Dresden Codak is a webcomic created by Aaron Diaz. The comic focuses mainly on the Singularity and machine intelligence. It's first page, "Tomorrow Man", was posted on June 8, 2005, and the comic has updated at an unpredictable and slow rate ever since. However, the lack of speedy updates is entirely forgivable because the quality of the artwork and depth of the stories presented are phenomenal.

The best way to describe the format of the comics is "very very big". Though a few of the comics have only a handful of panels, most of them have at least twenty, and every once in a while an ambitious one comes along that is upwards of thirty. Occasionally it can be hard to follow the order of the panels, though, because Diaz switches unpredictably between the Western left-to-right convention and the Eastern right-to-left order, sometimes within a single comic. A close reading of the dialogue can usually produce a reasonable guess in these cases.

Dungeons and Discourse

Dungeons and Discourse is a fictional roleplaying game explored in two of the Dresden Codak comics (titled "Dungeons and Discourse" and "Advanced Dungeons and Discourse"). The game borrows its underlying mechanics from Dungeons and Dragons, but rather than modeling characters, settings, and abilities after medieval fantasy, Dungeons and Discourse models them after philosophical theories. There has been work by members of the Dresden Codak forums to create a fully-playable game from the ideas presented in the two comics.

HOB

HOB was the title of a series of Dresden Codak comics running through 2007 and 2008. The series dealt with what could happen to a society that had rejected the Singularity but was forced to use its high technology to survive. Much of the character of each of the three main characters (Kimiko Ross, Dimitri Tokamak, and Alina Tokamak) was also developed as a part of the HOB story. The conclusion of the HOB story completely separated the Dresden Codak timeline from the present timeline, changing Dresden Codak's genre from modern science fiction to futuristic science fiction.

Diaz's impressive character development and fantastic art make Dresden Codak one of my most anticipated comics every day. I earnestly await the time when he achieves his goal of updating weekly. In the mean time, he is hard at work producing a television spin-off of the comic (though I do not believe that it is intended for television-television.




Dresden Codak official site.