minus is a webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

 created by Ryan Armand that ran from February 2006 to July 2008. It is a member of Koala Wallop, a webcomic collective that also includes Dresden Codak

Dresden Codak

Dresden Codak is a webcomic written and illustrated by Aaron Diaz. Described by Diaz as a "celebration of science, death and human folly", the comic presents stories that deal with elements of philosophy, science and technology, and/or psychology...

and Rice Boy. It was nominated for an Eisner Award

Eisner Award

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...

 in 2007 in the category of Best Digital Comic. New strips were usually released weekly on Thursdays. Many of the strips are standalone stories, though several follow a longer story or theme over the course of several weeks.

Plot

The comic follows the adventures of minus (always uncapitalized), a young girl with the power to change almost anything in the world around her, from the flow of time to her own appearance. minus is otherwise a typical child: fairly amiable, excitable, impulsive, and only vaguely aware that other people feel pain. Consequently, the comic ranges from flights of fancy to moments of surreal horror. In various strips minus has climbed into paintings and chalk drawings, brought inanimate objects to life, killed out of spite, turned a library into a pirate ship, become the ruler of a colony of ants, swum with mermaids in her bathtub and pulled the plug when she was done, and various other fantastical situations.

Between capers minus is a quiet child, or at least lonely. Her only conventionally real friend is a green-haired girl from school. minus speaks when spoken to but is content to wander by herself, often up or down vertical inclines, or doodle. The comic wanders into and out of short plotlines as minus gets ideas or loses interest, and changes her hair color with every strip.

minus is a large-format colour strip, drawn and painted on 15x20" illustration boards. On the strip's Web page, Armand states that he imagined minus as “a comic strip for a newspaper in the early 20th century”, in reference to both the art style and amount of space given (far greater than the usual three or four panel layout of most newspaper strips). He has cited the works of Shigeru Mizuki

Shigeru Mizuki

is a Japanese manga author, most known for his Japanese horror manga GeGeGe no Kitaro . A specialist in stories of yōkai, he is considered a master of the genre...

, and Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator.A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades...

's Little Nemo

Little Nemo

Little Nemo is the main fictional character in a series of weekly comic strips by Winsor McCay that appeared in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspapers from October 15, 1905 – April 23, 1911 and April 30, 1911 – July 26, 1914; respectively.The...

as stylistic influences, referring to the latter as “a playground for bizarre ideas which are ends in themselves”; a similar approach to storytelling is used in the minus comic strips. He also cites John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

's Cannery Row

Cannery Row (novel)

Cannery Row is an English language novel by American author John Steinbeck. It was published in 1945. A film version was released in 1982. A stage version was produced in 1995....

and the films of Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi Kitano

is a Japanese filmmaker, comedian, singer, actor, film editor, presenter, screenwriter, author, poet, painter, and one-time video game designer who has received critical acclaim, both in his native Japan and abroad, for his highly idiosyncratic cinematic work. The famed Japanese film critic...

as other examples of stories that eschew straightforward plot development and conflict and focus just on characters and the small events that happen to them.

External links

• Official site
• RSS feed
• http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2007-12-25/2007-japan-media-arts-festival-jury-recommends-works