The Slackerz: Here we have a webcomic that doesn't know what it wanted to be. It started out as just a random series about anything from the government stealing your teeth or the bad advice you receive from rapping hamsters. Now it's mostly another gaming comic. The change was slow, and apparently "fans" were unhappy with the general change, feeling that the internet is writhe with the two gamers on a couch routine. At least that's what I think happened, I showed up late to the game and only have Smith's word on the matter. The prerequisite author avatars are of Scotts Smith and Hepting. Smith is your basic bearded guy with glasses, while Hepting is a rooster man. Other regular characters include Matt, the fat orange haired Linux user who gave them a virus and is the honorary representative of all that is wrong with geek and nerd culture, Johnny Turbo, advertisement icon from the early nineties, and indiscriminate stick figure, their go to filler character. The humor itself is that of someone who knows they're doing something that's been done before and doesn't care. They're willing to poke fun at themselves over it. They now have a good balance of gaming and non-gaming humor. But since I tend to not pay attention to other peoples opinions of these sorts of things, I don't know whether anyone else is impressed.
Full Frontal Nerdity: Probably something closer to reality than most table top gaming comics are willing to admit. Just three guys and a web camera, huddled around a table rolling dice. No Dramatic depictions of whatever game their playing, no wacky aliens or robots, and most importantly, no women gamers. Now as I've stated before, I still have little to go on about table top games, and weregeek is the only other comic I know that's in this genre, but I feel that it painted this sort of thing in to positive a light. What they have is a best case scenario, where the players have an equal gender distribution and LARPing isn't all the odd, and while that may be true in some cases, FFN seems to be more anchored to the less glamorous parts of gaming. Of the three main characters, only one of them lives by themselves, they appear to be in their twenties or thirties, and are not the best looking bunch. One thing I'd like to point out is the art. Most web comics go through something called art evolution, a change in art as the years go by. But not all of them do, as is the case with FFN, where you can't tell todays strip from the ones posted all the way back in 2003. Which brings me to my number one fault with this comic: NO ACHIVE! Most web comics have the decency to at least have some sort of list of previous entries, but can be found here. This makes finding that one comic you really thought was hilarious nigh on impossible. The only safe bet is to bookmak the page When you plan on stopping, or write down the date the comic was posted. There's really not much you can do beyond this besides mindlessly hitting the next button, typing in random dates in the address bar, or simply just forgetting about it. I should point out it updates once a week on wednesday, so those of you crazy enough to actually try typing in the adress have at lesat some chance at getting results.
Castle Vidcons: Now this is a smartly written comic that has the misfortune to have stopped updating for the last four months. Which is too bad, it was so original. No other comic commented on gaming like it, by using 17th century royalty in place of the consoles themselves. Sure a website might anthropomorphize the consoles on occasion, even as a running joke, but never as well as this. Political intrigue, assassinations, and even religious rituals are all used as commentary on the kind of in fighting famous amongst gamers. As with royalty, there really are no protaganists, merely warring kingdoms, with the most powerful being the oldest as well. The kingom of Nintendo is ruled by King Wii. He is a direct descendent of the Great King NES, brother of the Japanese Famicom. As is common among royalty, he is married to his sister, Queen DS. Their greatest Enemies include Lord Playstation the Second and his son Lord Playstation the Third, King XBox 360, and the Dread Pirate King PSP. Admittedley the humor can be very hard to understand, relying heavily on news of the gaming industry and never outright stating what they're talking about, but the message boards attached to each comic will help to explain anything that you don't understand.
Alright, this post is getting to long for my tastes. I'll have to divide it into two parts.
