Narbonic

Narbonic is a webcomic written and drawn by Shaenon K. Garrity and syndicated through the Modern Tales website. The story arcs center around the various misadventures of the staff of Narbonic Labs, which is the domain of mad scientist Helen Narbon.

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About the strip

Narbonic is a hand-drawn strip (made without benefit of computer assistance even in the shading and lettering) in the traditional American four panel newspaper cartoon strip style. Its adventures focus on Helen Beta Narbon, the clone child of renowned evil Mad Scientist Doctor Helen Narbon, her Evil Intern Mell, and Dave Davenport, a computer scientist, programmer and engineer hired out of college to be the lab technician. These three, along with a super intelligent gerbil named RT-5478 (or "Artie") that Helen created as an experiment form the foundation of the lab's adventures. While the strip is essentially an ensemble piece, with storylines focusing on major and minor characters alike, Dave is typically placed in the role of either protagonist or narrative device, depending on the individual storyline -- as one of the few characters with some shred of sanity and a sense of normality, Dave's reactions and natural cynicism form a convenient viewpoint for the audience to empathize and respond to. Of course, this means Dave also has the worst things in the strip happen to him -- having been killed and sent to Hell, shot to the moon, transported helplessly through time, sent on road trips with dozens of identical androids, and experimented on without his consent dozens of times.

The strip uses the Mad Scientist trope as its premise, hearkening back to Sappo by Elzie Segar and the inventions of Rube Goldberg in theme. The insane, pseudoscientific inventions and experiments that Helen Narbon (or her nemesis and romantic crush Dr. Lupin Madblood) concoct become the springboards for plotlines as the Narbonics Labs staff tries to deal with the consequences. These can range from a revolution fomented by insane gerbils to Helen's mother vaporizing Dave with one of Helen's own death rays to fighting off the legions of Hell during a sleepover.

As a webcomic, Narbonic is free from many of the barriers created by the newspaper syndication system, and can explore violent or romantic themes that newspaper editors might ordinarily eschew. Despite this, Narbonic remains essentially whimsical and appropriate for any teenager and most children -- instead of falling into the typical webcomics trap of pushing the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope, Narbonic instead uses the artistic freedom to explore its own artistic, literary and humorous choices without fear of censure.

Allusions

Narbonic has so much creative energy that it never needs to borrow, but this doesn't stop it from throwing in allusions to other classic and cult works, as an added bonus for readers who get the reference. The reference may be as short as a single strip, or the basis for an entire story-arc, but it's never necessary to know the original in order to fully enjoy Narbonic's take on it.

Among the works that Narbonic has referenced:

Narbonic makes few references to other webcomics, which may actually be unusual considering how often other strips reference each other and crossover with each other. Two of the rare occasions on which other webcomics make an appearance are: at the end of the first arc, when a news report implies that most of Helen's escaped giant ur-gerbils were slaughtered by Bun-Bun of Sluggy Freelance; and at the end of the Moonbase arc, when Garrity draws the cast of the webcomic 1/0, in the human forms they received at the strip's end, as the other patrons of the bar where Helen, Mell and Dave are wrapping up the loose ends of the Moonbase adventure.

Setting and characters

Helen B. Narbon a.k.a. "Beta": The mad scientist who runs Narbonic Labs, Helen is cheerful, positive-thinking, and of course quite mad. B londe, plump, a graduate of the high school class of 1992, Helen's favorite attire is a labcoat (of course) over jean shorts and a T-shirt reading "evil", with the "i" dotted by a pink heart. She has a gerbil fixation and a fear (well-justified) of becoming her mother, of whom she is a clone (hence why her mother is Helen Narbon, and she is Helen Beta Narbon.)

Mell Kelly: Helen's evil intern. Mell has long dark hair, glasses, and usually wears an off-the-shoulder top, a skirt, and tights. While she starts with very few evil skills except treachery and a rather terrifying passion for weaponry, over the course of the series she has slowly learned the value of foresight and planning, and is moving into subtler fields of evil like lawyering and politics.

Dave Davenport: Helen's computer technician, who gets recruited straight from his college graduation to work on her malfunctioning doomsday machine. Bespectacled, bearded, 6'1" but with a tendency to slouch and wear flannel, Dave Davenport is an unrepentant geek, who tends to expect the worst to happen (and working at Narbonic Labs does not do much to correct this tendency.) As the most "normal" person at Narbonic Labs, Dave tends to be a viewpoint character much of the time.

Dave used to be a chain-smoker, but his attempts to change his past, present and future when one of Helen's experiments made him "come unstuck in time" resulted in his never having started smoking. Dave has romantic inclinations towards Helen, which she may reciprocate; unfortunately, he now has no way of knowing which feelings she has towards him are her own, and which are the result of a spell cast by Caliban. Helen has also revealed that Dave has a gift he does not suspect: some of the things he has done with machinery are not just difficult, they are actually impossible.

