April fools, bitch! Many have come up with elaborate pranks for this special holiday. Suicide Magazine's prank is to give you actual content this time around!
This month, I present to you the greatest charpine animation yet. Straight from the archives is RICK: ZOMBIED, utilizing the latest technology in flash animation. In this animation, Rick the blue stickman must go up against a zombie apocalypse and fight the corrupt Zombi Inc. Will he prevail and take out the CEO, or will he be zombied? Also, keep your eyes peeled for the hidden redhatstick!
[VIEW ANIMATION ON YOUTUBE]
Besides that, i generally want to start making animations more frequently so that I can actually get back into animating again, but also so that people don't have to wait as long to wait for new content as they currently are. Thank you all for the support and I hope to bring more in the near future.
I've read many webcomics over the years, but this one's my new favorite. When reading it, I actually felt somewhat immersed into the story. Rather than just rushing through 3000 strips, I actually wanted to know more about all the characters, from the main 4 Lottas to the random background characters that appear in like two chapters. As of writing, I've finished 20 of 28 chapters, but hopefully I'll still be able to capture what the webcomic is about overall.
This webcomic takes place in Finland, mainly during the Winter War in late 1939-early 40 where the Finns fought the Soviets. It focuses on the Lotta Svärd, a Finnish organization where women perform voluntary work. Members of the organization were called "Lottas." In particular, this webcomic focuses on one Lotta named Taimi Mäki, moving along with her life in the organization while Finland is engaged in combat. The sole author of the webcomic is someone simply going by Setz, as seen in the about section.
I enjoy how the comic exposes a lesser-known part of WWII history to a more global audience so that you kinda learn something new from it. The setting isn't there just to serve as a background, some of the history surrounding the Lotta Svärd does come into play every now and then. At the end of most chapters, there'll be a page talking about different parts of the history behind the Lotta Svärd. The webcomic also does a great job with the slice-of-life aspect while still making sure you know that this is World War II so that you don't get TOO comfortable.
The art and design is really good overall. The comic uses a limited color scheme of 2-3 base colors in its pages, but the cool part is that every chapter has a different color scheme. The Christmas chapter even uses a red and green color scheme. How festive! The art style's also kinda cool. It's anime-esque, but also rough and sorta blocky at the same time. There's also faint pencil lines reminiscent of xerographic animation like 101 dalmations.
One thing I will mention is that there'll be a sentence that's weirdly worded every now and then. I wouldn't worry too much about it since, at the end of the day, it doesn't take anything away from the webcomic. I'm not much of a fan of writing out the heavy accents of a character in their dialogue, but again, that doesn't take away from the webcomic. I find it a bit hard to read sometimes, but then again, accents can be a bit hard to understand, so it probably helps some people get immeresed in the story more than just being told that a character has an accent so they should read all their dialogue in an accent in their head.
But yeah, overall, i think this is a webcomic that's definitely worth reading. Whether you're a history buff or you just like the slice-of-life genre, there's something for everyone to enjoy in this webcomic.
[READ THIS WEBCOMIC]
CABARET VOLTAIRE: Electronic band from Sheffield, and one of the first industrial bands at that, founded in 1973. Their music is just strange to listen to in general. Early on, their music was rough and very industrial, but later on, they became more dance-oriented. Nag Nag Nag and Sensoria are both great songs of theirs, and in general, anyone wanting to get into industrial music should listen to them at least once.
CHROME: Experimental rock band from San Francisco. Half Machine Lip Moves is such a cool-sounding album. It's like a punk rock album, but every now and then, it randomly gets possessed and turns into Revolution 9. Alien Soundtracks is even more experimental, yet even more cool-sounding. Good listen for people into post-punk.
KRAFTWERK (early): Kraftwerk is, by no means obscure, but their work pre-Autobahn is still interesting to look at. For one, their first three albums had a very psychedelic and ambient quality to them. The electronic instrumentation is still present, but so are instruments like guitars, acoustic drums, flutes, and violin. I wish people talked about those first three albums more because I think they hold up just as well as the rest of Kraftwerk's discography. Hopefully one day, Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, and Ralf und Florian will all see a re-release.
THE MUSIC MACHINE: Garage rock band from Los Angeles, dressed in all black and spooky looking. The lead singer has that grunge voice that didn't get popular until like 25 years later. There's also distorted guitars, but the organ is what takes center stage musically. An overall underrated band that really stands out from their peers.
