The webcomics review said it has the best ending to any webcomic of all time, I don't think that's true but Narbonic is pretty good.
Narbonic is a comic about Dave Davenport, average scurbby joe who winds up joining up with Helena Narbon's mad science villa, the two slowly fall in love as he gets dragged on various different misadventures, including team moral compass Artie, psycho intern Mell Kelly, and they're usual rival Professor Lupin Madblood.
The comic itself only ran for around 6 years, which is a good amount of time in anywhere but the webcomic world, and if you want to know my opinions on it, it’s good, not great, but good, now it’s time to get into the spoiler segment.
To preface this, my overall thought on Narbonic are complicated by how I viewed it, over the course of around 3 days, mostly in college classrooms and lunch halls, which may have impacted my ability to see key details. You are now warned
The two comparisons I was making when reading Narbonic are that of El Goonish Shive and of 1/0, two webcomics I do really like (I should get to rereading 1/0) even with my issues with them El Goonish Shive mostly because of how early EGS seemed to be ripping it off (wonder if it's true, maybe in EGS next Q&A) and 1/0 because I can tell that it was inspired by it.
Most Narbonic strips have a formula, introduce a concept (Lupin has a moon base, Dave is now a girl, Helen turning into Dave, Dave made a robot toaster that summons demons from hell), and will then spend a few comic riffing on it, often repeating the events of the comic as a plotline slowly escalates forward. Stylistically it resembles the newspaper comics it draws inspiration from, with a bit of the arc structure feeling like 1/0’s.
While the comic starts out somewhat slow (though not nearly to something like EGS), the Dave dies arc in particular I feel lasted too long, soon afterwards, and especially after Dave goes to moon the comic picks up, arcs feel like the escalate strongly and naturally and slowly build up their overarching narrative. Out of the arcs, I really liked D-Con, Professor Madblood and the Doppleganger Gambit, Angels and Dave Davenport gets Unstuck in Time, for a cute premise, being really fun, having a lot of excellent payoffs and good character development respectively.
Dave himself the main character slowly undergoes an arc of slowly getting more and more accustumed to the world of mad science, and that he's honestly not a great person, although he does show a tendancy, especially in the middle of the comic, to be randomly principled on occasion. This is also partially do to as revealed later the scheming of Helen herself who sees Dave's potenial for mad science and wants to use it to make a cure as some kind of gift to him, by sort of deliberately lowering him in to test him.
Dave's probably the most strongly written character, which is good though overall, I would say something about the cast never quite clicked for me. The passive amorality of everyone but Artie was a bit of a turn off, though they at least admitted it, in general it's not EGS, or VE or even 1/0 character while not quite taking a back seat is put somewhat second to gags and plot, though both are often driven by Dave's own arc.
In general I'd say Artie was a highlight, outside of Dave he was always the most complete character in terms of transformation, both literal and metaphorical, his relationship with both the lab and once he can become human, Mel also had a bit more depth than the silly gag character type she was, her future self is a lot more spiteful than normal and we do see she does somewhat care about her friends, as much as she pretends not top, definitely a bit character but more complex than she seems. You could say similar things for Lupin, there's always a bit more to him than it seems. I think I liked him a bit more than Mel, but they're both kinda jokey, Lupin doesn't even really have an arc.
Helen was the other main character and deuteragonist, raised as an experiment to be a mad scientist, seemingly endlessly confident and the leader has a tendency to drag Dave into insane adventures. By the end, she's probably the more normal of the two though, they directly mentioned that, which is odd, since her own amorality and tendency to drag people into her misadventures was the center of her character, so when she's in a more serious position in the last arc, it does feel a bit flat.
I also feel there's more to explore about her and The Cure, you occasionally get the sense in the later half especially that being a mad scientist is something Helen was kinda dragged into, at least later on, early on it feels more like a real passion. She was basically designed to be one after all. I feel like she probably should've contemplated taking her cure more, I don't think she should take it (though I can see an ending where it's a role reversal, and she’s the sane one while Dave’s mad) I think she should probably be talked out of it, probably by Mel or Dave. Maybe even Artie.
In general, the theme of Narbonic, or at least one of the main ones, seems to be the line between the real world and the fantastical, the comic introduces this idea that supernatural science shit can’t be perceived by ordinary humans, you have to be some kind of crazy to see all this stuff, Dave’s whole arc is his slow dive into the world of crazy, contrasted by his clone Dave Prime who winds up being the version of Dave who takes the cure, and winds up a mindless drone working under Helen and can’t see Artie in his talking gerbil form. Similarly Dave’s brother can’t see the robot union Dave’s driving to Wisconsin (long story). With the cure being the sort of apotheosis of this idea.
One of the ways this is explored is the idea of mad science as this curse you're born with where if you have it and you snap your brain kinda gets broken and you get techno-superpowers to make like portals to hell. Dave passively being able to make doomsday devices out of random shit is later revealed to be the nascent stage of this. It’s a neat idea and key to Dave’s character arc, though I feel it’s partially there as a sort of way to keep the moral problems of the cast to a minimum, they're not fully in control. Though Helen does mellow out over time, and I wouldn’t really consider Lupin “crazy” per say.
