Archive for August, 2009
Review: Familiar Ground
Over the weekend, I went with my family to see the movie Julie & Julia. It’s an entertaining film, rather humorous, and manages to skip the awkward moments that so many comedy films seem to thrive on ever since Meet the Parents. And it centers around a blogger who rose to fame and a comfortable income, so you can imagine the tiny spark of glee that got set off somewhere in the back of my mind. It’s rather similar to the spark that gets set off in people’s minds when they see comics like Schlock Mercenary, whose creator can now live off of the earnings from his comic alone. So they set up their own webcomic, with dreams of advertisements, a well-stocked Cafepress store, and a PayPal tip jar dancing in their heads. Heck, that’s part of how I wound up making online comics.
So don’t immediately want to condemn Familiar Ground, by Cedric Atizado, for seeming to do the same thing. Sure, the main page has an advertisement at the top, one at the left, one at the bottom, and two on the right. Sure, a lot of his auxiliary pages point out how he’s selling originals of his strips (at an increasing price as they get older, natch). And sure, he’s set up a Zazzle store with exactly one item in it. But money-making doesn’t seem to be Atizado’s main goal; his author page indicates that he’s more interested in telling a story and learning to draw in the process—even if the process seems to be fueled by how much attention the comic garners.
The story is still in its fledgling state. We know that the main characters are a trio of helper animals in a very Dungeons & Dragons-inspired world: two familiars and a paladin mount. The idea of telling an epic story from the sideline characters’ point of view isn’t a new one, but handled well, it can be entertaining. For how new the comic is, though, the characters have already been established in their roles: Coco, a celestial horse who serves as a paladin’s mount, is the self-centered idiot fighter; Toad, a frog and familiar to an ungrateful wizard, is the grumpy straight man; and Lady Sasha, a cat who might be the familiar to a streetwalker, is pensive, clever, and probably evil.
The plot itself is looking like a typical fantasy storyline: a lackluster first adventure gives the setting just enough of a baseline that the world can need saving with just enough of an emotional pull that the reader wants it saved. And where Sandra and Woo pays homage to Calvin and Hobbes, Familiar Ground goes it one better and outright borrows a joke wholesale. Update: Check the comments section on this one. Strange minds think alike, it would seem.
Atizado is, as he’s made clear, still learning how to draw comics, so I won’t ding him too much for the art style being unpredictable. The main characters each seem to be pulled from a different cartooning style, with Coco seeming almost Dilbert-like and Lady Sasha more like a French poster circa 1920, and the difference can be rather jarring. However, with enough practice and repetition, the art style is bound either to improve or to codify into something smoother.
Now, I may have painted Atizado as a “wanna-be” cartoonist. But let me assure you, that’s not a bad thing. Pretty much everyone who isn’t among the first wave is a wanna-be of one sort or another, and a particularly dedicated wanna-be can improve greatly (compare the first-ever Mac Hall comic with Three Panel Soul for a particularly drastic evolution over nine years). Others sort of peter out over the course of time. So which will Familiar Ground be? Time will have to tell.
Comic Rating: Three hidden easter-egg jokes in the alt-text.
Review: Evil Inc.
Since last week’s review involved a comic that seemed like the Internet’s answer to Calvin and Hobbes, perhaps I’ve been in a bit too much of a mood to compare webcomics to popular things in other media. It doesn’t work all that well, though, because sometimes there’s nothing to compare and sometimes there’s too much. For example, if there’s anything in the older media that compares to Furthia High, I’d rather not know about it. This week, however, there’s a bit too much to compare.
At first, it’s tempting to describe Evil Inc., by Brad Guigar, as Dilbert with supervillains. After all, it’s set at a big corporation and occasionally gives extra attention to a specific department or the workers’ union. You even get the occasional jab at office misogyny from a super’s perspective. In fact, at first gloss the only apparent difference from Scott Adams’ oeuvre is that the art is considerably higher in quality and the plot lines are more complicated. (This plotline kinda resolves here, but its effects are still apparent here and may continue to dominate the comic plotline for some time yet).
Well, then the differences start to crop up. For one thing, you’ll notice that Guigar loves his call desk puns. He really loves him some call-center comedy. It doesn’t matter if there’s a plot in progress; if there’s a random pun to be made by Lightning Lady on a headset, the comic will be inserted. And if you take a good look at the comics I just linked to in this paragraph, you’ll notice that (with the exception of the Iron Dragon one) most of those panels do some heavy panel recycling.
