Brian Clevinger

Nuklear Age is a difficult read. For several reasons.

For starters, it is way, way too long for what it is.
Besides that, it is very repetitive, very episodic in a formulaic way. Which the author explicitly points out within the body of the text itself, but hanging a lampshade on the flaw doesn't make it stop being a flaw.
It is very much a product of the era it was written - ye olde early internet, the early 00's. Many jokes just feel ick, punching down, in a way that wasn't as obvious back show more then. We've all learned a bit since 2004, hopefully.
It's also a personal difficulty. I was very, very immersed in that early-00's internet culture - albino black sheep, webcomics, sprite comics, gamer humor, Penny Arcade, Thinkgeek, starcraft LAN parties hopped up on entire crates of Bawls. That person no longer exists, but they left this artifact of themselves behind, sitting on my bookshelf. It's bittersweet to feel memories being forcibly dredged up of things I have nostalgia for from a time that objectively speaking was pretty goddamn awful for both my life personally and the world at large.

Many times I considered donating or selling it, just to get rid of it. Always stopped myself - after all, I have a personally signed copy, bought straight from the author himself, a first edition sold at convention tables. It's mine, for better or worse, it belongs to me. The albatross on my bookshelf.

The worst part is the ending. Without getting too deep into spoilers, the ending of this book made me feel awful. It reframed everything that I had read coming up to it and retroactively made it much worse than it was.
And Clevinger thought it was a funny joke. He did - said so himself, in the apology afterward. Yes, the afterword is an apology to the reader. So, he knew what he was doing with that ending. Even now, two entire decades later, I still remember how that ending made me feel, and I still don't like it.

Nuklear Age isn't exactly unreadable trash - for the majority of the runtime it's decent, occasionally very funny. Clevinger's writing style here is the same kind of humor he used in his 8-Bit Theater comic, transferred from a graphical medium to a text-only one. Which is why deciding what to rate this thing was very difficult for me. Can you really give a one-star treatment to a book that, mostly, isn't actually that bad? Fine, take a star and a half. show less

It has now been exactly a MONTH since Brian fucking Clevinger posted what looked very much like a final end to his longrunning sprite comic and then promised us that there would be one or two more strips to wrap things up. A MONTH. Now, Clevinger is both a savvy businessman and a terrific practical jokester, and I am starting to think about how pretending there was more when there wasn't would not only be a crowning glory to the years of tricking, wrongfooting and letting down his fans, it show more would also keep them coming back to the site, looking for a new 8BT and then maybe checking out some of his other shit that nobody cares about, easing him into a post-Light Warriors future. The last strip ended with a newspaper headline for god's sake. That, and I'm getting pissy checking back, and I figure I'll add this to my LibraryThing while the memories of the good times are still fresh.


This was the webcomic I read before I even knew what webcomics were. It was the Final Fantasy sprite comic that perfectly captured the madcap joy of a stupid D&D session with all your nerdiest high-school friends, minus dice, junk food and Mark's intestinal horrors. It was identifying the characters with you and your chumz and thinking about how the roleplaying games of your youth will always affect the way you conceptualize yourself (there is a tiny Marko Mishakal inside Martin McCarvill, urging him on to more androgynous and unstable and Machiavellian shit, forever). It was endlessly unfolding and playing out and shaggy-dogging until you were like really? How many comics have they spend going from Pravoka to Elfland? A thousand? Most of all it was the story of three lovable psychopaths and one true hero in the most doomed world in the ... world, sword and sorcering and doing the worst shit to each other for our joy, and dragging in nerdy references toO embarrassing for even the latest-night sugar high. I first discovered it when I moved in with Adam for two years of geeky times with the Best Campaign Ever, Halls of Undermartin,and I stayed up all night reading and getting bleary-eyed.
It was all just pointless buildups toward payoffs that never happened, and it was wonderful.

And? It was laugh-out-loud funny. Best bit: the return of the Four Fiends, who appear in all their pants-shittingly dangerous splendour gunning for revenge, and Black Mage takes the fuck off, and Thief takes the fuck off, and Fighter, who is wearing Red Mage's flaming corpse as a hat (totally makes sense, don't even worry) still thinks everything is going exactly according to plan and turns around and whips out his swords and goes "Then so be it! The four of you versus the four of us!" That's the kind of moment that makes you feel like you can do anything.

Also, if I ever get around to LibraryThinging fictional books from non-book works of fiction, the first one is going to be The Illustrated Guide to Scatological Tricks.

http://www.nuklearpower.com/8-bit-theater/ show less

The "New Era" equals Brady Bunch's Cousin Oliver times three as a group of teenage students is suddenly shoehorned into the book. Mostly they just lurk around the edges not doing much of anything except stealing pages from the original cast.

Unfortunately, the original cast is not doing much of anything either as they are mostly keeping secrets, fretting, trying to go on vacation and tripping billies. With the exception of a brief vampire kerfuffle, it's all set adjustments and exposition show more set-up for the next volume.

A disappointing Atomic Robo graphic novel is still a pretty good graphic novel though. show less

Kind of flat. Atomic Robo's strong suit has been witty banter, but that was largely absent here. H.P. Lovecraft, Tesla, and Carl Sagan all have cameos, but none of them are very good. C'thulhu appears throughout, but he is more of a blundering Godzilla than evil incarnate.

Reading Atomic Robo is a like drinking store brand soda. It tastes something like a coke, but it's not quite as good and you know it.