Digger is a completed black and white web comic series by Ursula Vernon. It features the adventures of an extremely practical anthropomorphic wombat as she tries to find a way to get home, and turns into an amazingly epic quest involving a not-quite-dead-god, demons, and prophetic snails. (Trust me, this all makes sense in context.) Its tone ranges from darkly whimsical to deeply philosophical, and is frequently both at the same time.
Our Heroine is a wombat Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, or Digger for short. She hits a pocket of bad earth and after a very long, loopy length of time discovers she is halfway across the world. When she finally surfaces, it’s in a temple of Ganesh, right in front of Ganesh’s statue. The statue is more than willing to help her (yes, the statue is one of the major characters) though Digger is a little wary of the statue’s assistance. (Wombats do not like magic, and are largely ambivalent about gods.)
From there, Digger manages to make a number of very peculiar friends, two of whom will attempt to eat her. (The two are Grim Eyes and her hunting party, and Ed, a pariah exiled from Grim Eyes’ tribe. Digger is a very forgiving person, and in one case, she was within a certain narrow definition at fault, since she was technically a home invader.) She also meets a peculiar being she dubs the Shadowchild, which turns out to be a baby demon, and Murai, a shell-shocked acolyte who at one time had been one of Veiled (an order of priest who are also law enforcement types). She also makes an enemy in the form of Jhalm, who is the head of the Veiled. (He keeps finding her in what to him are compromising situations, and therefore becomes extremely suspicious of her and anything she does. He is not a bad person; he is just extremely...Jhalm.)
After some shenanigans involving bandits, Shadowchild and anthropomorphic hyenas, Digger takes a trip back down the hole to investigate. Accompanying her is Murai, who is suffering from the after effects of having a close encounter with an extremely dangerous god. They run into some very nice lizard-people who still manage to seem nice even though they want to (very respectfully) skin Digger and Murai. After that encounter, they discover that some mysterious bird-masked figures are attempting to keep a dead god more or less “alive.”
The quest then becomes finding out who the god is, who the masked figures are, and what all is going on. (And also what they should do about the god, who it turns out, would very much prefer to be dead.)
Digger has a great plot, engaging characters and some amazingly funny lines. It also has some wonderfully serious and thoughtful moments. This is probably one of my favorite web comics, and I highly recommend it.
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