The New Best Comics On The Web Are About 'Swan Boy'
At the end of 2017, internet cartoonist Branson Reese completed an impressive feat: creating and publishing a new comic, every day for 365 days. Drawn largely in black and white and written without recurring characters or long story arcs, they looked like this:
After tying a bow on a year of daily comics, Reese has a new challenge: tell the story of his new character Swan Boy. To do that, he's using a whole lot of color, a handful of recurring characters, story arcs that stretch across multiple strips and five comics per week. They look like this:
Swan Boy comics are upsetting and profane and weird and even a little sad — all in a delightful way. Like Reese's daily comics, there's an equal balance of humor in the art and the snappy writing. And the thing that makes them go is the titular Swan Boy character, who Reese told Digg he based loosely on himself.
"He's just a collection of some of my worst or more irresponsible personality traits," Reese said in a phone interview. "Someone recently told me, 'Swan Boy is the George Costanza1 to your Larry David.'"
While he's only been writing the mis- and non-adventures of Swan Boy and his friends for a few weeks2, Reese says he's hit a groove writing his new series that's different than his old daily comic grind.
"Something about it feels a little more relaxed. Literally there's a frame," Reese said, referring to his four main recurring characters: Swan Boy, Rona, Noel and Baptiste. The artist said keeping their personalities consistent has helped him move narratives forward and even surprises himself sometimes.
"Swan Boy's always going to be a shit head. I can't have him just change his personality to make the joke fit."
Reese is right: Swan Boy is a tremendous shit head.
But he's balanced out by his equally odd friends. Like Rona, a hairless cat:
And Noel the chameleon:
And Baptiste, "the worm who is French as his main thing."
And while the new format has kept fans guessing3, a few hallmarks of Reese's unique sense of humor remain. Perhaps most notable among them is his fondness for poking fun at such Big Concepts as God, heaven, hell and religion. The artist often reached into this well for God/devil archetypes and other religion-related humor during his year of daily comics, and he continues to do so with Swan Boy.
For example, this is the second Swan Boy comic ever published:
And here's the one that introduced Rona4:
"I grew up in the South and just went to church all the time," Reese explained. "There was no big falling out with me and the church. At one point I just realized, 'That's sort of a strange set of things to say to a kid.'"
He says when he first started experimenting with these sort of jokes5 he felt "like a child wearing his father's suit," but now that he has a bit more experience using these characters humans have told stories about for thousands of years Reese says it can feel "truly liberating."
And if this kind of high-concept God joke talk has you feeling like…
Then don't worry about it at all. Just go read some Swan Boy. You'll like it.
Anyway, for more Swan Boy comics, head over to swanboy.com. Also you should follow Branson Reese on Twitter and Instagram just 'cause.
George Costanza is a character from the TV show "Seinfeld" portrayed by actor Jason Alexander and based on the show's co-creator, Larry David. David and Costanza are both generally crappy people. That's the joke.
The first Swan Boy comic — which Reese says was born out of a mundane event that happened to him in real life that he simply transposed onto a swan character — was published April 6, 2018.
Reese recently experimented with his first story arc based around a character that isn't Swan Boy. This elicited the typical sort of internet criticism creators receive whenever they publicly try something new.
"People were up in arms. 'I didn't sign up for this fucking French worm,'" Reese said.
Which has some especially funny detail in the copy of the newspaper Rona's dad is reading. If that's hard to read, head on over to swanboy.com to see the full-resolution version
Which, once you become aware of them you'll realize appear all over Reese's comics. For example, the daily comic I embedded at the very top of this post? Christ, it's a joke about the Statue of Liberty burning down heaven.
