Cardboard Colin and the Wasps

By Philippa Rice
mycardboardlife.com

Philippa Rice does the awesome webcomic My Cardboard Life. All the artwork for it is done by cutting out pieces of paper, cardboard, and other material and arranging them into panels. It's incredibly well done, and funny too. It's one of the webcomics that I read every day, and I encourage you to click on the link above and read some.

Cardboard Colin is one of the main characters in My Cardboard Life, and from the description above you can guess that he is just some pieces of cardboard (with drawn in arms, legs, and eyes). Horrible things frequently happen to him (currently he is pretending to be a pop-star horse and has developed a sugar cube addiction). In this comic some wasps land on his head, don't go away for ages, and eventually settle in to raise a family.

The humour in My Cardboard Life frequently comes from the utterly bizarre experiences that the characters become involved in, but the characters also have distinct personalities, however "two-dimensional" or "paper thin" they may be (sorry, that was a terrible joke), and the interactions between them also creates humour in the comics.

I mentioned above how much I enjoyed Rice's cut and paste artwork, but I'll just repeat that again because I think it's really good. The amount of emotion Rice manages to get out of a square of cardboard and some dots for eyes always impresses me. I also enjoy the way Rice uses metatextual references to create humour from the way the strip is physically put together.

Rice also makes totally awesome dioramas to display at comic events. Below is the one from Thought Bubble a couple of weeks ago. How many of the comics on display have you read?