Webcomics are Awesome: Drive (The Scifi Comic)

For my second entry in my Webcomics are Awesome feature, I submit to you another one by Dave Kellett.  Today I am going to tell you about the wonderful comic Drive (The Scifi Comic).  I love the fact that the subtitle of this comic is what it is.  That makes me terribly happy.  Drive is Kellett's departure from his long-running regular strip Sheldon, and his entry into the storytelling of not just geeks, but their actual subject matter of choice.  (Fans of Sheldon never fear, he still does that comic five days a week, this is just an extra project.)

Let's get a description of the comic from the creator himself:

"An operatic comic strip told in weekly, page-by-page installments, the science fiction tale in DRIVE takes place in the year 2401.  The strip tells the story of the second Spanish Empire -- a galactic empire -- and its war with a race called "The Continuum of Makers".


We follow the crew of the Machito, who have been press-ganged into a unique mission by an Emperor they despise. But their mission ripples out in ways neither they nor the Emperor could imagine, to impact the fate of both warring races." 

Though the story follows the adventures of the Machito, from time to time we get entries that are "lost" historical documents of the royal "Familia," the almost mafia-like bloodline that maintains exclusive access to and control over the secrets of the drive technology that the empire's foundation was built upon.  We also are treated to the odd entry from the Enciclopedia Xenobiología, or logs from the Machito's xenobiologist.  All of this serves to flesh out the world in which Drive takes place.

There are several characters that make up this tale, but the two that stand out most brightly to me are the first two that we meet (after the prologue wraps up).  Nosh, a Veetan, was serving as Science Advisor to the Imperial Navy when he was framed for killing the emperor (even though he was on a different planet at the time) and sent to a prison moon.  This is where he meets a small alien of unknown species who appears to have come down with a serious case of amnesia, knowing neither his name, his species, or the crime for which he was imprisoned.  But, before waking up with amnesia on a prison moon, he attempted to save Nosh from an attack by an erstwhile prison guard and so was befriended by the larger alien.  When Nosh's crew (aboard the Machito) show up to rescue him, he takes his new friend, soon christened Skitter (Skitter voted for Steve but was vetoed), along with them.

Before long, the crew of the Machito find out that Skitter has an uncanny ability to sense asteroids and other debris in space, allowing him to pilot the ship like nobody's business, and so he soon becomes an invaluable member of the crew.  So invaluable, in fact, that the new emperor (who knows perfectly well that Nosh didn't kill his uncle) tracks them down and tasks the Machito with finding 10,439 more of him to pilot the rest of the ships in the fleet.

Of course, the problem here is that no one, including Skitter, knows what species Skitter belongs to or where he comes from.  So the crew embarks on a journey to figure that the heck out--with a few stops along the way, including, as one would expect, the friendly intergalactic Denny's.

Drive is a comic that both kids and adults--heck, anyone that loves spaceships and funny things--can enjoy.  The back story is incredibly rich--for an "experimental" strip, Kellett did an impressive amount of world-building--and it shows.  He manages to keep it fresh each week while still moving the story forward.  The story itself is truly an intriguing one.  Kellett lets us know that some of the people are holding certain cards up their sleeves, but we don't necessarily know what those cards are.  It is very fun to watch everything unfold as the various plot points converge.  To put it simply, Drive is an absolutely delightful strip.  I think even just marginal science fiction fans could really get into this.  Drive is the kind of thing I could easily see being my favorite Saturday morning cartoon.

New strips of Drive are published once a week, on Saturdays (reinforcing the feel of the Saturday morning cartoon).  Kellett is working on getting the strip up on its own site, but it is not quite ready just yet.  In the meantime, you can find it on the Sheldon website (just go to the archives and click on a Saturday) or you can check out the whole thing on its temporary site.  The first strip can be found here.    There aren't that many strips so far, since it is fairly new and only running one day a week, so you should be able to catch up pretty quickly.  There first major story arc is also available in a book in the Sheldon store.  This story is definitely even better when read in one large chunk.  In fact, I ended up reading my copy again last night after flipping through it in preparation to write this post...

Enjoy, my friends, enjoy!

Webcomics Are Awesome: Sheldon

So I have been thinking for a while now that I'd like to do a semi-regular feature to tell you about each of the many, many webcomics that I follow.  In an earlier post I told you about the comic Looking for Group, so I'm just going to go ahead and cross that one off the list.  I also won't be including Gronk, since I link to the new update on that one every week.  But fear not, gentle readers, for that still leaves over twenty comics for me to point  you toward.

What?  Why are you looking at me like that?  I like comics.  This world doesn't have enough happiness (or snarky nerdiness, for that matter).  Comics help to fill that void a little bit at a time.  Webcomics are slowly steamrolling over the old-school newspaper comics, sad to say (heck, I read all of my old-school strips online, without visiting any newspaper sites, so what does that say).

