A Softer World
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| A Softer World | |
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| Author(s) | Joey Comeau, Emily Horne |
| Website | http://www.asofterworld.com/ |
| Update schedule | Updating every Friday |
| Launch date | February 7, 2003 [1] |
A Softer World is a weekly webcomic by Canadians Joey Comeau and Emily Horne. It first came online on February 7, 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".
A collected edition, A Softer World: Truth & Beauty Bombs (ISBN 0-9739171-1-3), reprinting 180 strips, was released in June 2006.
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[edit] Format
With one exception of a double-length strip, 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 Emily Horne, and then sent to Joey Comeau for text.
The text consists of several bars of typewriter-written text, forming a small narrative. The text is always in the first person, typically being the thoughts or narrative of the main subject of the photos. The situations are often surreal, including one strip about a werewolf who writes love poetry, and another about a curse that befalls humanity, making everybody go through puberty a second time.
The tone of the comic tends to be slightly absurdist and dark, with the punchlines often being simultaneously funny and disturbing. 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." [2]
Placing your cursor over the comic image and allowing it to sit still will prompt the image name to appear, which acts as text for a fourth panel or commentary related to the strip overall.
[edit] Cast
There is no cast to speak of, as each comic tends to stand alone. There are two recurring characters however. The first is Baby Doom, an infant that plotted to destroy the world. He has so far appeared in three comics, but was recently run over by a car, and, apparently, killed off. Also, there is a black cat, Wednesday, who is featured in several of the strips.
[edit] Other features of the site
In addition to the comics, the Softer World site features "A Softer World News", a short-lived feature in which the photos come from news sources, and the comics are based on news situations. They featured much of the same tone and sensibility as the main Softer World comics, but the creators found them difficult and unsatisfying, and terminated them after seven installments.
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.
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.
