Scary Go Round

Last updated

Scary Go Round
Scarygoround 20060922 panel 1 shelley amy erin.png
Panel from 2006 featuring (from left to right) Shelley, Amy and Erin
Author(s) John Allison
Website scarygoround.com
Current status/scheduleEnded
Launch date4 June 2002 (2002-06-04)
End date11 September 2009 (2009-09-11)
Genre(s) Paranormal, comedy
Preceded by Bobbins
Followed by Bad Machinery

Scary Go Round is a webcomic by John Allison. Running from 2002 to 2009, it is set in the fictional North Yorkshire town of Tackleford and follows university students battling fantasy and science fiction threats to the town. The comic was a successor to Allison's first comic, Bobbins, and was followed by Bad Machinery, all of which take place in the same general setting.

Contents

The comic received praise from multiple British newspapers, and it won the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for best comic in 2005.

History

Scary Go Round began in 2002. [1] [2] It followed on from Allison's first webcomic, Bobbins, and features many of the same characters. [3] According to Allison, Scary Go Round was originally intended to run at the same time as Bobbins, but Allison said that he ended Bobbins for several reasons: to leave Keenspot, to focus on Scary Go Round, and because Scary Go Round was a "clean slate" to write compared to Bobbins which he called "a big mess". [4] [5] By contrast, Scary Go Round was intended from the start to be a work that could be printed in book form. [4]

Scary Go Round first appeared on Modern Tales, but Allison said that joining the service was "a straight out mistake" and by 2003 had moved Scary Go Round off Modern Tales and onto its own website. [4] In an interview in 2004, Allison said that Scary Go Round made up the majority of his income; [6] and in a later interview he said it was "his living". [7]

Scary Go Round was created in vector graphics program Adobe Illustrator, as opposed to earlier comics by Allison which he drew by hand on paper. [4] [6]

Scary Go Round ended in 2009. Allison said that he felt is work was becoming uninspired: "I had a lot of characters that I didn't care about, and I was making whole runs of strips about characters that people didn't really like... Seven and a half years is a long time and I had lost perspective and direction. I was also losing readers for the last year and it was evident that changes had to be made." Scary Go Round was succeeded in the same year by Bad Machinery , another webcomic in the same setting focusing on younger characters. Bad Machinery was initially published on the scarygoround.com site. [8]

Allison has also used the term "Scary Go Round" to refer generally to his works that are connected to the same setting. As of 2021, the scarygoround.com site no longer hosts the Scary Go Round comics; instead the main page links to the various comics produced by Allison as well as to a site where PDFs of Scary Go Round can be purchased. [9]

Premise

The characters in Scary Go Round are a group of students at Tackleford University. [10] The city of Tackleford, a fictional town in North Yorkshire, [11] constantly finds itself under attack by superhero-comic-style threats such as samurai, werewolves, giant robots, dimensional doorways, Bible-thumping witches, shy zombies and polite biker gangs. [10] [3]

The comic initially followed the lives of the barmaids Tessa Davies and Rachel Dukakis-Monteforte, but soon changed focus to another set of characters entirely, including Amy Chilton and Shelley Winters.[ citation needed ]

Characters

Adults
Teenagers

Reception

Writing for The Sunday Times in 2006, Danny O'Brien called Scary Go Round one of the "coolest strips online", describing it as "postmodern British Horror" which was "subtle and stylishly drawn, with a bold cartoon edge". O'Brien said that the comic "reek[s] of cool Britannia" and that the dialogue "ma[de] a pleasant change from the nonstop Americana of most comics". [10]

Also in 2006, James Eagle wrote for the British newspaper Morning Star that Scary Go Round was "brilliant", "bonkers", and "the best British strip that I've yet found". [13]

Writing for Wizard magazine in 2006, Brian Warmoth said that Scary Go Round "stitches a world of frightfully bizarre and at times even Lovecraftian happenings together with a brilliantly quirky cast indicative of his understatedly British sense of humor." [14]

