The Webcomicker

A typical example of the Terror Island humor style.

Every once in awhile, a strip comes along that is easily accessible to the wider audience, and garners immediate accolade and fame.

Terror Island is not one of those strips.

Terror Island (by Ben Heaton and Lewis Powell) is the adventures of board game pieces as they, well, hang around. It’s not like they don’t do anything (they do open restaurants, hold spelling bees, and occasionally summon demons), it’s just that mostly what they do is sit around and argue about who’s going to go buy groceries. To date, groceries have not been purchased.

Photocomics (or more properly, Fumetti) are kind of considered the fringe of the comics world, with a lot of comickers regarding them as the works of people too lazy to draw. And that probably is the case in some circumstances (perhaps the majority of circumstances). But some comickers have harnessed the form for dramatic effect. Leisure Town uses its colorful and cute toy actors to build irony which emphasizes the ugliness of the characters they portray. A Softer World uses blurred images a mundane life to subvert the reader’s expectations with the text.

And Terror Island uses board game pieces to give the strip a very iconic, universal feeling. The characters feel less like individual characters and more like disfunctional everymen, plotting and deceiving and generally disrespecting their friends. I feel like I can connect with the characters in Terror Island better because they are abstract pieces than I could if they were Lego men, which would be more likely to make me think “Shouldn’t they have drawn this instead of copping out with little figures?”

I mentioned at the top of this post that I didn’t think Terror Island was immediately accessible, and I stand by that. I think a lot of people will be put off at first by the photocomic style, and those that get by it and actually read a few strips may have some trouble getting into the style of the strip, which comes off very intellectual in my mind (it’s written by a Math major and a Philosophy major, and it sounds like it was written by a Math major and a Philosophy major. Take the strip thumbnailed above). Most of the jokes are of the “wry smile” variety than the “laugh out loud” style, and that’s not instantly appealing. It takes some investment to get into the characters, the running gags, and the style.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

So go give Terror Island a shot, and see what you think.