So you’d better treat me riiiiight…
Tonight’s (or today’s, depending on how you look at it) entry is somewhat brief, as I have to get up and make myself presentable for working on-site as well as work on comics tomorrow. Halloween kind of threw me off schedule. But, this week, you get more than you bargained for, as I missed last week’s update entirely.
But anyway, speaking of work, one of the strange phenomena of webcomics is the fact that so few of the characters in them work to pay for the 3-panel apartments that they so often inhabit. Some of them gloss over it, (and rightly so,) instead driving across the bridge of your suspended disbelief, others actually explain it, making one or more of the characters some sort of Internet tycoon, trust-fund baby, or even still, making one or more of the characters jobless. *
But then, there are those comics that actually revolve around the concept of the characters performing (not so) heroic acts of drudgery. Our first example of this is Kyle Miller’s Gamecreature, a webcomic that chronicles the life and times of a game designer named Cy and his game-addicted lizard companion, Gamecreature. The second is Matt Sandbrook’s Chip Shop Adventures, a loosely organized tale of a slightly psychotic (and as far as I can tell, nameless) man who works in a chip (French fry for us Americans) shop, and the hapless folk that keep coming back to his establishment.
Both of them are gag strips; Chip Shop follows brief storylines occasionally, but for the most part presents us with a new situation that is largely (if not entirely) unaffected by the previous random act of cruelty, whether mental or physical. I find this comic strangely addictive, and rather funny. It’s not the prettiest comic you’ll ever see in this blog, but it’s one of the better written, in my opinion.
But then again, I’ve been told (quite often at that) that I possess a very British sense of humor.
There’s actually a surprisingly large amount of other media at the site where Chip Shop Adventures lives; including a large amount of comics. I’m still making my way through the Chip Shop archive, but the others look interesting, if nothing else, if they are written in the same vein as Chip Shop, they should be entertaining.
Gamecreature draws on Mr. Miller’s game design experience, (scroll down) I’m sure, but does so in a way to make the ‘design’ aspect seem less like a design job and more like work, in a Dilbert-esque fashion that anyone can appreciate. Also, I’ve seen a lot of gaming comics out there, and I’ve never really been fond of a lot of them, as the humor often dates itself (as any joke about pop culture will), or is far too niche to appreciate, even as a member of the niche.
Furthermore, you can only make the same handful of ‘people who play games don’t have social skills’ jokes before it becomes totally self-referential. But Gamecreature is about gaming in a way that a lot of other game comics aren’t.
Gamecreature plays games. You don’t know what games he’s playing, a lot of the time you barely know what kind of games he’s playing, but you know he’s doing it, and he’s totally into it.
I don’t know, it just works better for me than another joke about Link’s fairy companion.
So, there you have it. Two comics, one about playing at work, and the other about working at play. I’m going to bed so I can work at’ oh, nevermind.
*(I was originally going to write about this aspect, but I needed to do some more referencing. You’ll also notice the shortage of links in today’s installment- it’s a bit rushed, if not as short as I had originally thought it would be.)
