Preview size of September’s wallpaper:
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Next actual page will be up Friday, keeping you in thuthpenthe a little longer. In the meantime, please enjoy all these fetching shades of purple I sunk a bunch of time into fine-tuning.
If you can see a sparkly icon here, that means you’re getting the updated version of erinptah.com:
If you can see a cat icon here, that means But I’m A Cat Person’s redirect at catperson.erinptah.com is functioning normally:
And if you can see a rainbow icon here, that means the new leifandthorn.com is loading:
These changes can take up to 48 hours to reach all corners of the internet, so if you don’t see them yet, don’t panic! If it’s after 12:01 US Eastern Daylight Time on August 24, and there’s anything you still don’t see, then please comment and let me know.
Sometimes you want to take a really deep dive into an archive and not come out for a while.
Ozy and Millie (2000+ strips, complete): She’s a mischievous fox kid. He’s a philosophical young wolf who was adopted by a dragon. They have shenanigans!
Bug Martini (2000+ strips, ongoing): Loosely-connected but densely-packed gags. One of those comics that gets an amazing amount of expression out of glorified stick figures. (Caveat: avoid if you have a low tolerance for bodily-fluids jokes.)
The Robman Show (2500+ strips, complete): Adventures of a nerd, his friends, the Angel of Death, and several talking childhood toys. (Plushie Cthulu is my fave.)
Phil Likes Tacos (5000+ strips, ongoing): Phil splits his time between fast-food comedy and geek-culture surreality. Best friend Doug spends 100% of his time being surreal. They used to be roommates, then Phil married Millie, which is why Doug’s evil twin and robot double both had to go to a wedding.
Kevin and Kell (7500+ strips, ongoing): The world’s longest-running daily webcomic. Fun, progressive furry sitcom. Lots of interspecies couples, business drama, and emergency filling-in for the Easter Bunny.
With an error message that said something about “account suspended,” which was immediately suspicious, because my web host hadn’t sent me any kind of “we are suspending your account” email. (Leif & Thorn is on the same host, and had the same issue.)
Well, it turned out it wasn’t a hack. Turns out A Small Orange can just…accidentally put that error on your site now.
I got into a chat with tech support, where the agent was able to fix it. They explained the glitch as “the permission of the website was not set.” What permission? Not clear (although maybe that was an EFL issue). How and why did it come un-set between this morning and this afternoon? No way to tell. Will this happen again? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last unexpected downtime was less than a month ago.
Long story short, anyone reading this who has a website and is loving the quality of the hosting, please send me a rec. I don’t need anything fancy, just 5 gigs of space where I can install a few WordPress installations and run them in peace.
It’s official, Monday’s page won’t be up on-schedule. I went and did a two-page spread right before a family vacation, which didn’t leave enough time to come up with a buffer.
I don’t have a rec post in the queue either…but at least that can be crowdsourced.
What webcomics do you read that scratch the same narrative itch as But I’m A Cat Person? If someone told you they’d just barreled through the entire BICP archive and loved it, what would you advise them to read next?
Comment with titles, and give us links!
Here’s one of many articles with the details. My webcomic sites are fully self-hosted, so nothing on BICP or Leif & Thorn will break…but I had a lot of stuff piled up on Photobucket for other reasons over the years. Fic illustrations, blog layouts, personal photos.
Long story short, Thursday’s page will be up Friday, because I spent an unhealthy amount of Tuesday and Wednesday just reuploading images and fixing links.
(Most of them are dealt with! Only 1500 more to go.)
Sometimes you want an ongoing story to keep up with; other times you want to dive into the archive of a finished comic and come up at the end. Here are some of those. Roughly in order from least-elaborate art to most-elaborate.
StickManStickMan – All stick figures. Deeply funny. Plottier than it looks. The kind of strip where a superintelligent alligator wins Who Wants To Be A Millionaire; a square yard of land in the center of the Bank of England’s main vault becomes the sovereign nation of Vaultland; and you can go pseudo-Super-Saiyan by playing Tetris.
Worst of the Time Lords – Single-panel Doctor Who fancomic, in which the Tenth Doctor gives snarky self-deprecating commentary on every episode of his run. For anyone who loves Who but also enjoys watching people poke their fingers through the plot holes.
