Last night I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for ages, which is reading through the archives of the Prohibition-era noirish webcomic Lackadaisy. I've probably set a world record for procrastinating on reading it, because I've been aware of it for almost the entire time the artist has been doing it (... it started in 2006), and in fact have been following her on Tumblr for the last couple of years because her art's really pretty and I wanted the reminder that I need to sit down and read this thing, since I figured it would be 100% my cup of tea.

And it really is. It's gorgeous, funny, bleak, and sharply characterized -- a lot more of all of these things than you'd realize from the first few pages, which are Looney-Tunes-esque hijinks with a hapless, incompetent bootlegger going through various mishaps trying to get a shipment of moonshine for the stylish boss he's got a crush on. (Just FYI, the characters are all cats, but you get used to that pretty quickly.)

And once the plot starts to kick in, it turns out that these aren't sanitized bootleggers; they're really awful people. We first meet one of the main characters drenched in blood and wielding a hatchet after coolly chopping up an informant to be fed to pigs. One of the characters can't climb stairs because his knees don't work; we later learn that this is because one of the other protagonists kneecapped him (probably in self-defense). One of the sweetest, nicest characters in the comic goes axe-crazy when threatened and backed against a wall, and the others actively encourage this despite the horrendous psychological toll it's clearly taking on him and the fact that he doesn't even want to be in the gang, because they're cash-strapped and need cheap muscle.

So basically it's not feel-good, edges-sanded-off noir, but it's also got that thing I fall for every time, with a broken group of people being each other's family and scrambling through the wreckage of their lives and the fallout from their own poor life choices trying to put something together that's better than what they had before. (Though in this case, it's more of a broken, dysfunctional family than a happy one.) I really loved all of them by the time I caught up with the newest updates, even the ones I didn't really like at first.

And the art's just gorgeous. I mean, look at this. Or this. Or here.

Being as it's noir, and there's also a hurtling-towards-disaster kind of feeling overall, I suspect that no one's going to come out well; I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing ends in a blaze of glory shootout or something like that. I fully expect to have my heart ripped out by the end. But I loved it enough to go and pledge to the artist's Patreon just to see the behind-the-scenes bits and process art. I recommend it highly, especially if you like period stuff.

Once you've read the main story, definitely read the side comics and character bios too; they're hilarious.

The comic archive starts here.