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7 alt-funny comix
Humor is no joke to me.
Seriously, I love it. In my opinion, the essence of humor is surprise, and since there is nothing new under the sun, it gets harder and harder to surprise an audience anymore. We have heard all the jokes before right? All jokes are oldies but goodies.
Maybe so, maybe so, but I think these seven comics are pushing humor in new directions:
I have no idea what the organizing thought behind this strip is. It’s these weird smokey creatures who usually don’t say much. They seem to be stand-ins for lazy America, but who really knows? I discovered it on the Drawn! Blog, and have been pleasantly perplexed by it ever since.
MCL dabbles in both traditional and non-traditional humor. The driver behind this strip is its whole approach to getting made. The artist actually cuts up paper or uses other mostly flat objects (like bandaids or cloth) to make her characters. She makes no bones about what her characters are. If the character looks like a button, it’s a button. Sometimes, this gets so meta that you’ll be thinking about it all day.
Gunshow veers into “crazy guy doing crazy things” territory sometimes, but mostly it uses craziness to find odd perspectives. I mean, it is always crazy, but — at its best — Gunshow goes to show you why they say that the truth will be heard from the mouths of madmen and fools. Getting crazy gives you another way to see things, right, but craziness is not itself funny anymore. Ace Ventura got us all crazied out. Gunshow uses skewed/screwed perspectives to reveal new funny. I’ve linked to my favorite of these strips recently, but I also really liked this satire on Win Ben Stein’s Money.
This guy is taking show-don’t-tell to all new levels. I’d say he does traditional jokes pretty often, but he does it in really strange settings with no words (most of the time). In fact, for a long time I assumed the artist was a foreign language speaker who wanted to break into the big American Internet market, so he just passed on words. He seems to be pretty okay with words, though. He still has a primarily visual sense of humor, so sometimes you have to look it over a couple of times before you pick up what he’s putting down. It’s worth it. This is one consistent comic.
I have to be honest… I think I might like this strip because so many of the jokes involve gratuitous violence. Is that bad? That could be bad. My saving grace: if the strip isn’t dripping in blood, it probably features God. Grumpy, bitter, impatient God.
This one goes nicely with Space Avalanche, now that I think about it. Though it’s more the death, dying, ghosts end of the dark and macabre persuasion. I haven’t been following it all that long, though it turns out that the comic that got me into Feel Afraid came out a while back. This comic reminds you that cartoons are cute, by nature, but cute can still be very menacing. And menace can really get the giggles.
In a way, DFAC is very traditional. It sticks with consistent, newspaper’esque format and has a recurring cast of characters. The main character is a two-headed baby. It started with a two-headed baby and logically proceeded from there. Ahem. This is a comic where huge things happen and characters act like they are no big deal or very unimportant things happen and they are a very big deal. Plus there’s a bonus comic in every comic.
So there’s my list. All these comics have way bigger followings than my tiny little site, so there’s a good chance that if you know about me you know about all of them, but maybe you’re interested in why I dig these comics? To me, jokes don’t have to be the beat-beat-pause-BEAT variety anymore. Let’s get new. Let’s create a whole larger sense of strangeness so that every single panel is funny in its own that’s-not-quite-right kind of way. Anyway, that’s what I am drawn to in the wide open world of comics online, and it is a world we never could have experienced in the lowest-common-denominator days of strictly newspaper comic strips.