Defunct: A Webcomic Starring Your Discarded Gadgets

We all own junk. Some of us keep junk around way after we stop using it, telling ourselves we’ll fix it up or sell it or repurpose it. In my case, a lot of it ends up in the basement.

So I’m making a webcomic about it.

It’s called Defunct. The ten-part prologue – currently halfway through –  follows an old non-HD, tube-based television as she suddenly has to start adjusting to a new life. Of course she gets to know plenty of characters who’ve been in the basement longer than she has. Sort of Toy Story meets Northern Exposure meets Circuit City.

After two weeks of daily strips, Defunct will go to a weekly schedule, updating each Monday morning. Every now and then, daily strips will return for multi-part stories.

The main site, displaying the latest strip, is defunctcomic.com. You can start from the beginning (August 24, 2015) at defunctcomic.com/first.

The site is hosted on Tumblr, so you can follow the strip right there. You can also subscribe to its RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook page. Please feel free to share, retweet, reblog, and embed individual strips, as well as bug all your friends about how great the comic is.

Since my target audience is basically nerds, you might like to know how the comic is made. Defunct is created in the 2D drawing component of LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite descended from StarOffice and using mostly the same codebase as OpenOffice. Scaling of the final strip is done with freeware called XnConvert. Both LibreOffice and XnConvert are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Yes, I know about Inkscape. I’m sure it’s lovely; I simply found LibreOffice Draw more intuitive to use for my purposes.)

Hope you all enjoy it! Oh, and tell me what other webcomics you like, and why.