0137 — An Achewood In The Style of Early Webcomics (Patreon)

This script came down the chute sounding exactly like one of those early-aughts "free-association and riffing" jams that will always remind me of the best of the early webcomics — the others who were squirming and shoving around in the Petri dish with Achewood, and occasionally got lucky with a home run of a weird line. The medium was a pirate's prairie, and out of the Big Bang of self-publishing a few distinct new voices were emerging. If you weren't there, these were some of the originals that I found noteworthy:

Leisure Town (1997) — Bendy characters photographed and cleverly narrated by creative wonderflash Tristan Farnon. Crude, charming, overwhelmingly labor intensive, still worth trying out.

Jerkcity (1998) — It almost works, but still keeps one foot in Dadaism. It uses Jim Woodring's art as clip art, and I suspect it's generated by software, but I haven't looked into it. I like its crazy sideshow noise, and that it just keeps publishing even though it almost never makes sense.

Pokey the Penguin (1998) — This one's a big mess, but I love how low the production values are. An inspiration to just publish, publish, publish, no matter what you were doing.

My New Fighting/Filing Technique Is Unstoppable (late 90s?) / Get Your War On (2001) — It's frustratingly hard to find a way to read these, which I guess means "buy the books." This was the first comic to prove to me you could just use repetitive clip art to support witty writing and still find an audience.

Dinosaur Comics (2003) — Ryan North's enduring temple of frenetic voice and unfiltered thought has proven conclusively that clip art is good enough when the writing is interesting. Ryan is a truly great guy, and a creative juggernaut. Hanging out with him is exactly like hanging out with his art, which means I miss hanging out with him.

I don't include Nick Gurewich's Perry Bible Fellowship (2001) here because it was already the best in terms of concept and execution, right out of the gate. An even better version of The Far Side, it was worlds ahead of all of us. In fact, I just joined his Patreon while writing this. Sorry it took so long, Nick! Nick and I did a presentation together at RIT back in the before times, and he let me pick him up (with my body).

What am I missing?