Michael Whitney reviewed Scary Go Round in 2004 for the blog The Webcomics Examiner. Whitney said that compared to vector art used in Bobbins, "The paper dolls loosened up. The figures were squashed and stretched to make them feel more natural." Whitney said that Scary Go Round "decoupled" the Bobbins characters from gag humor, relationship obsession and reality: "They meander into stories full of zombies, witches and inter-dimensional doorways." Whitney added that despite the horror elements of the setting, "the characters take their circumstances too well to let us feel that they're facing a genuine threat in a horror story sense... The tone is too silly for genuinely dire consequences, which may be why Allison fielded some angry response when he killed off a popular character, Shelley, early in the strip." (Shelley would return to life in a later storyline.) [3]

Awards

Scary Go Round won the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Outstanding Comic in 2005. [15] It also won Outstanding Original Digital Art in 2003 [16] and jointly won Outstanding Art in 2004 (tied with Mac Hall), [17] and was nominated for a further 18 awards over the WCCA's history. [16] [17] [15] [18] [19] [20] [21]

Related Research Articles

8-Bit Theater is a sprite comic, meaning the art is mainly taken from pre-existing video game assets, created by Brian Clevinger that ran from 2001 to 2010 and consisting of 1,225 pages. The webcomic was, at times, one of the most popular webcomics, and the most popular sprite comic.

Dinosaur Comics is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in three collections and in a number of newspapers. The comic centers on three main characters, T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus.

<i>Ozy and Millie</i> Daily comic strip

Ozy and Millie was a daily webcomic that ran from 1998 to 2008, created by Dana Simpson. It follows the adventures of assorted anthropomorphic animals, centering on Ozy and Millie, two young foxes attending North Harbordale Elementary School in Seattle, Washington, contending with everyday elementary school issues such as tests and bullies, as well as more surreal situations.

<i>VG Cats</i> Webcomic by Scott Ramsoomair

VG Cats is a webcomic written and drawn by Canadian cartoonist Scott Ramsoomair. Published on its own website, it follows the adventures of a pair of anthropomorphic cats, who both have an interest in video games, and often play the roles of characters in popular games that are parodied in the strip.

<i>Diesel Sweeties</i>

Diesel Sweeties is known as a webcomic and former newspaper comic strip written by Richard Stevens III. The comic began in 2000, originally hosted at robotstories.com. From January 2007 until August 2008 it was syndicated to over 20 United States newspapers, including major daily newspapers like The Detroit News and Houston Chronicle.

<i>The Perry Bible Fellowship</i> Webcomic and newspaper comic strip

The Perry Bible Fellowship is a webcomic and newspaper comic strip by Nicholas Gurewitch. It first appeared in the Syracuse University newspaper The Daily Orange in 2001.

Dumbrella is an alliance of webcomic artists who promote one another's sites, travel to conventions, and sell merchandise together. It is also the name of the website of that alliance, which serves as a shared weblog.

Least I Could Do (LICD) is a humor webcomic by Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza. The strip debuted on February 10, 2003. Past artists for the strip include John Horsley from y2cl, who dropped out before the strip launched, Trevor Adams, who was on board for about six months, then Chad W. M. Porter, who drew the strip for two years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Rowland</span> American artist and author

Jeffrey J. Rowland is the author and artist responsible for Wigu and Overcompensating, two popular webcomics. Originally from Locust Grove, Oklahoma, Rowland now lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where he continues to work on the two projects, while running TopatoCo, a company which sells merchandise based on his and other artists' comics.

Chris Crosby is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Keenspot, a company providing a platform and network for webcomics. They are also a comics writer and artist, with works including Superosity, Sore Thumbs, and Snap The Punk Turtle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Allison (comics)</span> British artist and webcomic writer

John Allison is a comic writer and artist. He has been producing comics since 1998 and his work has won multiple Eisner Awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Roman</span> American cartoonist (born 1977)

Dave Roman is an American writer and artist of webcomics and comics.

<i>Girly</i> Webcomic by Jaqueline Lesnick

Girly is a webcomic created by Jaqueline Lesnick which follows the romantic relationship between two girls named Otra and Winter, as well as other citizens of the city of Cute-Town. It ran from 2003 until 2010. The author describes their work as, “a comic that went everywhere and did everything, for better or worse. But all in all it is a comic about 2 gals who love each other very much dawwww. Girly is a comic that helped sexually awaken a generation of readers, as well as (eventually) myself.”

