The sluggy style

The first. The last. The Alpha and Omega if you will. Sluggy Freelance, the webcomic to end all webcomics. This is the story of two geeky yet manly (not in a good way, girls...) men and two feminine yet crazy (again, not in a good way) women, accompanied by a hyperactive and innocent ferret and a taciturn psychopathic bunny as well as a variety of frequently recurrent characters.
The author, Peter Abrams, makes his characters cross a number of surrealist situations disturbingly reminiscent of pop culture icons such as Alien, Buffy the VS, horror/zombie survival movies, etc. while managing an intricate coherence of the universe and background. The artwork goes from minimalist talking heads at the comics start in 1997 to intricate space roaming pirate ships at the end of 2006. Seems that daily online comics are quite an art school.
So what makes this webcomic the pinnacle of all webbed art? Several things. Firstly, it's consistency. One thing that the webcomic lovers that we are hate above all is to log on to our favorite online and find something along the lines of: "sorry, no comic today (damn lazy artist!) but here, enjoy this drawing I did of my dog when I was 12..." Peter never does this. Ever. I can't even imagine what his life must have been like when he still had another job.
Secondly, what am I looking for in a comic? I want it to be funny. I love the subtle awkward romances commonly found in these things, I adore the wacky action and subtle political commentaries, but a three panel webcomic that isn't funny at the end isn't worth squat. (yes I'm talking to you, Fred). Sluggy Freelance has all three. The romance, the action, the funny; but the funny trumps it all. Most webcomics take a bit of time and archive reading to get into the spirit and the story, but you can take one random page of the Sluggy's HUGE archives and be hooked. As you may have understood, it is the one comic that binds them all. The template against witch all others shall be measured.
Soooo, enough with the brainless worship. The VERY few defects of the comic include: black and white comics during the week; rather crappy art at the beginning of the series (almost kept me from starting to read it!) and...well, nothing on saturdays (saturdays used to be covered by the excellent guys from Rob and Elliot, sadly on hiatus).
That's about it. Start reading the comics, start going late to work and leave early just to get more comic time in...See you next week for a commentary with hopefully less unabashed praise.

Oao

The Cod.