#kevin and kell

[thewebcomicsreview]

One of my big personal hang-ups with Kevin and Kell is that it's about animal people, as a vehicle for jokes about animal people. "If a rabbit married a wolf that'd be fucked up" as a premise for jokes. And that's fine, it's never pretended to be anything else and that's a perfectly cromulent premise for a funny animal comic.

But in the decades it's been running there's been stuff like Zootopia presenting "Carnivores vs Herbivores" as a metaphor for racism, Beastars as a metaphor for sexual assault, and a million furry comics presenting furries as a metaphor for any number of oppressed real-life social groups. And this shifting cultural context has really poisoned my reading of Kevin and Kell.

Like there's an ongoing storyline about a tiger living in a rabbit community who's disguised as a rabbit and trying to live a normal rabbit wife but at some point he needs to tell his girlfriend. And I keep reading it going "It this a metaphor for a white-passing POC? Is it about religious minorities dating gentiles?". And if you think about it that way a lot of the comic reads weird because the comic keeps emphasizing that carnivores really do eat herbivores on the regular and that's a weird thing if they're supposed to represent-.

But...no. It's about a tiger disguised as a rabbit. He's a tiger. It's a metaphor for him being a tiger. He's not a minority, he's a large cat. Hal, it's about cats.

[homestuckreplay]

Sub-Project Complete! ✅

I read and reviewed 13 webcomics that aren't Homestuck to get a better understanding of the medium's development across the 1990s and 2000s. I learned loads, and discovered some really excellent comics that I'll continue to be a fan of!

left-right: Kevin Dewclaw (Kevin & Kell), Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade), Margaret Browning (College Roomies from Hell!!!), Unnamed Stick Figure (explodingdog), George (Bob and George), Petitus (1/0), Philippe (Achewood), Tedd Verres (El Goonish Shive), T-Rex (Dinosaur Comics), Haley Starshine (The Order of the Stick), Penny Levac (Penny & Aggie), Hazel Tellington (Girls With Slingshots), Black Hat (xkcd)

[doggirlsotd]

Today’s dog girl of the day is Kell Declaw from Kevin and Kell!

[sailorheadcanons]

In the Kevin and Kell verse, part of the reason Serenity and Endymion's relationship was frowned on was because Serenity was a rabbit (obviously) and Endymion was a wolf. They were reincarnated as Kevin and Kell (and swapping genders, ironically).

[furry-media-tourney]

ROUND 1 BATTLE 22: HERD THINNERS

[domono08]

I don’t read Kevin and Kell. (Even through I should) but I need to draw Kell

[str8aura-no-not-that-one]

i appreciate K&K's choice to follow up a very sweet comic about the main relationship with a very mean spirited one about simulating violence senselessly. its a nice tonal whiplash

[str8aura-draws-horses-and-stuff]

@zeemczed-blog as soon as i read this i knew what i must do

[bakertoons]

No predator stands a chance against librarians. A giftart I did for Bill Holbrook, featuring Kevin from "Kevin and Kell" 

[otherkinotd]

Today's otherkin of the day is Bruno, who is herbivorekin 🐏

[thewebcomicsreview]

You know what, good job Kevin and Kell, having this storyline about a local city council election perfectly line up with real-world election day in the United States. Most comics wouldn't have bothered, hell most people wouldn't even know today is election day!

...You did know today is election day, right fellow Americans? Because it is. Some states, like Ohio, are having hugely consequential ballot decisions regarding abortion access, that I don't think I need to sell you on the importance of.

Other places, like my home city of Boston, are choosing city counselors, which seems like a minor inconsequential choice, until you remember how much influence city councils have over what housing does and doesn't get built, and thus rent in your city.

Since I live in one of the most expensive goddamn cities in the world, I did some research into my candidates' position on housing. There's a candidate who supports rent control, one who opposes all housing projects that negatively affect landlords, a YIMBY who supports building more housing in nearly every instance, and a NIMBY anti-vaxxer who wants to let conservatives take over schools. That's a pretty goddamn consequential choice, it turns out!

Your vote matters more in local elections (literally, since there are way fewer votes), local elections affect you in major and under-reported ways, and the people winning local elections now will be running for higher offices later, so getting a guy you like in at city council may may huge national dividends one day. Take some time to look up what's on your ballot, and vote if you can!

Voting: It's more than once every four years!

