I guess I should nominate some as well.
Gunnerkrigg Court starts with a fire-headed girl named Antimony Carver who discovered she has a second shadow, and her adventures at her school with friend and gadgeteer genius Katrina Donlan. If I was to explain all of the shadows, fairies, robots, psychopomps, and mythological creatures it would sound like it's kind of a comedic mess, but it's really not that at all. You see, once upon a time, Coyote split the Court from the Forest, etching the canyon between, the Annan Waters, with his claw.
It has a slightly dark tone -- not nearly so dark as Uzumaki, which inspired the character design for Annie (I really wish I hadn't read Uzumaki honestly, since it's a horror that actually scared me). There is a conspiracy, but characters have real motives. You can tell that the story has been planned a long way out, and things that happened 90 chapters ago get completely reinterpreted in such a way that you think the author must have known from the beginning. He's kind of a master of telling just enough of the story to resolve the current dilemma, while leaving the mystery. Also every once in a while people get really mad at the main character for doing what she wants without thinking of others. Also when it goes on hiatus at the end of books, you actually get more frequent updates of omake-like comics -- such as the tales of City Face, the pigeon -- as well as "alchemical treatise" drawings (notice the art evolution).
Another comic I read recently when just randomly looking for a new webcomic is Stand Still, Stay Silent, picked just because I kinda liked the art style. Each chapter picks two different colors and does all of the art in those shades of those colors. This one is an After the End one, about various Scandinavian people investigating cities abandoned after the pandemic -- which are dangerous now due to all of the trolls. Kinda like Beowulf meets Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou I guess? With a dash of Scandinavia and the World? Not really a full-on Scavenger World, since Iceland closed its borders so it survived the disease mostly unscathed (except the resulting famines obviously).
There are only two "books" in this one, both complete, and the first is better than the second because the author kind of lost interest in it. Or rather, the author converted to Christianity and suddenly found she didn't want to be doing an action story with characters doing magic from old Norse and Finnish religions, in a world that abandoned Christianity. That said she treated all of the religions respectfully throughout, to the extent that I was quite surprised to discover that that one scene in the Church late in book 1 was written by an ostensible atheist.
I will say that the prologue feels weird because it was written well before our little tango with the corona, and the things people don't get right about how people would act in a pandemic because we lived through it. Like, in reality, Sweden's government had one of the dumbest responses possible, on par with places like Texas. (Even the Netflix adaptation of Sweet Tooth felt that little bit off, though they definitely leaned into what we learned by adding an armored train filled with toilet paper and hand sanitizer.)
Gunnerkrigg Court starts with a fire-headed girl named Antimony Carver who discovered she has a second shadow, and her adventures at her school with friend and gadgeteer genius Katrina Donlan. If I was to explain all of the shadows, fairies, robots, psychopomps, and mythological creatures it would sound like it's kind of a comedic mess, but it's really not that at all. You see, once upon a time, Coyote split the Court from the Forest, etching the canyon between, the Annan Waters, with his claw.
It has a slightly dark tone -- not nearly so dark as Uzumaki, which inspired the character design for Annie (I really wish I hadn't read Uzumaki honestly, since it's a horror that actually scared me). There is a conspiracy, but characters have real motives. You can tell that the story has been planned a long way out, and things that happened 90 chapters ago get completely reinterpreted in such a way that you think the author must have known from the beginning. He's kind of a master of telling just enough of the story to resolve the current dilemma, while leaving the mystery. Also every once in a while people get really mad at the main character for doing what she wants without thinking of others. Also when it goes on hiatus at the end of books, you actually get more frequent updates of omake-like comics -- such as the tales of City Face, the pigeon -- as well as "alchemical treatise" drawings (notice the art evolution).
Another comic I read recently when just randomly looking for a new webcomic is Stand Still, Stay Silent, picked just because I kinda liked the art style. Each chapter picks two different colors and does all of the art in those shades of those colors. This one is an After the End one, about various Scandinavian people investigating cities abandoned after the pandemic -- which are dangerous now due to all of the trolls. Kinda like Beowulf meets Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou I guess? With a dash of Scandinavia and the World? Not really a full-on Scavenger World, since Iceland closed its borders so it survived the disease mostly unscathed (except the resulting famines obviously).
There are only two "books" in this one, both complete, and the first is better than the second because the author kind of lost interest in it. Or rather, the author converted to Christianity and suddenly found she didn't want to be doing an action story with characters doing magic from old Norse and Finnish religions, in a world that abandoned Christianity. That said she treated all of the religions respectfully throughout, to the extent that I was quite surprised to discover that that one scene in the Church late in book 1 was written by an ostensible atheist.
I will say that the prologue feels weird because it was written well before our little tango with the corona, and the things people don't get right about how people would act in a pandemic because we lived through it. Like, in reality, Sweden's government had one of the dumbest responses possible, on par with places like Texas. (Even the Netflix adaptation of Sweet Tooth felt that little bit off, though they definitely leaned into what we learned by adding an armored train filled with toilet paper and hand sanitizer.)
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto