If you aren’t reading “El Goonish Shive,” you totally should be.
“What’s ‘El Goonish Shive?’“
It’s a goofy high school fanservice comedy with sci-fi and supernatural elements. No, don’t leave! Let me explain why it’s so good.
It has:
-Adorable, lovable characters
-Seriously, these characters are amazing
-They’re all fucking nerds
-Villains with understandable motivations
-Cool monster designs
-Genuinely funny jokes
-Heart-wrenching emotional moments
-Action scenes
-Character growth
-Some of the best reaction images I’ve ever seen
-An overall progressive bent
-Gay characters
-Lesbian characters
-Lesbian griffins
-Bisexual characters
-An asexual (or at least sex-repulsed) character
-A probably-transgender character
-A genderfluid character
-A lot of really cool LGBT stuff actually
-Good Tom. Just… Good Tom.
“What’s with that title?”
I’ll let the comic itself explain:
Yeah, it’s kind of a really dumb title, but the weird nonsense somehow fits it tonally.
There’s also a (usually) non-canon side-comic where the characters get up to all kinds of crazy shenanigans, though it sometimes has canon storylines that aren’t part of the main comic for pacing reasons.
It starts off pretty not-great, with lousy art and some sort-of gross writing, but it started in 2002 and the author was a teenager at the time, and the comic has really grown along with him a lot since then.
