Scary Go Round

"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.
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. It followed on from Allison's first webcomic, "Bobbins", and features many of the same characters. 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". By contrast, "Scary Go Round" was intended from the start to be a work that could be printed in book form.
"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. In an interview in 2004, Allison said that "Scary Go Round" made up the majority of his income; and in a later interview he said it was "his living".
"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.
"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.
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.
Premise.
The characters in "Scary Go Round" are a group of students at Tackleford University. The city of Tackleford, a fictional town in North Yorkshire, 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.
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.
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".
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".
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."
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.)
Awards.
"Scary Go Round" won the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Outstanding Comic in 2005. It also won Outstanding Original Digital Art in 2003 and jointly won Outstanding Art in 2004 (tied with "Mac Hall"), and was nominated for a further 18 awards over the WCCA's history.
External links.
 (the "Scary Go Round" series is no longer available at this site, but instead it has links to buy PDFs of the series)