Nature of Nature's Art

[Anarchic Fox]

Nature of Nature's Art. Content warning: everything except rape and pornography.

This comic is on its fifth arc, with around 1700 total pages. Every single arc is a doozy. The current one is about sex slavery, and is most definitely NC-17. However, there's nothing pornographic or intended to titillate, which is a relief considering every character is quadrupedal.

This is my favorite webcomic by a large margin: nothing else, not even OotS (my second favorite), comes close. Here are some images (five of them, 640 pixels wide, all SFW) to whet your appetite. I do have permission to post these, and all are fully SFW.

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Be warned, this webcomic can and will make you feel bad, despite its brilliant moments of manic humor. The completed arcs are happier. Here's what they're about:

10%+: A young maned wolf and his cat friend confront their professors over a plan to enslave wild coyotes.
Secretary: A degu student meets a kangaroo rat, but their friendship is subsumed by ambition.
Lycosa: A wolf spider searches for her lost egg sac.
Solar System: The entire damn solar system is in peril, and only a human, a chimpanzee, a dog, a guinea pig and a rat are in a position to save it.

I don't think I've violated any forum rules in this post, but we'll see.

[Elanasaurus]

Dang, that font is really hard to read!

Also, may I ask why this is your favourite webcomic?

[Anarchic Fox]

Also, may I ask why this is your favourite webcomic?

The most honest answer is, because I was there from the beginning -- page 28 or 29 out of 1700. I was browsing the Webcomics Top 100 list one day and saw a neat GIF of two canids fighting.

[Elanasaurus]

Alright then. Cool. Happy reading.

[Anarchic Fox]

I'll make a more serious attempt to answer the question.

I do not know another artist who can draw animals so well and so quickly. We get two pages a week -- which, by the way, are two to three times the size of a normal comics-book page -- with interesting layouts, expressive characters, vivid colors and well-developed symbolism. Not only that, the anatomy of these animals surpasses most artists who draw from references -- which Mr. Braun, I think, does not. Most animal artists end up specializing in one kind of animal, with their others noticeably worse, but in this case the mustelids, canids, felids, and rodents all look good. (Okay, when humans and ungulates show up they tend to look wonky.) My single favorite drawing of a fox occurs in the print version of Wild Style, which was not an arc, but rather him doing joke-a-day gag humor for a month.

The stories sound simple when summarized, but most of the arcs are every bit as detailed and involuted as the plot of Watchmen. The characterization is the best I've found in comics, web or print. When an arc starts, you may think you know what cliche or archetype a character fulfills, but by the time the story ends that character will have changed drastically, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. In the early days, the comic billed itself as a series of Kung Fu stories involving animals, and that held true up until arcs four and five. But if it were compared to Kung Fu movies, this would be one of the more esoteric ones, like Master Killer or Hero. The animals possess their own version of augmented reality, and the most powerful martial artists have the powers you'd expect to see from a classic D&D illusionist.

The visual pacing of each story is occasionally broken by magnificent, oversized pages. The most ridiculous of these is page 292 of Solar System, which is about 12000x8000 pixels (no, I did not include an extra zero) and requires a Java applet to read. These oversized pages are a rare treat, and usually represent a moment of profound victory or decision for the protagonists. As for the narrative tone, four out of five arcs are dark, the exception being the samurai thriller Lycosa. However, these dark stories are regularly broken up -- or in Syconium's case, begun -- with brilliant, albeit manic, humor. Even the horror story Secretary, which contains the most horrific imagery I've seen in comics (and I've read the print version of From Hell), contains some of this humor. It's a shame Mr. Braun won't write a comedy arc, because it would be great.

Um... I can say more, but this is already enough for a nice encomium. Oh, wait, here's one more thing. The level of discourse on NofNA's webpage is the highest I've seen for a comments section anywhere on the Internet.

[Elanasaurus]

Wow. That sounds super cool. I'll check it out.

[Anarchic Fox]

Have fun! For what it's worth, the first few pages of Syconium are as explicit as it ever gets. Almost all the rest of the sex happens between scenes or off-panel.

(Man, this is an embarrassing comic to proselytize for. Maybe I should have registered back when Solar System was approaching its end.)

[Elanasaurus]

Don't be embarrassed. I already read the opening of Syconium and had a laugh.

[Anarchic Fox]

The protagonist is currently battling her way through all her inner demons, and being both an artist and a courtesan, she has quite a few.