SILVER APPLES: An electronic rock band...in the late 60s. Their instrumentation generally consists of drums, vocals typical to the late 60s, a huge fucking machine made from WW2-era oscillators, the usual. They formed in New York the same year Sgt. Peppers came out and disbanded the year Kraftwerk formed because Pan Am sued them out of existence.
SUICIDE: Elvis impersonator and jazz-trained pianist start a band in New York and create very strange-sounding music from echoy vocals, minimalist keyboard riffs, and primitive drum machines. Also I stole their name for this magazine >:) Very solid band, especially if you're into industrial.
THE SCREAMERS: Synthpunk band from Los Angeles, sounds like a punk band but instead of guitars, it's distorted synthesizers and pianos, and a couple songs even use violin. Outside of a live performance video, a couple promotional videos, and an extremely rare, one-sided single with only two copies in existence, they never had any official releases of their music. Fortunately, I made a yt playlist with every song they recorded here.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: Alternative rock band from New York. Not as obscure as the other bands, but still super influential. I know I said they're alt-rock, but really, they covered a bunch of genres and invented new ones while they were at it. The banana album is mostly art rock, White Light/White Heat is super noisy, the self-titled album is much more lo-fi, and Loaded is much more conventional rock. I highly recommend giving them a listen if you haven't done so already. And if you don't? Well...I guess you don't then.
Stay tuned for 2505, which will be about obscure-ish 21st century bands. Well really, it's gonna be musicians in general since bands don't really exist as much anymore.
A question asked by no one, but I think is an experiment worth testing out. Basically, I took the top 100 albums from Rateyourmusic, looked at each album's respective Wikipedia article, and looked at how many of their tracks had an individual Wikipedia article.
Some ground rules: All tracks with sections are all treated as one track. Song covers still count as a track. Hidden tracks count as a track. Only the main tracks of the main release of an album are included. If an album only has one track, it will be counted as 1/1.
All results were gathered on the 29th of March, 2025. If you're viewing this article at a much later date, these results may be out-of-date.
| NO. | ALBUM | ARTIST | TRACKS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | To Pimp a Butterfly | Kendrick Lamar | 8/16 |
| 2 | OK Computer | Radiohead | 6/12 |
| 3 | In Rainbows | Radiohead | 7/10 |
| 4 | Wish You Were Here | Pink Floyd | 4/4 |
| 5 | Good Kid, M.A.A.D City | Kendrick Lamar | 10/12 |
| 6 | Madvillainy | Madvillain | 3/22 |
| 7 | In the Court of the Crimson King | King Crimson | 5/5 |
| 8 | Kid A | Radiohead | 5/10 |
| 9 | Loveless | My Bloody Valentine | 2/11 |
| 10 | The Dark Side of the Moon | Pink Floyd | 10/10 |
| 11 | Abbey Road | The Beatles | 17/17 |
| 12 | Remain in Light | Talking Heads | 4/8 |
| 13 | The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust | David Bowie | 9/11 |
| 14 | Illmatic | Nas | 8/10 |
| 15 | Lift Your Skinny Fists | GY!BE | 0/4 |
| 16 | The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady | Charles Mingus | 0/4 |
| 17 | Revolver | The Beatles | 14/14 |
| 18 | The Velvet Underground & Nico | The Velvet Underground | 11/11 |
| 19 | A Love Supreme | John Coltrane | 0/3 |
| 20 | Vespertine | Björk | 3/12 |
| 21 | Disintegration | The Cure | 4/12 |
| 22 | Paranoid | Black Sabbath | 6/8 |
| 23 | Animals | Pink Floyd | 4/4 |
| 24 | Kind of Blue | Miles Davis | 4/5 |
