In my review of Dresden Codak, I talked about how that comic is taking advantage of some of the unique properties of the Internet as a medium, namely the unlimited canvas of webpages. Another comic that takes this one step further is MS Paint Adventures, one of the most original comics I’ve seen.
The basic concept of MS Paint Adventures is that the various comics on the site essentially mimic the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and old text-based video games. Originally, readers would give suggestions for what the character in the story should do next by means of a forum, and the comic’s creator, Andrew, would then choose the first suggestion given to advance the story. The first two comics, “Jailbreak” and “Bard Quest” both followed this format, and also had branching story paths. However, Andrew considers them “failed experiments,” and they both remain unfinished.
For the first major story on the site, “Problem Sleuth,” he did away with the branching storylines and the forum-based suggestion method, and switched to a suggestion box, giving him a list of suggestions he could choose from. After finishing “Problem Sleuth,” which is several thousand pages, he started “Homestuck,” which is currently running, is very long, and also incorporates flash animation, interactive pages, and music. The site’s fanbase is so huge now that Andrew admits it’s hard to still call it “reader-driven,” as there are so many suggestions coming in at any given time.
So now to the actual content. As the title would tell you, all of the pages (excluding the flash effects) are created in MS Paint, so naturally they don’t look too great. The characters in “Problem Sleuth” are stick figures, and many of the objects are pretty crudely drawn. There are occasionally very well-drawn props though, and the contrast in detail when these things show up (I’m being intentionally vague) provides a good bit of humor. Nevertheless, the simplified art style allows for much faster updates, sometimes even multiple updates in one day.
First page of "Problem Sleuth." Copyright MSPaintAdventures.com
The comics also have a very unique humor, a lot of which comes from toying with readers’ perception of items in the “game’s” world. I won’t give anything away, just know that nothing is what it appears to be, and it looks like Andrew had a lot of fun twisting peoples’ suggestions. There are also a lot of recurring jokes and themes, so the comic only gets better as it goes along.”Homestuck” even has a webcomic-within-a-webcomic, “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff,” which is absolutely hilarious and is worth checking out even if you never read the rest of MSPA.
I’m most of the way through “Problem Sleuth” and still pretty early in “Homestuck,” but both are great in their own ways, and are both worth taking the time to read. I’d suggest starting with “Problem Sleuth” before moving on to “Homestuck” or checking out the earlier two (though “Bard Quest” is pretty funny). So go check them out, they’re a lot of fun!
Happy reading,
-Nate
Tired of Superheroes 