Chasing the dragon

Sometimes you don't realise quite how long you've been doing something. Seemingly fifty percent of conversations I have these days at some point include a brief interlude or a long debate about how we've gotten older or how time seems quite literally to fly these days. Bearing that in mind, it shouldn't be amazing how much things become habit; you do them because you always have or because you haev for so long, even if they now don't necessarily play such an important role in your life.

Reading web comics is not something I do a lot of, but largely falls into that category. Sure it's pretty geeky – the name web comic itself contains two stereotypically geeky elements, and the subject matter invariably is – but at the same time, if it makes you laugh, or smile wryly (which is rather the point in my book), go for it.

Snips, Snails and Dragon's Tails by Rich Burlew is a compilation of ocmics and other pieces from one I've been reading for what turns out to have been a rather large number of years now, hence the rather long preamble at the start of this entry. Perhaps, as with a lot of sitcoms and similarly long-runnign series, it becomes more about the story and the characters than the cheap and easy laughs, but I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Certainly in this instance, for me that's become more important. I want to know what happens next and be entertained first and foremost, and entertainment often comes from a good story. Balancing this with the humorous elements and keeping them alive isn't alwasy easy, but here it is largely accomplished in the right way. It has evolved from just being a vehicle for gags into something more, but part of what makes people come back and part of what makes many of the best comedies so good is that the reader or the viewer cares about the characters and what happens to them.

Anyway, this was a little different as a compilation, containing a few separate parts rather than an overall narrative, but it largely worked. The first experiemental section was interesting, the main section was more old school in how it picked and chose jokes, framing each strip around one, and the section parodying other stories (admittedly hardly a new idea), put its own twist on the subject matter.

Book number: 63
Title: Snips, Snails and Dragon's Tails
Author: Rich Burlew
Category: Chris' choice