However, it’s always nice to have someone point you in the direction of a few of their favourites. Which is just what Comics Alliance has done. And it was a pleasant surprise to find that even I had read 3 of the 17 suggested by Comics Alliance – Marc Ellerby’s Ellerbisms, Adam Cadwell’s The Everyday and James Kochalka’s American Elf (okay, cheating slightly – all three came to me via print versions first but we’ll skate over that).

But annoyingly, at least a handful of the suggestions look and sound rather brilliant and they’re now down on the big, long list marked “webcomics to get around to reading…. someday“. Damn you Comics Alliance!

But if I had to pick just one I really enjoyed, even with the briefest of looks, it’s Saucesome by Sarah Becan – very nicely done, very personal strip about Becan’s drive to eat better, exercise more, and lose weight. And all interspersed with plentiful recipe and meal ideas. A fascinating look at how delicate our self-image can be, and impressive both for the casual, easygoing humour and deeper, darker thinking, often bundled all together. Plus, her art has come on in leaps and bounds; from this – strip #1 (March 1st 2010):

…. to this more recent strip (Nov 11th 2011)

Eric Orchard pointed me to this new, weekly webcomic Saturday Morning Webtoons, which includes contributions from Eric himself, Andi Watson, J Torres, Stephanie Buscema, J Bone and more. From their own introduction:

“Happy Saturday Morning! Welcome to Saturday Morning Webtoons. Grab a bowl of cereal, pick a “channel” above and start reading… Here you’ll find weekly and biweekly comics as well as a free download every month brought to you by an all-star line-up of creators. We’ll also have a few surprises along the way. So bookmark this site, toon in every Saturday morning, and have some comics for breakfast!”

(The Little Tales of Otto and Olive by Stephanie Buscema, which has a lovely 60s animation filtered through early 90s animations style to it)

There are already a half dozen strips up to read and also to download for this first weekend just past, a nice online substitute for those long ago Saturday morning when as a kid you were excited to get out of bed to catch all the cartoons that were on. A great list of contributors, a good one to bookmark, methinks.

(Eric Orchard offers up gag panels with his Orchard of Laughs)

Jamie Smart brings back his spleen-rupturingly funny Corporate Skull webcomic, with issue four kicking off this week. More cynical slices into corporate culture, more swears, more lashings of the old ultra violence and personal abuse. oh yes, sign me up. I’ve been loving this since it launched, it’s rude, crude and doesn’t give a flying toss about it (and at the same time it is big and it is clever), it’s one of the funniest comics I’ve read in years, in fact. I’ve laughed my ass off. In fact I have laughed off a succession of asses, so much so I have had to go to the donkey sanctuary and borrow some more asses to laugh off for this new chapter…

Spanish illustrator and cartoonist FH Navarro is creator Sushi Online magazine and of the beautiful Dos Hojas, which I described as “one of the most poetic and thoughtful little comics I’ve read lately” – see my review here.  He has started a new webcomic, Zoe.  This time, “I don’t speak Spanish” is no excuse for checking it out, since Navarro also faithfully publishes an English-language version of every page as they come out.

It’s still a bit early to tell what it’s all about, but it features the moon, vampires and victorian explorers, so there’s not a lot that could go wrong!

This way of appealing to a larger audience by providing English versions of your webcomic is starting to be the new thing, it would seem. Israeli cartoonist Asaf Hanuka has been doing this with his The Realist for a while now, and Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise was even published in no less than thirteen languages.

(An Open Door Quietly by and (c) Barnaby Richards)

(we all hate people who seem to talk endlessly and loudly on their mobile in confined public spaces, don’t we? Patt Kelley creates the first strip for the Guest Artist Week on the Corporate Skull)

This is merely the start, there’s a fair bit of depression to go…. but right at the end, so true to life, there’s just that little glimmer of hope, that promise of something better, no matter how small. Just the sort of thing you need when sat right at the bottom.

The Cat Rackham comic is out from Koyama Press now, available from Wolfman’s website. Here’s the quick summary:

“Cat Rackham lives in the wilderness but he isn’t very good at it. Is he too self-involved to listen to his natural instincts? Did he go into the wild to escape some personal demons? Did he used to be a human being? We will never know the answers to these questions.”

And one last strip…. scoff all you like but wait till you hit 30 or 40 and it happens to you…..

This issue is called ‘Night Shift’, and basically follows the characters that start when Flo and Hettie and the girls clock off. Women were not allowed to take the night shifts in telegraph offices, for their own safety, so it was all men. We tried to get across the end of day muddle with people coming in and leaving, but the telegraph still being ‘live’ at all times. Like a call centre or similar, the telegraph offices were manned at all times to receive and send the messages rattling in from across the world.

