Sunday Comics | Ty Templeton, pandemic dogs and Eisner noms

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

We’d like to extend our best wishes to Ty Templeton, who recently revealed he has been diagnosed with stage 3 colo-rectal cancer in his autobiographical webcomic Bun Toons.

“So, I’m going to be having the fuzzy, floppy-eared, FUN kind of Cancer. I’ve decided,” he posted. “I’m not looking for sympathy — my experience of chemo and radiation (so far) has been quite tolerable — and I’m fairly confident I’m coming out the other side of this, alive and hopping, later this year. But I wanted folks informed, so they don’t wonder why I got SUPER-lazy this year, and just stopped drawing Batman Adventures Continue (and why I missed a couple of deadlines late last year too!).”

Sarah Mirk has created this comic for NPR on the joys and trails that come form adopting pets — something that’s been on the rise since the pandemic began and became somewhat competitive if you were looking for a new friend. It not only shares a lot of data on adoptions, but also follows her own story of trying to adopt a dog from Texas. Oh, and don’t miss the guest appearance by Bob Barker, which is not a statement I get to make that often about a comic.

Getting back to this year’s Eisner nominations, last week I highlighted a couple comics that were nominated in the “Best Short Story” category. This week let’s look at a few more nominees, starting with the “Best Digital Comic” nominee Genius Animals? It’s by Vali Chandrasekaran and Jun-Pierre Shiozawa, and it’s about “that situation where you think your relationship is going well then one day your significant other disappears and when you try to figure out what happened you can’t tell if you’ve been ghosted or have to save all of humanity.”

And then there’s the webcomics category, and I’ll start with one I’ve mentioned here before, back when it won an NCS divisional award for best online comic — Alec Longstreth’s Isle of Elsi. It’s a free, all-ages fantasy webcomic featuring magic, shady bad guys and talking dragons. You can find out more about Longstreth and order some of his comics on his website.

And finally, let’s end with another nominee from the webcomics category — Crisis Zone, by Simon Hanselmann. Hanselmann’s work is published regularly by Fantagraphics, but if you’re wanting to see it sooner than that, just follow Hanselmann’s Instagram account.