Grim Tales From Down Below #1, 0-25 [Guest Work By Planet Cool]

(Hello, friends! This is ordinarily where Questionable Content #1 would be, but my lovely friend Planet Cool said he wanted to do a guest commentary for me here, as if I was worth the attention. Anyway, here we go, with his look at Grim Tales From Down Below! It's rather shorter than mine, because he wanted it up by November 1. Give him lots of love!)

Cyanide and Happiness #5, 400-500 [YAWN]

Well, I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed my (ahem) break! But now we’re back on track, mostly, and I am going to regale you with some lovely tales of stick figures and improper behavior. That’s right, it’s Cyanide and Happiness time once again! Last time was a bit of a disappointment, but let’s hope this batch has at least three winners.

;]

Dinosaur Comics #4, 300-400 [SEEN IT]

(Hey guys! Sadly enough, I have realized that doing Dinosaur Comics, basically the same comic again and again with little to no character development, is driving me into a state of sad ennui, kind of like reading a textbook. In order to stave off this ennui, I am taking a slight sabbatical and putting you and this comic in the very capable hands of my very good though not entirely present friends, S, T, A, M, and D. The story that they are a part of is only barely written, but I hope their characters are up to your personal standard. Start here: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=301)

Something of a Delay

Just because I know you were all waiting on the edges of your seats for to read Dinosaur Comics today, I have to warn that I may not be able to make today's deadline. I will take responsibility for this, other than to say that a glut of tests on Thursday sort of threw me off completely. I am, however, working on building up a backlog of commentaries to prevent this from ever happening again (and also to prevent hypnosis from having to read 100 comics at once - this time it's only 10 at a time). I'm almost done, though, and I'll be working as hard as I can to get as many commentaries out as deadlines happen to pass. <3

P.S. I CAN'T OPEN GUNNERKRIGG COURT. ALSJDLASJSD.
P.P.S. Okay, now I can. STILL ASLDJALSDJSLD

Gunnerkrigg Court #3, 200-300 [SEEN IT]

Oh my god, you guys, my reviews of these comics really cannot go fast enough. I feel like we’re hardly into the story at all! Well, it’s time to fix that by digging deeper into the gorgeous mythos that is Gunnerkrigg Court.

Penny Arcade #2, 100-200 [SEEN IT]

Thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU for all the comments and help with the last commentary, guys! This is not stuff I’m familiar with and knowing about it makes me more smarter every day. I wish Blogger had a comment reply system so I could thank all of you without it looking weird. Special shouting out to Shawn for his continuing support 8D

Also, sorry for my lateness. Thursday was a mess, but hey, at least it’s still Friday!

Xkcd #1, 1-100 [OOH WHATDIS]

Before I start, I really want to send out some thanks to all the people that have been commenting on my stuff! Most of you have been giving me helpful corrections and enlightenments on things I get wrong or don’t know – thank you for that! I’ll try not to be so stupid in the future. 8D;

Maybe you didn’t know, but I was inspired to do these commentaries by the (far funnier and better at his job) Mark Reads Twilight/Harry Potter, which were uproariously funny (at least the little of it I read before I came up with this, which summarily took over my life) because he had never read either and reacted quite hilariously to each – Twilight with revulsion, and Harry Potter with apprehension and then all-encompassing love. This is a very long way of saying YAY, we’ve finally gotten to something I’ve never read before!

Cyanide and Happiness #4, 300-400 [SEEN IT]

You thought it was over. You thought it was safe to go outside…but think ye not of the outdoors! For Cyanide and Happiness is here to tell you about everything that is terrible and dangerous outside the comfort of your own home!

Dinosaur Comics #3, 200-300 [SEEN IT]

Wouldn’t you know it, it’s that time of week again! Time to learn trivia, become smarter, and hang out with the coolest three dinosaurs on the Internet! Most other dinosaurs are dead and in the ground, but T-Rex, Utah, and Dromi are cool enough to be on the Internet, so let’s have a chat with them and see what they were up to at the tail end of 2003.

Gunnerkrigg Court #2, 100-200 [SEEN IT]

So I forgot to set this post to go up at 1:00 tomorrow morning before I hit "Publish Post." I don't know how to fix this, and really don't feel like fixing it, so guess what? You guys get your commentary early tonight! Wooo.

OMG, YOU GUYS. I am supper ultra happy about the reaction to the first GC commentary! I’m really happy to see everyone loves GC as much as I do. So, for your reading pleasure, I’m going to continue what you guys better have read in the meantime. Alasjflasjfls, I love you guys so much.

