Digger

"But in your head
You're all dead
Your brain's cold
From what's been told
And there you sit
Begging change
Don't you get it?
You're still in the shooting range"

 

Switchblade Symphony - Ride

 

 

Like Unsounded or What Birds Know, Digger's another comic I'd meant to talk about from this blog's very inception (given it was just wrapping up about that time) but continually put off until forgetting about it. So, to the assuredly bountiful "stylized black and white fantasy wombat / hyena / demon / Ganesha / troll / shrew / squash / rat / veily monk and absent dwarf epic" fan demographic, here's one for you. Looking back now, Digger seems like the most precise delineation between webcomics' early years when their very validity as a medium was being questioned and even successful ones mostly consisted of pencil-drawn and scanned disjointed scribblings, and this current stage of fancy-schmancy drawin' tablets and Patreon.

It started as basically a five-page riff on Bugs Bunny failing to turn left at Albuquirky: a wombat gets lost while tunneling and comes up in a weird spot far from home. After that, the author freely admits to making it up by the seat of her pants, up to page 50-ish in its entirety and still adding largely random elements all through its run. You can basically see her fleshing out the mythology via concatenation: shadow?child! servants?cold! dead?skins! with those qualities later lent relevance and weight. In this it was very much akin to any number of early webcomics (e.g. Sluggy) but unlike them it increasingly cemented its setting and theme as it went. Instead of jumping haphazardly between genres and promoting an endlessly bloated character cast to sequential prominence, Digger doubled down and tied together its early brain farts into a single narrative.

 

It straddles the dividing line before the explosion of politically correct insanity as well. I've seen a rumor that Ursula Vernon's been quaffin' the woke-aid in recent years. But back around 2010, for all that Digger sported multicultural aesthetics (Balinese and Indian statuary, south-Asian garb) and gender inversions (keep in mind much of the story concerns hyenas) little in it pushed the currently prevalent anti-white, anti-male, heterophobic supremacist propaganda. The almost entirely female cast does contain both stupid and evil portrayals, the women routinely argue and confront each other, the heroine's sidekick's a highly sympathetic male, and in a style reminiscent of that other Ursula's The Telling, Jhalm the recurring male antagonist is portrayed as respectably stalwart in his misinformed lawful neutral obstructionism.

 

All in all, though trying to write a story with no plan is usually just a quaint exercise done for its own sake and not for the result, Digger's one of the few projects to ever make good on "LOLrandom!" In this case, constantly playing fix-up with half-baked ideas likely yielded a better story than would've come from overindulgence in any one aspect.