So if you’re still looking for a few gifts for your gamer friends this holiday season, why not check out the Humble Indie Bundle of games? Until December 27th, gamers have the chance to name their price for a bundle of five independently developed computer games . . . and they can choose how the money is distributed, between the game developers, The American Red Cross, and Child’s Play Charity.* Those who pay more than the average will also receive the games from the previous bundle, along with a copy of Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles.

And as long as I’m promoting a few good causes, I’ll also put in a link for GoodSearch, a search engine that donates a portion of its ad revenue to whichever charity the searchers pick. Just go to their web site, enter the charity of your choice, and start searching. They also have a shopping division that allows you to donate a portion of your purchases to charity as well.

With that, I wish you all happy holidays and a new year full of good will.

* I’ve given a direct link to the charities as well, so if you don’t want the games, you can always just donate directly to them.

This stands in contrast to The Towerlight, student newspaper for Towson University, subject of recent controversy over an explicit sex column and publisher of the comic I’ll be reviewing this week. While that may seem to be an unfair introduction to Less Than Three (submitted for review by Steven Baird, who writes and draws the comic), it’s a bit more relevant than you’d think. Like the last self-submitted comic, <3 does its best to make NSFW seem like such an inadequate tag.

Originally intended to be a World of Warcraft comic, <3 shortly found itself in print and didn’t seem to know what to do from there. There were a few editorial cartoons and cracks in the fourth wall before the comic settled into a sporadic regimen of poop jokes, sex jokes, poop sex jokes, celebrity smear gags, more sex jokes, and loud left-wing politics.*

Some of the time, Baird’s comics rely on pop-culture references for their jokes. (As the saying goes, “Steal from the best.”) This includes sources as diverse as Peanuts, The Wizard of Oz, VG Cats, The Silence of the Lambs, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Resident Evil, Star Trek, Batman, and (perhaps most baffling) The Newlywed Game. His comic titles have also referenced Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and Terry Pratchett (who is himself referencing Alan Moore). Of course, it’s somewhat depressing to see an allusion to Robert Burns tacked onto a comic about a mentally retarded ice cream cake.

Oh, well. At least he loves his mother.

Comic Rating: Two evil Snuggies.

* Political humor has its merits, chief of which being that as long as you express a popular opinion, people will laugh at your jokes no matter how tasteless or cruel they would otherwise be. The problem, however, is that it’s rarely done well enough to get people on the other side of the aisle to laugh. And once you start regularly expressing your political opinions in the middle of an otherwise neutral comic, BAM—there goes half your audience.

Enter Weregeek by Alina Pete, the most recent addition to Keenspot Comics and one of the more recent additions to my reading list. Just her cast page reads like a list of the people I’m usually eating lunch or attending medieval club meetings with: there’s the guy who still wants to be normal; the small, energetic LARPer girl; the “lovable lug”; the sarcastic MMO addict; the hyperactive fangirl; the guy who can’t stop talking; and the woman who dresses in vaguely pirate fashion. There’s even the occasional normal person who wanders over and lasts all of five minutes before fleeing in terror.

The art style is easy on the eyes. Being a graphic designer, artist, and animator, Pete is another of the cartoonists who have quite nicely avoided the typical webmanga look in favor of something fresh. And every character is recognizable and distinct from the others, which I can tell you is no mean feat. It’s a good litmus test of an art style to see if you can still tell characters apart after you change their clothes, and Pete is able to pull this off. You can even tell who’s playing which character in the many “gaming night” plot diversions by their resemblance to the players.

Speaking of plot diversions, the plot is where the comic gets either its most confusing or most fun, depending on which side of the line you want to sit on. The story at its most superficial concerns itself with Mark, an otherwise normal young man who, under the light of the full moon, develops a bad haircut and jaundice. Just kidding! He’s merely forced to confront his repressed desires to enjoy role-playing games and quote cult-favorite movies by being driven insane and running for the closest gaming shop post-haste.

That’s right, Mark is a weregeek. And as pretty much every recent monster movie other than Dog Soldiers has taught us, were-things are noble things, but terribly misunderstood. Hence, they must keep their existence a guarded secret and band together on full moons. Unless, of course, they feel like freaking the mundanes, in which case it’s perfectly fine to fling your darkest secrets to the wind and whatnot.

And you’d think they’d be a bit more careful when they have violent psychopaths tailing them. Yes, there are geek hunters. People determined to dress alike and preserve the city’s sense of normalcy by hunting down every last geek and making them suffer. Y’know, kinda like high school, except they kill you instead of stuffing you in a locker and calling you gay. Then again, considering that geeks are actually vicious shadowbeast fiends in human form as opposed to well-meaning social maladroits, maybe the hunters have more of a clue than the geeks give them credit for.

There’s also the trickiness of the storyline taking detours through various gaming experiences without much prior warning. Occasionally you can’t even tell that they’re in a deeper layer of fiction until someone ends up with elf ears or something. It’s not worth a massive gripe, and it’s not like it turned me away from the comic, but it can be disorienting on occasion.

So there you have it. I recommend giving Weregeek a look, if only to immerse yourself in the occasional justified wackiness that pops up.

Comic Rating: 2d6 + Int.