Page One, we see ‘F’ Verity’s online love interest, at his own key in a newspaper office. Newspapers were some of the first places to install their own dedicated line, just because they needed to hear the news first before their competitors. Reuters news agency was created for the telegraph, so reporters in different places could send their stories back to one central place and their stories could be sold and sent out again from there. The main telegraph room in Reuters office was apparently a thing to behold, with wires actually coming in through the apex of a domed roof, and then snaking down to reach numerous keys on plinths around the room. Reuter himself sat like the spider at the centre of his own web. My favourite thing about this page is that nobody is actually working. Everyone is sat about daydreaming about the weekend, about girls or boys and slacking off messaging each other on the internet during work time.

Page Two: Hettie is taking one last message for the day, which happens to be a little admin error fix from Charlotte Scott over at Bennett’s. When Charlotte breaks off it baffles Hettie, as they are both really good professional operators, but there is nothing she can do but listen for the beeps from the other end of the line. Operators who spoke to each other every day on a single line, would have become really attuned to each other’s way of sending, and would even develop a telegraph manner which only the other person could receive correctly.

Page Three: I can’t go past this page without pointing out how awesomely horrible Florence is. Hettie is worried about her friend, and all Flo wants to do is say she’s a slag. Wonderful stuff. I really must write more bitches!

Page Four: Here we see Grayson Standish in full predatory wolfish mode, which of course his natural state. Emily doesn’t really have a answer for him, and it’s hard to see whether she just thinks he’s a creep or if she likes him a bit. Life is tough like that. Quite often it’s the least suitable people that make the biggest impression. Or was that just me?

Page Seven: This was a fun page to write just for the mystery of whatever’s up with Archie and the subtle and not so subtle ways Emily tries to get it out of him. She wants to keep him in, but knows there’s no way she can, and however badly he’s messing up, her best hope is to stay close to him, and be there if anything happens. Tough decisions that fall on the shoulders of friends and family around anyone with issues. Archie seems really tired and hungover all the time, so maybe he’s an alcoholic, or an opium fiend? He might be spending all his money in card games, or brothels, Emily has no idea. He’s a worry, but then Emily is so sensible she makes everyone around her seem quite extreme.

Pages Nine and Ten we learn the truth behind George’s mysterious comments to Jenks earlier on. These were lovely pages to write, but a bit hard with the vocab we had to put in. Its ended up rather ruder than we expected but that’s probably all to the good!

Pages Eleven and Twelve we see Emily having a lovely evening Skype to her dad away working in Malta in the military hospital there. It’s so nice to see them remaining close despite the miles between them, and you really get a sense of how he has parented her across these wires for rather a lot of her life. She hasn’t suffered really, and seems closer to him than lots of the other characters do with their parents. I love the cosy fire and the rainy window. Just what a rainy Manchester night is all about.

Page Thirteen onwards is the drama and the real meat of the issue, so I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that incidents of this type were not uncommon at all, especially remote posts out in the American plains, far from civilisation. I love George and his “Health and Safety in the Workplace” awareness. He’d be employee of the month for sure.

FPI would like to thank John and Leah for sharing their thoughts and talking us through some of their cool new series – new episodes of The Thrill Electric go online every Thursday.

On a related note Kevin has an interview with Paddy up on Rabble which you can now read. (via ICN)

“KS: So, what started your ‘obsession’ – if I may call it that – with Irish folk legends, in particular the Ulster Cycle? I can see from your end notes to the Cattle Raid that you have put a lot of research into the project.

PB: My interest in the Ulster Cycle is a thing in itself, and I’m not really all that interested in Irish folk legends in a wider sense. I stumbled on a copy of Thomas Kinsella‘s translation of the Táin in a second hand bookshop while looking for research material for a comic I was thinking of doing based on the notion of a historical King Arthur in the post-Roman “dark ages”, and thought this stuff was just so much more immediate and visceral, the characters so much more vivid, than any Arthurian story I’d read, and it was not only Irish but specifically northern.

What especially interested me was that there was a whole cycle, it wasn’t just one story.It seems to be a trait of my personality that if I find something that excites me, whether that’s a band or an author or whatever, I want to know absolutely everything about it, so I went looking for all these other stories in libraries, and just got more and more into it. I ran a website for a while trying to collect them all. This would have been in the late 90s, the web was still quite a novelty and I was excited by that as well. I’ve even learned a bit of Old Irish. A couple of years ago I went to an academic conference on the Ulster Cycle in Coleraine, and was pleased to find very little of it went over my head.“