Silent except for occasional sound effects (it turns out that a robot penis goes VERT!), Chester follows the sexual adventures of a group of Victorians and their loving and lovable sex robot. Fink’s curvy ink-washed art combines elements of steampunk, Victorian/Edwardian erotica, and that innocent, animation-influenced look I’ve come to think of as the Flight style. Leading the pack is Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV, now also published in print by Top Shelf. The art has developed over the years, and Hard has branched out into non-adult subject matter (most recently in a series of strips about depression), but thirteen years in, it’s still the place to go for lines like, “Look! I’m fucking the fifty-foot woman!”īut now we may be seeing a renaissance of high-end webcomic raunch, comparable to the era in print comics when titles like Omaha the Cat Dancer, ambitious indie comics that just happened to feature a lot of sex and nudity, were taken as seriously as Cerebus. (In retrospect, Omaha is starting to look like the better comic.) The new indie smut is witty, cheerfully explicit, gorgeously drawn, and takes advantage of the ever-widening audience on the Web. Launched in 1999 and still ongoing, The Thin H Line has now run for ten years longer than Masahiko Kikuni’s Heartbroken Angels, the adult gag manga from Weekly Young Sunday magazine that inspired it. Only a few sex-oriented webcomics have shown staying power, most notably the amazingly long-lived Sexy Losers/The Thin H Line, a relentlessly crude manga-style gag strip by a cartoonist using the pen name Hard. It probably says much about the webcomics readership that role-playing games and math jokes beat out naked people almost every time. A while back, in a Comixology column, I mourned the decline of the good old-fashioned sex comic in the modern comics market. The webcomics world has always been less porny than you’d expect, with few NSFW titles making it out of niche circles (furries, mostly) and into mainstream fandom.

Teahouse emirain