A funny thing happened to me this morning - I went calling on my bookmarked webcomics, and when I came across minus., the ethereal and slightly twisted watercolored strip by Ryan Armand, I was completely surprised to find a message at the bottom of the page indicating the comic had come to its end.

That’s all - no warning or foreshadowing of any kind.  Just a “Thanks for reading” message, along with some internal housekeeping notes.

This makes me sad, as minus. was one of the most unique and atmospheric webcomics out there.

For those who’ve never had the pleasure, minus. is perhaps best described as a synthesis of the legendary  Calvin & Hobbes, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Little Nemo in Slumberland, and maybe a little bit of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to boot.  The title character was a guileless little girl with an apparently prehensile ponytail that perpetually stuck straight up from her head (giving her the appearance of a sprout with arms and legs), with the power to make or do anything she pleased.  Of course, with only a child’s view of the world and her own place in it, such power was frequently used on pulling seemingly harmless pranks with no consideration for their longer-term consequences; a frequent occurrence would be Minus, after creating a nearly-complete fantasy world for herself and her schoolmates, suddenly losing interest and moving on to something else, leaving everyone still in that world a bit nonplussed. Or the time when she gave a wrong answer to a teacher’s question when called upon, so she casually rewrote the textbook so that she was correct - much to the chagrin of the girl who actually knew the correct answer.  You know, that sort of thing.

There were things happening that wouldn’t have been out of place in a horror story, such as anyone who annoyed Minus being given their ironic comeuppance in a manner that would have made Rod Serling himself proud.  For example, she once bought a balloon from a street vendor, only to have it pop a second later.  Thinking he was selling bum balloons, she went and popped them all, and when he complained, she turned him into a balloon and had it pop!  But the soft watercolors and gentle visuals blunted a lot of the childish malice behind such actions, giving them the air of ludicrous fantasy rather than horror.  And notably, Minus never ever showed any signs of anger, no matter what was done to her.  The matter-of-fact way she constructed such bizarre situations was a large part of the strip’s charm.

minus. isn’t for everyone; there are very few “cymbal-crash” gags and some strips may need to be read several times to fully appreciate whan Armand was trying to do in them.  The rather off-kilter tone of Minus’s world might also be off-putting to some.  I can certainly see where some people might find this sort of thing as “pretentious,” but I personally feel it’s a noble experiment - and in a world where virtually every webcomic seems a clone of Penny Arcade, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, and/or PvP, minus. certainly stands out from the crowd.  And of course, there are those who look at Minus’s actions and immediately write her off as a horrible, vendictive child.  I submit that most of this latter group must have never been children themselves.  I think at one point or another in our youth, we all wished for giant tentacle beasts to burst forth from the ground and devour our bullies, or for a magical puppy that can shrink to fit in your pocket to hide from the parents who didn’t want you to have one, or to shrink that one obnoxious tall person lording his height over you down to ant-size so you can stomp him flat.  Minus is the same way.  The only difference is, through means that are never explained (because such exposition isn’t necessary), she can actually do all of these things.

Now that it’s over, you can read the entire archive and see for yourself what has to be considered one of the more unique webcomics to come down the bitstream in a long time.  It won’t even take you very long to get through; there are only 130 strips (though a few are double- and even triple-length) released on an almost-weekly basis since February of ‘06.

If you liked that, try...

1. Hockey Zombie Ends
2. Polymer City Chronicles by Chris Morrison
3. An Analysis of Comic Strip Humor - The Need for a New Funny
4. Silent Hill
5. Here There Be Robots by Spambot

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