Damn You, John Allison's Moral Fiber!

Those of you who read John Allison's Scary Go Round understand the significance of this week's major event: Shelley gets rehired by the mayor. Keep in mind that her previous work for the mayor entailed acting as liason for a visiting delegation from a town peopled entirely by robots.

John A. is a master: masterful artwork, masterful dialogue, and a masterful way of telling a story. In the few years the strip's been running, we've seen incredible work come out of his mind: Amy had become a singing sensation in a parallel dimension where music was transmitted through screaming melons; Shelley had been accidentally executed by bikers and brought back as a classic brain-munching zombie, then de-zombified by lightning; Fallon has gone undercover to bail Ryan out of a cult ("I am naïve in the ways of the world." "No, you are the apex of sexy danger."); and most recently, the town has gone topsy-turvy because of vague allusions of change made by a bald little boy. These plots are as compelling as you would think they be absurd. For whatever reason, John A. can superbly make me say to myself "OK, they stole a teapot and are now stuck in the past. What happens next?" His comic is the most clever strip out there. (If you know a better one, then by God, man, tell me!)

And yet, John A. came so close to disappointing me with Shelley's recent reinstatement. Why? Because as you'll see from reading the strip, Shelley was inches away from 'getting her kit off', as the Brits put it. And coming that close, only to be completely denied the gratification of seeing Shelley in the altogether, is 'something up with which I will not put'.

Thanks, then, go to Kristofer Straub at Checkerboard Nightmare, who was kind enough to follow up on the whole Shelley-no-jiggly debacle. It's no secret that Straub likes to frequently reference and sometimes imitate the art of other webcomics, and this is one time in recent memory that he's gone after a target that isn't some obscure also-ran that has to be pointed out by the original artist. (It was 'Unfettered by Talent', by the way. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to snark out the exact strip in question. It'll be fun!)

Thanks, Kris! Now get a damn RSS feed!