While I normally gravitate toward webcomics with ongoing (and often epic) storylines, I’ve a growing number of more humorous short-form comics that I enjoy reading. A recent addition to these whimsical webcomics is Ana Badra’s Ana and Gabriel, an imaginative slice-of-life webcomic about a college-aged girl whose childhood imaginary friend has come back into her life. Nor is this some rip-off of Count Your Sheep; Gabriel (the imaginary friend) isn’t a sheep, and while he’s one of the titular characters of the comic, it doesn’t rotate around him.

Instead, Ana and Gabriel is the story of Ana and her life in college. While her imaginary friend is a part of this, his role is ethereal in nature (seeing that he is imaginary. Unlike certain other imaginary characters in other webcomics, he doesn’t interact with the world around him with the exception of a certain rodent that appears early on in the comic; I won’t spoiler it for you, but it’s fairly obvious what’s going on as long as you remember Gabriel’s a figment of Ana’s imagination, not some manifestation of a fae spirit that pretends to be imaginary while helping around the house or something like that.

Unfortunately, Ana and Gabriel has suffered some signs of comic instability: while the artwork has improved from the early strips, Badra shifted from a colored comic to greyscale fairly early on. She has also utilized other cop-outs such as a couple of stick-figure comics and several filler strips that suggest Badra isn’t always sure what to draw. This can be a problem with non-storyline comics, and it’s a shame because there’s potential here. Whether it’s Gabriel being snarky about Ana’s interests, Ana interacting with her friends (and even trying not to react to her imaginary friend around her real ones), or even more college stuff, there’s some promise to this comic, and I hope Badra finds that happy medium that’ll encourage this comic to grow.