Gunnerkrigg Court: Gorgeous Art, Magic and SCIENCE!

As many of you know art is quite a core part of comic and webcomic development. Even though that sequential art with poor stories, dialogues or characters usually ends up as a big bummer, many people turn to read comics, mangas or webcomics because art is good or creative; so no matter how bad a story could be, if it looks good it will get a lot of viewers for a while, meanwhile better stories with poorer art will be ignored and get far lesser crowds. But even good art or creative looking characters can’t fight against ill-conceived stories, bland personalities and plot holes and mistakes so deep that can physically kill you. That is quite a problem in several webcomics and really something I don’t want to get in, ‘cuz it bores me¬¬.

Let’s instead look into stories that makes us readers thumb up in approval and dive in excitement while we see great character in gorgeous worlds run into adventures that makes our minds blow in all the good ways. So for today I’ll give you the gorgeous beauty of:

GUNNERKRIGG COURT

SAY IT’S PRETTY!

Gunnerkrigg Court is, like Dr. McNinja, a comic style webcomic that works premises in a chapter based system around the fantastic/sci-fi pseudo-British place called the Court. The Court is a highly technologically developed place where men lives; the Court is quite a mysterious place where mysteries are all around, they have been seen that highly advanced robots live hidden from humans and ghost, shadows and spirits lure every corner wrapped all in twisted stories of betrayals, lost loves and murders. Opposite to the Court, behind a cliff with a single bridge, there is a forest where magic and wild rule and humans are not allowed due to the bad relationship that both sides have.

Is in the Court’s boarding school, conveniently located near the bridge to the forest, where Antimony Carver settles and starts a life in the Court’s boarding school. Annie, as Antimony is commonly know, is the protagonist and main character through the story. She is a girl “left” by his father at the school once Annie’s mother died. Is not clear why did he leave her but it has been hinted that the reason may be an important plot in the story. Annie is a girl with powerful psychic abilities and constantly connecting to the supernatural. Annie is a girl that represents nature, change and emotion; she is connected to everything in a way and always finds a spark of hope and humanity in every creature or being in and beyond the court, she empathizes with everyone she meets and reflects on herself the scars carried on people souls.

SHE PLAYS WITH THE WEIRDOES^W^

As a support character and second in command is Katherine or “Kat” as she proffered to be called, she is Annie’s best friend and the youngest top scientist around. She is Annie’s counterpart since she is the mechanical whiz-kid capable of everything mechanical. She has a cheery personality to counter Annie’s gloom and is always inventive; she is obsessed with machines and have different manias explained through the story. She is a linear yet interesting character since you can almost predict her every move yet you never stop feeling for her and her decisions; the best way to summarize Kat is as a “love everyone scientist” she may be creative but she never overlooks anyone, she feels for all and holds responsibility for what science does and always think that there is a human solution for everything and save everyone (even robots).

The cast and crew is huge through the story, talking about characters and stories that’d make you cry, hate, laugh and simply scratch your head in awesomeness. Creatures like Reynardine the body thieve Fox eternally bounded to a pick-locking puppet; Shadow, the shadow; Coyote, the god of mischief and trickery; or humans like Mr. Eglamore, the super strong teacher; or Mrs. Jones, the “Terminator woman” (not a robot). All of them analyzed, seen and interiorized in ways you won’t think, his characters are quite deep and every end has a mean. Is worthy of your time and more.

I say you go and dig into this webcomic that, you like it or not, will pierce you deep and hit you strong.

NOW GO READ IT!

Romatically Apocalyptic

ROMANTICALLY APOCALYPTIC

Hello my loyal subjects! Welcome back to the horrible bottom of this clearly unstable hell and greetings back to “At The Bottom of The Pit”. Yes I know it has been long and many of you ain’t followers yet, but my point is that today I am back in full glory and majesty[1] and I am here to bring you the latest Crown Jewel[2] in webcomic works. If you didn’t read the title I’ll tell you again: Romantically Apocalyptic!

JUST GET HERE!

This great comic was created by Vitaly S Alexius,  http://alexiuss.deviantart.com/ ,a great photoshop artist who uses this tool combined with live actors (and dead ones) and footage to make this incredible stories of a post apocalyptic future. Is notable how the comic has a great sensation of fluidity of movement and a great sensation of detail, specially noticed in the quite expressive main characters, who despite having their faces constantly covered, pour great personalities thank to the great detail put in the movements and mask design, making having less face a big plus.

The story focuses on the post apocalyptic world where the glorious ZEE CAPTAIN lives and rules with an iron fist and a meringue brain over his incredibly loyal and quite mentally unbalanced soldiers. Zee Captain is more of a child/mentally ill soldier trapped in a fantasy world inside his head while navigating the cruel mutated world around him, is easy to love his cheery personality and his naïve and “lively” way to see the world. Despite what has been previously mentioned it has been shown that Captain can display incredible skills as a strategist and more than enough intelligence and cruelty it is unclear if he really understands any danger he falls in (most probably being a fantasy in steroids for his brain). Is stated that Captain is actually radioactive or covered in heavy radiation, possesses great emphatic skills and owns the only non-radioactive straw left in the world.

