Awesome Hospital
By Chris Sims, Chad Bowers and Matt Digges
Sponsor
Merchandise
About
Story by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims
Art by Matt Digges
Logo and Lettering by Josh KrachDeath Rays. Mind Control. Teenage Werewolves. When you've got a problem so rad that conventional science can't help, you need to consult the specialists of Awesome Hospital.
Case History
#1: Diagnosis: A rash of Death Ray attacks and a critical case of rocking too hard test the skills of the Awesome Hospital staff.
#2: Malignant: Financial troubles force a merger with the private Weakler & Associates clinic, but will the WeakAss doctors save Awesome Hospital... or destroy it?
#3: Forever: A problem in the past sends Mike, Sven, Arthur and the mysterious Dr. Time Machine across the timestream to operate, but on who... or what?
Bonus Stories
Awesome Hospital Nights: Artist Sheli Hay joins Chris and Chad for a 6-page story about what Dr. Bulldog on a Skateboard does on his off days: He's a private detective.
Night of the Secret Santas: Our 2010 Christmas spectacular, written and drawn by Matt Digges!
Anarchy in the O.R.: After walking out of her job, ex-Nurse Cindy Punk Rock goes DIY in a story by Chad Bowers and guest artist JoJo Seames!
Staff
Second Opinions
Stats
©2010-2024 | Awesome Hospital is powered by WordPress with ComicPress
| Subscribe: RSS Feed | Back to Top ↑
I’ll admit I have no idea what the green light slapping guy is doing. Apparently I know less about the 1920s than Chris does.
Hoooooooly crap, that Gatsby joke is a stretch.
Wow, I haven’t thought about Gatsby since I read it in high school. The other two I got right away though, nicely done.
Still one of my favorite old comedy bits.
http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/whos.html
Thank you so much kaliban, I went from not a clue to laughing hard and loud in one sentence. I would feel shame for not getting it, but I’m damned if I’ll let negative emotions ruin such a glorious panel.
Oh, an A&C reference! “First BASE!”
And is that Nurse Flapper in the first panel?
No Call of Cthulu/ Lovecraft stuff? DAMMIT, no I want to see the Awesome Hospital Staff fight an Old One. I want to see that SO HARD.
It’s not that I don’t get the references. I don’t get what’s supposed to be going on in this page at all. Last page they were in the middle of a dire paradox-related situation and now they’re just cruising around the 20s for some reason?
While Dr. Time Machine is trying to deduce the cause of the chronological problem, the guys are trying to reintroduce the treatments that have already been erased from history, I believe.
In the last page she told them to help out anyway they can and that’s what they’re doing.
Oh, Cthulhu can have its own sequel… when they go off on the Road to R’yleh.
… Tell me that’s a musical, billso.
You can say “that’s what they’re doing” but it still doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. She didn’t even tell them what to help *with* yet, much less explain how doing whatever they’re doing in this page (participating in classic comedy sketches, apparently) would help with whatever that is.
I mean, I’m assuming they’re supposed to be helping her find a way to restore the timeline. And maybe if we’re super lucky, this will be explained later? But the author has an absurdly short attention span, frequently cramming what ought to be an entire year’s worth of plot into a week’s time, so I don’t really expect anything this page to be explained, resolved, expanded upon, given a backstory, or ever be mentioned again. They’ll be in the jurassic age or the dystopian future by Monday, anyway, so whatever.
I just can’t stand the ADD pace of this story sometimes. Or most of the time. Dr. Robot attacking the hospital deserved to be a major event and should have merited at least a 12-page storyline, probably more like 20-page. Instead, within essentially *60 seconds*, two characters were introduced, one of them had a life-changing experience, the other was revealed to be evil in a plot twist, a battle took place, the heroes defeated the evil character, and the two new characters left the stage.
AuthorS. It takes two of us to write something this great.
Anyway, to clarify, Matt Maybray and Undrave are correct: The montage above takes place at Excellent Medicine; these are all patients who are seeking treatment for their excellent maladies. Doctors Dirtbike, Space Baby and Guitar Solo (in disguise, of course), are attempting to aid Nurse Flapper (Panel 1) and Dr. Adventure (Panel 2) in sorting things out. Meanwhile, Dr. Time Machine, having instructed the others to “help out as best you can” in the previous strip, is using her Four-Dimensional Head Mirror to track the source of the chronological anomalies they’ve gone back in time to heal.
We have no plans at this time to set a story in the Jurassic, but we’ve still got some time to make up our minds before Monday.
LockeZ reaction is a bit OTT, but I can understand where he’s coming from; this is the first page that really made frustrated after I’d read it, because I knew that each panel had something going on, some sort of in-joke or referrence, but I just didn’t get them. I had to go hunting for it all so I could appreciate the page properly.
