There exists a beautiful world of creative, funny, meaningful comic art on the World Wide Web. If you know where to look, you would be able to locate hilarious comic strips that are regularly updated and religiously followed by its fans.
Yenny is a young beautiful girl living in Villa Los Kubos. She dreams of becoming a model but her feet are too big. Zacha is her annoying, evil pet iguana and Buke is her pet sea-turtle. Others in the cast are Kelso (in love with Yenny), Margot (rival and professional model), Tomato (Yenny’s best friend), with many regulars such as Yenny’s Grandmother and a loud-mouthed owner of a restaurant. Luckily for creator Dave Alvarez the strip is now syndicated and he had been working for DC Comics and Warner Brothers as well. He previously had the #1 selling comic book in Puerto Rico titled ‘Changuy’. The flash website takes some time to load and his blog is in his native language. There is also a forum and webstore. A beautifully drawn comic strip with the inanities of modern life, Yenny is eye-catching and eye-popping.
Savage Chickens is a unique comic panel created by Doug Savage, drawn on yellow post-it notes, scanned and posted on his website for all to enjoy. Chickens too have a difficult life and you can see the humour is clean, funny, witty and at times philosophical. The About page is useful and updated to know this strip’s long history. Posted as blog entries Mr. Savage’s fans keep coming back to comment everyday. There are the regular chickens, the Zombie Chickens, the take on singing like Barry White, the PROD3000 Evil Management lessons, the Worm, the People I Hate series and also the very deep Love cartoons. On this year’s Valentine’s Day Doug Savage posted a compilation of the chicken love cartoons . One of my favourites – The World of Possibility . I had the honour of starting the Wiki page for Savage Chickens.
Fredo and Pid’jin is another offbeat, alternative comic online though its humour is clearly aimed at adults. Its tagline says “Two Evil Pigeons. One World to Destroy.” The two primary characters, Fredo and Pid’jin are pigeons who try to find ways to destroy the world. These are mostly funny turn of events where the world does not get destroyed in spite of their dedicated attempts. It has gone through three seasons and is updated once a week with new strip posted on Mondays. Fredo is lucky in Love and subtlety is his key in betraying his pigeon pal. Pid’jin on the other hand is repulsive, evil and desperate. A recent episode had them fooling the President to press the big red button in the White House which almost caused a Nuclear Fallout. This too is posted in blog format so fans can comment and laugh aloud. I was so impressed that I created the entry for it in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredo_and_Pidjin for all fans to edit, update and inform the world of its eminent doom. The wonderful creators of the strip, Eugen Erhan & Tudor Muscalu, graciously thanked me here in Comments and posted an Evil News Item here. Off-beat, alternative strips are definitely very attractive; I mean politically correctness and self-censorship by those daily newspapers are just too annoying these days. Those idiots still whine about the legendary “Doonesbury”. Somebody has to fill the gap. Well beware – “We da World Enders Baby”; Pigeon in the Hole!!!
XKCD is not an abbreviation, it’s a word. Rumour has it that the creator of this unique comic strip – “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” – Mr. Randall Munroe, a former NASA robotics scientist, had created this word as a meaningless phonetically unpronounceable screen name. So the humour here is quite high in quality though not instantly appealing. Drawing in stick figures the words, humour, physics, philosophy are what carry the strip to success. He is now doing this full time. I am sure NASA people miss him; I can’t imagine the office while working with such a guy whose humour incorporates science, philosophy, love and wisdom. Its not too nerdy and can be understood by anyone. It often incorporates College level Math, Physics, etc. Check out the ‘Map of the Internet’ and do read the mouse over text on the strips which are sort of an afterthought. For an instant gist of the style take a look at Angular Momentum strip .
Hope you all enjoyed this tidbit about independent creations. Get Wired, Get Connected.