OBEY!

The support cast consists mostly of two characters although one of them is clearly more relevant than the other. The first one and most important is Sniper (aka Mr. Yippy), a hyper responsible kind of second in command who follows Captain wherever he goes and does whatever the Captain tells him to do; is unclear why does Sniper follows and protects Captain, with two reasons given for that: the first is stated in the musical video in the site that he may be just a loyal soldier while in the comic is hinted that he doesn’t want to be alone and could be desperate to keep company and the potential sanity attached to it. Sniper is usually used as a butt joke and comic relief in which his dignity is destroyed by Captain perception and consequential use of reality.

The second main support character is Pilot, a less known character also loyal to Captain. It doesn’t appear too much in the comic and has only been seen interacting with Captain, a dead guy, radioactive spiders and a stuffed puffin doll.  It may seem that Pilot shares the same reality perception as Captain and his meringue status mind, but seems to lack the luck of Captain, although even in true danger he remains as “perceptive” as usual. He seems to look up to Captain and really enjoy his company.

Ain't he cute?

Romantically Apocalyptic is quite a modern jewel in the webcomic world, displaying creative stories and jokes with huge amounts of comedy and badassery involved. Is curious that this webcomic possess a characteristic that makes it unique[3] which is that each character (living or dead) interacts in perfect harmony in this potentially fictional world making them interesting in both dialogue and presence in the pages, no character is wasted or used as background; every one you see will probably die or suffer under Captain happy go lucky, destructive personality.

NOW GO READ THIS NOW! 

http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/1

Or Zee Captain will kill you¬¬

KILL YOU DEAD!..... sorta

And have a good dayXD

---

[1] May differ grossly from your perception of “Glory and Majesty”

[2] It looks more like a strange dump in the floor, but who is that perceptive this days.

[3] Besides the horrible mutations. 

Coming back soon

Soon "At The Bottom of The Pit" will be uploading new content.

Preview, Part 1: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Hello and welcome back “At The Bottom of The Pit: Where Webcomics Suffer”.

Well, today I have been roaming around the internet trying to see what to offer to you today and stumbled upon something curious; better say I remembered something I realized long ago that was quite unusual in a webcomic. The fact is that many comics on the internet are not comic strips but pages of a larger comic, in fact many wecomics that seems to be random strips really built up for a bigger story or a specific story arc in the strip. Comics like Ctrl+Alt+Del or Apple Geeks use this premise several times, but there is a group of webcomics who actually work like big comics itself, with standard heroes and villains, story arcs and a comprehensive idea behind the hero’s motivation in each new story. Is at this point where you could call a webcomic a comic book. Because of this I decided to introduce you to a webcomic that in my opinion is one of the greatest webcomics ever produced in a full comic book format: “The Adventures of Dr. McNinja”.

This will be a small overview so I can introduce you later on to the stories itself.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja is a webcomic created by Chris Hastings in 2004 and has been published in its own website ever since. It tells us the story of the ninja/doctor McNinja, being McNinja his surname; he belongs to a ninja group of apparently Irish ascendance ninjas who lives ninja style with occidental tradition. He dresses up as a regular doctor (coat, pants, stethoscope) but always wearing a ninja mask. The Doctor lives and works in his private clinic usually open at random hours or close when the doctor is on a mission. He is obsessed with Batman and would do anything to emulate him.

Doctor McNinja

In his clinic/home he lives with her receptionist/secretary “Judy”; a 200 pound Gorilla that is highly trained in several feats and his very smart, but for her bad luck the doctor can’t understand any word of what she says but that doesn’t stop her to be incredibly capable and one heck of a fighter. There is also the Doctor’s sidekick and Robin-like boy wonder “Gordito Delgado”  a 12 year old Mexican kid left under the care of the Doctor by his uncle; Gordito uses guns as weapons and is an excellent shooter and marksman, he has a mustache grown through pure willpower and rides his pet raptor named “Yoshi”.

Judy and Gordito

His adventures are usually related to his family or his home town “Cumberland”, your average “Anywhere, USA”. The main point behind his adventures is sheer and pure awesomeness! There are clearly well done plots and arcs that extent through different stories, plus some really great clingers for stories yet to come; but no matter what is it, you know that in this webcomic will be done as awesome as possible. The silliness behind this will give you great laughter’s and if you just push a bit the old nugget you will also understand why you laugh about.

 Courtesy of "TheEverLoser"

Deviantart Site

 

Well, this will be the end of this week preview, turn in next week where I will introduce you to the remaining characters and maybe the Doctor’s fist story. In the meanwhile GO AND READ THIS!

To Doctor McNinja