Day: February 28, 2008

Toothpaste for breakfast, lunch and dinner

Toothpaste For Dinner
toothpastefordinner.com

Oh toothpaste for dinner. You are omnipresent. From staring at me from bright orange of “The Wonnacott Word” in the toliet stall to printed across the chest of the awkward girl who rings me up at the Co-op, your snarky sense of humor has become mass-marketable.
Toothpaste for dinner has actually proven so successful an enterprise that his wife also has her own oddball site Natalie Dee and they have a joint effort Married to the Sea

And while the comics can be politically clever, offer scathing social commentary, or seve as icons of pop culture, for the most part their just strange. And, in my opinion, most these people never would have gotten published if wasn’t for the internet. On the other hand, a lot of this comics are way wittier, and in some sense more “artistic” than the Garfield I read in the Sunday funnies. Due to the democratic nature of the internet, should webcomics not be held to the same standards as print? I don’t know–it’s hard to say. It’s a double-edge sword, I suppose. More individuals are exposed to web-comics thanks to the viral nature, but in their mass-reproducibility, they seem to lose some of their credentials.

All-in-One

I got into webcomics when a friend of mine told me about Ctrl+Alt+Del freshman year. It was revelatory. I could read comics . . . good, entertaining comics that participated in topical debates . . . well-drawn, fun-to-look-at comics . . . on the internet. It took me about two days of obsessive reading to get through the CAD archives. They’re pretty epic. This is probably the strip that did it for me.

And that’s the beauty of the online comic. I did a quick browse through the archives – all there, all free – and dropped the link into this post. It’s brilliant, easy, fast.

Overcompensating is the comic-blog I mentioned in class. It has the odd effect of concretizing the experiences, daydreams, and mad delusions of the author and artist, Jeffrey Rowland. Continuity and plot are generally anathema to OC, but there are periodic bursts of work that make sense. I would say that it’s like Bizarro or Speedbump or I Need Help, except you know, because it’s a comic-blog, that Jeffrey’s trip to hell has some relevance to something – even if it’s just a movie about a Zombigeddon that he saw recently. The comic blog is an innovative way to share creative impulses . . . and to link to the all-important store.

Least I Could Do is another pretty good comic. Some story lines are better than others. However, LICD has, through the entrepreneurial genius of its writer and creator, Ryan Sohmer, turned into a full-fledged business. The site offers freebies – wallpaper, icons, stuff like that – a well-developed online store, an active forum, a Facebook application, and immediate updates (blogs, spaces for chat, etc.) on the front page. Blind Ferret Productions, born out of the LICD enterprise, handles the burgeoning animated series for CAD.

Dominic Deegan and Questionable Content are generally just great comics, but neither has really reached the vast heights of CAD or LICD in their instant-access, multi-user spaces. Forums and stores (QC’s t-shirts are pretty choice), yes, and J. Jacques has a couple of tangential blogs that got their start on QC ground, but I think that both Jacques and Terracciano are still experimenting with the possibilities of webcomicing.

Droppin Science

Hey guys,

I’ve been tapping my foot to a dj by the name of J Rocc. He remixed some fairly popular hip-hop with the music that the hip-hop tracks sample as well as some crucial bluenote tracks. For an easy to spot self-referential jaunt, listen to the track at around 12 minutes (its a 45 minute mix-tape). You can snag it here embedded in a post that I made earlier today.

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