Staff recommendations: web comics

By Clint Harris

Basic Instructions
Ever wondered how to apply the laws of physics to personal relationships?
What about how to write a haiku? How to confound your alien captor? Lie to a child?
Explain something to someone who just doesn’t get it? How to tell when a cartoonist is getting “a little punchy?” (By the way, in the strip it turns out the answer is that the cartoonist in question will draw a single-panel comic satirizing the popular videogame Rock Band with a new version called Jug Band.)
If you have, then you are in luck. Basic Instructions: Your all-inclusive guide to a life well-lived, written and drawn by Scott Meyer, is the webcomic for you!

Basic Instructions is updated every Sunday and Wednesday with a new four-panel comic dictating advice and showing how it is implemented, with narration over Meyer’s drawings of himself and his friends implementing that comic’s advice.
Meyer uses a strange technique of cartooning he calls “photocartooning,” in which he has a picture taken of himself and whatever other characters are in a panel, and then traces it in black and white. This makes for a very surreal world and one of the funniest comics you can find anywhere—in a newspaper, comic book or on the web.

The Superest
Answer: This webcomic features the superheroes The Unopposinator, Carl the Barber, Albinis the Eyeless, Albino Tortoise, Alco-Hal and The Birthday Squad. Question: What is The Superest?
Correct! You win the newspaper you’re already reading. The Superest: Who is the superest hero of them all?, drawn by Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter, is more than just a webcomic. It’s a contest between Cornell and Sutter (and the occasional guest artist) in which they take turns drawing superheroes whose powers will vanquish the incumbent hero.
For instance, The Silent Film Director (“Despises temptations of the ear”) is vanquished by Glowbo (“Over-exposes film with his penetrative Glowbobeam”), who is vanquished by The Shiv Cactus (“enjoys direct light, high heat, and bloodlust”). This results in a stream of comics only funny when taken in context with the one or two that precede it, which makes regular readers feel like they’re in on some inside joke.
However, any visitor to the site can click on the link “Start me at the First Hero” and read through all the comics (which is incidentally a much better use of your time than homework) in order to get “in” on the joke, which isn’t even a joke, just a hilarious webcomic.