My Top 5 Webcomics of 2008
It's 2009 now I'm told and I'd like to start the year by naming my Desert Island, All Time, Top 5 Webcomics of the topsy turvy year that was '08 (I would have prefered to end last year by doing this but I went out and got trollied instead).


1. Ellerbisms by Marc Ellerby

I can only start by admitting my bias for Marc's work. Marc is a good friend of mine, his work is in a very similar field to mine and I even appear in the comic myself, so you might see it as unfair that Ellerbism is up top but remember this, I have absolutely no authority, respect or clout as a critic so I'm only going to tell you about what I like, and I like Marc's comic (and Marc) a lot.
Ellerbisms is a black and white diary comic of which there are many but while most are set in their familiar tropes - partnership, suburban banality, dayjobs, cats falling off sofas (seriously, there are so many cats in autobio) - Marc is still at an age where he is yet to discover his tropes and Ellerbisms is, in a way, about finding them. The earlier strips detail experiences at indie rock shows and amusing encounters with friends but with the introduction of his girlfriend Anna, the comic "gets a backbone" as Marc puts it himself.
The comic ran on Marc's LiveJournal for a good part of the year but in late October Ellerbisms found its rightful home on its own website which coincided with a catch up story chronicling events in Marc's life during which he couldn't draw due to RSI. From there the comic has delved into multi page stories and some more serious material and it's really exciting to watch as Marc finds his own way of telling stories, and jokes, and the recurrances are starting to build into his very own tropes. I just hope he and Anna don't buy a cat.


2. Journey in the 6th Dimension by Danny Zabbal

I've mentioned Zabbal's comic on this 'ere blog before and I'm going to go on about it again because it's tremendous. The set up is quite inspired and a perfectly flexible device for webcomics; a young lady named Pheobe gets knocked down by a car and is presumably dead, however, her spirit meets Drake, a slightly smug duck, and he whisks her into the ether of the starry 6th Dimension to show her other worldsand realities in the hope she might learn a thing or two about, perhaps ironically, life. Think The Twilight Zone but with a duck.
Zabbal's art is the first thing that struck me about this comic, leagues above most on the web or in print, and he astounds me every week with his inventivness and damn fine drawing (this week: a monkey in a tiny crown!). He's had a couple of guest writers in to supply two of the tales and Zabbal's slick aesthetic keeps it all working together flawlessly. The overall story of Pheobe is growing slowly and getting more intriguing with every story's start and end and the great thing is you don't know what type of story is around the corner. Like Ellerbisms it's exciting to read and follow, not only for the story itself but to see this new artist drawing everything he wants to and impressing everyone who visits his own beautiful little dimension.


3. Scary Go Round by John Allison

Scary Go Round is a firmly established comic in the webcomic world, Allison has been telling his playfully literate comedy horror stories for about 6 years now, so like with most things, I'm late to the party. I picked up book 6 of SGR, 'Ahoy Hoy!', from John himself at November's Thought Bubble festival and I couldn't get enough of it. It was the first time I'd read a complete story arc of SGR and have been following it daily ever since. I worry I'm in the first giddy waves of a crush for a comic that everyone else has loved for years and takes it's brilliance for granted like an old friend, but I'll gush anyway.
It's hard to precisely explain SGR, it has certainly evolved a lot since it's inception in style, character and even protagonists, but I think the best way I've ever put it is "oddball characters taking the surreal in their stride" so I'm going to stick with that. There's many oddballs, a bunch in their twenties and a bunch in their teens still at school, and many supporting wierdos coming back now and again, but Allison's favourites are clearly Shelley and Amy, his own Maggie and Hopey. With them his capacity for witty back and forths, jaunty wordplay and sly digs at modern Britain are unequaled.
The stories themselves can be whatever Allison likes, he has set up a world in small town Yorkshire where Mermen, Tentacles, Imps and Yokels flying Giant Bees can wander freely but Allison always keep his focus on the characters and their lives on the fringe of our reality.
My crisp print edition of Scary Go Round sits on my bookshelf inbetween Charles Addams and Mike Allred, and I'd argue with anyone who denied Allison such esteemed company. They're oddballs, all three of 'em.


4. Bellen! by Box Brown

There's something incredibly subtle about Bellen!, so subtle that I when deciding which comics would make this list I was struggling to pin down why I even liked it. There's no reading between the lines in Bellen!, it simply is the blankness between. It's every moment in life you've forgotten, every nice thing someone has said to you that you didn't hear.
Bellen! is a comic about Ben and Ellen and their inseperability, hence the title. It's more from Ben's point of view as Ben is Brown in disguise, so much so that it almost autobiographical in it's tone and observational focus and if Brown doesn't have a devoted partner in his life like Ellen, then he is simply a genius. A brilliant but lonely genius.
Hunting back through the archives for a picture to use for this review, I realised how many of the strips are quietly really funny, it's like a sitcom with no laughter but everyone watching is smiling. Some are worth a giggle, some are more contemplative and some don't hit the mark for me but one thing that I always admire is Brown's will to experiment. His drawing is clean and minimal and he knows his limits as a draughtsman but almost every couple of comics he'll try something new with the colour scheme or a texture or his materials or the format. This October Bellen! played dress up as other webcomics Brown admires and he captured each one perfectly while still keeping the essence of his own. And for anyone not paying attention it looked like Bellen! had the best guest artists a webcomic has ever had.
Bellen! finds seemingly endless ways to show us what we all too often forget, we're only here to make someone else happy. That's it, the secret of life, played out three times a week by two simply drawn lovers. Go read it and if you smile, for God sake, remember it.


5. Sin Titulo by Cameron Stewart

I had the surprise pleasure of meeting Cameron Stewart in a Lower East Side bar back in a sweltering June in New York. I asked him about his research trip to Vietnam for The Other Side and he told me he took a lot of photos, sailed up the rivers and shot a gook. He was joking. I presumed. After having read Sin Titulo so far I wonder what exactly has pushed him to enter some of the shadowy cracks of his psyche present in the twisting, gripping, Lynchean story he has written for himself here.
Sin Titulo is, from what I can gather, Stewart's first work as artist and writer, usually drawing for such writers as Grant Morrison and Jason Aaron. It's a testament to the freedom of webcomics that an artist doing very well in print comics thank you very much has set time aside to explore a story of his own and to give it to us for free. And what a story! If I even begin to summise it I'd ruin a dozen of the twists and turns the comic takes. Almost every page has a great cliffhanger. In short it's about a man persuing the mystery of his Grandfather's last days but it takes you to many disturbing places along the way and 66 pages in I'm still not sure what's exactly going on.
Sin Titulo runs as part of Transmission-X, a Toronto based collective. All the stories on the site are of a very high quality because everyone in Toronto drinks SpecialComicMagicWater. Once you've gotten your breath back from reading Sin, you might like to have a read of the other comics on show.


And I'm spent. It took me bloody ages to write all that, I'm not doing it again for at least a year.