With a name like Anders Loves Maria, I was expecting Rene Engström’s webcomic to be light and cheery, the sort of comic that involves tiffs over who plays guitar and who plays drums in Rock Band. Ha, no. I’m not going to give anything away, but it’s brutal.
Do you ever wake up at night and suddenly think of something you did years ago that you deeply regret, something that drives a fresh spike of embarrassment and remorse into you every time you remember it? Anders Loves Maria is that sort of thing, given comic form. And at the same time, it’s very funny and compelling. I strongly suggest you start from beginning of the strip.
Now, I feel obligated to mention that the comic is more visually explicit than most, in the sense of sex and body parts, because you folk have told me you appreciate such warnings. It’s not a “sex comic” in any useful sense, though. It’s a comic about relationships and choices, and some of those are sexual choices and sexual relationships.
And, as an added bonus, Engström is Swedish. Sverige represent!
If those links are correct, someone hijacked the domain. They lead to a link farm.
Huh, not in my browser. I wonder what’s going on here?
I got a link farm, too. I even got it when from a google search for Anders Loves Maria, and clicking through to what was the first and obviously correct result.
But when i went to the cached result of that result, and then clicked the link there to the first comic, I’m now in the right place (no longer in cache).
Weird.
The link to the first comic worked for me.
It happened to me a couple of times. It’s not happening now.
I noticed the address bar flashed the correct url before switching to the link farm. So I clicked the link one more time and hit Stop to halt the loading before it switched away. Then I hit refresh and now the comic is running fine.
Well, her ISP says you all have pre-existing viruses that are causing this. I’m dubious, but I guess I’ll pass that along.
According to Rene’s comments on strip #8, she is a Canadian living in Sweden.
Hi everyone!
Swedish family, born in Canada. I have been living here for a very long time though. Here=Sweden.
I don’t know why people are getting link farms. Pre-existing viruses -does- sound funny and I am also sceptical. I am sorry for this. :(
The same thing happened to me on another website I was trying to visit yesterday, for about five minutes. Then it went back to working normally. I’m as positive as most people can be that I haven’t picked up a virus. It’s creepy.
For those wondering what Lore meant by more visually explicit than most, in the sense of sex and body parts, I once described it as “The only story I’ve ever seen in any medium where unambiguous butt sex is funny, poignant, and provides legitimate insight into the characters.”
It is also the only story in any medium to teach me that the onomatopoeia for butt sex is “Bork”.
I always love when you rave about something I’ve already been enjoying.
“Look, Internet demi-celebrity Lore Sjöberg likes that too! Validated!”
As for the pre-existing virus thing, I’ve actually seen that before. You can wind up with a “Browser Help Object” that does redirects to link farms on browsing, or in response to search requests. Spybot Search & Destroy does a pretty good job finding the little bastards.
Yeah, I think strip 122 has destroyed the Swedish Chef for me forever.
Works for me now. I’m guessing it’s DNS cache poisoning though I am just guessing.
Great strip btw. Thanks for the link, Lore.
Wow. Thank you. Anders <3 Maria is made of awesome. I just took advantage of my newly unemployed status to read through the entire archive + comments in one sitting. I am totally in love with this comic, and I hope you’ll agree to be best man at our wedding.
Hey, I read the whole thing in one go as well…but I didn’t read the comments. I needed to keep the submerge going, didn’t want to break the fiction plane.
Lovely. Am caught up. Thanks.
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