Freefall. One of the very first comics I stumbled onto when I first started reading comics was Mark Stanley’s Freefall (located at http://freefall.purrsia.com/) and I was almost instantly hooked. Freefall has been around for a very long time indeed, back when there were really only a few handfuls of webcomics that existed at all. It has survived the test of time, and it’s still as good of a read now as it was then.

Freefall centers around three main characters. First of all, you have the captain of the starship (which was grounded for most of the comic until Florence came into the picture and finally fixed things up), Sam Starfall, whose morals are, at best, questionable. At worst, he’s an outright thief and liar with one sole goal in mind; get kicked off of the planet he’s on while being chased by an angry mob, which is his species’ idea of success. Though essentially an idiot at heart, Sam nevertheless does try to be a good captain to his crew:

The robot is named Helix, and has one major purpose in life. Pick things up, and then put them down. Anything else is a complete learning curve for the poor thing, and until Florence enters the picture, his only guide in life has been Sam. He has been learning rather quickly from Florence, however, and now won’t let Sam do anything to hurt “Doggie!” He’s been known to smack Sam repeatedly on the head with anything that’s lying down until Sam changes his mind about stealing from Florence, just to pick one example.

Florence is the engineer of the crew thanks to a clerical error... which Sam apparently perpetrated in the first place. She is a Bowman’s wolf, which is essentially a wolf/human hybrid brought about by genetic engineering. Smart as a whip yet somehow grounded in reality, she is the one that holds everything together and attempts to keep things in running order (a tall feat when you consider Sam’s tendency to fix things with duct tape and how much he enjoys the many practical uses for explosives around the home). However, she is as much a wolf as she is a human, and as such she is forced to keep finding ways to satisfy both her human and wolf personalities.

And that’s where the beauty of this comic really comes into play. It’s a science fiction comic, but without a huge and heavy overload of “this is why everything works, and this is my explanation of this and that, and blah blah blah information overload.” The science is there, but except for a few times when Florence slips into engineer-mode, it’s just generally in the background to set the setting. Florence is an obvious “furry” character, but this is only a minor aspect of her and is not the defining part of her character.

The artwork is very smooth, clean and consistent, and as the creator pointed out in his interview, all of the strips are very small in size and easily downloaded via dialup connections. The site for Freefall is the same way, with very little by the way of bells and whistles on the main comic page to slow down the reader.

This comic grabbed me originally because of the story within it, a story that continues to this day. It’s a very immersive storyline that quickly pulls you into the world that Mark Stanley has created for us, the readers. And the archive is HUGE (over eleven hundred individual strips as of this writing), so make sure you’ve got a fairly good block of time on your hands if you start at the beginning.

If you do start at the beginning, however, you’ll likely feel like I do. Freefall has been around for a very long time, and it’s easy to see why. Simply put, it’s a darn good comic and a heck of a read. Go pay him a visit; trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

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