Gary Leib
www.Twinkleland.com
by Matt Silvie

Filling the void left by the loss of Idiotland, Gary Leib's ingenious Twinkleland.com shares the same hysterically lame, surreal and scatalogical mayhem his work enjoyed in print. This site features collaborative work with animator John Kuramoto and Leib's long-time partner-in-crime Doug Allen of Steven fame. The flash cartoons and interactive details (mouse-over links popping-up grotesque Leib art and creepy, indescribable sound effects) fully realize the comic dementia of Idiotland in Web form. The flash cartoon Shopping Spree, a classic Allen/Leib collaboration, is a short animated tale starring Idiotland favorites Lavender Sachet and Margarita Schnapps, with voices eerily appropriate to what was suggested when the characters appeared in print. The story is too funny and deranged to describe here: think classic John Waters bombast set to the comic timing of Rick Altergott's Doofus. The design and content of Twinkleland.com, with its castle drawbridge entrance and clever interactive details, are both inspired and hilarious. Hopefully Leib and company will expand the site to include even more Web-based collaborations and comic work not possible in the physical confines of print media.

Ben Jones
www.USSCatastrophe.com
by Matt Silvie

Warren Craghead and Ted May's USSCatastrophe.com is known for providing a much-deserved online presence for popular alternative comics favorites Ron Regé Jr, John Porcellino, Renée French, Carrie Golus and others, plus the webmasters' own impenetrable Pirate Stories. Yet what steals the show from these better known and more accomplished artists is the very weird The Future Genies of Mush Island by Ben Jones, a weekly serial that reads like an Atari 2600 game written by Eugene Ionesco.

The story, such as it is, focuses on bizarre digital creatures having discussions that alternate mundane inquiries about a "system" with the tone of heated philosophical debate. The result is an evocative absurdist drama combining a comically pedantic New Age inflection with hilariously low-tech art and delineation. With its color-coded dialogue, exaggerated style and dreamy, fragmented logic, Future Genies realizes the artist's warped childlike vision of a sci-fi/fantasy sub-genre, like Tron ruled by insane message board flames.

As a comic so dependent on its unique use of form that it couldn't exist off the Web, Future Genies gives USSCatastrophe.com a claim to having the most effective online comic on the Internet, and it will be fascinating to see if their strong stable of artists, better known for their brilliant work in print media, find cause to explore their online presence with an equally form-intrinsic mandate.

Ron Regé Jr.
www.highwaterbooks.com/ron/archive.html
by Matt Silvie

Ron Regé Jr, acclaimed author of Skibber Bee Bye, is stylistically the most original alternative cartoonist to emerge in the past decade; he crosses the linear cubism of Gary Panter with the fluid cohesion of Carl Barks, but this comparison still misses the mark by a hundred miles.

While his online presence, mainly at highwaterbooks.com, consists of little more than a posting of his print comics in html format, there is yet an eerie appropriateness to reading his work on the web: the raw simplicity that lulls you into taking a stream of information for granted only surprises you eventually with its extant grace.

Rege's weekly strip "Tonc Pup," which includes a now-dated preview of Skibber Bee Bye, is designed in a vertical scroll format that plummets downward with an ever-accelerating speed, due to the panels' abutting each other so tightly that the images have no room to breathe; the reader doesn't linger over each panel but only absorbs a minimum of the simply delineated information as fast as possible. When each page ends with a simple, devastatingly personal impact, the practical need to move forward to the next strip conflicts with the impulse to remain, viewing the strip as a cohesive whole. This holistic appreciation conflicts with the now rote, commodified act of surfing the Web, and speaks volumes to Regé's accomplishment as an artist.

Eric Pigor
www.toxictoons.com
by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Eric Pigor's goofy and simply-rendered reconstructions of Frankenstein figures are a good amalgam of the influences Pigor himself cites: Dr. Seuss, MAD, and Big Daddy Roth. Further, he spices up the mixture with a good sprinkling of stupid gross-out knock-knock jokes (How do you make a dead baby float?) and funny little pop-up images, all designed around the artist's unique humor.

Uncle Pigor's Spookhouse, the section of the site holding the animations, as well as the overall style of the site, are united on the single theme of cleanly presented ickiness. His animations are simple, focusing on the movement of one character and the reactions of another, or the repetition of single actions. Kids are encouraged to create their own Toxic Toons with used Band-Aids, moldy bread, a cigar, rat poison, chewed gum and meat. Bloody, moldy drippy things, squishy noises, visual investigations of the digestive process, and taunting little bug-based guys calling you fuckface over and over again reveal the intended demographic of this site to be overgrown man-boys with mental capacities of 8-year olds. Technologically advanced, it's not. Funny, it sure the crap is.

Pigor's characters are hairy, malformed, and have done nothing to stop the festering wounds which often cover their entire bodies. They swear and are generally very annoying, but it all works. The site is just as funny as that kid in the fourth grade who picks his nose for your amusement. And just as appealingly yucky.

Ethan Persoff
www.io.com/~epersoff
by Brad Angell

Kissing. Laughing. Fucking. Loving. Crying. Yelling. Glaring. Humming. Slapping. These are a few of the words contained in the new online comic, Teddy, produced by top-notch cartoonist Ethan Persoff. Top Notch, if you will remember, was published by Fantagraphics and cleverly/not cleverly (take your pick) disguised in a Chris Ware-like package. Zero Zero also featured Persoff's "Apocalyptic Funnies" on two occasions. These short doses of nihilism are brutal, but Teddy can be equally severe at times.

The story is a sad tale of love, happiness, cruelty and despair, as seems the comic, but in a different way. Deconstructed with cut-up images and empty balloons, it reads well and the visuals are large, quite striking and load fast. Did I mention gruesome? In a Laurel and Hardy kind of way? And who is that strange worm-like character nibbling on cookies? The text juxtaposes Teddy and his girl in ways that can be jarring, yet satisfying: for instance a drunken car crash, while we read of a heated sexual encounter and climax. In some cases text is all you see; in others, only visuals. Why not go see for yourself at ep.tc or www.io.com/~epersoff. As an added bonus, there are some activities to download (see "extras" button on the main page) and cut out. I personally printed out and assembled my own "Teddy's picnic" diorama! Look for other activities, printable stickers and more coming soon.

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