Sunday Webcomics

So last week I was featured The Oatmeal, which is a stand-alone type comic. Another another form of webcomic - and this type might look more familiar to you in the guise of a graphic novel - is a dramatic series that has a long, continuing story with a recurring set of characters and a fully-formed plot line.

Needless to say, this type of webcomic has it's roots in the comic books days of old when superheros would take an entire comic book to defeat the nefarious evil-doers threatening to destroy mankind. If you look very close, the old comic books would actually run in a series themselves (hence why they were numbered) to tell the long story. In the case of webcomics they are usually serialized, appearing once per week on average (the website will tell you how often and what day they publish and of course you can subscribe to their feed). Once a story is complete, it is usually left archived for new readers to discover and/or available for purchase in graphic novel format.

One of the better examples of a webcomic with a long running storyline is FREAKANGELS, which appeared weekly between 2008 and 2011 to wild popular acclaim. A post-apocalyptic story written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield, FreakAngels ended it's run at 864 pages. Oh yes, you read right. 864 pages. And it's all still available and new fans are (binge) reading it every day.

Based off John Wyndham's 1957 science fiction novel The Midwich Cuckoos (later turned into the movie The Village of the Damned), FreakAngels imagines what might have happened if the creepy children featured in the original novel survived and lived to see a world destroyed by apocalyptic flooding.  

Recipient of the 2010 and 2012 "Favourite Web-Based Comic" Eagle Award, FreakAngels carried some serious clout in the world of webcomics and is worth checking out if you have any interest in apocalyptic fiction or in seeing where the bar has been set in the past.

So get comfy. Check it out.