Webcomic Review Month 2013: Knights Errant

Meant to talk about this a few days ago but it slipped my mind, I seem to have finally found a partial solution to keeping up with all my comics. I've mentioned in the past that when I started reading webcomics (using Safari as my browser) I just made bookmark folders but that hasn't really worked for Firefox or Chrome. But this winter I installed an RSS feed collector right into Chrome and about 80, maybe 90% of my webcomics these days have RSS feeds so I've been able to keep up with everything nicely. Some comics don't have RSS feeds, or have ones but don't seem to be working (and whenever I mention it in the comments section I never an answer) and for those I still use twitter/facebook as a way to follow them but thankfully most of those comics also update promptly. I've seen more people using feed aggregator sites, such as Comic Rocket and Ink Outbreak, in the past year and while I can see the appeal I just follow entirely too many comics and when I find a new one I don't want to go to all the hassle to see if it's on the site already or not. In any case, onto tonight's review!


Knights Errant by Jennifer "theyoungdoyley" Doyle

Wilfrid is a mercenary who rather likes being one and is thrilled when a war breaks out between the nations of Aster-Morgaria and Vetal. They join a group of mercenaries known as the Errant Knights due to their reputation and discovers that their young commander, Oswald Dytel, is even more intriguing than he first appears.

Normally I wouldn't read a comic like this because, well, the characters are asses. But they are well-developed, amusing, and interesting asses and I like a story with good character development so why not! The summary mentions a war going on and while that's certainly a driving force lurking in the background of the story, so far everything has been rather character driven, although if the prologue is any indication that plot will kick in sooner or later, for better or for worse. The art style varies quite a bit from section to section, I have yet to figure out if there's a pattern or reason why some pages are in full color and others are not (believe me I have been trying for months now) but regardless of whatever style or color the pages are in the art is dynamic, expressive, and as it goes on increasingly detailed as well. I find the art style rather attractive, and thankfully not overly gorey, so while a bit inconsistent it's not jarring enough to take most readers out of the story. 


Knights Errant can be read on it's website and does not seem to have a print edition yet, although I'm sure one is coming down the road. It can also be read online in Russian which appears to be only a few pages behind the English version.

One thing that does have me worried about this comic is how it has a rather complicated set of character relationships and politics, which is awesome, but it hasn't updated in a bit and I'm worried that I'm going to start forgetting who was who and where they stand. And this is a worry I have with a lot of webcomics actually, the one great failing of webcomics is how they update so much more slowly than print comics (some might put out a full chapter a month, very few, and others will barely get a chapter out in a year) and that just completely messes with the pacing. I'm sure this comic will start updating again soon, I'm not too worried about that, but it does make me ruminate on what the proper way to read it is, there's no point in reading scattered updates if I know that I'll forget what happened in a month but I want to read it regardless, maybe someday I'll find a happy compromise between the two of them.


2012 "K" Comic

2011 "J" Comic
2011 "K" Comic