Tagged: strip

The world of webcomics has gotten to be nearly as large and encompassing as traditional newspaper strips – if there aren’t as many people making a living from webcomics yet,

give it a year or two and the one number going up will soon meet the other number coming down. It’s so big, actually, that there can be successful web cartoonists – successful enough to have a book of their work published – that otherwise smart and savvy people (meaning me) have never even heard of.

I don’t mean Scott Meyer: like everyone else, I started reading his online strip Basic Instructions when Scott ([[[Dilbert]]]) Adams linked to it. But I wasn’t familiar with [[[Nothing Nice To Say]]] – a strip about punk-rock culture by Mitch Clem – until I saw the first collection of that strip (confusingly titled “Volume Two”) in a comics shop.

So, since these two collections are both of webcomics, and both came out at the same time from the same publisher (Dark Horse, increasingly the home of webcomics in print), I thought they were just begging to be reviewed together.

And so they shall be.

Help Is On the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions
By Scott Meter
Dark Horse, September 2008, $9.95

In my circles, and, I think, those of webcomics in general, Meyer is the bigger name. He’s been doing Basic Instructions on and off since 2004, but went onto a regular schedule sometime in 2006. Since the Scott Adams shout-out, he might not be making a living from his comics, but he probably gets enough ad revenue to pay for nachos now and then.

[[[Basic Instructions]]] follows a rigid four-panel format, and is both very wordy and completely rotoscoped (Meyer prefers to call it “traced”) from pictures. It’s also, to one degree or another, based on Meyer’s real life – he’s the main character, and his wife, best friend, boss and other family members and random bystanders make regular appearances (though usually without being given names).

Each strip explains how to do something specific – but Meyer isn’t really trying to explain anything, so “[[[How to Correct Someone]]]” and “[[[How to Avoid Sounding Condescending]]]” are, like most Basic Instructions strips, really about everyday interactions with people. So Basic Instructions is really a very wordy gag-a-day strip, with a recurring cast, running jokes, and all of the usual accouterments. (This is a feature rather than a bug: a strip like Basic Instructions appears to be would be boring and purely oriented to facts, which might be useful, but wouldn’t be funny.)

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