Artie a.k.a. RT-5478: A superintelligent gerbil, created by Helen to do her taxes, with the I.Q. of 1.17 Stephen Hawkings. Artie tends to be the outsider of the group, whether it's by virtue of being the lone voice of sanity among a crew of obsessives, the lone good soul among a crew of the evil and amoral, or just the lone gerbil among a crew of humans. Artie is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and a Green Party voter.

Other significant characters

Antonio Smith, Forensic Linguist: A reader favorite, despite never having re-appeared after the first story arc, Smith is "the scourge of the literati", "the most dread linguist on Earth". Smith is first seen as a shortish, balding little man, called in by the police to verify Helen's authorship of "The Gerbil Manifesto", but with his soul inflamed to action by Helen's grammatical mistakes, he doffs a trenchcoat and slouch hat and begins scaling the wall to come after Helen and company. Despite Helen and Mell thinking he's cool and wanting his autograph, he's not a very nice person; when Dave tries to escape to him, he takes Dave hostage, putting him and then Helen as well into a deathtrap with a giant rotating saw blade. And he may have stolen Dave's lighter.

Professor Lupin "Wolf" Madblood: Helen's sometime romantic and sometime rival, Lupin Madblood is also a mad scientist, though his mad creations tend to be mechanical in nature, as opposed to Helen's mostly-organic tinkerings. Bespectacled, slightly shorter than Dave, with neatly-trimmed dark hair, moustache and goatee, Madblood tries to project the image of a suave, debonair conqueror, but at heart, he's really kind of a Mama's boy, even having to move back in with his mother after the rebellion of his androids destroyed his Moonbase.

The Madblood Androids: 15,000 robotic duplicates of Lupin Madblood, which he created as an army with which to take over the Earth. Unfortunately, due to some unwise choices Madblood made in programming them, they soon slipped from his control and became the army of the power-mad "Generalissima" Mell. They survived the destruction of Madblood's Moonbase and escaped to Earth, where they attempt (with some success) to unionize machines such as cars and coffeemakers.

Zeta Vincent: An alternative journalist in her early twenties, who has covered some of the exploits of the superintelligent gerbil Dana, and later, Dave's quest to get the Madblood Androids to Winnipeg. Helen recently revealed that Zeta was actually one of her own creations, a gerbil/human hybrid that she created for a science fair and then had to give up for adoption. Zeta knows she has some connection to the Narbonic Labs gang, but she has not yet worked up the courage to confront exactly what it might be.

The Dave Conspiracy: Every guy on Earth named Dave, engaged in a massive conspiracy aimed at world conquest. This includes (now ex-)MIT graduate Dave Barker, and formerly included Dave Davenport. Dave Davenport got expelled after breaking Dave Law by revealing the conspiracy's existence to Helen and Mell; however, Helen later discovered that the topmost leadership of the conspiracy, the Circle of Five, were the ones who had hired her mother to kill Dave (successfully) for reasons still unknown.

Dr. Noah: A short, balding dentist with a scar on his left cheek, who was Narbonic Labs' downstairs neighbor until the end of the first story arc, when their battle with Antonio Smith blew up the professional building (which seems to be the source of Dr. Noah's scar) and he got them evicted. While he is outwardly genial to everyone (except Helen and company) there are disturbing hints that he plots revenge: in Two Willows, Iowa, he befriended the golden hamsters created by Dana as an eco-terrorism force, and when Dave drove the Madblood Androids to Winnipeg, Dr. Noah turned out to be the mysterious figure who had extended the offer to free them of their obedience programming.

Helen's mother a.k.a. Helen "Gene Dicer" Narbon: Helen's mother, also a feared mad scientist in her own right. She has a fondness for boxed wine and a distressing tendency to discuss her nail fungus. The elder Dr. Narbon created Helen Beta in a not-very-well-planned plan to have a source of replacement organs, and according to Helen Beta, Dr. Narbon has created even more mad scientists, by driving many of those with the basic tendencies into insanity.

Caliban: When first encountered in the strip, Caliban was a minor demon Dave encountered in Hell after being killed. Later, when his current-time mind travelled back to his six-year-old body, Dave discovered that Caliban had been the monster under his bed. Later still, Caliban fled to the protection of Narbonic Labs, after renouncing his demon immortality and incarnating as a scrawny, short little guy with a British accent failed to throw the Malebrache (demonic loansharks he was in debted to) off his tail. For unknown and unnerving reasons, Mell has taken a liking to him, which may explain why she negotiated his freedom from the Malebrache.

Storyline

External links and other information

ISBN 0-9726936-0-2 -- Narbonic, the first volume of collected strips.