Questionable Content is a web comic drawn, written, and published by Jeph Jacques (who now also
makes IndieTits) at questionablecontent.net. The story begins when Marten Reed, a shy recent college
graduate who lives with an immature robot Pintsize, meets a very sassy lady named Faye
Whitaker at a local bar. She turns out to be homeless due to burning down her own
apartment, so this leads to that and she ends up moving in with Marten, beginning a saga of a
relationship filled with more then a healthy dose of sexual tension. Soon we meet Dora Bianchi, the owner
of Coffee of Doom and Faye's boss. A love triangle ensues.
Each character is both familiar to anyone remotely in contact with the indie music world, and yet
filled with enough idiosyncrasies to be interesting. Marten takes his music with a heavy dosage
of multi-prefixed genres; Faye likes to get drunk on Midnight Hobo, at which point
her Southern heritage begins to show through her language. Pintsize loves cake mix,
used to have a deadly laser (which caused some unwanted attention from the Robotics Defense Agency),
and enjoys dice-based role playing games with other AnthroPCs.
So far, the narrative has always focused exclusively on the four main characters. Major
sideplots will likely develop as more and more new characters are introduced and fleshed out
(so far the audience has met the trend-jumping Raven, the marine biologist Ellen, Marten's
jolly best friend Steve, and the freakishly tall sellout Sven Bianchi, among a few others.). Time
progresses slowly, so that a single outing can last a week. Luckily, at least for the readers, Jeph lost
his job in 2004 and decided to draw the comic full-time, meaning an update every weekday. For the same
reason, the art has improved drastically since the comic began in 2003. Jeph constantly changes both
the details of the characters' appearances and the overall style of the strips.
The humour tends to be aimed at hipsters of all varieties, so you will find much
emo bashing, indie self-mockery, and references to plenty of bands (and even quite a few Dune-inspired jokes). The overall feel of the dialogue admittedly owes much to John Allison's Scary Go Round. Personally, I feel that the
quality of funny has declined, but, luckily, the actually story
has steadily improved.
The comic, following the general trend, has spawned a fervent online fandom. Jeph seems to have a
love/hate relationship with his own forum - every so often he gets annoyed with the
random criticism and suggestions (and, especially, people trying to predict the
direction of the story) and promises to stop reading, only to seemingly return within a few weeks. He also
keeps a list of music he recommends, a shop with the usual T-shirts and hoodies, and links
to comics he personally enjoys.