Comic Book Resources

Vacation reading: Five webcomics I’m catching up on

As I write this, I’m about one tenth of the way along a 2,000-mile train ride from Boston to Denver. Most people think I’m crazy to travel this way, but I like to really know that I’m traveling a long distance, I like to see everything along the way, and I like to have long stretches of time with nothing to do but read. Shooting in a tin tube from point A to point B isn’t travel, it’s just transport.

On this trip, thanks to my new Android phone, I can bring the internet with me, and I’m looking forward to whiling away the hours with some webcomics. Here’s what’s on my virtual bookshelf this week:

Shi Long Pang: Every now and then I bump into this long-running webcomic, and Lauren Davis has just reminded me that it’s worth getting through the fairly dense opening pages to get to the meat of the story.

The Princess: Thanks to Lauren for this recommendation as well. The Princess looks like a standard, well-drawn gag strip, but the story has a good twist: It’s about a little boy who is really a little girl—she just needs to get the rest of the world to realize it. Lauren says the strip is “wholesome,” and it looks like a funny, pleasant read.

Zahra’s Paradise: I was subscribing to the RSS feed for this comic, but it’s too hard to read it in small bites first thing in the morning. And the subject matter, the Iranian Revolution, doesn’t lend itself to light reading. This is a comic to be read at length and savored, so that’s what I’m planning to do.

Nathan Sorry: More good escape reading. I started this when it was still very new, and I want to come back and see how it played out. Nathan Sorry disappeared on September 11, 2001; he didn’t die, he just took the opportunity to slip away and reset his life.

Red Light Properties: This comic has an intriguing and rather timely premise: It’s about a real estate agent/exorcist who specializes in “previously haunted homes” and sells them to recent victims of foreclosure. He seems sort of down on his luck himself. Goldman uses a combination of photos and drawings and puts it up in a Flash interface that unrolls the story a bit at a time, in a surprisingly natural fashion.

That’s what I’m going to be doing this week. What are you reading on your vacation?