Week 14: The Perry Bible Fellowship


This week’s reading was The Perry Bible Fellowship, a webcomic by Nicholas Gurewitch. I’m going to write my thoughts and feelings as always, but there is one thing you need to say about it: it’s just funny. If I had to sum up my experience in a sentence, I’d say “It’s funny and I liked it.” I’m not that complicated.
I had seen strips from The Perry Bible Fellowship floating around online for a long time, but I never sought it out: Experiencing Perry Bible has always been an experience thrust upon me, but it was never unwelcomed. I think what kept me from pursuing the franchise further was the default style of simple little white figures. While simplicity helps to elevate comedy, the style wasn’t that stimulating. However, now that I’ve read all that is available, I’ve since discovered that there are beautiful watercolor/colored pencil pieces.
Apparently, the strip was named after a church in Perry, Maine and has supposedly been running since 2001. There is a decent number of comics on the website, https://pbfcomics.com/, but maybe it doesn’t update that much since I was able to read all of them in less than an hour. It reminds me of humor from animated shorts on Newgrounds.com, where the punchline is often violence, sexual innuendo, or just mean-spirited. Unlike what you might find on Newgrounds, though, none of the content is horrifically offensive (unless you’re not into anything raunchy). The violence is never too gory and the sexual content is limited to tasteful nudes. Also, The Perry Bible Fellowship punches up instead of down in most cases, which I can appreciate.

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