For some time now, "Roughies" has been one of my favourite Keenspace comics, one comic that I have great hopes for and something that could eventually became a genuine webcomic masterpiece. As if by an unspoken rule this comic is mostly unknown, or should I say ignored? And its tagline “the epic comic strip of Hobo surrealism” is enough to give a clue that it’s creator, Brian Waibel, stumbled onto something big.

In short, this comic tells the story of a group of hobos, very different and picturesque people and animals, with various pasts that brought them to their way of life. Some are refugees, some have amnesia and some are simply hobos by nature. Their adventures vary from the ordinary in finding food, to facing the ghost of a Viking, but they’re all dimmed, low-key and subdued to a specific feel of the comic and despite their weirdness and versatility we could hardly see in them the “wacky adventures” that are now practically a new webcomic genre. There are significant elements of mystery as all main characters (except, perhaps, one) have a mysterious past that, the comic so far promises, is going to come out in daylight sooner or later. Announced surrealism is covered in scenes that, although realistic in the context of the story, just have a strange, unearthly feel when watched separately. Now, if you allow me, I’ll go back to surrealism later. Let’s check some other technical qualities of this comic first or my editor with strangle me for not following the standard article format.

“Roughies” art is as far from bad and amateur as it is from slick, professional and perfect. Its line is bold and shaky. Together with its bold shading it reminds me of “Hagar the Horrible”. Art is somewhat buggy, but Brian will never run away from drawing something he’s not perfect at. In fact, this drawing, as it is, plays an important part in building a particular atmosphere of the comic, which is something I’ll also come back to later.

Characters in “Roughies” are very indiscriminative: humans, anthropomorphic animals, non-anthropomorphic animals, girls in cat suits, as if aiming to achieve the widest possible range of cartoon stylizations. Art is black-white, with emphasis on heavy line work. Formally it is a gag comic, as it is consisting of comic strips in standard newspaper format with a punchline at the end. However it’s a mock of such a format, as the punchline rarely attempts to be funny and draws a chuckle out of you at the most. Actually, “Roughies” is not a humoristic comic, even though there is some humor in its weirdness and its unlikely set of characters; it is before all a story based comic. Brian holds to newspaper-like strips as a formal thing: at a micro level, every strip is a unity with a micro-culmination at the end. This culmination (in relation only to other panels in the same strip, of course), is an actual punchline, a punchline that, in the context of non-humor comics, doesn’t need to be funny. But it has to be strong, which it is in “Roughies”.

“Roughies” website is very dirty, moldy and seems like undefined dirty liquid is leaking out everywhere. Usual elements like the navigation system, newsbox and tagboard are casually arranged under the comic with a big, rune-like central image which the visitor recognizes as a navigational system that leads to the usual webcomic stuff like characters and links pages. Since link symbols might not be obvious at first, Brian provided the legend at the bottom of the page. However, I’d like to see elements of the legend turned into links too, just for convenience. Anyway, “Roughies” site could be more visually attractive, but it could hardly be any more appropriate.

Let’s go back to surrealism. A good example of this is the scene, rather the entire sequence, dedicated to the main characters eating garbage. And while such a sequence is by its definition enough to surprise us (where else can you find a scene with characters picking up garbage from the junkyard to eat?) it is its down-to-earth approach to this basically survivalist - but gross to its core – process that gives it a special feel. Why dedicate full attention to eating, a process that most often goes without saying in comics (even when characters have to hunt or fight for food)? The reason is that in this case, the whole process of eating is weird, gross and surreal. It adds to the overall impression that this comic is not an adventure comic (although adventure plays an important part in it) – it is a life comic, a documentary comic, though the fact is that life in this case is very unusual and surreal. In such situations, the fact that rarely anything important happens in this comic isn’t really a bad thing.

An unusual element of the comic is seemingly covered by the appearance of Vikings, competent use of historical and mythological data (not the least are Vikings here a novelty, clichéd representation of brutes with long red beards, such as can be seen in comics or cartoons). With this, Brian probably wants to emphasize the epic dimension of the comic which is already hinted by the span of time, place and topics covered in the comic; Viking parts have been so far the least interesting parts of the comic, but Brian obviously has a few aces up his sleeve so we’d better wait and see what they are.

The thing that “Roughies” is most special for is that it is strongly influenced by film, particularly B-production movies. “Roughies” atmosphere reminds of the low-budget movies of the late 70s and early 80s; John Carpenter comes to mind, with his early films such as “Dark Star” or “Assault to Precinct 13”. Treatment of female characters reminds of these days’ exploitation movies such as brutal “I Spit on Your Grave”. Backtracking, we can find a connection with Roger Corman, the king of B-production; the main character even quotes an old pulp SF movie, "Them" (by Gordon Douglas). It is through this intensive recognition of subculture that “Roughies” achieves a feel of B-production comic, which is not easy because there is no such thing as a B-production comic, just as there is no budget where an artist writes and draws in his room, so another category of low-budget is also nonexistent.

Going along that line, “Roughies” is located in locations that are easily accessible to an imaginary low-budget director, such as a junkyard and other kinds of dirty and poor public places. Even more so, the art that I described earlier is an essential factor of the low-budget feel: good enough to be taken seriously (in cartoon terms) with visible imperfection. This is most obvious in the occasional nude scenes of one of the female characters. This buggy nudity, although cartoony, is realistically challenged, and it talks more of a comic where nudity isn’t conveniently stylized to be more sexy and submissive to fanservice (for instance I can’t recall other comic nudity with untrimmed bikini zones). After “1/0”, “Roughies” is probably the first webcomic where crumbly drawing works for the comic, not against it, where a comic would probably lose some of its touch, were it any better.

If there was anything to say against “Roughies”, I would say it was overuse of explanatory, arrowed signs. These signs don’t intend to really explain something to a reader, they are either puns (“not a gopher”) or a device to emphasize something. As such they are really charming, however, sometimes Brian is overusing them so they not only lose their charm, but became irritating.

In short, “Roughies” is an excellent, unique webcomic by an author who really knows what he’s doing. It’s a comic that somehow manages to turn every drawback to its advantage, and thus those drawbacks become virtues, quirks by which we remember the comic.

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