You do, if you buy the game they’re developing based on the classic graphic novel. The game will take place before the events of the story (and next year’s film adaptation by Zack Snyder, director of “300″), when a still-fit Nite Owl and a less-crazy Rorschach fought crime together.

I have hopes for this, but not high ones considering the generally poor state of games based on comic-book franchises (those score averages make me very glad there wasn’t a game rushed onto shelves as a tie-in for “The Dark Knight”).

But hey, it’s no fair judging a game before even a screen is released.Maybe this one, like Dr. Manhattan’s thermodynamic miracle, will surprise me.

I’ve talked about Web comics here before, vis-a-vis the recently released Penny Arcade video game. But today I’m here to talk about a different comic — one that has nothing to do with video games.

(What, you didn’t expect me to talk about video games here all the time, did you? Good. That would get boring for both of us.)

Anyway, the comic I’m talking about is a fantastic creation called Gunnerkrigg Court, written and drawn by Tom Siddell. That link will take you to the most recent page; if you haven’t read the comic before, it’s best to start at the beginning. (For the print-inclined there’s also a new hardcover book that collects the majority of the comic’s run so far.)

Gunnerkrigg Court follows the adventures of Antimony Carver, a young girl who attends the vast but mostly empty boarding school of the title. This facility is huge and mysterious, and seems mostly dedicated to teaching technology and practical mysticism to its relatively few students.

Across the bridge from the school there lies an equally enormous forest teeming with fairies and gods and other strange creatures. The story of the comic so far has been a slow reveal of some of the conflicts between these two sides — nature and technology — and Antimony’s place in them, with plenty of lighter stuff going on in between. The main plot shows signs of being drawn out for some time to come, but the comic never drags and never gets dull.

The feel of the Court and its inhabitants is part Neil Gaiman, part Harry Potter and part Invader ZIM. It’s often bizarre and creepy, though never really frightening or gory. Siddell’s world is one where the unexplainable is commonplace, where a student can cobble together a thinking robot from spare parts and see it come back to her possessed by a shadow, where an angry wolf with a wooden body accompanies the deity Coyote on a trip to the Court to argue with its administrators over a mechanical bird.

In other words, it’s a great read. Check it out!

(Artwork courtesy of Gunnerkrigg.com)