Webcomic recommendation: 05/01/14

This week I decided to do exactly the same thing. With a different comic, that is, but yeah. And pester one of the other posters here. Angrily.

Surviving the World

http://survivingtheworld.net/

So this is an odd one. STW is a 'photocomic education': Dante Shepherd takes a photo of himself by a survival lesson on his blackboard(s). The humour is also odd. Most of the time the 'lessons' don't pertain to survival at all, but that's what the webcomic claims to do. It used to have reader-interactive lessons answering a question posed by one, but those stopped for whatever reason. Unfortunately so: they were quite fun. Still, exactly 100 were made before they stopped and you can peruse those at your leisure.

However, you can't blame the comic for inconsistency. With the exception of the times his internet went down, he moved house, his child was born, Dante has posted one comic every single day. On the very rare occasion that he misses a day, he just posts two the next day. This means that in just a few years, he has made just under 2000 comics (as of today. It'll exceed that landmark in two weeks). So the whole thing is a trade of quality for quantity: the comics can be weird as heck or completely pointless or painfully cringeworthy, but it's an enjoyable form of those, and once you've spent several hours reading thousands of them*, you start to get into a rhythm.

STW is a silly comic by a science professor who must know what he's talking about. It rarely talks about science, though, so you're left with an interesting perspective on a science professor's worldviews and sense of humour.

Rating: PG. At some point in the series, 'hark' is coined as a catchall swear word, but that doesn't stop the not-so-bad c-word (anagram of carp) from being spilt a few times. However, it's pretty family friendly content other than that.

Art: N/A. I could talk about the photography, but unfortunately I don't know a thing about that. It does bear mentioning that he takes his own photos and they still tend to come out very nicely! Also, some comics have illustrations on the blackboards which are sometimes quite intricate but limited to what you can do with coloured chalk.

Humour: 5/10. It's so, so strange. And often unfunny, I'm afraid to say. But it's always at least... 'buzzy'. You get a buzz of humour from every strip, so there's something there.

Writing: 8/10. There must be at least a novel's worth of words in STW, and, except in the descriptions, never a grammar or spelling error! But also the vocabulary is very extensive, and it really feels like you're being spoken to. As you can see, the quality of the writing here is separate from the humour.

*Don't do this, please. It's not worth your life. It bears mentioning that any comic I review on here I have read every last strip of, unless otherwise stated.