Minus (comic)

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Minus
Panel from Minus #15[1]
Author(s)	Ryan Armand
Website	http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus.html RSS web feed
Current status / schedule	Thursdays
Launch date	February 9, 2006
Genre(s)	Fantasy humour

Minus is a webcomic created by Ryan Armand. The first strip was published in February 2006, and it was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2007 in the category of Best Digital Comic. A new strip is usually released weekly on Thursdays. Many of the strips are standalone stories, though several follow a longer story or theme over the course of several weeks.

The comic follows the adventures of Minus, a young girl with the power to change almost anything in the world around her, from the flow of time to her own appearance. In various strips she has climbed into paintings and chalk drawings, brought inanimate objects to life, swum with mermaids in her bathtub, turned a library into a pirate ship, become the ruler of a colony of ants, and various other fantastical situations. She is often seen flying, walking up or down vertical inclines, or causing objects to levitate. Controversially, her games have killed people or otherwise robbed them of normal lives as she doesn't fully understand the consequences of her actions. She has also created sentient beings, only to abandon them once she is bored with her current game. She has even killed herself on certain occasions, only to revive in another strip.

Minus is a large-format colour strip, drawn and painted on 15x20" illustration boards. On the strip's Web page, Armand states that he imagined Minus as “a comic strip for a newspaper in the early 20th century”, in reference to both the art style and amount of space given (far greater than the usual three or four panel layout of most newspaper strips). He has cited the works of Shigeru Mizuki, and Winsor McCay's Little Nemo as stylistic influences, referring to the latter as “a playground for bizarre ideas which are ends in themselves”; a similar approach to storytelling is used in the Minus comic strips. He also cites John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and the films of Takeshi Kitano as other examples of stories that eschew straightforward plot development and conflict and focus just on characters and the small events that happen to them.