Awkward Zombie: A Gaming Webcomic About Games

There is an arc to popular videogame webcomics: they start off being about videogames and then they drift, as the creator and audience change and develop, to being more about the characters contained within the comic. It makes sense that as people become more invested in their own creative world, they'd shift slightly from solely making jokes about other people's.

Praise be for Awkward Zombie, a videogame webcomic which has been open in my browser for three weeks. As I've sat here, clicking through its years and years of archives, reading its jokes about PC games (and Nintendo games) instead of working, a thought occurs. If I share this fun with other people, it becomes work. These hours wasted were research.

So there we go. You can click the link and start reading for yourself, or you can step below for some examples and some prattling about joke forms.

Awkward Zombie's great strength is that it doesn't have its own cast of characters. Almost every comic takes place within the universe of the game being joked about, albeit with semi-regular author insertion as the necessary player character. This means that the most common joke the comic tells is in the form of, "Hey, wouldn't this thing be weird if logically considered or applied to the real world?" As per the above Skyrim comic, from back in 2012.

While Fire Emblem, Zelda and Animal Crossing all feature, there's plenty of Mass Effect, Dead Space, Team Fortress 2, etc. to keep this relevant and me still employed ha ha ha. I am especially fond of this Deus Ex: Human Revolution comic.

Of course, this reminds me that you can always read Rock, Paper, Shotgun's very own Tim Stone-created Strafe Left comic.

Thanks to Tom for the initial link. Tom links me to so many of the things that I post here that he is basically ghostwriting RPS at this point.