[homestuckreplay]

Webcomics at Day 100 #1: Kevin & Kell

Pages read: 9/3/1995 – 9/3/1996 & 4/13/2009 – 8/18/2009; about 380 pages

Reason for selection: Best I can tell this is the oldest webcomic that’s still running as well as among the first ones made. It updated every weekday from 1995-2000 and every day since then without breaks, totaling around 4500 strips as of 2009 and 10,000 strips as of 2024. This webcomic is older than I am and has been around for over 90% of the internet’s public history. While not originally intended as a ‘furry comic’ it quickly gained popularity among furries, who are an important internet subculture. K&K meetups happened at furry conventions in the 2000s.

Current status: This comic is an eternal truth of the internet

Content warnings: predator/prey dynamics

Overall thoughts: I think this strip is charming. It’s functionally identical to a newspaper strip, and there’s nothing about its presentation that couldn’t be done in print – which makes sense as its creator was already a newspaper cartoonist before starting this. Being published on the internet allows readers easy and instant access to the archives without having to buy the newspaper each day, although the sections I’ve read don’t take advantage of this by having long running storylines that require reading the archive. There is overall continuity, but jumping from 1996 to 2009 wasn’t super confusing. At the time of writing this the website is quick to load, well organized and really easy to navigate, so it’s no work at all to just start reading and get lost in the comic.

Content wise, the strip features anthropomorphic animals living in modern society (humans appear to be mythical creatures?) and includes a lot of jokes about animal traits manifesting in school, work and day to day life. Some specific jokes such as the hedgehog character getting stuck to things with her many spines are used often. Quite a few jokes rely on the fact that a significant portion of society are killing and eating the other portions on a daily basis, which is written in a lighthearted way but won’t be to everyone’s taste. I’d also describe the comic as ‘boomer humor’ in some places. Bill Holbrook began writing the strip in his late 30s so is older than the average early webcomics artist, and writes about family and technology from that perspective. The content also focuses on both nontraditional relationships and traditional family dynamics, and the ways these rub up against one another, while avoiding any genuinely controversial topics.

I love how Holbrook draws rabbits – Kevin and baby Coney’s designs are adorable to me and are the visual highlights of most strips. The character R.L., wolf and CEO of Herd Thinners Inc., is never shown in full – only his drooling mouth, fangs, and hands clasped on his desk are shown, which kicks ass as a villain design. Holbrook is also really good at conveying a character’s overall mood or vibe just through their body language in a still image, which is impressive considering how many different species he’s working with. The comic began in black and white and switched to color in 2000, and while I don’t think the color significantly improves the strip, it does make it easier to distinguish between characters of similar species as the cast has grown.

Connections to Homestuck: K&K doesn’t use the affordances of the internet (such as including gifs/sound in the comic) but it is definitely about the internet. It’s established imemdiately that titular couple Kevin & Kell first met and fell in love online, and that Kevin’s job is the system operator for the ‘herbivore forum.’ Kevin attends an online high school reunion, daughter Lindesfarne (INCREDIBLE character name) attends a virtual prom, and son Rudy stays in touch with his long distance girlfriend via email. Jokes about online life being inferior to digital are rare, and spending a lot of time online is normalized within the world of the comic, a decade or two before it became normalized in the real world.

K&K also plays with the boundary between digital and real space, and commonly depicts a character typing something into the computer to cause a physical effect in the world far away. Computers physically react to the digital content they are used for, such as Kevin’s computer starting to grow leaves and plants when he spends too much time on the herbivore forum, and digital phenomena are represented physically such as this depiction of a firewall:

I don’t think Rudy and Dave are the exact same archetype but Rudy does wear sunglasses 24/7 and is a different flavor of above it all coolguy whose feelings aren’t as secret as he thinks.

Continue reading? Probably! Despite being loosely drawn archetypes I did start caring about the characters quickly, enjoyed reading enough to go well past day 100, and have marked my place to come back to. It’s sweet and low effort entertainment that I can easily see myself digging into when I’m tired or sick.

I have sponsored today’s update which only costs $5 and is a small contribution to webcomics history.

[tgirlrhumba]

‼️⁉️

[laropasucia]

I wonder how Bill Holbrook does what he does?

It's always a trip seeing post-Homestuck webcomics try to emulate Homestuck's narrative structure without understanding that Homestuck's narrative structure only worked because of its extremely rapid update schedule. Like, yeah, you've got the whole elaborate acts-within-acts thing going on, but your comic has been running for nine years and you just hit the halfway mark on Act 1; I think maybe some reassessment is in order!

[a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e]

oh man. I was thinking how cute Francis and Ardei were together but then I realized it'll be weird as hell if/when Francis grows up. Everyone is anthro but he's a human. I feel like him having a relationship with anyone would be weird by default.

[str8aura-no-not-that-one]

Kevin and Kell, Preeny Has To Repeat Sixth Grade, and Laika's Comet all take place on a planet of animals called Furth. Coincidence???