Cheers: 8-Bit Theater

Continuing in the tradition of "web comics that I like a lot", I really love the 8-Bit Theater web comic, now sadly-but-satisfyingly finished. Created around 8-bit sprites from the Final Fantasy games, the storyline very loosely follows the traditional "save the world" adventure quests with a crew of dysfunctional, immoral, and frequently utterly off-the-rails-wacky four man band. The humor is delightful, especially for classic gamers and D&D aficionado, so it's possible that you may see a theme developing here in terms of my interests.

The comic isn't as liberated as The Order of the Stick comic; there's really only one recurring female character (White Mage) and there's a sometimes-used running gag on cross-dressing that may or may not be offensive depending on personal feelings. (To elaborate, the Red Mage seems to be confused about his sexuality and/or a cross-dresser, but before the jokes on this subject devolve too deeply into "Stereotypes! Amiright?" territory, it's pointed out that the resident Thief has been using his high Bluff skill to just make Red Mage think he's a stereotypically sexually confused cross-dresser. So while Red Mage embodies a stereotype, he does so because he's been deliberately made to embody that stereotype, not because the stereotype is automatically true or valid. Whether this makes the jokes less offensive or not will be a matter of personal opinion.)

For myself, personally, I enjoyed 8-Bit Theater a lot, and it's definitely a great example of an "anti-protagonist" work where pretty much every one of the good guys is obviously (or, in Fighter's case, potentially) a complete sociopath and yet somehow still thoroughly interesting to watch and sometimes even root for. I keep hoping that Brian Clevinger will publish the comic in eBook format, but until then, we'll always have the web site and various image-to-PDF compiling tools for non-web access.