Wondermark is an "illustrated jocularity" -- that is to say, a Victorian-themed webcomic -- by one David Malki !. (The author seems to like spelling his name with an exclamation point.) It has been running twice a week since 2003.

Many popular webcomics these days experiment with a kind of cut-up technique, making use of everything from bad clip-art (Get Your War On, Dinosaur Comics), to found photography and collage (A Softer World, Nearly Forgotten), to the ultimate in comic democracy: reader-submitted drawings that change from strip to strip (Whispered Apologies), invitations to mix and match old Family Circus cartoons with quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche, or scripts that randomly rearrange Garfield cartoons.

The effect can be delightfully surreal, since the texts in these comics are designed in tension with the illustrations. For example, Get Your War On takes banal clip-art diagrams of secretaries talking on telephones or corporate bigwigs typing on their computers, and provides captions filled with childish obscenities deftly combined with contemporary political commentary. Dinosaur Comics is famous for using exactly the same six panels in every comic, creating dozens of freshly bizarre conversations between three unlikely protagonists.

Wondermark is firmly ensconced within this po-mo tradition. But the vintage feel of the comic, combined with the brilliant, self-referential dialogue, gives Malki !'s work its own unique character. Even the faux-Victorian layout of the web page is hilarious: we are told that the comic is "REG'^D AT General Post Office" and that it costs sixpence (or, "by post," sixpence halfpenny).

Malki appears to possess an immense collection of nineteenth-century drawings, engravings, and illustrations of the sort that you might find in etiquette guides, cookbooks, political flyers, dime-store novels, and instruction manuals for such newfangled contraptions as bicycles and radios. He then proceeds to rearrange and juxtapose the figures in ways that would no doubt send the original artists into conniptions: two young gentlemen with fine moustaches talk to each other from their respective bathtubs; a well-appointed English dandy glowers at an East Indian man playing chess; little girls in lacy dresses read books or pick flowers; Napoleon carries on a bland conversation with an African-American maid in a headscarf.

To these images, already freighted with irony simply by virtue of their age and their appearance on the Internet, Malki ! adds outrageous and incongruous dialogue.

Two men in trenchcoats study a corpse lying face-up on a slab. The same drawing appears in all three panels.

Man #1: He looks so natural.
Man #2: Still got good pallor.
Corpse: Man, I'm beat. Hey, you got the time?
Man #1: Ahh! The vile undead!
Man #2: Stakes and garlic! Fetch me kerosene!
"Corpse": I just lay down for a nap. My head feels like a snail.
Man #1: I'll call Father Mulcahey. You fetch the ax!
Man #2: Lord have mercy!
"Corpse": I knew I shoulda slid into the drawer.
Man #1: We must sift the ashes through water and drink!
Man #2: I'll get the curly straws!

The nature of the humour is unpredictable, which is part of the reason it's so marvellous. Usually the characters talk in a stilted, faux-Victorian dialect, but occasionally they will shift into Ebonics or surfer-speak or a stream of random cussing. The art sometimes repeats across panels, but occasionally an illustration is flipped or inverted or otherwise manipulated. From time to time, Malki !'s own hand as an artist can be detected as he sketches an explosion or... um, well usually when he sketches something, it's an explosion.

In Wondermark, the obsessions of the original, nineteenth-century illustrators are juxtaposed with our own as readers. We like to think that we have moved beyond the tunnel vision of Orientalism and sexual repression, but when we are faced with the image of a beturbaned rajah or a grim-looking Indian chief or a madam in a boudoir, we are still surprised when they express themselves in perfect, if situationally inappropriate, English. I suspect that we haven't overcome our own issues with colonialism or classism or empire just yet -- and my point is nowhere so neatly demonstrated as it is in this comic, where strange bedfellows are created simply by the gleeful application of scissors and paste.