| 25 | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West | 11/13 |
| 26 | Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) | Wu-Tang Clan | 5/12 |
| 27 | Red | King Crimson | 2/5 |
| 28 | Long Season | Fishmans | 1/1 |
| 29 | Songs in the Key of Life | Stevie Wonder | 9/17 |
| 30 | Spiderland | Slint | 0/6 |
| 31 | Igor | Tyler, the Creator | 6/12 |
| 32 | The College Dropout | Kanye West | 10/21 |
| 33 | Pet Sounds | The Beach Boys | 13/13 |
| 34 | Dummy | Portishead | 3/11 |
| 35 | In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | Neutral Milk Hotel | 2/9 |
| 36 | Pink Moon | Nick Drake | 0/11 |
| 37 | Heaven or Las Vegas | Cocteau Twins | 2/10 |
| 38 | The Money Store | Death Grips | 0/13 |
| 39 | The Queen is Dead | The Smiths | 7/10 |
| 40 | Souvlaki | Slowdive | 0/10 |
| 41 | The Glow Pt. 2 | The Microphones | 0/20 |
| 42 | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | The Beatles | 12/12 |
| 43 | Blonde | Frank Ocean | 7/17 |
| 44 | Atrocity Exhibition | Danny Brown | 2/15 |
| 45 | Unknown Pleasures | Joy Division | 4/10 |
| 46 | In a Silent Way | Miles Davis | 0/2 |
| 47 | Homogenic | Björk | 8/10 |
| 48 | What's Going On | Marvin Gaye | 4/9 |
| 49 | The Low End Theory | A Tribe Called Quest | 3/14 |
| 50 | F♯ A♯ ∞ | GY!BE | 1/5 |
| 51 | 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare [live] | Fishmans | 0/14 |
| 52 | The Beatles | The Beatles | 30/30 |
| 53 | Either/Or | Elliott Smith | 1/12 |
| 54 | Hounds of Love | Kate Bush | 4/12 |
| 55 | Discovery | Daft Punk | 6/14 |
| 56 | Mm..Food | MF DOOM | 2/15 |
| 57 | ★ | David Bowie | 7/7 |
| 58 | Close to the Edge | Yes | 3/3 |
| 59 | Selected Ambient Works 85–92 | Aphex Twin | 0/13 |
| 60 | Bitches Brew | Miles Davis | 0/6 |
| 61 | Low | David Bowie | 10/11 |
| 62 | Deathconsciousness | Have a Nice Life | 0/13 |
| 63 | Highway 61 Revisited | Bob Dylan | 9/9 |
| 64 | Endtroducing..... | DJ Shadow | 2/13 |
| 65 | Illinois | Sufjan Stevens | 1/22 |
| 66 | Nevermind | Nirvana | 10/13 |
| 67 | Marquee Moon | Television | 2/8 |
| 68 | Soundtracks for the Blind | Swans | 0/26 |
| 69 | Doolittle | Pixies | 5/15 |
| 70 | Donuts | J Dilla | 0/31 |
| 71 | Led Zeppelin IV | Led Zeppelin | 8/8 |
| 72 | Electric Ladyland | Jimi Hendrix Experience | 9/16 |
| 73 | In Utero | Nirvana | 8/12 |
| 74 | Master of Reality | Black Sabbath | 4/8 |
| 75 | Ants from Up There | Black Country, New Road | 0/10 |
| 76 | Late Registration | Kanye West | 6/20 |
| 77 | The Doors | The Doors | 8/11 |
| 78 | The Downward Spiral | Nine Inch Nails | 5/14 |
| 79 | Station to Station | David Bowie | 6/6 |
| 80 | Grace | Jeff Buckley | 10/10 |
| 81 | Laughing Stock | Talk Talk | 0/6 |
| 82 | Blonde on Blonde | Bob Dylan | 14/14 |
| 83 | Blood on the Tracks | Bob Dylan | 10/10 |
| 84 | Ride the Lightning | Metallica | 3/8 |
| 85 | Karma | Pharoah Sanders | 0/2 |
| 86 | Mezzanine | Massive Attack | 5/11 |
| 87 | Aquemini | Outkast | 2/15 |
| 88 | Closer | Joy Division | 2/9 |
| 89 | Carrie & Lowell | Sufjan Stevens | 2/11 |
| 90 | Symbolic | Death | 0/9 |
| 91 | Midnight Marauders | A Tribe Called Quest | 3/14 |
| 92 | Velocity : Design : Comfort | Sweet Trip | 0/11 |
| 93 | Are You Experienced | Jimi Hendrix Experience | 8/11 |
| 94 | Since I Left You | The Avalanches | 3/18 |
| 95 | Innervisions | Stevie Wonder | 6/9 |
| 96 | Songs of Leonard Cohen | Leonard Cohen | 3/10 |
| 97 | Master of Puppets | Metallica | 4/8 |
| 98 | Clube da Esquina | Nascimento & Borges | 1/21 |
| 99 | Liquid Swords | GZA | 4/12 |
| 100 | Stop Making Sense [live] | Talking Heads | 6/9 |
Thank you for reading the walls of text I've written. Hopefully there'll be more issues where you get to use the scroll wheel to be able read the whole thing. Email if you see anything interesting.
-CHARPINE