” and “Blackchapel” (scripted by Stian Andreassen).
And it’s Tomte’s birthday tomorrow! Celebrate him by writing happy comments in his blog!

Then, check out another cartoonist from Trondheim, multiple award winner and Norwegian Emperess of Fantasy (okay, I made that up, but if we had an Emperess of Fantasy it would be her), Inkalill. Inkalill became famous throughout last decade with her fantasy series The Knights of Dor and the children’s comic book series Felina, and she’s currently working on a 24-volume fantasy comic called Miranda. You can now read several of these comics on her Webcomics Nation page — in English. It will take you some time to really get into the story, but it’s worth the effort — these comics are awesome.

After that, check out Gard Helset‘s Wyyrd. This comic started in English, and after it got lots of free PR for being so damn awesome, Gard decided to publish a Norwegian edition on the webcomics portal Nettserier.no — where it’s now the forth most popular comic of all time, and the most popular comic with regular updates. The original English version is still being updated, though, so bookmark it if you like it.

And here’s one more — possibly my favorite webcomic at the moment. Kristian Nygård‘s Optipess. Another wildly popular Nettserier.no comic (the third most popular with regular updates) with a homepage in English, Optipess is a hilarious and way-too-difficult-to-describe-with-words webcomic which I can only strongly recommend. Have a look at it, and you’ll understand why.

I doubt that I’ve managed to cover all the Norwegian comics in English out there, but it’s a small start. If you know any other, please let me know in the comments field.

And if you like these comics and you have an international blog with more readers than I have (that shouldn’t be too difficult), bring the recommendation forward. And the least you can do is look into them. At least I like them, and I like to believe that my taste isn’t too bad.

The Eyrewood reaches top to toe,
And through this wood we all must go.
Let winter freeze, and summer burn!
What men must know, a boy must learn.

Lookouts page 2 is out, and it looks awesome. I’m really looking forward to see the rest of this.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about: Penny Arcade geniuses Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik recently decided to do something different than usual, so they published the first page of three new comics stories: Lookouts, Automata and Jim Darkmagic. After that, they let their readers decide which of these comics they should make a full story of.

The result was a tie. And since they can’t do both: Holkins and Krahulik will make Automata, while Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby make Lookouts.

I never voted because I couldn’t make up my mind, so I’m thrilled that they’re doing both. Both Lookouts and Automata was absolutely beautiful to look at, and they both had very intriguing and interesting concepts. I’m very excited to see how this turns out.

By the way: I love the Lookouts emblem. Scroll down a bit on this page to find it in wallpaper format — I just started using it myself.

If you haven’t seen Lookouts yet, check it out, and remember to read page one first. It’s completely different from regular Penny Arcade comics, but like anything else Holkins and Krahulik makes, this reeks of quality. I’m enjoying this, and I can’t wait to see Automata.