<i>Bobbins</i> (webcomic) Webcomic written by John Allison

Bobbins is a webcomic written by John Allison. It ran from 21 September 1998 to 3 June 2002, but shifted into reruns with commentary on 17 May 2002. It has made occasional returns in John Allison's website in between his other comics since 2013. Webcomics portal Keenspot kept the Bobbins archive freely accessible online, but the archives eventually moved to Allison's own site.

Bad Machinery is a webcomic written and drawn by John Allison and set in the fictional town of Tackleford, West Yorkshire, England. Bad Machinery started on 21 September 2009 loosely based on characters and situations from John Allison's previous webcomic, Scary Go Round. New full colour paneled pages appeared four times a week.

Sluggy Freelance is a long-running webcomic written and drawn by Pete Abrams. Starting in 1997, it is one of the oldest successful webcomics, and as of 2012 had hundreds of thousands of readers. Abrams was one of the first comic artists successful enough to make a living from a webcomic.

Notable events of 2009 in webcomics.

Notable events of 2002 in webcomics.

Giant Days is a comedic comic book written by John Allison, with art by Max Sarin and Lissa Treiman. The series follows three young women – Esther de Groot, Susan Ptolemy and Daisy Wooton – who share a hall of residence at university. Originally created as a webcomic spin-off from his previous series Scary Go Round, and then self-published as a series of small press comics, Giant Days was subsequently picked up by Boom! Studios first as a six-issue miniseries and then as a monthly ongoing series. In 2016 Giant Days was nominated for two Eisner Awards and four Harvey Awards. In 2019, it won two Eisner awards, for Best Continuing Series and Best Humor Publication.

Notable events of the late 1990s in webcomics.

References

  1. Tyrrell, Gary (6 December 2017). "Chaos Abounds". Fleen. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  2. "Mo/Tu/Th/Fr Comic by John Allison". Scary Go Round. 4 June 2002. Retrieved 25 June 2009.
  3. 1 2 3 Whitney, Michael (August 2004). "Laboratory and Obsession". The Webcomics Examiner. Archived from the original on 10 August 2004.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Fitzgerald, Leah (March 2003). "Scary Go Chat: An online interview with John Allison by Leah Fitzgerald". Comixtalk. Archived from the original on 24 October 2007.
  5. Leaver, Tama (27 July 2005). "Webcomics: Interviews with John Allison & Jeph Jacques". ponderance.blogspot.com. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  6. 1 2 Gerding, Stephen (29 September 2004). "Scary-Go-Round: A John Allison Interview". Archived from the original on 19 August 2011.
  7. Raffe, Jon. "John Allison and his Scary-Go-Round". Thunder Chunky. Archived from the original on 30 June 2007. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  8. "John Allison's "Bad Machinery"". CBR. 28 December 2009. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  9. "Scary Go Round Comics by John Allison". www.scarygoround.com. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  10. 1 2 3 O'Brien, Danny (26 February 2006). "The tooniverse explodes; Site test". The Sunday Times .
  11. Allison, John (16 February 2009). "True Stories: Proud Mum Hits Back at Bullies". Scary Go Round. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011.
  12. Allison, John (6 April 2008). "A hundred dance moves per minute: The magic hour" . Retrieved 11 September 2009.
  13. Eagle, James (6 May 2006). "Wired: Net some of the best cartoons". Morning Star . p. 9.
  14. Warmoth, Brian (22 December 2006). "A Ride on the 'Scary Go Round'". Wizard magazine. Archived from the original on 6 January 2007.
  15. 1 2 "2005 Results". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016.
  16. 1 2 "The 2003 Cartoonist's Choice Awards". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  17. 1 2 "2004 Results". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.
  18. "Outstanding Comic presented by Tom Brazleton of Theater Hopper". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 8 March 2016.
  19. "Outstanding Character Writing by Ben Gamboa of Tweep and M.Neils of Pocket Kitten". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 31 July 2016.
  20. "2007 Results". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 24 July 2007.
  21. "Here are your 2008 WCCA Winners!". ccawards.com. Archived from the original on 6 March 2016.