Penny Arcade #1, 1-100 [SEEN IT]

So…Penny Arcade. Kind of hard to know where to start with two of the strangest men on the Internet…

Cyanide and Happiness #3, #200-300 [SEEN IT]

 

So, Cyanide and Happiness, we meet again! It’s been a long time – exactly a week, in fact. So, what could you have in store for us in the next hundred comics, give or take whatever you care to give me? Numbers skipping around? Most likely. Humor to make the devil blush? Maybe. Humor to make my Theology teacher blush? Never. Humor that elicits comments from me? ALWAYS.

Dinosaur Comics #2, 100-200 [SEEN IT]

Whew…wow. Now that I’m coming off the high I got from reviewing Gunnerkrigg Court, it’s time to go back and continue the other two comics to commentary on this site! I do hope you’ve figured out my update pattern by now…

Also, now that there are five commentaries on the site, and five is about as many as most people can count on one hand, I imagine keeping track might get unwieldy for some. So, I have created a master archive post! This post has a lot of information. It has commentaries sorted by comic, also including the names of the next five commentaries I will be doing. I’m trying to alternate requested comics with comics I wanted to do in the first place. So, uh, stay interested!

A Directory Post

Hi, welcome to the directory post! This is for organizational purposes as I build up an archive. This list contains every commentary I've written thus far, plus the next five I will write for...I dunno...suspense. Perhaps I will make fancy pictures for them soon. Anyway, thanks for reading, have fun, and don't die! 8D

Archive Commentaries

Cyanide and Happiness

September 27, 2010 - #15-100

October 1, 2010 - #100-200

October 8, 2010 - #200-300
October 18, 2010 - #300-400
October 29, 2010 - #400-500

Dinosaur Comics

September 29, 2010 - #1-100

October 6, 2010 - #100-200

October 15, 2010 - #200-300
October 27, 2010 - #300-400
November 12, 2010 - #400-500

Gunnerkrigg Court

October 4, 2010 - #1-100

October 13, 2010 - #100-200
October 25, 2010 - #200-300
November 10, 2010 - #300-400

Penny Arcade

October 11, 2010 - #1-100
October 22, 2010 - #100-200
November 8, 2010 - #200-300 

Xkcd
October 20, 2010 - #1-100
November 5, 2010 - #100-200

Questionable Content
November 3, 2010 - #1-100 

Guest Commentaries

Planet Cool - Grim Tales From Down Below
November 1, 2010 - #1-25 

Daily Updates
None yet.

Gunnerkrigg Court #1, 1-100 [SEEN IT]

So why am I typing this so soon after having eaten my keyboard? The answer is simple – because I lied. Duh.

So Tangent128, lovely person he is, suggested Gunnerkrigg Court. Well, he didn’t suggest it, only mentioned it as something he wanted to suggest because he knew I was going to do it anyway. And I have to say, yes, yes I think I am going to be doing commentary on Gunnerkrigg Court. You know why? I LOVE GUNNERKRIGG COURT.

ASJDLASJGASOPJGLASJFLSFSL.

Cyanide and Happiness #2, 100-200 [SEEN IT]

 Hi! Wasn’t Dinosaur Comics awesome? It was awesome and also very different. Well, C&H is awesome and very different too, so now we’re going to go back and ramble aboot some more strips done in early to mid 2005. Hopefully there will be more strips in this review, once the numbering sorts itself out. Because I do know it sorts itself out eventually. There are over 2,000 strips after all.

Dinosaur Comics #1, 1-100 [SEEN IT]

I just realized that I mentioned Piperka in the last C&H review, and then neglected to mention what in fact Piperka is! Piperka is a webcomic bookmarking and tracking service, which tracks updates for webcomics and delivers them right to a neat little page. It’s how I’m keeping track of the comics I want to review. http://piperka.net/  is the address and you are to go and give it lots of love right now.

But this is not a review of Piperka. It is a REVIEW OF DINOSAUR COMICS.

Cyanide and Happiness #1, 15-100 [SEEN IT]

This counts for Monday, kids! 

So, why 15? Because for some reason Cyanide and Happiness does not have a strip 1, or a strip 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14, for that matter. I don’t know what happened to them or if they ever existed, but I’ll live with it. The discrepancies mean there are far fewer strips to review!

Remarks Because Remarks Should Be Made

D’you know what’s super hard? Making an Internet persona.

