‘My Giant Nerd Boyfriend’ gets an animated Youtube Series

If you’ve ever been kicking around the ‘slice of life’ genre page on Line Webtoon, then chances are you’re familiar with the wildly-popular webcomic My Giant Nerd Boyfriend by Fishball. After all, with nearly twenty MILLION subs and over 320 episodes, it’s kind of hard to miss.

What you might have missed, however, is that My Giant Nerd Boyfriend is the latest Webcomic to officially land it’s own short animated series—as a Webtoon original animation, no less!

The MGNB animated series officially launched last week and it’s certainly… interesting!

Longtime readers of Webcomics know that animated spinoffs are nothing new. From the satisfyingly-dark Looking for Group animated short, ‘Slaughter Your World’ that aired way back in (oh God) 2007, to the not-quite-so-satisfying Ctrl+Alt+Del animated series (anyone remember that?!), the jump across the gutters from static page to moving pictures is time-honoured ground.

More recently, we’ve covered how powerhouse studios such as Explosm! (Cyanide and Happiness) have taken their webcomic model to YouTube with incredible results, not only having their own run of highly-popular animated shorts, but also using the platform to selections from their deep comic archives. And, indeed, one of the first article series published when the Digital Strips blog was renewed in 2017 looked into one of Penny Arcade’s many YouTube projects (Strip Search).

With Webtoon dominating more and more of the online comics market, it’s probably not all that surprising to see them branching into animation as well. Although their YouTube page launched about four years ago, they’ve restricted themselves to trailers, announcements, reviews and creator-focused interviews in that time (at least for their English-speaking audience).

A sample of the Webtoon YouTube channel

It remains to be seen what kind of impact the fledgling animation of My Giant Nerd Boyfriend will have on the landscape. The first couple of episodes are… okay, but are definitely more reminiscent of the old Flash-based animations that characterised the YouTube webcomic ports of the early 2000’s, than they resemble the slick and simple quality of the modern Webcomic animations like the Cyanide and Happiness shorts. The jankiness of the english voice-dubbing doesn’t help, but behind the superficial visual aspects of the animation, Fishball’s creative voice—and the characteristic soul of the comic—still shine through.

Let’s hope that’ll be enough…

What did you think of the first few episodes of My Giant Nerd Boyfriend – The Animated Series? Is it something you’re going to subscribe to and keep up on, or was it not exactly what you were looking for? We’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments below or over on Facebook and Twitter. And until next time, always remember—don’t eat the clickbait!

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