Launch date 7 February 2003 | End date 1 June 2015 | |
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Current status / schedule Updating every Monday, Wednesday and Friday Genre(s) dark humor, surreal humor, photo comic Similar Dinosaur Comics, Pictures for Sad Children, The Adventures of Dr Mc, Wondermark, Three Panel Soul | ||
Making a softer world
A Softer World was a thrice weekly webcomic by Canadian writer Joey Comeau and artist Emily Horne. It was first published online on 7 February 2003. Early comics had been published, intermittently, in zine form. With the launch of the website, the comic has gained wider recognition, most notably when Warren Ellis linked to the comic on his blog, and then began to feature it as a "Favored Puny Human". The comic won the first Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for photographic webcomic in 2007. It often appeared in The Guardian for a short amount of time until a change of editors caused it to be removed. It was profiled in the September 2007 issue of the Australian Rolling Stone.
Contents
A softer world
Collected editions
Format
With occasional exceptions of a few double-length strips, each comic is three panels long. The three panels are made up of photographic art, either a series of three photographs, or one photograph that is spread over multiple frames, or repeated with different crops and zooms. The photographs are taken by Horne, then sent to Comeau for text.
The tone of the comic tends to be slightly absurdist and dark, with the punchlines often being simultaneously humorous and disturbing, occasionally with overt sexual content. For instance, the text of the strip from which the comic takes its name reads, "In the caves behind my house, I found a softer world. / They understand what I had to do for love. / They don't believe in restraining orders." Recurring themes include sexuality, accidents or disasters, and the supernatural.
Hovering one's cursor over the comic will prompt the image title to appear, which acts as text for a fourth panel or commentary related to the strip overall. In May 2010, a feature was added to display this text when clicking or tapping on the comic image, for users on mobile phones and touchscreen devices, which lack a "hovering" function.
Other features of the site
"i blame the sea" is Emily Horne's photo journal, added to the site in 2008 and updated weekly.
The site also includes "Overqualified", an occasional series of satirical cover letters for job applications. These cover letters are generally written so as to reveal a degree of insanity in the imagined author. For example, one is a letter from someone applying to be a mall Santa Claus, in which he explains that, as a foreman at Mattel, he fired all the middle aged men and hired midgets who he forced to wear green costumes, and that, after being fired, he broke into houses to steal milk and cookies. Overqualified was published in book form in 2009.
"i am other people" is a series of interviews that Joey conducts with people.
In an attempt to raise money for his tuition, Joey wrote a novella, Lockpick Pornography, and released it in a micropatronage form on his website. He posted the first chapter for free with a PayPal donation link, telling his readers that he'd release each additional chapter after he'd raised a couple hundred more dollars through donations. Response was so enthusiastic that he posted all seven chapters within a week. Loose Teeth press has since published the novella with an additional three chapters. The full book is now available as a free download from the Lockpick Pornography website.
