Two of my biggest inspirations atm for me are TwoKinds, which basically introduced me to the fandom and, rn, Uberquest, which is a pretty cool fantasy-adventure comic (Although I don’t like that there’s so much text in the beggining lmao)
The only physical anthro comic I remember reading tho was Blacksad once, but don’t remember much.
Any of you have any cool comics or webcomics to share your interest towards?
You already mentioned TwoKinds, so I’ll skip that one and get to some deeper cuts:
Night Physics: This is one of my all time favorites. Simply described by the author as: “a comic about a bear and his friends.” A slice-of-life that contemplates the intricacies of navigating life in your 20’s. (CW for: mature themes, drug use).
Pixeas and Henry: A story about two unlikely friends struggling for acceptance and coming to terms with themselves and their lives. (CW for: mature themes, implied SA, drug use, one of the characters struggles against homophobia, both internalized and external.)
Synthetic Instinct: From the author: “A Cyberpunk-Dystopia. Isa’s mundane life is completely changed when the government finds out that she is a chimera- a hybrid of two unrelated genus. Navigating an unforgiving society Isa befriends a demobilized war machine named Rex, whose past is much darker and violent than she may realize. A story about who you are versus what the world wants you to be. Updates once a month.”
Derideal: A series of sci-fi comics (there are several side stories set in the same universe available to read through) featuring anthro animals created as test projects for a shadowy corporate-state.
Project Roar: Not sure how to describe this one…A speculative historical fiction/sci-fi about a group of soldiers in WWII, biological experimentation, and their lives and experiences after the war. The story is still unfolding, but this is the general theme of the comic so far…
The Slow Decline: From the author: “When the world ended, they happened to be out of town. Now two co-workers, Rudy and Tom, are alone in a city that is making less sense by the day. The Slow Decline follows the two as they make their way through the mundane life of surviving the apocalypse. From anomalies at the breakfast table, smoke falling from the sky in the afternoon, or disembodied screaming through the night, it’s all just another day at the end of it all. Updated EVERY THURSDAY!”
Psychopomp: From the author: “Something spooky’s happening in the eerie Southern town of Bonaventura, and Ray’s the only mutt who can communicate with the restless spirits plaguing the town. This ability might help him save the town from a supernatural threat, but it can’t help him navigate his own mundane life. Psychopomp is a queer comic which blends the campy mystery fun of Gravity Falls with the atmospheric horror of Silent Hill.”
Lackadaisy: I’m sure you’re already familiar with the animation, but before the animation, there was this comic. Beautifully illustrated and painstakingly historically researched, the comic follows a down-on-its-luck crew of rum-runners and the speakeasy they supply in prohibition-era St. Louis.
And for dessert, the saccharine sweet Duncan and Eddie: From the author: “Two boyfriends stumbling their through life together. They may not be the most competent couple, but that won’t stop them from loving each other to bits! Updates every SUNDAY”
Shocked and appalled that no one has mentioned Freefall yet. One of the earliest webcomics on the entire Internet and still updating today every M/W/F, Freefall explores the question “Humanity has created robots with full human-level consciousness. Now what?” Some of my favorite topics that it tackles are how robots will or won’t replace jobs and the ethics of creating a sapient creature and adding a way for you to give it orders that it physically cannot disobey.
Lengthier summary
In the incredibly distant future, sometime after the invention of faster-than-light travel (made possible using the D.A.V.E. drive (Dangerous And Very Expensive)), mechanical engineer, genetically uplifted wolf (one of 14 “Bowman’s wolves” ever produced), and only anthro in the comic Florence Ambrose finds herself on the planet Jean, which is home to 40,000 humans, half of which are children, and 450 million fully sapient robots (most of which are bipedal but their design varies somewhat from individual to individual). She has just been smuggled down from the interplanetary transport several stops early by interstellar space mollusc and professional criminal Sam Starfall and his warehouse robot sidekick, Helix. Her job is ostensibly to repair Sam’s extremely dilapidated allegedly-a-spaceship and be its full-time engineer, but it isn’t long at all before the trio find themselves caught up in all sorts of shenanigans and political intrigue, and poor Florence, who it’s revealed is a flesh-and-blood artificial intelligence using the exact same neural network design as the robots, finds herself the de facto ambassador to all artificially intelligent beings.
Robots are programmed with hard-coded safeguards that prevent them from doing things humans don’t want them to do; for example, they cannot intentionally harm a human who is not harming other humans. The definition they have of “harming a human” is somewhat vague and ripe for abuse They also are physically obligated to comply with all properly-qualified direct orders. This is abused quite heavily by the first arc’s villain, the mayor of the settlement in which Florence and co. reside.
Florence, a shining paragon of ethics and Doing The Right Thing, No Matter What, poses a striking contrast to her captain, who lies, cheats, and steals more or less for the fun of it and is morally opposed to doing anything the legal way when an illegal option presents itself. They initially clash, but over the course of the comic, both, without compromising their moral fiber, start to realize that the other’s method of getting things done is sometimes the only way to get results, and start cribbing off their homework. As an example of this, the mayor “conveniently forgets” to say that that last order (to only speak when asked a question by the mayor or her aide) only lasted for the duration of that phone call. Sam learns of this and almost immediately comes up with a working solution.
Beyond their hardcoded safeguards, robots are programmed to want to help humans. That is their singular driving goal. They like building and repairing things just because they can (and in a fully post-scarcity society, they can), and with very, very few exceptions, they hate to sit around not being needed for anything. At one point, Sam happens upon a gang of teenage robots who are “vandalizing” a pickup truck by repairing and upgrading it (“IN YOUR FACE, ENTROPY!”). The comic’s most recent arc takes place on a failing space station, where Sam and Florence plan to revamp it by marketing the opportunity to repair it whilst working alongside humans as a luxury cruise for robots.
My favorite part of the comic so far is an arc spanning hundreds of pages, initiated by middle manager Mr. Ishiguro who is temporarily placed in charge of a rather powerful artificial intelligence and gives it a direct order to make him the richest person in the solar system within thirty days, with no other instructions. The AI, a robot named Clippy, decides that the most efficient way to do this would be to transfer the wealth of every robot in the solar system to Mr. Ishiguro by using last-resort the-robots-have-gone-rogue cyberweapons to erase their brains. Florence discovers this plot quite by accident and almost immediately gets her ass in gear to thwart it, marking the first time an artificial intelligence fought against what humans were telling it to do in order to preserve the lives of other artificial intelligence. The humans, after realizing they could have lost their entire robotic workforce if she hadn’t done that, laud her as a hero and start to think about how maybe “anything a human says, goes” wasn’t such a great plan from the start, and that Florence’s ability to do that might be more a feature than a bug.
My favorite part about Freefall is that even when it’s talking about deep and often depressing philosophical questions (which are definitely not the majority of the comic!), it never fails to keep the tone upbeat, liberally sprinkling in jokes to make sure we don’t get too depressed. It’s also incredibly careful to avoid using foul language, containing such curses as “Oh, poop!”, “Oh, carp!” and “Holy this!”
URL in case Lemmy messes it up is http://freefall.purrsia.com NOT HTTPS. Mark Stanley (the comic’s author) has not seen the need to upgrade yet, and if you try to visit his site using https, you’ll get a Connection Refused.
I recommend reading Freefall using the Freefall Flytable/Speed Reader which loads every strip in a huge “infinite scroll” webpage (not actually infinite but you get the idea) so you don’t have to keep clicking next every time. Alternately, if you (or anyone who’s reading this) is interested, I’ve been working for a while on a program that can download the entire archive of most any webcomic as a .cbz file that can be opened with most any comic book viewer (even some PDF viewers!) for offline viewing, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to polish it up and release it.
