Ask the Little Bald Bastard

Webcomics One-Off: Ugly Hill

  If you've ever perused my links bar, you'll have noticed that I link to a lot of webcomics. Yes, before you ask, I read every single comic on that list, and more.

  I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite; one of the great things about the medium is how widely it varies in both form and content. Trying to rank a weekly captioned photo (A Softer World) against a daily clip art philosophy lesson (Dinosaur Comics) against a randomly updated, hand drawn visual journal (Malfunction Junction) is an exercise in futility akin to comparing a picture of a kitten with a recording of guitar feedback, and deciding which one smells better.

  Still, one of the strips that currently pleases my sulfurous, corroded soul most is, in Interweb terms, a fairly traditional "comic strip." Ugly Hill is visually reassuring; its three horizontal panels, clean, polished line work and vivid solid-color palette would be right at home in your Sunday paper. Creator Paul Southworth is a graphic designer, and the result is a strip that's visually very appealing. The characters are distinctive and interesting, the panel layout is tidy, and the word balloons are logical and readable.

  As much fun as it is to look at Ugly Hill, reading it is an equal pleasure. The strip takes place in a weird mirror-America, where the "people" are a variety of colorful monsters, with all the tentacles, fangs and scales that this implies. This inspired conceit allows Southworth to put life under the microscope in a consistently entertaining and insightful way. Ugly Hill wrassles everything from the mundane (office politics) to the truly thorny (racial tension) with a gently bent, satiric take that's disarming in its ability to wring laughs out of the monsters in all of us.

  Southworth has recently started experimenting with longer, more intricate storylines. While this seems like a common evolutionary path for webcomics, it's particularly gratifying here. Ugly Hill's characters are rich, their relationships are genuine, and their world has lots of curious nooks and crannies that are hinted at, but have yet to be fully explored. Freeing up the characters to get out into the world and stretch their legs (and brains) a bit will be good for them, and great for readers.

  Here comes the book jacket blurb; Ugly Hill is a comic with visual flair, rewarding dialogue, and characters that are monstrously believable. Start reading it, or I'll email your entire browser history to your mom.