WebComics/Fans

Location: [(archives)] [1] (daily)
Updates: Usually on weekdays; during cross-over with /ItsWalky!, was daily
Rating: 15, occasional strips 18 (have warning at top)
Archives: Since start of 2000; big strips, one per page, so take a while to load. Take a few days solid to read through them all, maybe a couple of weeks at work.
Recommended by: ChiarkPerson
Example Strip: []
This is clearly the 'magic as drugs' theory, not the 'magic as lesbian sex' theory!

Great. The adventures of a university sci-fi club who get caught up in various supernatural and secret governmental organisational machinations, while trying to have lives. This is what Buffy, the Vampire Slayer should be like.

Possibly the only web comic to have done a musical story. Oh yes.

Now moved to GraphicSmash, so you have to pay to see any of the recent archives. --Vitenka

: Seems to have restarted on GraphicSmash. --Vitenka

How not to be bored: read WebComics, like /Fans!:

I tried it. But as 5 mins' wait per page, I got bored after 3. --M-A

Tell 'em you need a faster connection. Plus, it gets much better after the first story.

: It is good - maybe not that good. Try it during US offpeak - KeenSpace is bandwidth impoverished again.

/Fans! is on KeenSpot?, not KeenSpace.

Plus, at least listen to http://faans.com/futuresound/future11.mp3

: Spot, space, whatever. It's all the same place that steals all of my comics. (I'm only really annoyerd that it does so because it's a single point of failure. One which fails often.) However, for any remaining /Fans! doubters - "I am the head alien. Ruler of this world, its inhabitants and even its visitors. And this is my monkey." --Vitenka

It's not the same place: different servers, for one thing. And maybe KeenSpot? doesn't fail so much if you get a subscription? And, more importantly, the Head Alien and Monkey Master are from /ItsWalky!.

/Fans! doesn't lend itself so well to quotes (except maybe 'This is just play sadomasochism' ) as it's more of an intense character-based strip. Not that /ItsWalky! isn't character-based, but it goes in for one-liners more.

Found one! 'This is clearly the "magic as drugs" theory, not the "magic as lesbian sex" theory' .

: /Fans!, though, gets lots of points for its constant visual (and, indeed, otherwise) inventiveness. Read it to see what I mean: strips with soundtracks, general messing about with backgrounds and brilliant use of stylesheets.

From the 15th of Septemeber, /Fans! will be going subscription on T Campbell's new webcomics site GraphicSmash. Fortunately it uses the crappest subscription model ever: instead of sensibly having open access to some archives to draw people in and needing an account to follow the story, you can follow the story daily for free and only subscribe to catch up (which you don't even need to do if you've caught up by the time it moves).

It will be interesting to see the result: it's obviously an attempt to avoid the fate of Adventure Strips by trying to bring a large pre-existing fanbase to GraphicSmash from the start. If it works, and a fair proportion of /Fans! readers shell out, GraphicSmash could become instantly the most successful /Subscription site (as one of the references on that page points out, KeenSpot? strips like /Fans! have a hundred times the readership of ModernTales strips). Or it could kill one of the best web comics out there.

Time will tell. It always does.

: In a way it is a real shame, since the earlier parts of /Fans!, with the different styles of telling the story were far far better IMHO than the current story arcs. Both /Fans! and /ItsWalky! have completely lost my interest over the past few weeks which is really quite annoying. Maybe it's one of those things that is best read as a bulk... --Kazuhiko

I can sympathise about /Fans!: since the crossover it's been dragging something terrible. 'Dont' Know him From Adam' was long and boring, 'The Cruelest Month' didn't make much sense unless you read /CollegeRoomiesFromHell, and Inner Spaces went on too long. Departures is shaping up interestingly, but again is moving too slow.

/ItsWalky!, on the other hand, has been non-stop action, plus (plus!) Penny. How can you lose interest in that?

Aside - does anyone else think that it has become very slow and dull since the move to GraphicSmash? Is it just an artefact of bering unable to read the archive to get back up to speed, or is the current PlotLine? just not to my taste? --Vitenka

: It's not since the move, it's since the planned storyline ended and it moved on to short, not-terribly-interesting stories. Including that bizarro one with the animals that I could make neither head nor tail of. Campbell had the story planned out as reaching from the start of 'The Fandom Menace' to the defeat of Mist, and after that it seems to have totally lost its way. --PlasmonPerson