I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but it’s taken until now to formally get this off the ground. Welcome to Gecko Recommends, a running feature where I do a little profile of webcomics I really, really like. By the way, I’m not taking recommendations on this one, so please don’t ask me to profile your cousin’s webcomic. Because I won’t. These are comics that I personally love, by artists whom I personally respect. They also have to be comics which are currently updating. Them’s the ground rules.
Today’s comic is Tripp, by master comic-smith Bill Taylor (aka Spinester).
If you aren’t already reading Tripp, you seriously need to start. Bill is, in my humble opinion, simply the best writer at balancing the humorous elements of a strip comic with the narrative elements of a running serial. The best I’ve ever seen. Ever. Each comic brings big laughs, and never does a strip feel like filler. Beyond that, the full-color art is stunning. The characters’ hilarious facial expressions give zing to the jokes and really make everything come alive.
So what’s it about? Tripp (whose exposure to a ‘certain substance’ a long time ago left him permanently under its lingering influence to this day) wanders through his life seeing things that other people just don’t see. Chief among those things is the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, who follows him around as a sort of hip, hilarious spirit guide. The strip is ostensibly about Tripp, the everyman, but Poe is clearly the wise-cracking, media-savvy star of the show. Which is saying something for a somber guy who’s been dead more than a century.
Other characters round out the ensemble, including Coco, the delightfully pneumatic blonde love interest, Proxy, the delightfully cute redhead from the future (you can see why I like this comic), Sam, the delightfully hard-drinking Goth girl, and Delia, a vicious, green, medusa-like chick bent on … saving the world. Seriously.
The whimsical nature of the content is pitch-perfect, the art is consistently beautiful, and the story takes Tripp from mundane office life to interstellar battles with alien oppressors to encounters with God himself. There is nothing this comic doesn’t have. And there are so many reasons to read it.
I think it’s safe to say that if you like Puck, you’ll love Tripp. It’s got truly great humor, cute chicks, surreal flights of fancy, and the funniest dead guy who ever lived. Then died. Then hung around just for the fun of it.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. (Duh duh DANH!)