While it’s clearly central to the motives of a good chunk of the cast, from Helen’s relationship to mad science, to Artie’s slow acclimation to the human world, to the punk reporter Zeta who introduces the concept, and searches for the supernatural being a creation of Helen and her mother, it never really fully comes around, we never see say a person who can’t see the supernatural forced to confront it or something like that. The character who represents this idea, the clone Dave, winds up dying to give Dave a new body. I’ve heard that they explore this idea more in the sequel Skin Horse, but I haven’t read it yet.
Other major characters are Antonio, a police officer super linguist who serves as a rival to Mel though he never acknowledges her, a conspiracy of people named Dave (who are more like a collective character), Caliban, an ex-demon turned Mel's boyfriend, Lovelace, the oddly important to the ending robot assistant to Lupin, Their all solid, I particularly liked Caliban, though they mostly exist in response to our “heroes”. Though thanks to the comics intertwined nature, often end up coming back around, there's sort of a since that a good number of them have their own lives off screen.
The thing I’d like to praise most is the comics mix of brevity and leading plotlines, the comic lasted six years, which by webcomic standards is not a lot, it’s not an El Goonish Shive meant to last forever, it’s not an overly ambitious dreamwork like Vast Error, it’s a story with a clear beginning middle and end, like 1/0 or to a lesser extent Alabaster (which straddles the line between VE style dreamwork and something like Narbonic), and a lot of it was planned ahead, a lot of plot points are seeded into the future, in particular in the literal our protagonist goes into the dark future arc sets up most of the last arc, and basically everything leads to something. You read the commentary between strips and hear of things being planned months in advance. There was a plan here.
The comic loves to seed little plotlines between arcs, like how the survivor of Artie’s mad mouse creation winds up making a army of hamsters before dying of their own madness, those mice wind up hanging out with the dentist who lived beneath the main casts old building, who teaches them libertarianism leading them to build a doomsday machine in their later creators image, acting as the central threat for the Artie half of the finale.
And of course there’s the swimming pool. Everyone loves the swimming pool. You just gonna have to read the comic to find out what I’m talking about.
Probably my favorite of these is the story of Seth, Dave’s shitty friend. In the comic, it’s established one of Dave’s friends outside the group in his DND group is Seth, a vaguely dating obsessed geek who kinda sucks, when Dave turns into a woman he winds up going on a weird fake date with Seth because Seth’s desperate and had Lord of the Rings tickets, the date breaks off thanks to Helen’s intervention and the two decide to ignore it for a while.
Of course, Seth returns during the Halloween party arc as Mel’s date, they went to the same college and Mel was kind of dateless in spite of her popularity. Seth’s mostly just desperate in general. The date winds up being crashed by fail-demon Caliban who hides out there to dodge demons who wind up crashing and taking Seth to hell, before being transferred to the Dave cult thanks to Mel lawyering her way through. Mel herself winds up dating Caliban and Seth winds up replaced in the DND group by a woman, who really wants to run a sailor moon campaign.
While he disappears from the strip, he comes back after Dave builds a portal to hell out of their friends microwave and it starts spewing weird angel monsters where it’s revealed his time in hell turned him into a demon-slaying badass, and he still can’t get a date, he winds up joining with their new sailor moon campaign as Dave winds up off to his date with Helen.
He’s not a very important character, but he’s layered through all this plotlines, each of whom has its own purpose, like helping Dave and Helen ship tease get off the group (the genderbending is cancelled by kissing, very El Goonish Shive core), helping reintroduce Caliban or establishing Dave’s increasing power as a nascent mad scientist. Through the hell stuff he’s weirdly entangled with Mel and Caliban, he’s only a side character but he’s got a whole rhythm to him.
That’s how intertwined everything is, and that’s a strength, and the brevity means everything has a climax, it’s not going to just last forever like EGs and Vast Error, everything eventually does come crashing down. That’s where I see the 1/0 influence here, it’s similarly contained, and builds up it’s cast similarly, though the white void premise makes it much more of a literal endeavor than in Narbonic, which is much less constrained.
I don’t think Narbonic would’ve worked at all if it were as long as something like EGS or VE, I could imagine other storylines with the characters, but the way things build up and intersect is a key strength of the comic.
On the ending itself, while I’m not sure I liked everything, the gerbil stuff ended in a massive anti-climax and Helen’s arc feels like it’s missing a piece, but it was a huge treat to see Dave actually lose it and finally unleash his whole mad science plan, plus we got some solid Artie and Mel in there as well.
I think I may have been a bit too harsh up top, I wound up reading the authors commentary for this (it’s placed really awkwardly on the main site, it’s kind of distracting), and you can really see a lot of love for the characters and love for Narbonic, a singular experience, and sometimes in a webcomic that’s what you need.
7.5/10 - If you want something you can read in a few hours and makes you go, oh that yeah, read Narbonic.
Link Here: Narbonic !