Webcomics!

It's been ages since I did a proper webcomics review, which is a pity, since I read tons of 'em, and there's more cool webcomics coming out every second.  So here's a couple that are worth looking at.


Skin Horse From the same person who gave us "Narbonic" we have another tale of weird science, neurotic relationships, and talking animals. In this case, it's a government agency devoted to dealing with the 2,000 intelligent animals and other creations that assorted mads have left behind.  Fans of Narbonic will find the characters look somewhat familiar, and well, some of the character behaviors are familier.  However, I'm actually enjoying this one more than Narbonic, as I have less of a desire to pistol-whip some sense into the characters.  well, most of them anyway.





Dawn of Time this is a cute comic about a cute barbarian in a fur bikini, her pet dinosaur, and a couple of neo-victorian time travelers, who want to settle some questions about Iguanodons (one that actually puzzled scientists in the real world for decades).  It's well drawn for its cartoony style, and the writer isn't afraid to have entire comics without dialogue.  In fact, the wordless barbarian girl is easily worth the price of admission.






Ballad this is a seriously weird and creepy comic with exquisite artwork and a gothic sensibility. The story is hard to detail: it involves a reanimated servant, a terrifying girl "child", and a town where oddities are almost accepted as commonplace.  It swings between beautiful scenery, moody interiors, and grotesque scenes that made me flinch.  Normally it's difficult for a webcomic to actually give me a sense of horror; they usually at most gross me out.  But Ballad is so atmospheric and well drawn, that it accomplishes what it set out to do.

Excellent World-building Advice: Language

Courtesy of two master SF authors.  One can easy disagree with their conclusion, but their "Let's not distract the reader" reasoning is worth considering.  As always the author should consider the essence of the story they are telling, and what is the most important thing they want to convey.

Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.

In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.

If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out.

-Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg