Sluggy Freelance

Sluggy Freelance is a long-running webcomic written and drawn by Pete Abrams. Starting in 1997, it is one of the oldest and most 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.
While the strip began as a gag-a-day based series in which the three main protagonists (Torg, Riff and Zoë) would stumble from one brief, bizarre, parody-centric adventure to the next, the characters and plotlines gradually became longer and more serious. Some critics have praised the humor of the strip and its use of subject matter not available in newspaper comics, while others have criticized the long and complex stories and continuity.
Creation.
"Sluggy Freelance" started on August 25, 1997. In an interview, creator Pete Abrams said that he had always hoped the strip could become his full-time job, and treated it like a job from the start. According to Abrams, he promoted the comic to friends, at conventions, and in posts on newsgroups, and popularity came from "organic credibility". In an interview, Abrams said that the initial plan was to write out the original characters as new ones were introduced, to keep the strip fresh, but after around a couple of years found he like the characters so much that he stuck with them.
In its early days, the strip was hosted on Big Panda, but today is on its own website.
In a 2007 interview Abrams would not reveal the origins for the name "Sluggy Freelance", instead joking that he couldn't hear the question and that his great-grandfather was named "Sluggy Freelance". According to a 2014 article in CBR, the "Mokhadun" storyline provided a explanation for the title, "which has been a source of consternation for webcomic pundits for nearly two decades."
Abrams draws the strip on card stock and uses Photoshop for lettering and coloring.
Premise.
According to a 1999 review, "Sluggy Freelance" followed the adventures of Riff, a self-described freelance bum and inventor, and Torg, a web site designer trying to make a living. They are aided, or sometimes hindered, by a Mini Lop rabbit named Bun-Bun. Early characters also include their neighbor Zoë, the strip’s straight woman, and Dr. Lorna, a parody of talk show psychologist Dr. Laura. A 2002 review described the comic as "telling a complex ongoing story in a punchline-a-day style... His characters, a pack of cheerfully put-upon twentysomethings... frequently fight killer robots and drop into alternate dimensions as Abrams parodies popular film, television, and video games." Writing for CBR, Larry Cruz said in 2014 that the characters """form a sort of Scooby team that encounters ghosts, mad scientists, aliens and holiday mascots on the reg. The comic is epic in nature, yet it's adamant in its refusal to take itself seriously."
While the strip started as a gag-a-day comic, it soon expanded into complex storylines. Abrams said that he felt able to have longer story arcs because readers could catch up with stories through the online archive. As time progressed he wanted to write longer and more involved stories, and in order to tell the story quickly enough, he added more panels to each daily strip.
Main characters.
Characters in "Sluggy Freelance" include:
Traditions.
Sluggy Freelance has featured several yearly recurring themes, although many of them have eventually been broken or discontinued due to developments in the overall plot.
In an early 1998 plotline, one of Riff's inventions sent Torg to the "Dimension of Pain." Every Halloween afterwards for several years, a different demon was sent to Earth to try to bring him back, failing in amusing and unexpected ways.
Bun-bun has tried to kill Santa Claus every Christmas, with continuously escalating violence; the fact that Bun-bun became the Easter Bunny early on in the strip merely added spice to the relationship. There was a break in the tradition when Bun-bun was thrown out of time and was not present in 2005, and aside from an attack more inconveniencing than dangerous in 2006 he has not resumed the feud.
Also on almost every Christmas/Hanukkah, Torg and Riff have attempted to continue their own, private tradition of giving each other "a beer every year." Usually they never quite get it right, for a variety of reasons, including being trapped in a mummy's tomb, selling their shoulders for science, and other random occurrences.
Every year on 25 August, the comic features a small animation to commemorate the comic's anniversary, most of which involve Kiki singing karaoke. The Fifth Anniversary, August 25, 2002, fell on a Sunday, which traditionally was reserved for full color extended comics. This comic combined the two themes, presenting a full-color animated comic, which advanced one frame at a time.
In every New Year's Eve storyline, Bun-bun gets drunk on 151 Rum, which results in his being uncharacteristically kind and courteous (such as apologizing to Torg or praising the main cast).
Other guest strips and crossovers.
Guest strips.
Abrams invites other well-known webcomic artists to do the strip for a week once or twice a year, while he goes on vacation. A frequent result is a parody of the strip itself, other webcomics, other creative works and/or artists, including Scooby-Doo and Ayn Rand. Clay Yount of Rob and Elliot was guest artist several times prior to taking over Saturday duties. Abrams also has various other artists providing art for Saturdays and Sundays, most recently Stuart Taylor and Lauren Taylor of Chain Bear.
Crossovers and references to "Sluggy Freelance" in webcomics.
Numerous other webcomics have referenced Sluggy Freelance, and various guest artists on Sluggy Freelance have included their own webcomics' characters in their guest strips, including "User Friendly" who swapped A.J. for Torg for a week. Gwynn from "Sluggy Freelance" has appeared in the webcomic "General Protection Fault", and Trudy Trueheart, a character from that webcomic, is Gwynn's cousin. The creator of "General Protection Fault" said that the crossover doubled the readership of his comic overnight. There are several implicit cross-overs with R. K. Milholland's "Something Positive", such as a comic where Aubrey was forced to sell her bunny, an aggressive Mini Lop with a love of sharp things, to "Kiki's Petstore". In the webcomic "Freefall", two rabbits are shown and the character Helix names them Kevin (presumably after Kevin Dewclaw in "Kevin and Kell") and Bun-Bun.
In the game "Munchkin" by Steve Jackson Games, a monster card for players to fight against has a picture of a switchblade wielding Bun-Bun. There is a 5 in 6 chance that the monster is a perfectly normal bunny rabbit and a 1 in 6 chance that it is "that" rabbit. Possibly also a reference to the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In the expansion called "Munchkin Bites" there is a monster card called "The Evil" which refers to a horror story in the comic.
Shortly after the birth of Leah Nicole Abrams in the middle of "The Love Potion" storyline, Sluggy Freelance entered a three-week-long side story. The story involved Ki and Fooker of "General Protection Fault", Lindesfarne and Ralph of "Kevin and Kell", and Bruno and Fiona of "Bruno the Bandit" attempting to play the roles of "Sluggy Freelance" characters and find the original cast. Other characters, such as Gav from "Nukees", and Trudy from "General Protection Fault", made appearances. The non-comic characters from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" also appear, in their silhouetted form.
References to "Sluggy Freelance" in other media.
Science fiction author John Ringo has included references to "Sluggy Freelance" in his novels. For example, in his "Legacy of the Aldenata" series, the crew of a massive mobile artillery platform in the third book are depicted as Sluggy fanatics to comedic effect (including naming their vehicle after Bun-Bun and painting a giant picture of Bun-Bun on it). In the fourth book, "Hell's Faire", a character is based on a friend of Pete Abrams who was the inspiration for Riff. A section of original Sluggy comics set in the alternate future world of the novels appears in the end of "Hell's Faire", and a sampler of Sluggy storylines is included on the CD-ROM bound into this book. Pete possibly returned the favor shortly thereafter by entitling one subchapter "Hell's Unfair." Another possible Sluggy reference is in the short story "Lets Go to Prague" where one character uses the codeword Kizke. This is the common mispronunciation of the demon K'z'k. (The proper pronunciation has no vowels.) Also, the first two novels of Ringo's distant-future "Council Wars" series have appearances by an irascible, treacherous, switchblade-toting, telemarketer-hating AI in a rabbit-shaped body, created by a long-dead fan of an unnamed 20th-century webcomic.
In S.M. Stirling's "Conquistador", one of the characters unleashes a self-destruct sequence with the code phrase "Override B-1 oasis". Override B-1 is a program that causes the "Sluggy" character Oasis to unleash her own level of destruction.
Use in education.
"Sluggy Freelance" is part of the "Create a Comic Project".
Success and critical reaction.
Abrams was one of the first cartoonists to make a full-time living from webcomics. The Washington Post reported in 2005 that there were only "a dozen or more" cartoonists able to earn a full time living from webcomics, though there were also "thousands" of cartoonists earning some money this way. As of 2005, "Sluggy Freelance" had more than 100,000 daily readers, and in 2012 it was reported to have "hundreds of thousands" of readers. Shaenon K. Garrity said in a history of webcomics that around 1996–2000, while newspaper-style strips continued to dominate webcomics, "now the winning genre was the ongoing serial adventure strip, usually done with a heavy dollop of geeky comedy", and listed "Sluggy Freelance" as a prime example. Writing for "The Beat", Maggie Vicknair called it one of the oldest and most successful webcomics. "Sluggy Freelance" was nominated for Best Comic by the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards in 2001, and was included in a 2007 exhibition by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art called "Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics".
Early reviews noted that being published on the internet allowed "Sluggy Freelance" to use subject matter not allowed or not typical for newspaper comics, including geeky subjects such as "Star Trek", "The" "X-Files", "Aliens," "The Matrix," slasher films and Microsoft, as well as references to alcohol and sex. A 1999 review in MIT's campus newspaper, The Tech, said of the first book printing, ""Sluggy Freelance" sits comfortably in the top tier of comic strips out there today, and "Is it Not Nifty" deserves to be on every MIT student’s shelf." An A.V. Club of the fifth book in 2002 by Tasha Robinson called "Sluggy Freelance" "one of the oldest and best of the ongoing Internet comic strips", and described plots in which the characters are attacked by Satan-spawned kittens and a nanotech-based Y2K bug. Robinson said that "Sluggy Freelance" had "irrepressible silliness", describing his humor as "absurdist", "geeky", and "left-field", but that the book did have a serious side, building on a previous plot threads and story developments, and said that "Sluggy Freelance" and other webcomics "collectively offer hope for the future of the comic-strip medium." "The Sunday Times" described "Sluggy Freelance" in a 2006 article as "TV buff heaven ... think "The Office"-style sardonic observations about everyday life set in "Buffyverse"'s universe, with "Battlestar Galactica" thrown in ... very funny indeed."
Many reviewers have criticized the length and complexity of storylines. In 2006, Eric Burns-White of Websnark called the "Oceans Unmoving" storyline "long, laborious, [and] turgid", and the "Oceans Unmoving II" storyline, which ended in 2006, "mind-numbingly long". He said, "I got pushed as far as I humanly could on the 'why do I read this strip, again' thing, but I'm still here... there's hope." Writing for AppScout in 2007, writer Whitney Reynolds said that "Sluggy Freelance was better in the 90's, when you didn't have to slog through ten years of continuity and alternate universe and rabbits to figure out what the heck is going on." A reviewer for "Sequential Tart"in 2008 said, "Sluggy Freelance has such a convoluted interconnected plot line... by God, if I've mastered this universe, I'm in it for the long haul... Some of the Sluggy plots suck, but overall they're great, sometimes brilliant, like 'Ocean's Unmoving,' which got a very mixed reaction, but I loved it." In a 2014 article for Comic Book Resources, reviewer Larry Cruz felt that the mythos of the strip was impossible for a reader to retain, and said, "Marathoning "Sluggy Freelance" can often feel like a chore, and I admit that I tapped out during the second "Oceans Unmoving" storyline (concluding in 2006), which I understand was the breaking point for many longtime readers." Cruz noted that "Abrams himself is aware of the impenetrable nature of his webcomic" and had been including footnotes with most pages, hyperlinking to previous strips to provide context for recurring characters, locations and storylines.
Cruz also felt that "revisiting "Sluggy Freelance" [in 2014] is like stepping into a time warp", not just because the site "still looks like it was developed on Geocities and optimized for 14.4k dialup modems", but because the one of the first scenes in the contemporary story "was a big-eyed female who resembles an anime girl with her clothes falling off," concluding their review by saying: "Things may change, but "Sluggy" never changes."
Collections.
In addition to being available on the website, "Sluggy Freelance" has been collected in paperback. At least 21 collections have been published, including:
Tomes
Spinoff games.
Get Nifty.
In 2005, Blood & Cardstock Games published Get Nifty, a card game based on "Sluggy Freelance" designed by Rob Balder with illustrations by Abrams. It is a 2–6 player game taking about 40 minutes per game.
Button Men expansion.
In 2001, Cheapass Games published an expansion to their game "Button Men" of six buttons with Sluggy Freelance characters.
Role-playing game.
According to a post on the Sluggy Freelance forums, a "Sluggy Freelance" RPG was in development in 2006; it was being written by R. Brent Palmer in consultation with Pete Abrams and was first playtested at Dragon Con later that year.
Author.
Pete Abrams (born August 4, 1970) is the writer and illustrator of "Sluggy Freelance". Abrams said in an interview that he went to The Kubert School but was unable to get into the comics industry after school. Instead he got a job as a web designer, and started "Sluggy Freelance" as a creative outlet. He did not believe the attention span on the Internet was long enough for the kind of elaborate graphic novels he was used to drawing, so instead he went for a daily, quickly drawn daily strip. "Sluggy" eventually became so successful that it is now his full-time job, and he is reputed to be the first person to make a living at drawing webcomics.
As of 2005, Abrams lived in Denville, New Jersey.