I love webcomics. I don’t read as many as I used to – but I still keep up with six or seven, not including xkcd, SMBC or Cyanide and Happiness. It doesn’t seem to matter the format or genre, either; it’s just the nature of a digitally-published (digital native, in digital humanities terms) comic. More and more though, I struggle to find long-runners that can keep my interest and that haven’t been abandoned or put on a long, vague hiatus. Some of this is the sheer amount I’ve already read or tried; some of it is that a lot of webcomics just…never get finished.
That makes Kaspall a very, very special creature. Started in 2004 and completed in 2015, Kaspall is a strange entity in the webcomic world – part anthro comic but with a significant number of human characters. That’s because Kaspall itself is a city of portals – ‘off-worlders’ fly or walk or fall into the wild gates seemingly at random and end up in Kaspall. Every so often, but rarely, someone from Kaspall will disappear — but for off-worlders, there’s no way home. This allows for a fun combination of tropes – Sam, misanthrope and cranky asshole human, has a bionic eye that keeps bugging him for upgrades and comes from somewhere where the only food were “NutriCubes”. Another off-worlder is a dragon who chews on coal and tries (badly and drunkenly) to teach Sam how to fly.
Part of what sells this clash of cultures so well is Lyall’s incredibly expressive black-and-white art style. Kaspall is a dense, urbanized throng of moles, rats, badgers, squirrels, rabbits, dragons, tentacled aliens, all existing in close proximity, all interacting with and bouncing off of each other’s cultures and traditions. There’s places like Coneywarren where the rabbits live in a culturally polygamous society, and the zone of the Separated, an anti-magic, low-empathy group, and the Skyways, strung out above the city on boardwalks and rope bridges. All of this – and every other world besides – is held together by the Skein, the dreamworld. This is a fantastic amount of worldbuilding to fit into a comic that, by the way, is 464 pages. That’s not a lot! And then there’s the contrast between the richly detailed main story, and the strange, almost coloring-book styled interludes…
If I have any one complaint about Kaspall it’s that I wish it was bolder with its queer themes, but I’m also thrilled that they’re there at all. The Captain is deliberately non-binary/ungendered, and the polyamory of the rabbits is mostly a joke but also quite charming. Caroline and Claudia keep feeling about a second away from kissing, and one wonders if, had Lyall started writing this a few years later, she’d have gone about it differently; but that might also be wishful thinking on my part. Sometimes writers/artists are just straight.
Kaspall can be read in its entirety over here: https://www.kaspall.com/pagelist. Watch out for Avast and other antiviruses giving false-positives on its host site Spiderforest – as far as I’ve been able to tell there’s no issues, just something being marked as ‘suspicious’ when it shouldn’t be.
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Elliott Dunstan 