Reusing panels for throwaway gags isn’t a terrible thing to do, but after a while it gets sort of grating (which I imagine call center work also does). Mostly, it’s disappointing. After all, Guigar does both dramatic and cartoony art well enough to transition smoothly from one to the other in one strip. And once the color comics start, you get to see every curve of … well, let’s just say that Guigar follows the example of comic book artists everywhere. So while seeing repeats of Guigar’s art isn’t as bad as seeing the sort of thing that Powerup Comics actively spoofs, it’s still a little let-down from someone whose fresh art is so appealing.
The writing is heavy on the parody, as the above examples show. There are certainly enough comic book cliches to mock out there, and Guigar mines them for all they’re worth. But, as with most long-running plot-based comics out there, it starts to experiment with more serious fare. This can be good or bad, depending on whether it adds maturity or detracts from the humor.
It’s not until you get into the supplemental information that you find out that Evil Inc. is actually a spin-off from Guigar’s previous comic, Greystone Inn. Apparently Lightning Lady started with a minor role in that comic, then garnered enough attention to go for a solo career of sorts. In which csae, perhaps Evil Inc. isn’t so much Dilbert after all, but whether it’s a Frasier or a Joanie Loves Chachi is still up in the air.
Comic Rating: Three and a half days he will RUE!
Review: Sandra and Woo
A few hours before writing this review, I was cleaning out a closet (the joys of moving and resettling) and got clocked in the forehead by an unexpected large decorative glass thing-a-ma-bob. It inspired a good deal of pain, dizziness, nausea, and nostalgia for all things that involve surprise attacks by somewhat softer things. Calvin and Hobbes, for instance.
So imagine my delight when I remembered the comic Sandra and Woo, written by Oliver Knörzer, drawn by Powree, and copy edited by Sarah Dunphy. This is one of the first officially multilingual comics I’ve reviewed, being also available in German. Seeing as my own skill with German only goes up to recognizing what an eszett is, however, I’ll have to limit myself to reviewing the English portion of the comic.
The combination of a German writer, an Indonesian artist, and an American editor leads to some interesting complications for the comic. Speech bubbles that would be fine for a sentence in German wind up being rather loose around a laconic English equivalent. And sometimes the translation doesn’t account for styles of speech, leading to the oddly charming “be damned!” moment or two. And the art is unabashedly Asian in style. That last part isn’t really a complaint, other than the big sparkly eyes and Hime Cut on a girl named Sandra North feeling strangely incongruous.
Another side effect of the multinational team-up is that the comic will occasionally take a turn for the political. Sometimes it’s part of a plot arc, but rather often it just sort of pops up out of the blue.
On the one hand, Sandra and Woo acknowledges the influence of Calvin and Hobbes quite openly–and does it twice, just to make sure. On the other, Hobbes’ token solo adventure didn’t end in a spin-off set of friends or successful hunting, so Knörzer is safe from any copyright infringement problems. (Granted, Bill Watterson would have to get past all those Calvin-defiles-a-logo truck stickers first anyway.)
Sandra does, however, share Calvin’s capacity for sophisticated sarcasm, as well as his strong eco overtones. Of course, she also lives in a world where just about all animals have proven human intelligence, so saving various wildlife species may be more an exercise in keeping the neighbors happy. Of course, given that people can legally (or at least openly) keep raccoons as pets in her world, I may be way off base.
Sandra’s precociousness may seem a bit strange at first, especially to those who haven’t read Calvin and Hobbes, but it makes a good deal more sense once you realize that Sandra probably had to grow up really quickly. Her mother is deceased, and her father doesn’t always pay her terribly much attention. (In fact, as one of my friends pointed out, it seems like all of the adults are video game addicts for one reason or another. At least it seems to come in handy sometimes.) And now she has to deal with a talking raccoon that could almost seem like an imaginary friend . . . or schizophrenic hallucination. An extensive vocabulary doesn’t seem like such a big deal now, does it?
So in the end, has Calvin and Hobbes found a weekly successor? You’ll have to answer for yourself, but this pun tips the scales for me.
Comic Rating: Three stuffed animals. They couldn’t eat another bite.