Stand Still, Stay Silent

"Lose all to save a little

At your peril it's justified
And dismiss your demons
As death becomes a jest
You are the laughing stock
Of the absinthe minded
Confessions stuck in your mouth 
And long gone fevers reappear"

Opeth - Reverie / Harlequin Forest

Witness the Internet's foremost pan-Scandinavian zombie fungus vision quest digi-watercolor apocalypse serial! Also cats.
I'd meant to talk about ST:TNG next, but derailed myself by checking up on one of my favorite webcomics just in time to catch page 263 going up.
And... wow. That's a good page.

I've mentioned Stand Still, Stay Silent once before here in the context of other supernatural-themed post-apocalyptic comics. Like Derelict or Soul to Call, it mixes low tech with low magic and an emphasis on high adventure. It is, however, slightly lighter on the horror elements, though the author has proven more than capable of a tearjerker moment when the situation calls for such. This is her second webcomic that I know of. The first, A Red-Tail's Dream, riffed off Finnish folklore. While surprisingly advanced in light of being started by a first-year university student, it suffered mildly from occasional awkward or generic visuals and awkward phraseology (at least in the English version.)
aRTD already outshone most of its competitors.
SSSS improved on it, and while I'm not sure what recognition Sundberg's been getting for it, it's probably not enough.

It would be easy to recommend it by its grim but not self-indulgent background story, or by its characters' quirks or by its grisly monsters or by its lavish scene-setting splash pages. However, page 263 best embodies the whole lovely mess by capturing most major facets while at the same time telling an uninformed viewer almost nothing - except that, apparently, the cows came home. It includes tech, magic, the wilderness setting and the tension of encroachment, with the slightly fish-eyed viewpoint amplifying the art style's deliberate ambiguity and eeriness. For those who've been following along it summarizes the adventuring team's progress qua team by its junior member having grown both more competent and more trusted.

I'm impressed also by how SSSS employs its unusual simulated watercolors. Normally I'm more about science fiction instead of fantasy, hard lines and definitions, clarity. But the blending effect, used most heavily whenever the supernatural shows up, allows not only for quick yet impressive backdrops but for the fungoid "trolls" to meld with their surroundings, to slither and tumble menacingly out of the shadows in the best horror movie tradition. Which is not to say the comic plays up the ambiguity unnecessarily. Its greatest charm is probably its attention to world-building: Tolkien-ish maps, calendars and genealogies abound, as do charming little instructional pamphlets to acclimate the reader to post-divine-microbial-zombie-cataclysm lifestyles. The background is getting slowly filled in, the characters are growing into their pleasingly varied personae, the humor keeps dripping in just lightly enough so as not to water down the sense of danger or exploration, and the dramatic moments remain grim enough to wring sympathy from even a sour old demi-human like myself. This is what we were hoping webcomics would become back in the late '90s, when stick figures cracking one-liners about Quake were cutting edge.

And of course, I am in no way praising this particular comic at this particular point in time because phrases like "shield themselves from a disease and humans who spread it" sound in any way topical, no sirree, nope, nope.