Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “webcomics”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, by CRC Payne
- kudos:Look, I’m still tired of Batman stories, and I don’t think this series really pushes back against the grittiness and violence that finally pushed me over the edge, but this is as close as you get to “wholesome Batman,” and it’s kind of fun.
Atomic Robo, the Book of Mormon, and Animal Man
- kudos:I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.
webcomics and the importance of content aggregation
- kudos:One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Renounce Magical Thinking and Embrace Empirical Evidence (A Tenth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:You know, I’d kind of been dreading getting to this book because I remembered the climax, and I remembered not liking it. After reading it, though, I’m starting to think that it’s better done than I remembered but just that it stresses me out. At any rate, this comic continues to be good, and I also feel like we’re getting more Carla, which I appreciate. She’s the best.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Now Let's Go Commit Something Mildly Subversive (A Ninth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:This actually has an absurdly long(er) title that I refuse to include in its entirety. I appreciate the effort, but I think it might break something somewhere on my web workflow. It’s interesting to read this volume with knowledge of what’s coming up in the series! I can see plots being set up that I might not notice otherwise. Not all of those plots are my favorite, but I still really like this comic, so I’m looking forward to them anyway.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Machinations of my Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift, and Absolutely Ridiculous (A Sixth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:The lines between books continue to blur, and as much as I like Becky’s growing importance, I’m not always a huge fan of Amazi-Girl scenes. This continues to be a good comic, though, and I’m enjoying the reread.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Hey, Guess What, I'm a Lesbian! (A Fifth Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:Lots of plot developments that will go on to define the comic here, and I enjoyed revisiting them. The bonus material is also really starting to pick up here with the inclusion of Patreon strips, so that’s fun, too.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Your Stupid Overconfidence is Nostalgic (A Third Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:DoA can get kind of melodramatic sometimes, and there’s plenty of that in this book. Sometimes it strains credulity, but it doesn’t get in the way of a fantastic webcomic.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print (The First Dumbing of Age Collection), by David Willis
- kudos:It was just earlier this year that I archive binged this comic, but I recently bought PDFs of the collections through a Kickstarter and decided to reread it with the commentary and bonus material. I can see the rough spots that have been improved in over a decade of webcomic history (in art and choice of language, for example), but this still makes for an excellent introduction to the universe, and I feel such a connection with Joyce that it’s interesting to meet her again in her original characterization.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal'
- kudos:This criticism of “learning things they won’t use in real life” has always been frustrating to me, so I appreciate this response. link to “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal”
some praise for Dumbing of Age
- kudos:I’ve been a big fan of webcomics since I first discovered they existed in the early-to-mid 2000s. I’ve been following Order of the Stick for about twenty years(!), I’ve read the entire web run of Dr. McNinja, xkcd makes frequent appearance in my lecture slides, and there are other comics that I’ve jumped in and out of over time. It hasn’t been that long since I started following Dork Tower again, but last Fall, it did a crossover with Dumbing of Age, which I mentally noted I should check out sometime.
an 'enmediated' God
- kudos:Mormon theology doesn’t really do incarnation. Latter-day Saints believe in an embodied God and that (nearly) all humans will be resurrected to perfect bodies after this life and inevitable death. Latter-day Saints are also not Trinitarian and see Jesus and God the Father as more distinct than most Christian traditions do. Between those two beliefs, Jesus’s taking on a mortal body is not really a big deal—it’s kind of par for the course for any human, whether or not they are the Savior of the world.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Cat and Girl'
- kudos:Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it. link to “Cat and Girl”
- kudos:
I love knowing that there’s a webcomic-to-children’s-book IP pipeline out there. Gives me some hope for humanity.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Strong Female Protagonist (Book Two), by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag
- kudos:I’ve skimmed the archives for this webcomic several times in the past, but I’ve never gotten this far in the story, and it was a delight to do so now. I was not sure this would live up to the first book, but it’s so, so good at using superhero tropes to explore philosophy and ethics. I really, really like this series.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Strong Female Protagonist (Book One), by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag
- kudos:I hadn’t realized this webcomic had been released in print volumes, and I honestly couldn’t remember how far I’d made it through the webcomic archives, so I leapt at the chance to read a collection. I think I might like this deconstructive “realistic” take on superheroes more than any other. The questions are interesting, the art is uneven but compelling, and the characters resonate with me. It’s a great read.
- kudos:
I did not know that “wholesome Batman” was a genre I needed, but Wayne Family Adventures is a lot of fun.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Brave Sir Bentham, Utilitarian Knight - Existential Comics'
- kudos:Only thing better than a critique of utilitarianism is a critique of utilitarianism in the form of a comic. link to ‘Brave Sir Bentham, Utilitarian Knight - Existential Comics’
data privacy and kiddo's school
- kudos:In addition to all the irritating ClassDojo stuff going on at kiddo’s school, I’ve also spent some time banging my head against the wall made up of two forms: One to opt out of FERPA directory information sharing, and the other to opt out of kiddo’s information being shared with media outlets. I’m too tired tonight to get into all the details of what’s been going on, but the short version is that there’s no (clear, easy) way for spouse and I to request that kiddo’s name and image not be shared on school social media without also insisting that kiddo’s name and image not appear in innocuous things like… a school yearbook.