Friday, December 22, 2023

War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers by Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich

Another day, another collection of a webcomic I don't normally read - I do tend to get into these grooves, don't I? (I wish Europe Comics was still on my library app, so I could keep up the "reading stacks of random BD by French people" groove, but we don't get to choose the brane we're sorted into.)

Anyway, this is the first collection of the webcomic War and Peas, titled (somewhat obviously) War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers. It's been running for more than ten years (since 2011), comes out once a week, and this first (and, so far, only) collection came out in 2020.

A lot of aspects of the War and Peas experience are familiar: the two creators (Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich) met in art school, they have a Patreon these days, the strips start out as one-offs but a number of characters (particularly the self-named Slutty Witch, on the cover, but also including Death, a researcher and her robot, and a eventually-married couple) and storylines grow over the course of the book. The art style is on the simple/cartoony style, which is a good choice for the often dark or cynical jokes, including very distinctive (and notably large) dot eyes in otherwise blank faces.

It has a dependable gag-a-day rhythm; even the continuing characters don't have storylines, just moments. The jokes do tend to be cynical or dark - this is a modern, webby thing - but not mean or forced. It is funny, in that old juxtaposing-odd-things way - Kunz and Pich just have a really broad world from which to pick things to juxtapose.

One possibly unique thing: Kunz and Pich are German - the art school they met at was the School of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken - but War and Peas is written in English. (Well, I haven't done serious research. Maybe they're both Americans who happened to go to art school in Saarbrücken? If so, ignore me.)

So this is another one of those strips - you know the kind. If you're the kind of person who complains that newspaper strip comics is an ossified and depressing medium - I am, intermittently - it's exactly the area you should be checking out more often. I am, intermittently - as in right now. Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers is fun, and has both Death and a Slutty Witch on the cover. What else could you ask for?

No comments:

Post a Comment