Whomp Comic by Ronnie Filyaw
Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.
I’m not 100% sure how to start this particular post. With all my previous posts, it was easy because I knew what I liked about the comics I was writing about and they all sort of fall in a similar indie vein. If you read my work you certainly wouldn’t think that Whomp is my favorite comic going and has been for years. I don’t know how to articulate why I love it so much. But I’m in the middle of reread of the entire archive this year, and I need to fill up an entire week of posts, so let’s see if I can pull off an article that articulates my love for this comic other than, “This hits Anna’s humor sweet spot.”
(These are all screen shots from my iPad by the way because I’ve been saving all my favorite strips and spamming my boyfriend with emails full of them. I’m not sure how happy is about that but he loves me so he has to deal).
Whomp is a comic strip that stars a fictional-esque version of Filyaw himself (from now on, I will be referring to the character in the strip as Ronnie and the author by his surname). Ronnie is a cartoonist that struggles with his weight, anxiety, depression, loneliness, the grind that is creating comics (hmmm... if you know me and my work there might be more similarities here than I originally thought). I think the difference is that Whomp is hilarious in a way my work isn’t.
Whomp has a lot of the self deprecating humor many web comics have, as well as a lot of mainstream nerd cultural appeal which is popular today that I personally don’t relate to. But Whomp is really smart and has a lot of elements that make it unique.
It’s primarily slice of life but then has fantastical elements that are woven into the comic seamlessly. For example, Ronnie’s absent father is literally Santa Clause. My favorite fantasy character is Motivation Dude (M Dude) who is a physical manifestation of Ronnie’s motivation and is incredibly cruel and unforgiving.
(To call myself out a little bit, I say I don’t relate to nerd culture but I do have a dragon ball tattooed on my left breast. But I stand by my original claim because I regret it).
Whomp is primarily a single a day gag strip but there actually is quite a bit of world building that happens over the course of it. You find out the believable in world explanation for M Dude, you find out quite a number of ways that Ronnie having a magical father like Santa Clause impacts his day to day life, you find out why Ronnie’s pet panda disappears after three appearances years later.
Filyaw is also a very competent artist. Many of the gags wouldn’t work if he didn’t nail a particular concept or an expression (he has an incredible knack for expressions).
So in conclusion, Whomp is a unique gem of a comic. It’s hilarious and relatable and I hope I did a decent job of conveying some of the reasons I love it to you all.
You can follow Ronnie Filyaw on Twitter and here is his website. You can read Whomp here. You can follow me here @annasellheim and my website is here.
THIS WEEKEND: I stay on my snobby indie brand and discuss three zines that I came out this year that I’m really into!