Now by this I don’t mean dragging-and-dropping cute little facial features onto an MMORPG character or somesuch, fun as that always is. I mean, how to act and create a personality for myself in this template. I should probably be myself, but what is myself? Does “myself” automatically mean that I have to be an aggrandizing meanie-butt to counteract a life full of politesse, or that I have to use more swear words than I do normally? Or would refraining from that make me too boring? I suppose I’ll do what I always do and ramble until something happens. That’s always given me some sympathetic smiles in situations before.

S’pose I should introduce myself. My name over there is CarthagoDelenda, and I like that name. My real name is Mary, but CarthagoDelenda sounds super cooler. This is the part of any introduction where any accomplished adult would list their credentials – that is, why they are qualified for you to laugh at and taunt. But while many ages are the most awkward ages ever, no age is more awkward than seventeen, where you can’t do a damn thing but more likely than not end up doing a damn thing anyway right under everyone’s noses. So with that in mind, I'm an amateur author and doodler, and plan to study English or somesuch at whatever college the black hole of the application process gets me into.

I’m a veteran of internet fandoms, but there’s no genre I’ve consistently loved more than webcomics. I’ve adored them since I was nine, when I discovered a site whose name I can’t remember…ugh, I know it was affiliated with AOL and was ostensibly for kids’ comics drawn by kids (though that quickly deteriorated…if anyone could remember what it was called and kindly not kill me for the idiocies young miss STARgirl inflicted upon you during my time there, please tell me). It seemed super cool to me that anyone with talent could put themselves out there to be seen and make a following. I tried and failed several times, but I love reading them and seeing a story unfold over a period of time. (And for free. 83) So, I’m going to use this space for rambles, raves, and reviews. Mostly commentary, but rambles and raves may also follow.

Just a few things to note:

1. In doing this, I’m using my own discretion and also keeping in mind what I saw in a Linkara video (an individual who, by the way, is far more qualified than I am at everything, among other things wearing a hat and being male) about webcomics – they are peoples’ hobbies, things that have love poured into them, and so I’m not going to really try not to tear anyone a new asshole because that kind of hurts a wee tad. They aren’t thumbs-up thumbs-down reviews so much as they are an experience of reading something and reacting to it. I just use the word because it’s shorter. I will also take another leaf out of his book (but last one, I promise) by never, ever, ever, ever reading Sonichu.

2. I’ve got a list of my favorites that I’ll visit, but visitors are free to suggest anything so long as it isn’t Sonichu or explicit pornography. I’ll do archives in big chunks (and I mean big, some of them are real long runners) and then maybe a daily dump of updates once I get through an archive and can start following more recent updates. I’ll add it to the list and get to it EVENTUALLY.

3. I understand that webcomics come in many storytelling formats – sequential stories, gag-a-days, and gag-a-days that inevitably metamorphose into sequential stories. I will treat the comics as such – that is, I won’t review Cyanide and Happiness like I’d review Gunnerkrigg Court. Usually gag-a-days will be done by number, while linear stories will be done in a narrative. Depends on what I feel like doing that day.

4. Some archives I have read before, some I have not, and some I have only read a couple hundred strips or so. In order to denote a change in experience I’ll use these indicators – 

[SEEN IT] Means I have read the material sometime before writing the review.

[OOH WHATDIS] Means I am reading the material for the first time.

[AND THE PLOT THICKENS] Means I am crossing over from read to unread material.

[STANDALONES] Usually to me a webcomic is an archive of strips with the same common theme, but if I find a group of especially sexy standalone comics (fan or non) I’ll clump em together.

Daily updates won’t really start until I’ve read through a few archives, but they’ll usually have names like “Updates Insert Date Here.”

5. I’ll be linking what I want read along with the commentary, but I won’t be hotlinking any images because that’s stealing pageviews (and advertising profits!) from webcomic managers. If I want to crop out part of an image for decoration, so be it, but that's as far as I'm going.

6. As much as I’d like to group my reviews by number, there are some webcomics that just don’t roll like that – their strips are not numbered. Usually these strips are dated, though, so I’ll do six-month chunks – that is, from January 1 to June 30 (which happens to be my birthday) and then from July 1 to December 31.

7. I will try to keep a Monday-Wednesday-Friday update schedule, and also keep a good backlog of updates so that I won't get caught in a bind come some night out of nowhere. If I can't keep that...I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

8. Finally, if you are a webcomic author/artist that I’ve reviewed and you want the review the hell off the Internet, tell me and I will remove it. I do want to be polite to people and even though reviews are not the place for that I want to try. D8

Anyway, I now wish myself luck and hope I was not being too pretentious. Love you all, and thanks for visitng! 

- Carthago

Edit: Realized [YAWN] might make people think the review is boring. I need to hone my sense of humor, clearly.