So, without further ado, I bring you the first official installment of Webcomics Are Awesome!  I hope you enjoy.

We're going to start off with a really truly wonderful strip called Sheldon, which is written and drawn by Dave Kellett.  Here is the premise of the comic that Kellett gives on his website:

"Sheldon is a sarcastic, nerdy family strip filled with pop-culture references and fun, random storylines. At its center is this weird, wonderful little family: a boy, his duck, and the grandfather that raises them both. It's a strip of geeks, for geeks, drawn by a geek. You'll dig it: trust us."

And that is a pretty good summary.  On the "New Here?" part of his website, you also get a brief description of each character featured regularly in the strip.  Since that original little summary was written, Sheldon's family has also been extended to include Sheldon's pet pug, Oso, and his duck Arthur's son Flaco, who is a lizard (it's all explained in the strip). 

I would extend the summary by telling you that Sheldon, who is about ten years old, is actually a software billionaire, though he only goes in to run his company (Sheldonsoft, of course), every once in a while.  His blue-collar grandfather does his best to keep Sheldon living a normal life though.  Really, Sheldon isn't so much concerned about his money as he is about keeping Arthur from spending it all on silly silly things.

But as Kellett says, the heart of this strip is that it is about a geeky little boy, and despite the talking duck and the insanely intelligent lizard (that speaks in a language consisting only of the word "squee"), it is this heart that keeps this story so darn believable.  It is warm and touching and funny all at the same time.  I also feel like this is a comic that appeals across a wide variety of ages.  Young geeks can see themselves in Sheldon and his friend Dante, older geeks are taken back to when they were that young.  People who live with and love geeks but don't always understand them will find Gramps (and often Arthur) quite familiar, and those with a sense of adventure will be hard-pressed not to fall in love with Flaco.  There's an added dimension for people who own pugs, of course, as Kellett himself does, in the ongoing adventures of Oso.

I originally stumbled across this strip from a link on Whedonesque, and then another, and then another, and after reading the strip and enjoying the repeated Firefly and Star Wars references, I ended up just subscribing to it.  This is a strip that I share and recommend often.  I would like to say it is my favorite webcomic, and maybe it is, though there are so many that I love for so many different reasons I have a hard time placing that qualifier on any these days.  But this one is definitely in the top three.

New installments appear Monday through Friday and you can check them out at the Sheldon website, subscribe via RSS feed, or sign up to have the strip emailed to you daily, for free.  (Note that there is also a Saturday installment, but that is actually for Kellett's other strip, Drive, which I will be telling you about in another post.)  You can jump in with the first strip here, but be warned that this strip has been running for nine years now (and was running seven days a week for a lot of that time), so it's quite a slog if you want to catch up with all of it online.  You also have the option of just checking out a bunch of random strips from the archives, which I think is pretty neat.

Kellett also has done a pretty good job with the merchandising aspect of the comic.  He's got all of the installments released in book form (the eighth collection just came out, actually).  The artists editions are a little highly priced, but worth it, and a plain version is totally affordable.  He has also released a few individual collections, about pugs and literature, collecting the strips focusing on those elements.  There are of course shirts and stickers and buttons as well.  I am waiting for the plushies to arrive, but other than that, I am pretty satisfied with what there is to buy (and own quite a bit of it, truth be told).

One of the coolest items you can buy, however, is the original art from any given strip.  Each strip is hand-drawn by Kellett and then loaded into his computer-machine to be shared with us on the web.  But if you really really love a particular strip (and if someone hasn't beaten you to it), you can buy that original art.  I own one (for this strip), it is one of the best Christmas presents I have ever gotten (I love my husband). I just think that is a really cool thing that Kellett does, and I have my eye on a few other strips as well, though they are not cheap, and so will have to wait.  They are so totally worth the price though, I promise you.

Finally, I will close by saying that the last thing which recommends this strip so highly to me, and therefore why I recommend it so highly to you, is that the creator is such a darn nice guy.  If you email him, he emails you back, personally.  He completely and totally appreciates his fans and acknowledges that our lust for merchandise is what allows him to do this for a living.  Also, he's pretty darn funny--if you do decide to check out the comic, be sure to give his blog entries a gander as well.  He also makes himself accessible, going to as many comic conventions as he can and planning meetups with his fans in those areas when he is in town.  One of the reasons I am so keen on going to Emerald City Comic Con this coming year is because he is a regular attendee and I am really excited to hopefully get to meet him.  And get my high five.

So, I hope you will check this comic out.  It really is worth the read, and who can't use a daily smile, am I right?