Now, two points here on this: I’m not asking you to hand me everything on a plate, and nods to the wider culture are great. They really set your comic out from the crowd, and Ilike it every now and again. But when I have to go rooting through the bowels of the internet to figure out the jokes I consider it bad page design; it’s a bit alienating, to say the least. With this page in particular you either get it or you don’t, which is frustrating.
Secondly, and I know this is going to sound weird given what’s just come above, this page is one of my favourates anyway, up there with Dirtbike stunt-operating way back in issue one, because that profile of Verity is, frankly, mesmerising, and uterly brilliant. I love the way it looks so much, which is why I got so narked by not getting the in-jokes.
Anyway, regardless, please do continue. I do really enjoy reading AH, and long may it continue
LockeZ & Spinoza,
Thanks for the comments.
We had a similar bit that ran over pages 22 and 23 of Malignant . Of course, those were all comics related in-jokes, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that more than a few of our readers are familiar enough with the subject matter that those worked as intended.
But honestly, I was more worried about those than I ever was with this one. I figured two pages of full-on Silver Age Superman references would be WAY more obscure than Chaplin, Gatsby and “Who’s on First?”.
I will say, these were kind of the easiest nods to the 20s we could’ve gone with, hence the alt text.
But thanks for making us feel like Jess Nevins or something.
I must say that I have to agree with my fellow commenters that not enough has been explained not just here, but in the comic as a whole.
First of all: Dr. Dirtbike wears a helmet, but you have never given the reasons why. Now that he’s in the past, Dr. Spacebaby suddenly has a mustache. Where’d that come from? What’s Santa Claus’s origin story?
Also: At no point have you explained the term “hospital” and what it means. Unrelated: All these characters are just in this building for some reason, trying to help people out, I guess, but the author seems to have made up the idea of a building where people help people out.
I hope Dr. Time Machine can solve the paradox of how Abbott and Costello could be doing their bit over a decade before they even met.
uh, that is…assuming this is supposed to be in the 20’s…never mind, timey-wimey, etc.
@MW: I was about to go on a tirade about fake mustaches, then I realized you were being sarcastic.
It’s funny – I had literally wrote half a comment immediately after this was posted lauding the pacing of this strip. And then deleted it because I thought *of course* everyone allready recognizes the genius of the super-compressed story plotting. Now I am filled with regret.
Seriously, in a bi-weekly strip – if they took “12 pages” to flesh out this sequence – that’s *2 months* of real time. This entire story arc would take *years* at that pace. Look at how little actually gets accomplished in most (bi) weekly webcomics. At most you’re getting the equivalent of a couple standard floppies a year (less actually because most authors will be using a lot of that space to build in far more “hand-holding hooks” for new readers, and to remind existing ones what happened previously). The pace is frustratingly glacial. AH on the other hand just cranks the dial to 11 and stomps on the gas (Literally in the case of Sven and Mike).
I think that pacing approach is absolute apropos here (and executed increasingly effectively by the creative team). AH isn’t about explaining what they’re doing – it’s about craming awesomeness into critical situations until they burst like a sausage casing – and then leaving the audience in the smoking wreckage trying to figure out what happened (like me with that mixed metaphor).
Augh, Gatsby!! I totally fail high school english. Actually, I think we did Gatsby the year I almost did flunk english.
Ka1iban – I think we’d issue you some kind of No-Prize (or make some kind of argument that it’s evidence of the timestream starting to fray at the edges) but I think that the fact that Abbott and Costello freely admitted to borrowing and refining Who’s on First from a pre-existing meme of burlesque sketches dating back to the turn-of-the-century might get us off the hook on this one. It’s probably my fault for making the likenesses so close to A & B, but I imagine that there were more than one “fat guy, skinny guy” acts around back then. Good catch, though.
Brad – You graciously indicate one of our main concerns going into AH: Do we want to be a comic book that posts pages on the internet or do we want to be a webcomic? Some people don’t see a difference, but Chris and Chad, in their wisdom, did. There’s a whole other set of pacing issues that come with choosing the latter. We try our best to make each strip a satisfying piece of the whole. Two to five days is a long time to wait between pages, especially without some kind of payoff. If the enjoyment of one page is dependent on a payoff that comes on the next, then we kind of fail at making a satisfying experience every Tuesday and Thursday.
Sure, there are times when I wish we could expand certain sequences (and sometimes we do: I think Arthur’s fantastic voyage to destroy the death ray in Diagnosis was originally written as one page, but I lobbied to expand it to two) but we always try to balance that with maintaining the integrity of our mission to make a well-paced webcomic.
—
Also, I’d just like to thank everyone for taking the time to comment. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that AH is a labor of love. This is were we choose to spend our time away from work, families and Xboxes. Our only reward is hearing about your enjoyment of the goofy little strip we put together.
That, and the dozens of pennies that we make on advertising.
Ha! No-Prize…
Yeah, visual gags for the Twenties is rough…maybe flappers with actual wings?
Love the strip