New Adventures of Queen Victoria
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| The New Adventures of Queen Victoria | |
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| Author(s) | Pab Sungenis |
| Website | http://www.newadventuresofqueenvictoria.com RSS web feed  |
| Current status / schedule | Daily |
| Launch date | February 8, 2006 (uClick launch on May 21, 2007) |
| Publisher(s) | GoComics.com |
The New Adventures of Queen Victoria is a webcomic created by Pab Sungenis. It uses the photo-manipulation technique popularized by Adobe Photoshop and other image editing programs to insert actual photographs and paintings of the characters into situations, instead of more conventional methods.
The strip was first posted by the author on his own LiveJournal blog, then moved to a journal of its own shortly afterward. On April 5, 2006, the strip joined the Comics Sherpa online comics service.
On April 3, 2007, it was announced that 'Queen Victoria' had been picked up by uClick, for inclusion on its GoComics.com and MyComicsPage.com services, and began running on those services on Monday, May 21st, 2007.[1]
Contents |
[edit] Cast
Main Characters:
- Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Empress of India, and thoroughly modern monarch.
- Edward, her son and future king.
Secondary Characters:
- Liz, a former queen, and Victoria's best friend.
- Mary, Victoria's friend and spiritual guide.
- Maurice, a clipart image, who serves as Victoria's handyman
- Mrs. Clipart, another clipart image, who is principal of Edward's school.
- Grandpa, Victoria's grandfather, who is quite mad.
- Anne, Liz' mother.
- Osama, a master of disguise and Victoria's self-appointed nemesis. Extremely incompetent.
[edit] Themes and subject matter
Mainly due to its juxtaposition of historical figures into modern society and current events, the overall style of the strip tends toward absurdism, with occasional forays into postmodernism and satire. As a quintessential 19th century figure thrown into modern society, Victoria becomes an everyman, commenting on modern pop culture.[2] Television, movies, current celebrities, and other aspects of modern culture have been commented on and criticized in the strip.
Often, the strip comments about the comics industry itself; such as during mid-late June, 2007 when the strip commented about shrinking page sizes of newspapers and the proliferation of "reruns" of comics no longer drawn such as Peanuts. Peanuts was parodied again in late October, 2007, when instead of the normal strip characters an entire week of strips was devoted to an "interview" with what a middle-aged Charlie Brown might look like, discussing David Michaelis' controversial biography Schulz and Peanuts. Part of the parody has him married to Lucy, who henpecks him.
[edit] Politics and controversy
The strip has occasionally wandered into what could be considered political material. When Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a hunting trip, Victoria went hunting with him shortly afterward. When twenty students were suspended from a California school for viewing postings on MySpace, Edward found himself expelled for creating his own page.[5].
In July 2007, in response to the Supreme Court's overturning of anti-segregation laws in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which Sungenis compared to overturning Brown v. Board of Education, the strip "segregated" itself into two separate stips -- a "white" strip above a "black" one which was represented by showing characters and text in photo-negative on a black background.
In support of the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Pab spent a week "on strike" in November, 2007, replacing the strip's dialogue with that of classic comic strips from the late 19th and early 20th centuries like Happy Hooligan, Abie the Agent, and Buster Brown, which had fallen into the public domain.
In December, 2007, the strip ran a week-long storyline criticizing the Beloit Daily News of Beloit, Wisconsin for dropping the comic strip Non Sequitur over a strip that mocked the Ku Klux Klan. Publicity arising from Queen Victoria's mockery of the paper was one of the reasons cited by the paper's editor for the decision to return Non Sequitur to its comic pages.[3]
Perhaps most controversially, in response to the controversy over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, a new character was introduced into the strip based on the Virgin Mary. Although the depiction of the character of Mary caused some backlash against the strip (one reader called it "Sacrilegious and unfunny"), Mary has since become a regular cast member.
[edit] Style and influences
The graphic style of the strip has been compared to the animations of Terry Gilliam as seen on the television show Monty Python's Flying Circus.[4] Like Gilliam's creations, the strip uses cut-out photographs and other images for its characters and settings. This same technique was used to a limited degree by Berkeley Breathed in his comic strip Bloom County, to add photographs and images of famous people to the background of the strip.
[edit] Collected editions
Two paperback collections of the strip have been published by Lulu Publishing. The first, entitled We Are Not Amusing, was published in December 2006. The second paperback, entitled I Can Has Empire? was published by Lulu in November of 2007.
[edit] References
- ^ "'Queen Victoria' Strip Moves to GoComics.com," Editor and Publisher, May 24, 2007 [1]
- ^ "Victoria Puts On A Royal Show," Rockford Register-Star, May 17, 2007 [2]
- ^ "About Non Sequitur, Part Two" Beloit Daily News, Dec 19, 2007 [3]
- ^ "Riding Low With Baldo," Comics Coast To Coast Episode 8, July 13, 2007 [4]
