The Webcomics Review — I’ve been reading Drugs and Wires lately...

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

I’ve been reading Drugs and Wires lately (”reading” in the sense that I’m reading the latest comics and haven’t gone through the archives yet”) and I think this scene has sold me on it. Dan is trying to work for Lin’s political campaign, but is crashing hard because he’s recently quit doing drugs. Lin has a novel solution to his problem: Drugs! 

I love it. It’s such an unbelievably bad thing for a protagonist (I think?) to do to another protagonist, that even with as little as I’ve been reading it I’m already invested. I think a lot of webcomics are afraid to inject drama into their drama comics, because they want to have safe appealing likeable characters that no one will ever get mad at. And, to be clear, it’s perfectly fine to have lighthearted low-stakes comics and forcing things for shock value will usually backfire, but man, there’s nothing quite like a character having a good reason to act on a bad idea for building dramatic tension. I’m probably going to actually archive binge this comic now, because of this. I want to know more. 

Drugs and Wires I think this is part of the reason LotH got better reactions than Saffron and Sage

More you might like

image

Obviously I have a personal interest here but I’m super interested in Latchkey Kingdom doing a storyline about a comic made by an artist/writer pair where the artist does most of the work, the writer pays the bills, and the relationship has a little strain over that. It’s a very common creative setup for webcomic shops, but which isn’t something you really see appear in webcomics themselves.

Whenever a writer/artist pair appears in the webcomic, it’s the personifications of the actual writer/artist team (or stand-ins) and it’s all a little idealized. But there’s a lot to mine there! Artists do spend way more time on a comic than even a really dedicated writer and can get miffed when that writer is usually the face of the project, and writers do tend to be the ones doing a lot of the unglamourous administrative work (at their own expense!) and can feel a little resentful that artists consider them an afterthought at best and a leech at worst. And there’s a lot of observational stuff to be had of that setup, and I think it’s an interesting topic to a lot of readers, but it’s hard for the Writer/Artist teams to do without causing real life fights (Latchkey Kingdom is a solo act by Nick Daniel).

Debbie should count herself lucky that she didn’t get a page back that looked nothing at all like what she envisioned and it was too close to deadline to change, though!

Latchkey Kingdom

Anonymous asked:

Okay, seeing today's Questionable Content, I'm beginning to wonder if the plan is to move the whole cast to Cubetown. Maybe I'm reading too much into "the coffee shop is a single coffee maker," but it would make a convenient reason for Dora to move Coffee of Doom there. And there are definitely job opportunities for Bubbles and Faye in a place like that. Not sure about the rest of the extended cast, but I feel like it's at least a little plausible.

Hey, PvP had the entire cast move to Seattle, so there’s webcomic precedent! But also I don’t think that’s going to happen here any time soon, for a few reasons. 

A. Given how the comic has been leaning more and more into the sci-fi aspect over the years, with Cubetown being an escalation of that, it would actually be more plausible for Martin to get a transporter so he could beam over to Massachusetts for coffee.

B. Even if Jeph does plan to have to entire cast move to Canada, it’d be a bit of a waste to not do an arc of Martin missing his friends first. 

C. Even before the move, Martin and Claire were kind of already in their own little island and didn’t interact with the rest of the cast much, so there’s not really any need to reunite the cast just so Martin can continue not hanging out with Faye that often. If Jeph wants to do a Martin/Dora storyline, he can just have one visit the other. Massachusetts and Canada aren’t separate dimensions, characters have cars.

See this in the app Show more