Suburban Jungle – Anthro soap opera about an aspiring supermodel/actress. Ambition and interpersonal drama with some charmingly weird touches, like the programmer who occasionally speaks in code and the conspiracy-theorist panda who actually got abducted at least once.
Fake News Rumble – Daily Show fancomic. An evil AU version of Dick Cheney has come to conquer this dimension, only to be stymied by Jon Stewart and a bunch of correspondents who seem to be abruptly developing superpowers. (Or, in John Oliver’s case, to have always been a Time Lord.)
Buying Time – cyberpunk m/m romance. In a world where conversation time is a paid commodity, our hero struggles to save up enough money (and courage) to get something going with his crush. Every strip is a Flash file with stunning animation, making the world feel that much more futuristic.
me this evening: but first I have to do some actual cooking for dinner, and I have to wash dishes and mop the kitchen, and I have to finish the Patreon wallpaper for June, and work on this commission, and that one, and I definitely have to get a shower before work tomorrow, and, and, and…
tl;dr the next page will not be up early Thursday morning. Keep an eye out for it some time late Thursday night.
“It comes in arcs?”
Comics that have a joke at the end of every strip, but that might be better saved up and read in batches, because it’s easier to remember the details of a storyline if you read it all at once. (Not that I always have the self-restraint to hold off until a storyline ends….)
Bruno the Bandit – fantasy comedy, complete. A self-centered Conan-type adventurer and his perpetually-annoyed mini-dragon assistant go around being heroic, sort of. There’s some surprisingly heartwarming family stuff (Bruno’s mother is a former adventurer herself, and at some point a daughter ends up in the mix), in between satirizing everything from epic fantasy to reality TV.
(True story, this comic is the whole reason for the way I number Leif & Thorn strips.)
Flaky Pastry – fantasy adventure-comedy, ongoing. An elf, a goblin, and a perfectly normal woman with cat ears share an apartment. Part wacky roommate sitcom, part questing across the magical multiverse, with the occasional breathtaking bit of scenery porn.
Schlock Mercenary – Sci-fi dramedy, ongoing. An interspecies team of mercenaries goes from “wacky shenanigans” to “inventing new tech and uncovering alien secrets that reshape the whole nature of intergalactic civilization, plus wacky shenanigans.” Notable for its great AI characters, increasingly complex and clever alien-species designs, and hard aversion of the “sci-fi writers have no sense of scale” trope.
Skin Horse – Mad-science-y dramedy, ongoing. The adventures of a government outreach team to America’s sapient nonhuman population. There’s a talking dog, a zombie, an intelligent swarm of bees, a bunch of robots, and a human whose official job description is weird therapy.
(And if you like it, don’t miss Narbonic, a complete mad-science comedy in the same universe.)
I’ve picked up some new webcomic reads lately. Let me introduce you to the prettiest. (And, frequently, the ones I’m trying to learn something from…)
The Sanity Circus – Fantasy drama, ongoing. Girl gets attacked by a demon, it turns out not to be random, and (eventually, once the story picks up) there are family secrets and cross-town chases and, yes, at least one battle at a circus. The lovely soft coloring style makes every page atmospheric, and there are some great design touches in the monsters and magically-adept protagonists alike.
Dark White — Angsty fantasy drama, ongoing. Notable for detailed scenery, fascinating magical-creature design, and pretty characters suffering prettily. There’s some kind of magical international conflict — honestly, I archive-binged it a while ago and don’t remember much of the detail. I’m mostly here for the pretty suffering.
Alice and the Nightmare — AU fantasy magic-school drama, ongoing. Alice in Wonderland AU in which Alice has been raised by the Red Queen, and is off to school to meet a cute roommate and learn to fight Jabberwockies. Don’t know where it’s going yet, all I know is that it’ll be sparkly.
Floraverse — Surreal fantasy dramedy, ongoing. The most visually gorgeous thing on this list, as well as the most confusing. (It starts with typical linear plots…then before you know it there are alternate timelines, and unreliable narrators, and it’s not clear how much of what you’ve read still lines up with the memories of any of the characters.) But it has wonderful creature design, stunning use of color, and a wealth of gorgeous art styles that are worth reading the whole thing just to look at.
(The dream sequence in BICP Interlude 4 was a direct attempt to mimic Floraverse’s palettes. Even though it’s nowhere near on that level, I like how they came out.)
