Scary Go Round is a webcomic by John Allison. Running from 2002 to 2009, it is set in the fictional North Yorkshire town of Tackleford and follows university students battling fantasy and science fiction threats to the town. The comic was a successor to Allison's first comic, Bobbins, and was followed by Bad Machinery, all of which take place in the same general setting.

The comic received praise from multiple British newspapers, and it won the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for best comic in 2005.

History

Scary Go Round began in 2002. It followed on from Allison's first webcomic, Bobbins, and features many of the same characters. According to Allison, Scary Go Round was originally intended to run at the same time as Bobbins, but Allison said that he ended Bobbins for several reasons: to leave Keenspot, to focus on Scary Go Round, and because Scary Go Round was a "clean slate" to write compared to Bobbins which he called "a big mess". By contrast, Scary Go Round was intended from the start to be a work that could be printed in book form. and in a later interview he said it was "his living".

Scary Go Round was created in vector graphics program Adobe Illustrator, as opposed to earlier comics by Allison which he drew by hand on paper.

Allison has also used the term "Scary Go Round" to refer generally to his works that are connected to the same setting. As of 2021, the scarygoround.com site no longer hosts the Scary Go Round comics; instead the main page links to the various comics produced by Allison as well as to a site where PDFs of Scary Go Round can be purchased.

Premise

The characters in Scary Go Round are a group of students at Tackleford University. constantly finds itself under attack by superhero-comic-style threats such as samurai, werewolves, giant robots, dimensional doorways, Bible-thumping witches, shy zombies and polite biker gangs. As of the new comic Bad Machinery it appears she has returned as a newspaper journalist, at least temporarily.

  • Looks Brains and Everything – The first Scary Go Round collection : strips from 27 August 2002 to 28 February 2003
  • Blame The Sky – The second Scary Go Round collection : strips from 4 March 2003 to 27 March 2004
  • Skellington – The 3rd Scary Go Round collection : strips from 9 May 2004 to 11 March 2005
  • The Retribution Index – The 4th Scary Go Round collection : strips from 14 March 2005 to 17 February 2006
  • Great Aches – The 5th Scary Go Round collection : strips from 27 February 2006 to 22 December 2006
  • Ahoy Hoy! – The 6th Scary Go Round collection : strips from 1 January 2007 to 2 November 2007
  • Peloton – The 7th Scary Go Round collection : strips from 5 November 2007 to 5 September 2008
  • Recklessly Yours – The 8th and Final Scary Go Round collection : strips from 8 September 2008 to 11 September 2009

Reception

Writing for The Sunday Times in 2006, Danny O'Brien called Scary Go Round one of the "coolest strips online", describing it as "postmodern British Horror" which was "subtle and stylishly drawn, with a bold cartoon edge". O'Brien said that the comic "reek[s] of cool Britannia" and that the dialogue "ma[de] a pleasant change from the nonstop Americana of most comics".

Writing for Wizard magazine in 2006, Brian Warmoth said that Scary Go Round "stitches a world of frightfully bizarre and at times even Lovecraftian happenings together with a brilliantly quirky cast indicative of his understatedly British sense of humor."

Michael Whitney reviewed Scary Go Round in 2004 for the blog The Webcomics Examiner. Whitney said that compared to vector art used in Bobbins, "The paper dolls loosened up. The figures were squashed and stretched to make them feel more natural." Whitney said that Scary Go Round "decoupled" the Bobbins characters from gag humor, relationship obsession and reality: "They meander into stories full of zombies, witches and inter-dimensional doorways." Whitney added that despite the horror elements of the setting, "the characters take their circumstances too well to let us feel that they're facing a genuine threat in a horror story sense... The tone is too silly for genuinely dire consequences, which may be why Allison fielded some angry response when he killed off a popular character, Shelley, early in the strip." (Shelley would return to life in a later storyline.) It also won Outstanding Original Digital Art in 2003 and jointly won Outstanding Art in 2004 (tied with Mac Hall), and was nominated for a further 18 awards over the WCCA's history.

References

  • (the Scary Go Round series is no longer available at this site, but instead it has links to buy PDFs of the series)